You Never Know Who You'll Bump INto in the Street

You Never Know Who You’ll Bump Into in the Street

You Never Know Who You’ll Bump Into in the Street ©

By Michael Casey

I was up the road doing my walk and ordering my medicine when who did I bump into? Only an old Chinese friend, she was in fact one of my wife’s old bosses. She looks very young but she told me that she had a 26 year old daughter who was now a teacher. That’s how young Chinese and other Oriental people look. My own wife looked so young when she had our first daughter they wrote her age all over the front of the chart. Or Lord knows what people would have thought. In fact once when I bought her new trainers in Clarks New St Birmingham store she told the assistant “He’s my dad” it amused her no end. So when we got home I sent her to bed without any supper.

Which brings me back to my topic, you really don’t know who you’ll meet when you are out and about. We all say we are bound to meet somebody we know when we are in such and such a place. And we are always in our scruffiest clothing, we hadn’t bothered to dress up, or to shave, or wear clean clothes without toothpaste down the front or paint on our shoes.

So it’s then that we meet Nosey Norris, who can and will tell the world that we looked like a bucket of sick when we met him in Aldi by the frozen food. And he always wears a suit, and is perfectly shaved, it’s just because his boyfriend insists on it, or he’ll run away again. Nosey Norris only got Boris to stay by promising on a copy of Vogue that he’d always look immaculate.

So Nosey Norris, or NN in shorthand, sneers at us as he looks down at us from his towering Cuban heels. How are you he asks as he makes a mental note of the number of dress crimes we have committed. Boris and NN enjoy laughing about normal people as they eat crumpets as they sit naked on their shag pile rug in their sitting room.

I only know this because Horace the window cleaner was about to ask for a refill for his bucket and to rinse his sponge when he stumbled over this vista. Of course he promised not to say a word in return for a squirt of Fairy Liquid and a bucket of hot water.  And obviously the whole world or rather everybody and their mother on his window cleaning round knew. Now every time NN and Boris are in Aldi the checkout staff just pray they don’t come to their till with Fairy Liquid and Crumpets. It’s too much to bear, so they have to think of something really really sad or they will burst out laughing. The Big Bake Off leaving the BBC and going to Channel 4 usual does the trick, it makes the checkout staff glum enough to remain serious, and not think of them naked eating crumpet.

However the younger Aldi staff did wonder what eating crumpet while naked on a shag pile carpet was like.  And what did you do with all the butter melted and dripping down their bodies. If you add Aldi wine to the situation what would happen. All I can say is that in 9 month’s time Aldi baby products will be very useful.

But where was I, I was in the street bumping into people I know, some who prefer they didn’t know me, see some people are so cruel. So what do you do when you meet that old nosey neighbour who knows your mother, or who you went to school with.  What you do is LIE, you say you are living in a 6 room detached house, in fact you are living in that house but only in an attic bedroom, you are sharing it with Cinderella and she is such a noisy bitch talking all night long to the rats and mice. You are going to sneak a cat into the attic to sort her out, then you’ll get some sleep.

You say you have a glittering career, you are in waste reclamation and disposal, no you don’t drive a skip you joke, you boast as if you are in the office and in charge of thousands of people. You are in fact a street cleaner with a litter picker in your hand and plastic sacks galore in your back pocket.
And are you married they ask sneering, just because you are fat and ugly with that horrid hair, and the birthmark does not mean God won’t sprinkle some Fairy Dust. And this is where you flatten them, where you demolish them. Oh actually I did meet somebody. The old nosey neighbour cannot wait to see the photo you are struggling to get from your back pocket, its bound to be a ginger, a fat and ginger English girl.

Slowly you hand over the photo and she drops it, you pick it up, not with a litter picker for you are no sanitation expert, you are a writer. And as for the family photo, you married a Shanghai girl , and yes the 2 girls are your daughters. God did not just sprinkle Fairy Dust, he threw in foolish Angels, because he treads everywhere, and He always has the last laugh.


my family April 2013 in Malta, I’m holding the camera