I’m not sure what counts as a heatwave in other countries but here in the UK it seems to be a run of a few hot days. The recent heatwave lasted for around two weeks and during that time perhaps only five days were really extraordinarily hot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking it, I like the warm weather even though we’re not really equipped to deal with it here in England.
Trains have been cancelled due to the heat, rails were expanding apparently but then, don’t they expand in hot places like Spain and Mexico? Apparently not. Why are we getting these heatwaves? Is the climate changing? Well, it certainly seems like it. Can we do anything about it? My opinion is no, we can’t. This planet that we all call home has gone through various different climatic periods throughout its 4.54 billion year existence. It’s been hot and it’s been cold and no doubt it looks like it going to be hot, or at least warmer again.
Extinct animals have been found in Siberia with fruits and grasses in their stomachs and I read recently that the sphinx in the Egypt has been weathered by water, meaning that for a time, the pyramids and the sphinx must have been underwater in the past, as well as Siberia once had a much warmer climate. Times change, just like the weather. This year Liz and I had disappointing weather in France in the spring. The previous year at the same time, the weather was wonderful.
As soon as the first cooler day appeared I have to say I did feel a certain amount of relief. Things were more comfortable. I could sleep without waking up sweating but then I actually began to miss the heatwave. I enjoyed lying in the sun in the back garden reading and doing puzzles with Liz. I enjoyed having barbecues. I enjoyed watching TV with the back door open and a comfortable breeze slipping through the house. I enjoyed going out for meals wearing just a short sleeved shirt, shorts and canvas shoes.
Typical press reporting of the heatwave. (Image credit: Daily Express)
After a few cooler days though, the sun came out and the temperatures began to rise and at bedtime we once again had the fan on in the bedroom.
At the moment I’ve got a big legal problem that’s occupying my mind and perhaps that’s why I haven’t really made full use of this lovely weather despite having a motorhome in which to travel. Anyway, I’ve been happy enough, reading and writing, watching TV and dining out with friends and of course having our weekly visit to our favourite pub quiz.
Our friend Mike runs the quiz night at the Lord Derby in St Annes. Liz and I are not accomplished quiz people but between us we have a fair knowledge of most things and when it comes to music, we both have our ‘specialist’ areas. Mine is the 1980s and Liz is pretty good with the 1970s. Neither of us are that great with the sixties though (we’re both far too young) but it’s even harder when you have a tricky quiz master to contend with.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been going to this particular quiz but it’s a very long time. We’ve had a few wins and plenty of disasters. In the past the winners received beer vouchers but recently they have upped the prize to a £25 voucher which is always nice to win.
The quiz starts off as usual with the picture round. Twenty five pictures of famous and not so famous people and always portrayed in the picture sheet at their very worst so as to make it so much harder to guess who they are. I have to say we are pretty good at this round and Liz and I are good at prompting each other. (Who is that guy who played Steed in the Avengers I might ask? Was it Patrick Macnee says Liz? Who is that comedian you like Liz asks? Is it Jack Dee I answer?) Of course, there are always the problem faces and sometimes we have to barter with other teams (tell me number four and I’ll tell you number fifteen!)
Patrick Macnee in a photo he sent to me after I wrote to him as a child fan of The Avengers
On one occasion I remember being foxed by a picture of a football manager but I was pretty certain he was an Italian. I texted my friend Andy ‘Tell me some Italian football managers who manage a UK team!’ Andy gave me various options, none sounded right but I chose one. The guy turned out to be José Mourinho, a football manager from Portugal! Sometimes, no knowledge at all is better than a little! Oh well, another point lost.
The next part is the music quiz. Ten decades and two tracks for each decade. Our quiz master will usually give us a bit of a clue so he’ll throw in two numbers to help us with the years. Now on the particular occasion I want to talk about he gave us 1 and 7 so the first year would be 1961, the next 1967 then 1971 and so on. Now, and this is pretty important, Mike mentioned that as usual, the year he is after is the year of highest chart placing. Starting to get a hint of his trickiness? I thought so.
We quickly identified the two sixties tracks, Del Shannon and the hit single ‘Runaway’ and the Kinks with ‘Waterloo Sunset’.
So, all the sixties tracks out of the way so we could concentrate on the others and in this endeavour, we used to invite John and Kurt, two young guys in their twenties to our table for their up to date music knowledge. (You can see how ruthless we are!) Sadly, we haven’t seen either of those two for a long time but of course there are other quizzers willing to barter answers.
The final music track was designed to totally confuse us because Mike played another sixties release, Frank Ifield and the yodelling song! We should have been ready for it really because, as I’ve said, Mike made much of the importance of the year of highest chart placing, however, we were snookered. I personally thought Runaway had been a re-release and we changed our answers but the sad truth is that Frank Ifield’s single ‘She taught me how to Yodel’ was re-released in 1991 and was a bigger seller then than in the sixties.
The final round is a fairly quick fire general knowledge round. It always starts with a long forgotten music track from an eighties one hit wonder singer or band. It’s always something that we know and that rings a bell but reaching out for that elusive performer isn’t always easy. After that we get questions like what year did the Titanic sink? (1912)
Name 4 US states that begin with the word ‘New’? (New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey and New York)
Which battle started on the 1st July 1916? (Battle of the Somme)
What was the name of the famous streaker at Twickenham in January 1982 during an England v Australia rugby match? (Erika Roe)
Time to get a quick pint in before marking the answers and then we find out that two guys sat out at the far end of the pub were the winners. Despite accusations of using their mobile phones they take the big prize.
Oh well, no £25 voucher for us on that occasion. But we’ll be back next Thursday for another shot.
For Christmas the previous year my mother had given my brother and me a shared present. It was a portable stereo record player. At the time neither myself nor my brother were that interested in the pop charts. The first album I bought was a collection of TV theme tunes by composer John Barry. Barry wrote a number of famous tunes for both TV and the cinema. He is probably best remembered for a tune he didn’t write, the James Bond theme tune. There was actually quite a controversy over the authorship of the tune. Monty Norman is credited as the writer of the music although it was John Barry’s jazz arrangement of the theme that most people are familiar with.
The title track from the album is the theme from The Persuaders, a TV show starring future James Bond, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The pair played Lord Brett Sinclair and US businessman Danny Wilde who are recruited by a retired judge to fight crime. Tony Curtis drove my favourite car of all time in the series, a Ferrari Dino 246 GT. Price tag today, anything between £500,000 to a million.
MASH was a series based on a book and film about US army surgeons in Korea who worked in a mobile army hospital unit. Alan Alda played the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce and the series ran for many years combining humour and drama in a most impressive way. It perhaps ran a few years longer than it should have done and the later episodes were not as good as the earlier ones, at least in my opinion.
I’ve always rather liked Kenneth Williams, the slightly over the top star of many a Carry On film as well as many radio comedy shows, however it did feel rather odd reading his private thoughts through his diary, although sometimes it was hard to keep track of what was happening. In a lot of the diary entries Kenneth refers to people by their initials rather than their name. The habit of using initials can be rather annoying as the editor will mention in one of the many footnotes that SB for instance refers to his friend and fellow performer Stanley Baxter. Later on, SB will turn up again and I find myself flipping back through the footnotes because I have forgotten who SB was.
Albert Speer was Hitler’s armaments minister and favoured architect and this book is made up of diary entries he had secretly smuggled out of Spandau prison where he was incarcerated for 20 years after the Second World War. Speer admits he was one of those people seduced by the power of Hitler’s personality. Looking back at Hitler today in grainy old black and white films, it is hard to understand how this strange and dour man who ranted and raved while speech making could seduce anyone, however many have testified to the startling power of his personality. I remember watching that interesting BBC documentary ‘The Nazis: A warning from History’. In one segment various people were interviewed who declared their youthful love for Hitler; a young girl who looked into his eyes and saw goodness or an old man who testified he had once seen the great side of Hitler. Sadly Hitler let them down and many more like them. Speer maintained that he knew nothing of concentration camps and the final solution but author Gitta Sereny claimed in her book Speer: His battle with Truth that Speer knew more than he let on.
This is the first of Michael Palin’s diaries and it’s been pretty interesting, especially being a fan of the TV show Monty Python. Anyway, Palin started his diaries soon after packing in smoking. Perhaps it was a way of helping get over his tobacco addiction, or perhaps not. The diaries also begin just as Monty Python, the comedy TV show, was starting and Palin mentions this in his introduction, his aim not to record the start of the ground breaking comedy but more to record things about his new family, his wife having recently given birth to their first child.
My diaries are definitely not for publishing. Looking back at them I notice that whenever something interesting has happened to me I have never written about it at the time, it has always been some time later when I have set down my feelings about the incident, whatever it may have been. The diary may be a confessional for some people but for me, as I said earlier, I started writing a diary as a way of making myself write when I couldn’t think of anything else to write about. In the early 2000’s I started writing a diary on my laptop, only to lose all my recollections from 2005 to 2006 when the file somehow became corrupted and refused to open. I was quite excited when the latest version of Microsoft Word came out because it gives you the option to repair a damaged file. Alas, that option would not work on my diary file. Then of course there are my big boxes of pre-2000 diaries. What shall I do with this lot I wonder? Will they add something to social history or grace the rubbish tip when I’m gone?
The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about spies and espionage is probably James Bond, perhaps not the version of Bond as written by Ian Fleming but more the version given to us by the producers of the Bond films and portrayed by a succession of actors like Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and latterly Daniel Craig.
I was probably first introduced to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by the 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. In the story Smiley has retired but he is brought back into the intelligence fold after Lacon, the senior civil servant responsible for the service, asks him to investigate a story that has been brought to him by a missing agent named Ricki Tarr. The story concerns a ‘mole’ working for British Intelligence but passing information to the Soviet Union.
Kathy Burke plays Connie Sachs, an old Soviet watcher who became convinced Soviet diplomat Polyakov was a spy but her idea was rejected by the new Circus leaders but Smiley realises Connie might have been on to something. There are various suspects for the mole and they have all been given code names by Control; Tinker, Tailor, Poorman and so on. Control expected Prideux to come back with a code word but he did not and by the time he was exchanged and returned to the UK, the poorly Control had passed away.
I’ve always been a writer, even as a school kid I was writing stories and screenplays. I used to write scripts and do all the casting. Not sure whether Steve McQueen would have appreciated the roles I was planning for him though.
Well, more of the same really. I’ve begun to work on a follow up novel to Floating in Space but a novel is hard work and I sometimes wonder if I’m up to the task. Even my latest book, Timeline, which is just a collection of stories and blog posts was pretty hard work. The big problem is just me, being motivated and just getting myself geared up to work and write. Writing short stories is much more enjoyable and I’m really pleased at how my stories have turned out. A few are available for readers to download and enjoy, just click on the download link above.
I did read some news snippets over the previous weekend indicating Starmer was planning to resign on the Monday but I pretty much dismissed that as just a rumour without any background. Of course journalists have their contacts within government and certainly whoever started that rumour off must have had a good source because he was proved fully correct.
Those memories and other ones always come back every time I look at that picture. I happened to be looking at it this week as I scanned through some of my old posts looking for inspiration. The photo only took a moment to take but it’s nice to think about that house and all the happy times I had there. Not only that, my Grandmother and Grandfather lived there before us. They later moved to Prestatyn in Wales and my Mum and Dad took over the house when they were first married so it’s almost like a little bit of Higgins’ history, wrapped up in a picture.
Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacing roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brewcan. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the Highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brewcan.
In 1956 over in Liverpool, John Lennon formed a skiffle band called the Quarrymen. On the 6th July 1957 Lennon met Paul McCartney at the Woolton village fete and invited him to join the band. A year later in 1958 McCartney asked his school friend George Harrison to join but Lennon declined thinking the 15 year old George was too young. The two kept on at Lennon and he finally allowed George to join up after hearing him play guitar on the top deck of a bus.
Also in 1963 the Rolling Stones first single was a cover version of Chuck Berry’s Come On which rose to 21 in the UK singles chart. Their second single was a Lennon/McCartney song, I Wanna be Your Man.
Behind the scenes there was a good deal of mutual respect between the Stones and the Beatles. In fact, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had helped the Stones early in their career by giving them the song “I Wanna Be Your Man”.
As a band, the Beatles had come to the end of the line. There were arguments about the cinema film, the final album mixes, whose songs were to be included on the final album and all sorts of business issues. Allen Klein became the Beatles’ new manager but Paul McCartney wanted John Eastman, his new father in law. He was overruled by the other Beatles and Klein became their business manager and Eastman their lawyer.
This week I seem to have arrived at Friday with only two partly written posts and one of those is a longer version of a post I’ve done before. I wasn’t sure what to do and then I came up with an idea. What about merging the two posts together?
One day, round about the beginning of our last week there, the heat suddenly ramped up very quickly. It was almost as if some unseen hand had switched on the exterior central heating and things went from cold -we were wearing fleeces and had the inside heating on- to T-shirt and shorts weather, in fact most of the time it was too hot for even a T shirt.
In the evening we would usually have a barbecue, made much easier these days by our little ‘Camping Gaz’ gas barbecue which means we don’t have to wait yonks for the barbecue to get going or have to have it relit (a common occurrence when I’m in charge of the coals). Yes, our little gas barby clips together in minutes, the gas bottle is slapped into place and we are ready for those burgers.
Slow Days, Fast Company
Red Strike by Chris Ryan
The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry
The Man who Died Twice by Richard Osman
Amanda appeared in Coronation Street for a number of years but I’ve always known her as the girl who played Cleopatra in the Carry On film Carry on Cleo, you know, the one where Kenneth Williams says ‘Infamy, infamy; they’ve all got it in for me!’
Letters from an Unknown Author! 