Funerals and a Star of England

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Before I went away on holiday at the beginning of May, I went to see my mother. She had lived in a care home since 2020 and suffering with dementia, she would alternate between periods of deep depression and confusion. The first words she would usually say to me are ‘where am I?’ or ‘when am I going home?’ The home she remembered though is her childhood home, one that she left behind many years ago.

On visiting just before I left for France, the staff took me aside and told me that Mum had only a month to live. She looked bright and cheerful, if a little thin but certainly not someone with only a month to live. Over two years ago they had told me the same thing. Then on another occasion they told me she only had six months left. Both forecasts were inaccurate. This one however, proved to be correct.

When Elvis Presley died someone approached John Lennon with the news and waited for his reaction. He reportedly said, ‘Elvis died ten years ago’. Lennon despite his peace and love image always struck me as a hard faced sort of man who cared little for the sensitivities of others. Those words of his came to me when I heard the news that Mum had indeed died. Her name was Mary and the real woman, the real soul or spirit that made Mary what she was, had either long gone or been obscured by dementia.

Still, even though I felt as though I had lost Mum a long time ago, I still grieved at her passing and of course there was a funeral to arrange. I don’t really know much about funerals and what they involve so I began to cast my mind back to other funerals I had attended.

When my Gran died the funeral service was held in Marple. I’m not sure why as it was nowhere near where my Gran lived or was buried. The journey from there to Southern Cemetery in Manchester was for me, a masterpiece of motor car management, juggling with high water temperature and having to dive into a garage to top up my car with water and then hurry along to catch up the funeral cortège.

At the graveside I noticed my Dad making signs to the two grave diggers and after the coffin had slipped into the ground and the final words of the vicar had faded, my Dad, a former grave-digger in years gone by, had a happy and joyful reunion with two of his old co-workers, much to the dismay of Mum who stood with me and cried her heart out. (Not your finest moment, Dad.) At least he thought better of introducing her to his friends which I thought he was going to do at one point.

My Uncle Raymond was my favourite uncle and my Dad’s best friend. When he died his funeral cortège took a detour past the British Legion, one of his numerous watering holes, and the staff and customers came outside to pay tribute as his coffin passed slowly by.

The funeral was sad and tearful and the wake was pretty similar. A lot of sad people, a lot of tears and my Dad, who had lost his best friend was devastated.

I was driving that day and was asked to run some long forgotten relative home. I did so and returned a short while later. Only twenty minutes or so had passed but when I returned, I returned to a happy, noisy, enjoyable party, full of laughter and fun. I don’t know what had happened in the twenty minutes I had been gone but I came back to exactly the sort of party that my Uncle Ray would have loved.

Over in France I called the funeral home. They assured me Mum’s body would be looked after and soon someone would give me a call about further arrangements. The next day someone did indeed call and we set a date. I called or messaged all the relations that I could and then waited for the next step. The next step never happened so I called the funeral home again. No rush they said, finish your holiday and then come and see us and we’ll set a date for the funeral. Set a date? But we’ve already done that, haven’t we? It turned out that the date I’d set was a date to speak to the funeral home’s financial advisor! Perhaps I was more stressed than I thought.

I was full of nerves as we approached the day of the funeral but I went back to some of my old Paul McKenna confidence building routines that I used to use before job interviews. I woke on the day of the funeral feeling calm and confident. Everything went as planned and it was good to see my cousins and other family members who I hadn’t seen for many years.

My mother was born on Black Thursday, the day of the Wall Street crash, October 24th, 1929. She was born in Cheltenham, I’m not quite sure why, perhaps my Grandad was there looking for work. The family lived for a while at 36 Bath Street in Hulme, a suburb of Manchester. They moved to the new council housing estate of Wythenshawe in the 1930s. It must have been a wonderful place then, surrounded by farms and country lanes. Mum was the eldest in her family, followed soon by, in no particular order, Ada, Beryl, George and Frank.

The war came in 1939 and being the eldest, Mum helped with the cooking and shopping and used to tell me stories of queuing at shops and ration cards and swapping ration coupons for the things you didn’t want for the things that you did. She told me she could tell the German planes from the British ones by the sound of their engines and when the blitz came, the family used to troop out to the bomb shelter, all except my grandad who under no circumstances Mum said, would he ever step in there.

When Mum left school, she worked in a series of local factories and then later worked in Manchester city centre. She used to meet my grandad in Piccadilly; he would be going home after a night shift at Evans Bellhouse in Newton Heath and she would be on her way to work.

In 1948 tragedy struck when her sister Ada was killed in a cycling accident. Mum was deeply affected and told me about it many times.

Happier times came when she married my dad in 1954 and although they had their ups and downs, they stayed together until he died in 2000.

Mum was the centre of our small family. She organised everything we did. She arranged all our family holidays to places like Rhyl and Prestatyn, Blackpool and Morecambe and all the seaside destinations of northern England. They were always caravan holidays and as we had no car we always travelled by coach. We took the dog with us and no matter what preparations were made Bob, our dog, was always sick on the coach. Myself, my brother and my dad all looked the other way and pretended the dog was nothing to do with us while Mum, always prepared as usual, cleaned up the mess.

She also arranged all the decorating in our house taking charge of the wallpaper and preparing all the surfaces for painting. Dad would appear in his overalls, do the painting and then Mum would clean everything up.

She was devasted when he died in 2000 but like always, she just carried on.

I used to ask her if she wanted any shopping and she would always say, when she couldn’t go shopping herself anymore, then she was finished.

Once, when I was living in Merseyside, she bought a new lawn mower from Argos and asked me to pick it up. I kept putting it off but eventually drove back to Manchester and down to Argos. I had the code she had given me but the staff told me it had been picked up. I insisted it couldn’t have been but they were equally insistent that it had.  I drove round to Mum’s and it turned out she had got tired of waiting for me and had picked it up herself. She had gone to Asda, got herself a trolley, pushed it to Argos, the staff put the mower in and then she pushed it home, returning the shopping trolley the next day.

When she began to suffer with dementia my brother and I looked after her with the help of carers and believe me, it was very difficult indeed. She would forget she had eaten and demanded more food. She complained that her clothes were not her clothes and after an illness which I personally thought might have been covid she moved into a care home.

Sometimes I’d visit her and she could hardly put two words together. Other times she’d be bright and happy and talkative but even so, her death was more of a freeing of her spirit than anything else.

A lot of the words above came from the eulogy I read at her funeral. I’d decided to finish with these words from Henry 5th by William Shakespeare: Small time but in that small most greatly lived this Star of England.

You might those words were perhaps a little inappropriate, after all, Mum wasn’t a king or a queen. She was a simple lady who loved her husband and children and did her best for her family. She was proud to be a housewife and a homemaker but I truly believe she was, in her own way, a Star of England.

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Graham and Damon: An F1 Story

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I haven’t done an F1 post for a while so I reckon it’s time for a new one. F1 in 2023 seems to promise much but so far has failed to deliver. Red Bull seem to be winning everything which is great for them but makes things a bit boring for the average F1 fan. It’s in times like these that I tend to look back to the past for a little F1 drama.

Damon Hill is not exactly my favourite racing driver. He pops up these days as a pundit on Sky TV’s F1 coverage and I’m sorry to say that I tend to fast forward past him until I find someone a little more interesting to listen to. Back in the day when he beat Michael Schumacher to the F1 world title in 1996 I cheered for him but even then, that was mostly a reaction to the tactics of the highly ruthless Michael Schumacher. Anyway, when Liz handed me a copy of Damon’s autobiography, I thought it might be worth scanning through.

Hill starts his story not with himself but with his celebrated father Graham Hill. Hill was a great driver, a double world champion but also one of the great, if not the greatest, characters in the sport. What F1 fan would not instantly recognise the prominently chinned and moustached Graham Hill with his swept back hair and his witty and straight to the point remarks?

Graham didn’t even pass his driving test until he was 24 yet went on to win two world championships. He began by seeing an advertisement offering some laps of Brands Hatch in a racing car for five shillings. He went along, paid his money and subsequently was hooked on motor sport. He got himself a job working as a mechanic for Colin Chapman’s Lotus team and soon talked his way into actually driving one of Colin’s cars.

In the 1960’s, Colin’s star driver was Jim Clark, one of motorsport’s absolute greats. Jim was universally respected as being the star driver of the day and won the world championship for Lotus in 1963. In that year Jim won seven of the year’s races (there were only 10) a record that stood until 1984 when Alain Prost won seven races for McLaren.

Graham Hill had left Lotus for the BRM team and won his first world championship in 1962. In 1967 Hill returned to partner Clark in Colin Chapman’s new Lotus 49 powered by the new Ford Cosworth DFV engine.

In 1968 Clark was entered in a Formula 2 race for Lotus at Hockenheim in Germany. In those days, F1 drivers regularly competed in other events apart from F1 including sports car racing, saloon cars and of course, Formula 2. During the race, Clark’s Lotus veered off the track into trees and Jim suffered a broken neck and was killed. A deflating rear tyre was thought to be the cause of the crash but the racing community was devastated. Clark was a quiet unassuming Scotsman, born into a farming family but is still remembered today as one of the greats of all time.

The Lotus team looked then to Graham Hill to lead them forward into the next round of F1 races and despite initial difficulties with the car and engine, Graham was able to win his second championship title. In 1969 he suffered a terrible crash in the USA when, after getting out to push his car after a spin, he jumped back into the cockpit but was unable to fasten his safety belts. He crashed and was thrown from the car breaking both legs. He later drove for Brabham and finally started his own F1 team with sponsorship from Embassy cigarettes. He was killed in a plane crash in 1975 along with key personnel from his team.

In Damon’s book, he gives an interesting insight into the events above, telling them from a son’s point of view. He knew many of the great drivers and team bosses of the time, meeting them as a child and he tells of Graham’s life from a family perspective; Dad being away from home a lot and always being so busy. He was the first to hear of his father’s death, seeing TV reports of a light aircraft crash just when the family was expecting him home. Graham was an accomplished pilot and owned his own Piper Aztec light aircraft. He had flown back from testing his new car in France but when he arrived back at Elstree, the weather was cold and foggy and he crashed on his final approach killing all on board. Not only was Damon distressed about the loss of his father but he resented the press who reported on not only the plane crash but also the subsequent funeral.

Graham HillAfter Graham’s death it was found that his pilot’s license had expired and this and some other things invalidated his insurance which meant that the other families who had lost loved ones in the crash were forced to sue Graham’s estate for compensation. This meant the Hills had to sell their home and move to a smaller house. These things seem to have weighed on young Damon’s mind for a long time, even into his own days as a racing driver.

Damon initially took up motorcycle racing and worked in a variety of jobs to fund this, including being a motorcycle courier. Later his mother arranged for him to take a course at a car racing school thinking cars would be safer than motorbikes and so Damon began his career in car racing. In his book he describes the difficulties of getting drives and wrestling with the issues of bringing money to the table through sponsorship.

He managed to get drives in Formula 3 and then Formula 3000 and I personally saw Damon quite a few times at Oulton Park in the late 1980’s. I remember meeting his mum in the paddock at Oulton Park when I was photographing her son’s car. She went off to bring Damon back for a picture but alas, she wasn’t able to find him.

Damon at Oulton Park. Photo by the author

Damon struggled with the issues of sponsorship as many race teams were looking for drivers who could bring personal sponsors into a team but Damon was able to get himself a F3000 drive which also led to an F1 drive with the faltering Brabham team. At the same time, he had also replaced Mark Blundell as the test driver for Williams. After a difficult year with Brabham, Williams were having a tough time with their driver line up. Mansell had won the world championship in 1992 but he wasn’t happy about having Alain Prost as a team mate in 1993. Williams were still expecting Nigel to drive for them, after all he had just won the title, but Mansell decided to up sticks and go to the USA to drive in Indycars. Williams signed Prost and Hill got the promotion from test driver to full time driver for the 1993 season.

1993 was an interesting season. The Williams was without a doubt the best car of the field but Prost had just come back from a season out of the sport and was on a learning curve with the new car while Hill, who had been testing was actually pretty familiar with it.

Prost won the championship and Damon scored his first win but for 1994 Frank Williams had signed Ayrton Senna and Prost decided he wasn’t going to work with Senna again and promptly retired. That left Damon to partner Senna. In 1994 active suspension, a system where the suspension and ride height of the car was controlled by an onboard computer, was banned and the car had become rather difficult to drive. When the team came to Imola that year, Senna had scored no points at all and was desperate for a win. Damon says he had not settled into the team well and he was clearly still trying to get used to the way the Williams team operated. In the race Senna had a major accident.

Damon passed the scene of the crash, not knowing it was serious and felt for Senna thinking it would be three races in a row without points for the Brazilian driver. When the race was stopped he sat in his car on the grid waiting for information but little was forthcoming. Later, the team’s press officer advised him that things were serious but it was only after the restarted race had finished that news came through that Senna was indeed dead.

It was almost a familiar scenario to that which Graham Hill had experienced in 1968. The team leader had been killed and Graham had to step up and lead the team. Now Damon had to do the same.

Damon Hill won the world championship in 1996 but his team boss Frank Williams had for whatever reason decided Damon was not the driver he wanted for 1997 and his contract was not renewed. Damon ended up driving for Arrows in 1997 which he thought was a middle of the grid team trying to move up to the front. It turned out to be a back of the grid team, trying to move up to the middle. Damon won once more for the Jordan team and then retired. In some ways it almost seems that Damon had his F1 career in reverse, he started at the top and then drove for lesser teams until he decided to call it a day.

Damon’s book is not one I really fancied but in fact it was really a pretty good read. His younger years as the son of the great Graham Hill are fascinating, especially his behind-the-scenes motorsport memories. His recollections of his early racing days and the complexities of sponsorship and his experiences of F1 also make great reading. The book falters a little when Damon tries to interest the reader in his problems with depression, brought on possibly as a result of losing his father in such a tragic way, however, I do feel I have a little more respect and time for Damon and perhaps in future, when he comes on my TV screen as an F1 pundit, I might not be so quick to fast forward past him.

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Even More Random Film Connections

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back in the 1970’s. TV presenter James Burke made a TV show called Connections. It was a really fascinating series which connected various historical events to make a sort of chain which led up to something which was pretty unexpected. The episode which stands out in my memory is one about the atom bomb, various unconnected events and discoveries that together, led to the splitting of the atom. I’ve written a couple of posts in which I’ve tried to do something similar but all relating to the world of classic film so here is another collection of film connections which I hope you will find interesting.

In 1954 director Nick Ray made his classic film Rebel Without a Cause. The film remains a cult classic even today because it’s the film James Dean starred in as troubled teenager Jim Stark. The film opens with Jim’s first day at a new school. He tries his best to make friends but finds himself at odds with a gang which includes Natalie Wood as Judy, Corey Allen as Buzz, Dennis Hopper as Goon and quite a few others. The day doesn’t end well for Jim because he ends up in a deadly car race with Buzz in which the two drive towards a cliff edge and the first one to bale out is chicken. Buzz doesn’t get out in time and is killed and his friends want revenge on Jim.

Jim and Judy along with Plato, a teenager profoundly affected by loneliness and a broken family, decide to hide out in a deserted mansion. It was in fact the same mansion used in the film Sunset Boulevard, made years earlier.

Rebel was only Dean’s second film. He was killed in a car crash after his third and final film Giant.

Giant was directed by George Stevens and in it, Dean played Jett Rink, a surly ranch hand on Bick Benedict’s huge Texas ranch. Jett doesn’t get on well with Bick played by Rock Hudson but at least he has a friend in Bick’s sister Luz played by Mercedes McCambridge. When she is killed trying to ride a horse belonging to Bick’s new wife, Jett finds she has willed him a small plot of land on which he later strikes oil.

Bick’s wife was played by Elizabeth Taylor. Liz had a number of husbands but in 1957 she married for the third time to Mike Todd. Todd was an entrepreneur who was involved in various business ventures. He was also a theatrical producer and moved into films producing the classic Around The World in 80 Days starring David Niven as Phileas Fogg. Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958. His widow, Liz, was devasted and turned to her friends Eddie Fisher and his wife Debbie Reynolds for comfort. Eddie perhaps took comfort a little too far and his friendship with Liz soon turned into an affair and he left Debbie, marrying Liz Taylor in 1959.

Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds had a daughter named Carrie. Carrie was born in 1956 and went on to play Princess Leia in the Star Wars films.

In 1989 Carrie played Marie in the comedy classic When Harry Met Sally. The film follows the slow to start romance of Harry and Sally played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. The two don’t seem to like each other at first but later become friends. They decide to introduce each other to their best friends Marie and Jess, played by Steven Ford, who both hit it off instantly.

The film is a really wonderful comic look at relationships with some sparklingly witty scenes and dialogue. The screenplay was written by Nora Ephron.

Nora later moved into directing and one of her best films was You’ve Got Mail. The film teamed Meg Ryan with Tom Hanks once again, the pair having worked together on Sleepless in Seattle, another Nora Ephron film. Such a pity, from a personal point of view, that Billy Crystal didn’t play the Tom Hanks role in those films. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both of them but I’ve always thought Billy and Meg seemed to just work together so much better. Anyway, getting back to the blog, You’ve Got Mail is a romcom about two people who get involved together in an online chat room. In the chat room they use internet ‘handles’ to hide their true identities and don’t realise that in fact they are business rivals. Tom Hanks’ character owns a big discount bookstore while Meg has a small popular childrens’ bookshop.

In real life, the two are constantly at odds as Tom is opening a massive new discount bookstore just by her small shop. In anonymous cyberspace though, their relationship seems to develop and the two decide to meet but Tom Hanks arrives for the meeting in a coffee shop, peeks through the window and sees who is waiting for him.

The film was actually based on another film The Shop Around the Corner, a 1940s classic starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. In the film two employees who work together but don’t get on are actually falling for each other as anonymous pen pals.

James Stewart also stars in one of my favourite films, It’s a Wonderful Life. I love that film and my DVD copy gets watched quite a lot. The film is about George Bailey played by James Stewart who looks forward to an interesting life of travel but then finds obligations force him to stay in the small town where he has always lived. George is beset by problems and even considers suicide but then his guardian angel -literally- arrives to help him.

The secret of this film is, I think, the fact that despite the fantasy premise of the film, everyone plays their parts as if they were in a serious drama. The result is that the drama and emotion of the situation rises to the surface and we are left with a vibrant and dramatic piece of cinema.

Donna Reed plays Stewart’s love interest but another lady who sets her sights on his character, George Bailey, is Violet Bick played by the sultry Gloria Grahame. She made her film debut in 1944 and appeared in a number of films, including many film noir movies. In 1955 she appeared in the musical Oklahoma but afterwards her star began to wane a little.

She created something of a scandal in later life. After divorcing her first husband she married and later divorced one of her directors then later married TV producer Cy Howard. When they split, she married Anthony Ray who was the son of her second husband. The second husband was Nick Ray, who directed James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

Hope you enjoyed this interconnected tour of the classic movie world. Have a great weekend and call back next Saturday for another post.

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Thoughts From A Sun Lounger (Part 15)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This year we arrived pretty early at the Eurotunnel check in at Ashford. We’d spent the night near the Bricklayer’s Arms, a pub in Kent that has a quiz night combined with a special food offer and it was a short hop down the M20 into the Eurotunnel terminal. We were pretty early and fully expected to be upgraded to an earlier train but no, it wasn’t to be. So we relaxed for a while, made a cup of tea and then finally drove down to the customs. Both the English and French customs are over here in England. We passed quickly through the English passport control and then on to the French where they take a much longer time. I’m not sure why, after all it’s not as if anyone is trying to smuggle immigrants into France, that happens on the way back.

Finally, after a cursory check by the French we drive down to the loading area and soon we are driving onto the specially built trains that take us under the channel and into Europe. Once we arrive we are free to drive off into France as of course the French customs have already checked us out.

A couple of years ago we came into France pretty late, drove for about an hour and stopped at a small motorhome stopping place which was part of a farm. We had found the place in our motorhome stopping guide and although it looked a little unloved, there was everything we required, a nice pitch, water and a place to empty our toilet. Liz had brought along some leftover Bolognese and we heated it up and it went down well with a glass of red wine which as you may know, is compulsory in France.

Parked by a lake in France

As I walked around, I noticed a sign which mentioned a ten euro fee for the night which I hadn’t seen in our guide but I guessed as the place looked a bit run down, that notice was probably an old out of date one. Next morning though at 9am (8am UK time) I realised that wasn’t the case when the farmer’s wife came hammering on the door wanting her money. She looked and sounded a little fierce so not wanting to upset her I coughed up the ten euros.

Last year we had a late night crossing and parked next to a crematorium and this time it was free. We usually get ready, have a cup of tea and then drive off and search for a picnic place or an aire where we can get breakfast under way. I’m not an early riser and breakfast is for me probably more of a brunch than breakfast. My personal rules are that breakfast must contain (A) eggs and (B) toast. After that I’m pretty easy going but secondary items must be things like bacon and sausages and tomatoes but really, I’m not fussy.

I’m not really a lunch person but the other day we decided to dispense with breakfast and have lunch. We took ourselves down to a French restaurant we had visited before. Their lunches come complete with a basket of bread which usually gets refilled when the supplies get low, a bottle of water, a bottle of vin rouge and a bottle of cider. The cider is fairly low alcohol so as I’m driving that’s what I tend to go for.

The starter is a buffet with things like salads, pâté, cold meats and so on. The main course was a choice of four dishes. Choice one was roast beef. Now I knew this wasn’t going to be roast beef that we know and love in England so that was out. Choice two was fish, no thanks. Choice three was something I didn’t understand even when the waitress repeated it so that was out also though Liz later said it was some kind of turkey dish. Choice four was steak.

Now the problem with steak is that in France, French chefs don’t like to cook a steak too much. If you ask for medium rare you usually get rare. If you ask for medium, you’ll get medium rare and if you ask for well done, well that’s an even bigger problem. When the chef hears well done, he immediately realises the customer is a dreaded ‘Rosbif’, an English tourist as clearly, no Frenchman in his right mind would order a steak well done. Now the chef might be eager to teach the unsuspecting Brit a foodie lesson, so you might find your steak arriving pretty much like an incinerated burnt offering. (It’s your own fault, you asked for well done!) Now some French chefs will go the other way and give you a medium steak but now I think about it, you’ll probably find it’ll be medium rare because the French chefs just don’t like cooking their food too much. This is where I made the fatal mistake. Faced with those food choices, I went for the roast beef. It came in a tasteless red wine sauce and it looked like it had hardly seen the inside of a roasting oven when the chef decided to whip it out and slap it on my plate.

The good news though was this; the resourceful lady in my life, Liz, slipped the beef into a plastic bag, we took it home and she fried it up later with some onions, a little seasoning and served it up on a slice of a French baguette.

Of course this being a French restaurant I didn’t starve. There was still the cheese course and then the sweet which customers help themselves from a plentiful choice displayed in a glass cabinet. Lunch? Think I might just stick with breakfast in future.

The first week of our holiday the weather wasn’t great although it was pretty warm in the sun but cool, very cool in the shade. Afterwards things got hotter and we were able to spend many relaxing hours swimming in lakes or relaxing in the countryside.

Here’s a pretty crazy random thought that came to me in my sun lounger. Before we left the UK, I trimmed my hair with my trimmers but the other day I looked in the mirror and after only a week in France my hair had grown quite considerably. It is Spring of course and everywhere in the French countryside, things are growing. On our travels we saw fields of poppies and other wildflowers blooming, could it be then that people are linked in to the forces of nature? Does my body know that the season of Spring is upon us and has reacted in sync with the universe?

Or perhaps I should just have given myself a number two cut rather than a three?

After two weeks away some sad news came to us, my mother died.

She was 93, suffered with dementia and lived in a nursing home and although many times during my visits to see her I was able to put a smile on her face I knew she wasn’t happy. She always asked me to take her home even though she was no longer able to remember where her home was. Death was a release for her, something that has set her spirit free again.

She was a tough lady and very, very determined. On one particular visit, many months ago we spoke about the warm weather and the rose buds that were on the bush outside her room. We talked about her sister Ada who was a keen cyclist and was sadly killed in a road accident many years ago. I asked her how she was sleeping and she gave me a big smile and said ‘you know I never have any trouble sleeping!’

As usual I asked her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. We did a simple one, the three times table. One three is three, two threes are six and so on. Round about nine she began to falter and looked suddenly distressed. ‘I can’t remember anymore’ she said sadly.

We talked about other things and then I told her it was time for me to leave. I felt a little disappointed as my attempt to get her to use her memory had backfired when her memory failed her.  The disappointment of not being able to remember such a simple thing was evident in her face. We said our goodbyes and I went towards the door. As I turned back for a final wave goodbye, she said something and I stopped to listen.

‘Ten threes are thirty’ she said. ‘Eleven threes are thirty-three, twelve threes are thirty-six’. She looked back and smiled. ‘I remembered after all’ she said. Like I said, she was a very determined lady.

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Holiday Book Bag: Spring 2023

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I was reading a biography about Richard Burton called ‘Rich’ by Melvyn Bragg. The book used Burton’s own diaries and mentioned, amongst other things, Burton’s love of books. When Burton went on holiday he looked forward with delight to the contents of his ‘book bag’. I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but one thing I have in common with Richard Burton is a love of books and when I go on holiday, one of the delights of lying under a warm sun on my sunbed is a good, undisturbed read. I read a lot at home and before I retired, on my lunch breaks at work but it’s a few minutes here and a few minutes there and whenever I get interrupted it kind of breaks the flow. Some books, as we all know, are just made for a really long, uninterrupted read so here are the books I took on holiday with me recently, all sourced from either the internet or secondhand bookshops.

I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke

I’ll start off this book bag with this autobiography by John Cooper Clarke. I wrote about it a few weeks ago so I’ll keep it brief here. This was a wonderful read. It wasn’t the I did this and then I did that conventional autobiography, it was a very observational book and Cooper Clarke paints an interesting picture of Manchester and Salford from the 1950s to his heyday as a punk poet in the 1980’s. The last quarter of the book resembles a more conventional biography and it made me want to read some of his poetry.

Verdict: A fabulous, entertaining read.

10 Years in an Open Necked Shirt by John Cooper Clarke

This was a poetry book by John and to be fair I found it a little disappointing. The thing is, Clarke is a performance poet and his grammar free poetry doesn’t work as well on the printed page as it does when Clarke performs it on stage. Some poetry I suppose is meant to be read, other poetry needs to be performed and Clarke’s comes into the latter category.

Verdict: Interesting but not my cup of tea.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I first heard about this from seeing a trailer to the new film version and it looked pretty interesting. I do love something that is new and original and so Liz and I went to the cinema to see it which was my first cinema visit for a long time. It’s a good film but not a cinema classic and I wondered if the book would be better. The story is about Harold Fry who is retired and lives with his wife on a suburban housing estate. He gets a letter advising him that a friend and former workmate named Queenie, is dying of cancer and he pens a short note of sympathy in reply. He goes out to post the letter but decides to walk further wrapped up in thoughts about Queenie. At a petrol station where he buys a sandwich the young girl assistant tells him a story about her aunt who suffered with cancer and she -the shop assistant- feels that real faith and positive thoughts can help beat even something like cancer. Harold decides there and then to walk all the way to Berwick-upon-Tweed and see Queenie in person.

Along the way Harold meets various people and when news of his march reaches the media, many others come to join him. Along the way he thinks a lot about the events of his life, in particular his relationships with his wife and son and eventually both he and his wife, who he speaks constantly to on the telephone, seem to reach a sort of understanding about what has happened to them as well as an unspoken desire to reunite and move forward. The book was a great success world wide and many reviews printed on the back cover tell the reader what an uplifting read it was. It wasn’t a bad read at all but I actually found it not only sad but rather miserable and, to be honest, not uplifting at all.

Verdict: Original and interesting but a bit too melancholic for me.

Then Again by Diane Keaton

This is another autobiography and like the one by John Cooper Clarke it was a rather unconventional one. Diane Keaton is a film actress you might remember from the Godfather movies or from Annie Hall. Diane’s mother had died and looking through her effects she had found numerous notebooks and diaries in which her mother had written about her life. In this autobiography, Diane has tried to link her story with that of her mother and has put her own experiences and memories side by side with those of her mother. The result is for the most part a really very interesting book, told in a very open and talkative way by both Diane Keaton and her mother. Diane doesn’t get too personal but does talk quite a lot about her work and her life in particular with Woody Allen and Warren Beatty, both of whom she was involved with for a time. She also had a long relationship with Al Pacino who she played opposite in the Godfather series of films and it seems to me she was expecting to marry Al but for whatever reason he decided to call the relationship a day.

The last part of the book is really about her decision, late in life, to adopt two children and the result for the autobiography is rather like when one of your friends has a child and all they ever seem to do is go on and on about their new little boy or girl. Her mother sadly develops dementia and Diane’s experience of trying to look after her was all too familiar to mine.

Verdict: The book goes off on a bit of a tangent towards the end but generally I really enjoyed it, especially the bits about working with Woody Allen.

The Richard Burton Diaries edited by Chris Williams

I mentioned at the start of this post about reading Melvyn Bragg’s biography of Richard Burton and how Burton used to always take a ‘book bag’ with him whenever he went away. Bragg’s book was based partly on these diaries which have now been published and are available to everyone.

There is a lot I like about this book and a lot that I don’t like. I tend to prefer paperbacks but I bought this one from the internet and it’s a big heavy hardback and as I’ve dragged it across France it’s generally getting a little tattier every day.

Moving on to the text and I see a lot of the big events in Burton’s life are missing as sometimes he stops writing for days and even months at a time. We don’t hear about the making of Cleopatra and his meeting and affair with Elizabeth Taylor but he does mention some of those events in retrospect.

The book starts with his schoolboy diaries which are rather like mine, brief and to the point. Later, the main diary starts in 1965 and as I write this, I’m up to about 1970. Burton tells us of his immense love for Taylor and how he has given up womanising to be faithful to her but sometimes I get the feeling he isn’t being totally honest, after all Liz has free access to his diary and she frequently jots down her own comments too. Burton was rumoured to have had an affair with Genevieve Bujold during the filming of Anne of a Thousand Days but of course, gives no mention of that in his journal. He does talk a lot about food and having lunch in places like Paris and Rome. He enjoys having money and delights in spending it on jewels for Liz, a new private jet plane and a yacht which he thinks might actually save him money as he can stay on the yacht rather than use hotels. Even so, he continues to use hotels anyway. At one point he considers buying a barge, modernising it and touring the canals of France.

He doesn’t seem to enjoy his acting and in fact rather looks down on it as a profession, although unlike an actor like Brando who had similar thoughts, he did take pride in what he did, learning his part and his lines whereas Brando couldn’t even be bothered to learn the script for the film of Superman despite his million dollar fee.

Surprisingly there is also quite a lot of professional jealousy in the text, for instance, he gives Robert Shaw a bit of a slagging off for his performance as Henry VIII in A Man for all Seasons which I thought was rather good, better or at least the equal of Burton’s Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days.

Burton drinks a lot and frequently argues with Liz, sometimes he is banished to the spare bedroom and usually he regrets his drunken words and wonders why he did what he did or said what he said.

He was though a man who loved books, reading anything from the classics to detective novels. He enjoyed books immensely and even had ambitions of being a writer himself. His entries are peppered with quotations from authors and poets and of course Shakespeare.

I was really looking forward to reading this book but after the first few pages I thought it a little uninteresting. As the narrative moved from 1968 into 1970, Burton seemed to be putting more effort into his journalling and consequently it became more enjoyable to read. Later large gaps appear in the diaries and he doesn’t appear to have written anything about his breakup with Liz Taylor. The entries become less frequent and to be honest, I ended up skipping quite a few pages.

Verdict: A book that promised a lot but failed to deliver.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

I’ve read a few books by this author before and always enjoyed them, this one being no exception, in fact it might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in some ways plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President asks the FBI not to investigate further.

Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.

This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.

Verdict: A brilliant read.

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John Cooper Clarke and Some Other Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s that time again for Liz and me to troll through France in our motorhome, on the look out for swimming lakes, cheese, wine and restaurants. The weather has so far been good but not great so sometimes I’ve been relaxing on my sun lounger, other times I’ve been inside wondering, where the hell is that sun?

As I write this we are about a week into our holiday and the sun has made an appearance. We’ve had three or four really hot days and a few of those spring days where it’s really warm in the sun but move into the shade and yes, it’s freezing. You might be thinking what do we get up to in France? Visit museums? Explore fascinating French towns? Well, we have done all that stuff in the past but these days we tend to relax in the sun, read a lot, sup copious amounts of red wine and visit a lot of restaurants.

In the past we’ve visited the blockhaus in Eperleque, a huge concrete structure where the Nazi V weapons were launched against the UK in WWII. The building was rendered useless by the efforts of the RAF Bomber Command and the heroism of those pilots has guaranteed the freedoms we enjoy in western Europe today. I’ve always been moved by the museums and memorials to those who lost their lives in the war. In one place and I can’t remember where it was, we went to a museum dedicated to the French resistance and an old French chap, noticing that we were English told us how much the freedom fighters were aided by the RAF dropping supplies and ammunitions.

Another thing I look forward to on a long trip is reading. Yeah, I know you might think that’s a bit boring but I do love a really good book and one book that has really inspired me this week is an autobiography by the Bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke. I should really save all this for a forthcoming book bag blog post but out on the road, drinking fine wines and eating good food, I really need to knock out a blog post whenever I can.

I love the way Clarke tells his story, maybe because he writes a little like me. I’ve always tried to make my posts chatty and colloquial, using the kind of language I might use when talking and John Cooper Clarke does pretty much the same thing in his book. It’s a very observational book and he talks about life in Salford in the 1950s and later in the 60s and 70s and very gradually slips himself into the narrative. It’s not a me, me, me type of autobiography. It’s not I did this and then I did that and then I did something else. It’s a fabulous book and though I’m not that interested in the punk music scene which John was very much a part of, I still love it.

Salford is the twin town to my home town of Manchester and a lot of the places and people in the book resonate with my own memories, even though Clarke is a north Manchester guy and I’m from the south. Many years ago though, I used to frequent a place just on the Salford/Manchester border. If you turn off Deansgate and go up Bridge Street and cross the bridge over the River Irwell, you are going into Salford. The bar there, the Mark Addy, was actually the last place my small family (myself, my brother and my mum and dad) had an afternoon out together. It might have been my dad’s birthday, I’m not sure. The four of us had an afternoon lunch at the pub where they served these really tasty cheese and pâté platters. They came with chunky bread and salad and were really lovely.

Mum had her one bottle of stout and then she wanted something lighter. I ordered her a tea and she was pleased to see it was served in a very elegant way with a little teapot, a small jug of milk and a bowl of sugar.

Some years ago the bar, of which the lower floor was down on the banks of the river, was flooded when the river level rose during a storm. They couldn’t get insurance and the place closed and remains empty till the present day.

Just across the road is a small square where Manchester’s first sports superstar George Best had his fashion boutique. Back in the 1960’s my friends and I travelled into Manchester by bus to hang about Best’s Boutique. We never saw the man in person although what we would have done if we had? Ask for an autograph perhaps? I don’t know but at that time George Best had a kind of local fame that was on a par with a film star. The newspapers even dubbed him the fifth Beatle in the sixties because of his Beatle like haircut and his undeniable charisma.

Best was born in Northern Ireland and came to Manchester to begin his career as a footballer aged only 15. In the 1970s he seemed to fold under the pressure of his own stardom. He began drinking heavily and was eventually sacked by his team, Manchester United. Best died in November 2005 aged 59.

Anyway, getting back to John Cooper Clarke. He decided early on that like Dylan Thomas he was going to be a career poet and to his credit he eventually achieved just that. He was and is very much a performance poet and became famous performing with punk bands in the 70s and 80s. His big problem from reading his book seems to be that he was a habitual drug user, even becoming a heroin addict. In the later pages of this book, it does seem that he is very laissez faire about his addiction and wherever he goes to perform, he always makes arrangements to score his drugs just like you and I might try to source a bottle of milk or a packet of tea bags. On one occasion he finds himself in New York, desperate for heroin. The only dealer available to him is based in some dead-end part of the city and a friend lends him a gun which he is advised to keep in view while he goes up to the seventh floor of a dilapidated building to score. Happily, all went well for him but this kind of thing appears to have been the norm for him, having to do what he has to do to get his drugs. In later life he realises he must break the habit which he eventually does, helped by the love of a good woman who he eventually settles down with.

Much of the text is written in his own rapid fire colloquial idiom and is for me, at any rate, a joy to read. Like me he is a man who loves his pies although Clarke prefers the meat and potato version to the steak variety which I rather like. Like he says though, a steak pie is full of gravy which makes it a little harder to eat on the move.

A memorable moment in the book is when he arrives in Scandinavia for a gig. He is starving but is advised that after the performance there will be a huge buffet laid on. There was, but this being Scandinavia it consisted of a great deal of pickled fish and not the hoped for pies.

Clearly he is a great rock and roll fan and lists various members of the rock and pop fraternity who he has either worked with or bumped into over the years and if you happen to be a fan of punk, Clarke points you in the right direction for either further reading or music listening.

I thought Clarke would have had a back catalogue of poetry volumes but that doesn’t seem to be the case although I did buy one of his few poetry books, Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt. That might be my next read.

OK, that’s enough reading and writing for tonight. Time for a glass of some vin rouge and perhaps a nibble on some cheese. Yes, don’t mind if I do . . .

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Concert Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I mentioned in last week’s post about, among other things, seeing Paul McCartney and Wings live on stage in 1975. Someone asked me what I remembered about the concert so this week I thought I’d talk a little more about music.

Seeing Paul McCartney and Wings at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester back in 1975 was probably just about the best concert I ever saw. I’d been into the Hall on my lunch break to buy tickets to see Kiki Dee and her band but while I was waiting, a sign went up saying that tickets for McCartney were now on sale so as well as getting tickets to see Kiki Dee, I bought tickets to see Paul as well.

I asked a girl from work to come to the concert with me but she declined. It turned out she was more interested in ballroom dancing than pop music so I dragged my brother along with me. While we were queuing to get into the venue a guy approached my brother and offered him £100 for his ticket. My brother who was and still is a pretty mercenary sort of guy was pretty keen on accepting the deal. I think I even remember him offering to go halves on the deal with me, £50 each. I had the tickets though and I declined. The young lad had told us he was Paul McCartney’s biggest ever fan and I remember thinking, perhaps rather meanly, that he might be McCartney’s big fan but unlike me, he didn’t have tickets to see McCartney in concert.

I hope my brother was glad I turned down the offer because seeing Paul and Wings that night was a fabulous experience. The band had just released Band on The Run and they performed all the hits from that album as well as many other songs. Part way through the evening the band left the stage and Paul sang alone a few of his best Beatle numbers including Yesterday, just him and his guitar and then his bandmates returned and played some more Wings hits. It was a fabulous night.

 

Back in 1975 I already had the Wings album Band on the Run, on vinyl. It was a great hit at the time and featured a cover with Paul and Linda and their other band member Denny Laine posing with various celebs including talk show host Michael Parkinson, comedian Kenny Lynch, actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, MP Clement Freud and boxer John Conteh. A few years ago I bought a remastered CD version which in the tradition of film directors producing  DVD director’s cut film remixes, was a new version featuring outtakes and highly different versions of some of the songs. My copy has three CDs and there are other versions with even more CDs but to be honest, the original version was actually the best.

A few weeks after the Wings concert I took my friend Steve to see Kiki Dee, also at the Free Trade Hall, a venue that these days has been overshadowed by the MEN Arena. I say MEN Arena although the name of the Arena changes according to which organisation has paid to have its name up there. Originally it was called the Nynex Arena when it opened in 1995 then in 1998 it became the Manchester Evening News Arena. Today, according to the internet it is called the AO Arena, sponsored by God knows who.

Kiki Dee is probably most known for her duet with Elton John on Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, a 1976 hit for her and Elton. Her own musical performances are perhaps less popular and my favourite track of hers is I Got The Music in Me which was a hit in 1974. My copy of the single has ‘play loud’ in large letters on the disc which I used to think was an invitation to blast out the music but actually the single plays at a rather low volume so you have no choice other than to play it loud.

Back in 1976 when I went to see Kiki Dee, we had seats right at the very front and rather disconcertingly, right in front of me was a huge speaker actually about my size and I wondered if Kiki was taking that ‘play loud’ instruction a little too seriously. Just as the concert was about to begin, a guy armed with a huge stack of cameras came over, grimaced at me and returned a few minutes later with some concert staff heavies. It turned out we were in the wrong seats and we were shown to other seats in the section behind, which as much as I loved Kiki Dee, I was actually pretty happy about. Hope that photographer didn’t have hearing issues after the concert.

Another concert I went to was Michael Jackson at Roundhay Park in Leeds. That was back in 1988 when I was a coach driver. Actually, by the power of Google I see it was August 29th, 1988. I was a coach driver for a company called Charterplan. I wasn’t keen on the job but on that trip, I was happy to see that a fellow driver was a guy called Alex that I had known for years. After dropping off our passengers we decided to see if we could blag our way into the concert and eventually the security staff did let us in. The thing I remember most was a long, a very long introduction and Alex turned to me and said when is Michael going to appear? Just at that exact moment, Jackson popped up onto the stage propelled by either a rocket, compressed air or some sort of catapult. Alex wasn’t amused as he had missed Jackson’s spectacular entrance completely.

The other thing about that night was that another driver had estimated there were about 90 coaches in the coach park and there was only one exit so if one coach exited every minute then it would take 90 minutes for us all to get out. I was glad that I had told my passengers to get back to the coach ASAP and they did, all except for one guy. I waited and waited but he didn’t turn up so I pulled into the queue of buses trying to get out. The guy eventually turned up knocking on the door. He wasn’t happy but when he started to complain the entire front section of the coach gave him the slagging off of his life and he wandered shame facedly back to his seat. We were stuck in that queue for ages trying to get out. Alex told me later he had arrived home a full hour before me that night. I wasn’t amused.

That is probably it for my concert memories. I have seen Barbara Dixon at the Lowther Pavilion in Lytham. I’ve also seen Justin Hayward and John Lodge in Manchester when they had just released their BlueJays album. They had three video screens above them and I could never work out which screen to watch or just to watch the stage.

Barbara Dixon came out after her performance and signed CDs and programmes for the audience. On stage she looked like a typical female rocker but when she appeared to sign autographs, she popped on a sort of old lady’s shawl and reading glasses and looked like a little old dear.

Those are my concert memories, what are yours?

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Scrapbook Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m always on the hunt for new ideas for blog posts so when I was a little stuck today, I thought I’d take a look at my old scrapbooks and see what was in there.

I started making scrapbooks when I was much younger and my prime source was a comic I used to buy, TV21. TV21 was based on the TV shows of Gerry Anderson all of which were set in the world of the 21st Century. In the 21st Century there was a World President, a World Government and many global organisations such as the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and WSP, the World Space Patrol.

Those organisations featured in Stingray and Fireball XL5, futuristic puppet series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and the two followed them with series like Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 and perhaps the most famous, Thunderbirds.

TV21 featured all the series above in comic book format and the front page resembled a newspaper style headline featuring the stories that were inside as well as smaller stories and items such as stop press columns, again all relating to items inside the comic.

I couldn’t find my oldest scrapbook but it must be around somewhere. I did find some of my newer ones though. One featured a page similar to the ones in that first book with clippings from TV21 featuring the submarine Stingray.

The first scrapbook I could find was labelled Scrapbook 6 and I can see my interests have moved on a little from TV puppet shows. There was a page featuring Olivia Newton John. Olivia was probably my first celebrity crush back in the early 1970s. One item was dated 1973 and says ‘Olivia to sing for Britain.’ She was chosen to sing for Britain in the Eurovision song contest. I didn’t care for her song though, Long Live Love. I bought many of her albums and records when I was younger and her poster adorned my old bedroom wall. Sadly, she died in 2022.

A more personal item in the scrapbooks was my ticket and programme from seeing Paul McCartney and Wings in 1973 in concert in Manchester together with a review from the Manchester Evening News.

I’ve always loved magazine covers and among the ones in my scrapbook is a cover featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I wrote a post about the duo some time ago; it was about famous couples like Burton and Taylor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and so on. On holiday I hope to take along my new copy of Richard Burton’s diaries with me to read which I hope will be interesting. Burton was a frustrated writer so I think his diaries might be a cut above some other diaries I have read.

The first season of F1 motor racing I followed was back in 1970. In those days a lot of races were not televised and I had to look to magazines and newspapers to find out the race results. I have scrapbook entries about Jackie Stewart, my all time favourite driver and lots of other newspaper cuttings about motor racing. Back then or so it seems to me, the only time the big newspapers were interested in motor sport was when a driver was killed and there are cuttings from the deaths of Jochen Rindt and Peter Revson to name but two. One more positive newspaper headline was when James Hunt won a dramatic world championship at the very wet Japanese Grand Prix of 1976.

Ronald Reagan went on to win a second term as President by beating the Democratic candidate Walter Mondale in 1984. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’ ran the newspaper headline in what might have been the Daily Express.

Reagan had previously defeated Jimmy Carter in 1979 and served two terms as President. Reagan also had various summits with Gorbachev, the head of the USSR and another news cutting is from August 1991 with the headline ‘Gorby arrest: Soviet Chief Toppled’ which as we all know was the beginning of the end for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.

A lot of my interests are showcased in the scrapbooks. I do love modern mysteries and there is a cutting about Lord Lucan who disappeared in 1974 after the murder of his children’s nanny and others about the JFK assassination in 1963. On the cover of the Sunday express Magazine is the so called ‘magic bullet’, the bullet that the Warren Commission said passed through John Kennedy and inflicted various wounds on John Connally in Dallas in 1963.

Could a pristine bullet like the one in the picture have really passed through two bodies?

While I’m on the subject of JFK, things must have been hard for his widow, Jackie. How she carried on after seeing her husband shot to death while only inches away from her, I don’t know. I saw a documentary about her today which asserted that she wanted to commit suicide afterwards but carried on, kept afloat only by her love for her children. In the scrapbook there is a clipping of her winning a trophy for some kind of horse event but horses may have helped her keep sane as she had loved and ridden horses since childhood.

Just like today I was a big Doctor Who fan back in my scrapbooking days. The first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast on UK TV the day after the JFK assassination in 1963 and as no one was interested in anything other than the JFK assignation that day, it was rebroadcast the following week. In January 1982 Peter Davison had just become the new Doctor Who, replacing the hugely popular Tom Baker. Tom Baker was probably my favourite Doctor and I was sorry to see him go.

One interesting news item I spotted was about John McCarthy and Jill Morrell. They were in the news back in the late 1980s when McCarthy, a journalist, was kidnapped in Lebanon and his then partner Jill was actively campaigning for his release back in the UK. McCarthy was finally released in 1991. He and Jill wrote a book together but they parted four years later. That was all pretty interesting but I’m pretty certain I stuck the item in my scrapbook because I actually rather liked Jill.

In my last scrapbook from the 1990s there are many empty pages but there are also a stack of cuttings that have yet to be stuck in. There are some F1 items and some from the news. One interesting one is about writer Patricia Cornwell who writes the Kay Scarpetta series of crime thrillers. According to the article, Patricia wanted Jodie Foster to play her character Scarpetta in the film version. Jodie had already played an FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs and apparently wasn’t keen to be involved in another gruesome murder film. That was in 1997 and as far as I know, Scarpetta hasn’t made it into the cinema yet although I did read an item only today which suggested Nicole Kidman might be soon playing Scarpetta on the small screen.

I spent quite a while last week relaxing and skimming through my scrapbooks and I think I’ll finish with my favourite item. It’s a small clipping which was on a page of smaller funny items.

Do you have a scrapbook? If so, what sort of things do you keep in it?

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Writing, the Village and Young Higgins

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Liz and I will soon be off to France in our motorhome. It’s had an MOT, it’s been taxed and has had a good wash and clean up and it’s pretty much all ready for the trip. As a writer, I try and get ready for the trip too, I like to get ahead with my weekly posts so I have a few all written and ready to be posted, even if I’m in the middle of the outback of the Loire valley. All I have to do is press the post button and I know that I will have met my deadline, my one deadline of 10:00am on a Saturday morning when my new post goes out.

A couple of weeks ago I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, I was actually three blogs in advance, a whole three weeks, all I had to do was keep writing one blog per week and then in the hoped for sunny Loire I could relax, read books, sunbathe and swim and still put out my one blog post every week. Of course, there are some writers, some bloggers whose output is considerably more than that. Even so, my one blog post per week keeps me honest as a writer and of course I do actually write more. I’ve started to recycle my old posts over on Medium.com to hopefully engage more readers and even sell more books. One day, when my royalties build up, I might even have enough to splash out on a pint of lager on our regular Thursday night pub quiz.

It was nice to get back behind the wheel of our motorhome and take it down for its first wash of 2023. I’ve already got a few good books to read packed aboard and it almost seems as though I can already taste the vin rouge and the French bread. Yes, that was a good feeling. A bad feeling though was when I realised that despite being three blogs ahead, it was soon two and then just one and as much as I looked at prompts and old posts, no inspiration seemed to come.

Parked by a lake in France

I did a post a while ago about Ideas, Inspiration and Effort. They, I thought, were the key things to any kind of writing, whether it’s a blog post, a story or a poem. The more I think about it, a better title might be Inspiration, Observation and Effort. Some ideas just come naturally. A writer is inspired, he jots down notes and then writes. Other ideas come just by observing things. A recent idea for a post came from a car journey and observing what happened during the trip and it got me talking about my former job, working as a motorway traffic officer and other ideas from my car stereo and the music I was playing. After that comes the effort, the actual work of putting together a blog or story or book.

This week it’s round about a year since I retired. I’m really still getting used to retirement. It’s nice having a free bus pass and it’s nice not having to go into work all the time. I did think about getting a part time job but I actually don’t need a job. Perhaps if I spend too much on holidays or restaurants then I might have to think about working but so far, I seem to be doing OK. When my father retired, he went out on long walks with his dog. He used to roam about the huge council estate where he lived and take in the farms or what used to be farms where he used to work in his youth. He once showed me an old farmhouse hidden in the estate surrounded by council houses. There was a large green there which he said used to be the farm’s orchard and indeed, there were still many apple and pear trees on the green.

After thinking about my father I thought that I might do a similar thing, have a little walkabout around some places I used to know well and see how they had changed.

Not far from the housing estate is a small village called Gatley and when I was younger I used to go there quite a lot. There was a fabulous model shop there and as a schoolboy I bought many a plastic model kit from there. I used to make models from scratch too using glue and balsa wood which I also bought from that shop. The shop itself was a wooden hut type of affair and walking down there the other day the shop was gone and only bushes and shrubs had taken its place. Right outside the shop was the bus stop for the 45 bus which came from Manchester, turned around in Gatley and then went back to Manchester. Today, the small block which the bus circled in order to turn round has been blocked off so the 45 bus is no more, although there is another bus which carries on through the village.

The Red Lion pub is now a Tesco store. There is still a café on the spot where there was aways a café but despite various visits recently, I have never seen it open. Further down, The Prince of Wales is still there. In that particular pub I had my first ever pint many years ago.

As I walked further into the village the traditional English chip shop I used to frequent is now a Chinese takeaway and the chip shop dining room is another shop entirely. The Tatton cinema was demolished some time ago although the builders kept the façade of the building when they built the new supermarket. Among many other films I remember seeing there was my first James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in what must have been 1969.

Next door is the Horse and Farrier pub. My mother once worked there at lunchtimes making sandwiches and my father too, he was the pub gardener. Once, when I was 16 and still at school, a couple of friends and I went inside for a pint. We left our briefcases outside with our school jackets and just as we bought our drinks and had our first sips of beer, who came in through the entrance but our physics master, Mr Farragher. The three of us shot out of the back door and into the gardens before going round to grab our jackets and briefcases from the front. Ever afterwards we three referred to the pub as the Horse and Farragher!

Today I often have a drink in that pub. On the outside it looks just the same as it always did and when I’m there I often think of Mr Farragher. That reminds me of Return Journey, the radio broadcast by Dylan Thomas I spoke about in last week’s post. Dylan returns to a pub of his youth looking for his younger self. He asks the barmaid about young Thomas and she in turn asks him what he looked like. He replies like this:

Thick blubber lips and a snub nose, a bit of a shower off: plus fours and no breakfast you know, a bombastic adolescent provincial bohemian with a thick knotted artist’s tie made from his sisters scarf. A gabbing, mock tough pretentious young man . .

How would I describe myself if I was looking for young Higgins I wonder?

A tall thin reserved young man wearing aviator spectacles. He sometimes wore tinted glasses even when it wasn’t so bright. A provincial adolescent wannabe writer and film director who packed in his job in an insurance company to travel through Europe and ended up as a bus conductor.

Such a shame we can’t go back and change things.

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Return Journey (More Thoughts in my Car)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s post is a sequel to the one last week and I’m going to talk some more about the thoughts and ideas that come to me while driving. OK, I’ve left my house in Manchester in good shape, trimmed the privets, cut the grass and tidied up inside. Final check in the fridge, nothing left behind that is liable to go off. OK, pack the car and let’s get off back to St Annes on the Fylde Coast.

Returning to St Annes is always a nicer journey that the one on the way down. I’m not sure why but perhaps it’s that all the bad traffic areas are closer to Manchester and generally I get them out of the way first and so I can then relax and drive along to some good music. I always tend to return via the M60, the M61, the M6 and finally the M55 motorways. The M60 is always busy around the turn off for the Trafford Centre which is a huge American style shopping mall. I’ve never been that keen on it and on the few occasions when I’ve been there I always have a job trying to find my car again in the huge car parks.

Just as I pass the Trafford centre the signs for ‘Reports of an Accident’ pop up on the VMS (variable message signs). The traffic slows to a crawl and I start to wonder if I should perhaps divert to the M62. I can see the M62 turn off up ahead but I decide to stay on the M60 for a while. When you see Accident on a sign it usually means that is a genuine confirmed accident but when the signs say Reports of an Accident, well there might not be an accident at all. Most of the accident reports come from motorists who dial 999 and tell the police what has happened. The big problem is that a lot of people don’t actually know where they are. They might tell the police they are travelling towards Manchester from Staffordshire and that they are on the M6. The last junction they noticed was junction 16 so they might perhaps reckon they are between 16 and 17 although in fact they might be further up the motorway than they thought. In some cases the informant might even get the motorway wrong saying M6 instead of M60. Anyway, my colleagues and I in the motorway control room would have checked the cameras and maybe we would find the incident on CCTV. We would also task a patrol to run through the area and check.

Approaching the Trafford Centre

Of course all that is behind me now. I’m retired. The traffic begins to speed up and soon we are back to normal speed again. It could have been there was no accident at all or sometimes the cars involved just get going again and leave the scene.

In some ways I miss my life at Highways England or whatever name it is going by now. (Actually National Highways.) In other ways I don’t miss it at all.  I had a long drive into work, forty-two miles and I certainly don’t miss that journey although on the positive side, most of my ideas for blog posts used to come to me while driving. Somehow concentrating on driving always seems to free up another part of my brain and lots of ideas will come. I even have a dictation gadget in the car so I can blab my ideas into that and save them for later.

Another thing I used to do was to create a room in my head for those ideas and make sure to leave those ideas in there. That might sound a bit silly but a long time ago I read a book by Jack Black called Mindstore and it involved using various techniques to help the reader. I bought the book to improve my confidence, especially in job interviews. The writer asked his readers to relax and create a house inside one’s own mind. In the house would be various rooms which one could use for different things. A bathroom with a shower that washed away any problems or negative energy and so on. Another was one for rehearsing events in a positive way, like a job interview for instance. You would rehearse the interview in your mind, imagine being successful and then save the result on a big monitor screen. One of my rooms was for storing my blog ideas.

An RTC on the motorway from quite a few years ago.

A big accident hotspot on the M60 motorway is junction 13. The big problem here is that traffic is entering the M60 from the M62 and the M602; this traffic is all merging to the right while traffic already on the M60 wanting to leave at 13, which comes up pretty quickly after junction 12, is trying to go left. I always try to stay in the outside lane and avoid all this although further up the road I’ll need to get over to the left to exit onto the M61.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve copied a whole lot of audio onto the SD card I’m using in my stereo so no need to be constantly changing discs in my CD player. The next item comes up and it’s not music but Dylan Thomas reciting his work. He reads some poems which really is what got me interested in Dylan. I like to read his work but it’s the power of his recitals that really hooked me. Dylan wrote various plays for radio and one of my favourites pops up now. It’s called Return Journey. It’s a brilliant work read by Dylan himself in which he imagines his older self going back to Swansea in search of his young self.

Anyway, time to get over to the left and merge onto the M61. The M61 is a busy road and once you come on to it you have to beware of traffic coming over to the left from the A666. The traffic is heavy but so far it all seems to be moving well.

Return Journey was inspired by the devastation Dylan saw in Swansea after the town suffered the blitz of WWII. His broadcast begins with ‘It was a cold white day in the High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the Docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and headstoned with fences.’

Later Dylan is in a Swansea pub asking the barmaid if she remembers young Dylan. He describes his younger self to her and she replies ‘There’s words, what d’you want to find him for. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole’.

Later he meets the old park keeper in his childhood haunt, Cwmdonkin Park. Does the park keeper remember him as a boy? Of course, replies the man, he remembers all the boys who played there even the ones who would ‘climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old Swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of.’  It’s a very moving piece indeed.

I notice accident signs on the message boards and the traffic begins to slow. Ahead I can see the flashing lights of a Highways Traffic car, slowing the traffic down. A year ago one of my jobs in the control room would be running an incident like this. For a rolling road block the patrol would call for a dedicated radio channel and someone like me would shout up that they were ready to take over. On the M61 the dedicated channel was 28. We had dedicated channels so that any police patrol nearby could also change over and assist us. I’d confirm the patrol were on the channel and drop the speeds down on the motorway signals. The patrol would slow the traffic then sometimes bring it to a stop while they shifted any accident damaged or broken down vehicles to the hard shoulder. A quick sweep of any debris and the patrol would move to the hard shoulder and wave the traffic on.

Me in the Highways Agency Control Room

One particular traffic officer used to make me laugh. When he returned to the main radio channel he would always hail the control room and advise Romeo Echo Three One: Back from the dark side!

As we leave Greater Manchester and enter Lancashire, traffic begins to thin a little although on summer weekends the M6 gets busy with holiday traffic making to the Fylde Coast as well as the Lake District.

I pass a Police car on one of the Police Patrol parking points. They are distributed about on various points of the motorway network. There was a Police desk in our control room and I’m happy to say that generally we at Highways had a good relationship with them. The big surprise to me working with the Police was that I always thought the Police were, well the Police. The thing is, the UK Police are not just one single organisation, they are numerous separate Police Forces that actually all work differently and independently.

Appropriately The Greatest Hits of Sting and the Police starts up on my stereo. I’ve always rather liked the Police and I do love the music of the eighties.

Anyway, getting back to the actual Police, Lancs Police do things differently to Greater Manchester Police and Cumbria do things differently to everyone. Why there isn’t a more centralised Police Force I’ll never know. In our control room the Motorway Police Group is headed by Cheshire Police. They used a computer system that wasn’t compatible to the one used by GMP. When an incident occurred that came from GMP the staff at Cheshire had to copy the incident over to their system. We both used a system called Command and Control. They could then send the incident electronically over to us so we could set the motorway signals and respond with our patrol.

When I left in 2022, Highways had a new system called (I can’t remember!) and Cheshire Police had a system designed by Saab. I know it sounds a little controversial but why don’t all the Police and even other emergency services use the same system? Wouldn’t that be better?

The Police are singing Every Little Thing She Does is Magic just as I take the slip road onto the M55 for the very last leg of my journey. There are roadworks here that seem to have been going on forever. They are making an entirely new junction and of course all the slip roads and overhead bridges have had to have been constructed. A lot of it is nearly ready but it is still a 50mph zone.

Sting is the frontman to the Police and I read somewhere he got the nickname Sting because he used to wear a black and yellow sweater. His real name is Gordon Sumner and I’ve always thought his attachment to the name Sting kind of silly but what the heck, I still like his music. After leaving the Police, Sting went on to a successful career as a solo artist.

Just as I pull up at home, one of my favourite Sting tracks comes on; If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free. I’m tempted to sit and listen to it but I flip back to the beginning and switch off my stereo. Sting will be all ready for me on my next journey.

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