Some Thoughts from a Francophile

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s been a little chilly this week although here in the north west we had one rather sunny day in which I was able to give the lawn and the privets a final trim before the winter.

That brief glimpse of the sun got me looking back through some of my older posts and I started reading about and remembering our recent trips to France this year. I do love the French countryside. I like the quiet country lanes, the swimming lakes and the many parking aires for motorhomes. Occasionally we will find a parking area well placed for a nice restaurant. In many ways French food is for me a little over rated but what I love is the relaxed French way of eating. Lots of small courses rather than one big course.

We spend most of our weekends in France at vide greniers and brocantes. A vide grenier is literally a loft sale, the equivalent of a UK car boot sale.  A brocante is slightly different, a cross between a flea market and an antique sale. Many of these events in France are combined with a village fête and have a bar and a food area which can range from merguez (French sausages) and frites (chips to UK readers and fries to you in the USA) to a full three or four course French sit down meal.

As I mentioned above, there is always a bar, hey we are in France after all. Eighty cents for a glass of vin rouge, two euros for a glass of beer, and nothing stops these events. Rain shower at a UK car boot -forget it! Event over! Everyone leg it to your car and pack up. Are the French bothered by a downpour? No way! Put a bit of plastic sheeting down on your goods and quickly make way to the bar for a glass of red. Stalls soon open up again when the skies clear.

Bric a brac at a brocante

Now, here’s another thing; All these events are pretty well attended which means there must be plenty of people about in the local area but- and this is an important question. What do the French do when there isn’t a village fête on? Where do they go? What do they do and where do they do it!

Liz and I have spent many years travelling through France and here’s the thing; French towns close at 12 midday on the dot. Shops close. The only places open are the restaurants because nothing, and I mean nothing, interferes with the French lunch. Nothing! Everywhere shuts down until 2 pm. Okay, I’ve noticed in recent years the supermarkets have started to stay open, which is a good time to shop for all us UK tourists. But even in the late afternoons French villages are still and quiet. UK villages are full of people, cars, traffic and kids. Where do the kids go? Why aren’t they kicking balls about in the middle of the street like normal kids? Where do the people go and what are they doing? If you know the answer, let me know!

Parked up at a french aire

This is what we need to do. Not so long ago on BBC there was a pretty interesting documentary about cats. The BBC team wired up all the cats in a village, had cameras and tracking devices on the cats and worked out what the cats did, where they did it and in fact the whole pattern of their behaviour. What the BBC need to do for a follow up programme is to attach cameras and GPS tracking to a village of French people and report the results as soon as possible!

We need to know!

In previous posts I’ve wondered about what I would do if I was ever lucky enough to win a large amount of money. After the usual new car and new laptop, next on my purchase list would be a nice house and perhaps a holiday home in France, somewhere towards the south of the country because I really don’t like the cold.

Come to think of it, a great purchase would be one of those large French canal barges. I could spend the summer in the lush Loire then chug serenely south when the weather cooled keeping an eye out for suitable bars and bistros along the way. A change of blog might be in order. Letters from an Unknown Diner sounds pretty good!

The starter at a french restaurant

The French departments, similar I suppose to English counties, date from Napoleonic times and there are 96 departments in France today which are further subdivided into cantons.

In the Cher region which we visited a few years ago, there are some lovely rural communities. Still and quiet villages, almost haunting in their silence can be found everywhere.

What I’ve always liked in France is the simple tabac. As the name suggests it’s a place where you can get your tobacco and in some places it is also combined with a presse so you can also pick up a newspaper. One thing you will always find in the tabac though is a bar, similar to the vault of an old English pub where French men chat and drink coffee, sip wine or a pastis. In the village where Liz and I stayed, Germigny l’Exempt, there is a small sell-everything shop, a combination épicerie, depot de pain (the lady owner explained carefully that they are not a boulangerie, but a pain depot) and of course, a bar! An interesting combination.

You can imagine the situation if a similar establishment was available in England: The wife happens to mention to the husband, sitting in the lounge watching sport that they are a little short on veggies for the coming Sunday dinner. The husband jumps up; “need some vegetables love? Well, I’ll just nip down to the local shop and get you some!” And have a few beers while he’s there no doubt! Frenchmen, at least those of the rural Cher countryside, are clearly made differently here because I’ve yet to see anyone in that bar!

One Friday night, Liz and I went down to a nearby town, La Guerche sur l’Aubois, and had a meal out. The only place open appeared to be a rather nice looking pizza place so we went in. There were only two other diners and at the small bar –this was Friday evening remember- were two or three French guys chatting. We had our pizza, had a beer at the bar and by nine pm they were ushering us out! What do the French do ‘au weekend’? I don’t know but it’s certainly not a beer and a pizza! One really nice thing about that bar though, every time a new customer came in, he said hello to all at the bar and shook hands with everyone in turn, including Liz and me, two English strangers. As for eating out though, that is something the rural French do of a lunchtime, not an evening.

You can’t go to France and not have some fromage!

At every restaurant or bar serving food you will always see a sign for the ‘plat du jour’ or the dish of the day and one thing I love about French restaurants is their menu deals. You might see something like, for instance, a starter, the plat du jour, and then fromage (cheese) to finish. I do so much prefer small courses to one big meal!

The great thing about France is the wine and my personal rule about French wine is this –buy the cheapest, it’s always the best but then, I like my wine cheap and cheerful. In Intermarche, the Asda of France, you can buy a 10 litre box of merlot for about 22 euros, that’s about £19 in UK money, an absolute bargain. Forget expensive French wines, a nice quaffable French red does it for me every time!

Whisky in a french supermarket -and this was only one section!

Another thing about the French, especially regarding drink. You’d think that France, the country that created brandy would be a haven of cheap brandy, after all, this is where the drink is made! Sadly that isn’t the case, in fact, brandy in France always looks to me to be pretty expensive. However, when you come to whisky, a product of Great Britain, there seems to be an incredibly vast choice, far bigger than you would find in the UK. Perhaps the French are a nation of secret whisky drinkers!

Another thing I miss about France is when we rent a place with its own pool. Recently we have rented a regular place in the small village of Parçay Les Pins. It’s an old house with great thick walls and a lovely pool. It’s great to relax in the sun reading and then when you warm up you can just take a dip and cool down. Later in the warm evening we might light the barbecue for our evening meal and sip a glass of wine while the sun slips slowly down.

Of course if I did win the lottery and buy the barge I spoke about earlier, where could I swim? Yes, I may have to rethink what to do with my lottery win!

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A Few Random Thoughts about Time

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Time is a pretty odd thing when you think about it. You can’t see it or touch it but it’s there just the same. As far as I understand, time is uniform, it bumbles along at exactly the same speed, year after year. There are always 24 hours in any given day and 365 days in every year, except of course for leap years. I mentioned last week about encountering each new birthday with a sense of apprehension. After all, each birthday brings me closer to my inevitable end, my dying day but it seems to me that as we get older, time seems to speed up and the months and years pass by faster and faster.

Perhaps that’s a consequence of nearing the latter stages of my journey through life. Recently when we were travelling through France motoring along through the endless country lanes of the Loire valley, it seems as if I only became aware of the speed when I reached a new village or hamlet and had to slow down. Perhaps that’s the way it is with time too, that you only notice the passing of time with some new event, something that brings time into perspective.

One of my friends has a daughter born on my birthday and the other day the child’s grandmother mentioned to me that she would be soon off to school. School already I thought? After all, I still think of that child as a baby, which clearly she no longer is. (Quick check and the little girl in question was born in 2019!)

In the boot of my car are two big yellow anoraks with reflective stripes. I put them there in case I ever break down on the motorway although they were given to me when I first joined the Highways Agency. They were compulsory clothing for being out and about seeing the motorway network first hand with our traffic officers, our area contractors and the police. I remember being out with the motorway police for a day and looking down at the speedometer as we made our way to an RTC and seeing it registering 120mph. That was an interesting day but it was actually back in 2005, 18 years ago. Can those yellow jackets really be 18 years old?

Music is another thing that always registers the passing of time. In the pub quiz that we visit every Thursday there is always a music section. The quizmaster plays 10 tracks and asks for three answers for each; the title, the artist and the year. We are helped in the year aspect as the DJ plays two tracks from each of ten decades and gives us the year endings. Now back in the 1980’s I was at the height of my love of vinyl singles. I bought singles every week, usually when they dropped out of the charts and were sold off at half price and not only that, later in the 80’s I bought my first video recorder and spent a lot of time recording my favourite music on video. What this means is that I should be spot on with the 80’s music but a lot of the time I sadly am not. Last week at the quiz, one of the tracks was Red Light Spells Danger, a hit by Billy Ocean which I was convinced was 1987. Actually it was older and was released in 1977. Fortunately Liz’s recollection was better than mine.

I have always been one for skimming through records and CDs, especially when the word ‘sale’ can be seen. Some years ago, a prime location for buying cheap CDs was Woolworths which sadly went bankrupt in 2015. In Woolworths many years ago I picked up a compilation CD. It had some really nice tracks and a few I’d never heard of but I chose it particularly because of one track, ‘Horse with no Name’ by America. I’ve always loved that song and I don’t have a copy of it so I bought the CD. Later when I had got home and played the album I was surprised to find another track that I hadn’t spotted earlier, it was Desiderata, a poem by Max Ehrman made into a pop song, of sorts, by an American guy called Les Crane.

Now not only is that poem one of my favourites but so is the musical version. It was played a lot at school by our headmaster in the morning services and as soon as I heard it again it brought memories of those long ago schooldays flooding back to me: The registrations, the morning assembly, the prayers. Back in the late sixties a lot of those morning assemblies were about Vietnam and how our headmaster, Mr Trickett wove his morning address from Vietnam to the Desiderata, I do not know but that musical version was something I loved and finding it again on a CD was like getting part of my youth back.

 

Quite a few years back Liz and I visited many of the war cemeteries in Northern France and like many others were moved by the many monuments to those who lost their lives in two world wars. I made a video about the many war memorials we came across and in the video commentary I spoke about the passing of time.

I have a theory about time and it’s this, it’s that time flows differently in different places. OK; sounds a bit mad doesn’t it? Let me explain further.

On many occasions when trundling through rural France I’ve come across many bunkers, fortresses and other sites. In northern France Liz and I stopped at a war grave cemetery that was picture perfect in its own way. The lawns were incredibly neat, and the hedgerows immaculately trimmed. Sadness pervaded the site like a scent coming over from the adjacent fields. Throughout there is a feeling of peace, of slowness and a feeling that time has stopped here or perhaps just slowed. That’s not strange when you think that time must have speeded up during the action of the first and second world wars, so it seems only fair that nature must compensate, that time must slow later to make up for the fast and frantic earlier time.

You can imagine the pace of things even a hundred years ago: The early morning bombardment, the whistles blowing as officers called their troops to go over the top. The advance parties who made ahead to cut the barbed wire, the troops walking apprehensively forward until they walked into the deadly machine gun fire that cut most of them down. Many found their final resting places in these cemeteries, places that are now quiet and peaceful with a silent beauty, timeless and moving with the beat of nature as a backdrop; the humming of the insects, distant cows mooing, and the birds flying past.

All the places we visited have had their moments in the spotlight of world history. They all lived through times of accelerated pace when time flowed swiftly. Perhaps it’s their time now for a quieter pace while time flows slowly.

Back to me then and my 67 birthdays. Time as I mentioned seems to speed up with age but there is still time to mention one more thing.

Time for a cup of tea!

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My Birthday Week

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Some time ago, and I can’t remember when it was, I went from looking forward to my birthdays to not being interested in them at all. In fact, I even think I’ve gone a little the other way. I don’t hate my birthdays but they worry me as with each one I just get older and older.

I’ve had 67 birthdays now which is quite a considerable number and one thing is certain, I won’t get another 67. This year I took my birthday off Facebook, I’m not sure why, perhaps I just don’t want people to know I’m so ancient. Perhaps inwardly I’m ashamed of being old but either way, Liz posted birthday wishes on Facebook so removing my birthday was a pretty pointless exercise. Anyway, together, Liz and I had a pretty lovely week.

To kick things off, on the Monday prior to the big day we visited one of our favourite restaurants. It’s called Ego and it’s actually part of a big chain of Ego restaurants and on a Monday they have a special offer which consists of any starter and main course at a reduced fixed price and also £10 off a bottle of wine.

The food isn’t outstanding at Ego but the one thing that makes it stand out is that if something is wrong, the staff will fix it. There will be no questions, no excuses, they will just get you another meal or just fix whatever it is that was wrong.

In a lot of restaurants staff seem to want to give excuses or reasons for the problem but never seem to want to do anything about it. A while ago we were in another restaurant, actually one of my favourites and we complained that the mussels were a bit gritty. The manager came over and explained that it wasn’t the fault of the restaurant but the fishmongers. Really? Another time we complained that some of the leaves in a salad were a bit dead. Again, it wasn’t their fault as the salad comes pre-washed. Yes, but didn’t the chef look at the plate? Wasn’t it checked before it came to the table? A quick check and the offending leaf could have been removed and then there would be no problem. That particular restaurant has since gone down a little in my estimation.

Anyway, if those things had happened at Ego, the manager would be round to our table to apologise, the food would have been instantly replaced and now I come to think of it, the last time we complained, the manager not only sorted the issue but also gave us both a free glass of wine which is why we keep coming back there. The food is important at a restaurant but so is the service.

Anyway, that was Monday. On Tuesday, the day of my actual birthday, we went to the restaurant which served the gritty mussels and I had a really nice meal. The waiters had been tipped off beforehand that it was my birthday and after our meal came and sang happy birthday and two of our friends who were also in the restaurant came over and joined in too.

Later, we went over to the Pier Inn for their Tuesday night quiz. These days you hear a lot about pubs closing down. Even the Rovers Return, the pub in the long running soap Coronation Street is currently boarded up and closed so it’s nice to see new pubs opening. The Pier Inn used to be a shop many moons ago and now it has reopened as a small pub serving some very nice real ales.

(Picture courtesy Wikipedia creative commons)

The quiz at the Pier Inn is one of those that is mostly based on current affairs rather than general knowledge so as we hadn’t watched the news that much it was certain we weren’t going to do well, however, we were joined by a friend who actually was pretty well up on current affairs and combined with a few crucial answers we added when it came to music and Hollywood, we ended up as the winners!

I believe that the decisive question was actually one that I answered. Which four things were removed from the top of Mount Lee in Las Angeles, California in 1949?

 Yes, that was a tough one for many of the quizzers but being a fan of classic Hollywood I guessed that the four things were letters, actually LAND. Yes, the famous Hollywood sign was originally ‘HOLLYWOODLAND’ and was erected to advertise a new housing estate in Hollywood in 1923. In 1949 when the sign became rather dilapidated, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce offered to repair the sign but removed the ‘land’ segment so the sign would advertise the area itself and not just a housing estate. It was refurbished again in the 1970s and still stands today.

I thought I’d take a break from my birthday week and talk for a minute about Sex and the City. On a previous post I gave the latest series of And Just Like That a bit of a slagging off but I thought, is it that bad or is it that SATC was not actually as good as I remember? In order to resolve this issue, I opened up my DVD box set collection and plumped for my favourite season, season 4. With the DVD player cranked up I slipped in the first disc and there it was, SATC how it used to be; fabulous stories, great characters like Maria, Samantha’s lesbian lover, Charlotte’s husband Trey and his mother Bunny, Aidan, Steve, Mr Big, the OCD jazz guy and many others and Charlotte doesn’t look like some plastic botoxed oddball version of herself like she does today. I loved it and yes, And Just Like That really is as bad as I had thought.

Picture courtesy Olivers

Wednesday was a day of rest and a chance to ease up on my food and alcohol intake but on Thursday, our regular quiz night, we ate out once again. This time we went to Olivers, a friendly little place only a 5 minute drive from Liz’s house. Olivers is a small place with only a few tables serving pizza and pasta. They don’t serve alcohol but you can bring your own beer or wine which keeps the prices down which of course is vital to a tightwad like me. The pizzas are nice at Olivers but the dish I really like is a sharing board consisting of some pretty simple elements. Meatballs in tomato sauce, slices of some fabulous bread the chef makes himself, a pretty amazing garlic mayonnaise, olives, salami and potatas bravas which Liz doesn’t like so we swap that for a side salad. It’s simple but I love it plus the pizza we share for a starter is really nice.

After that it was off to our regular quiz. We excelled as usual in the picture round, we did reasonably well in the general knowledge but the music round was our downfall where we attributed the wrong songs to the wrong years. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

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A Slice of My Life Part 7

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always good to come back home and yet, at the same time, it’s always sad to leave your holiday destination. As you arrive back in rainy and cold UK, you can be sure that someone else is sitting on your sun lounger, sipping wine from your glass and contemplating a dip in your pool. Oh well, there’s always next year to look forward to.

We’ve spent three and a half weeks tootling through France in our motorhome. The weather was wonderful and not exactly what I was expecting in France in September. Usually, in the first weeks of September in the Loire, and I do speak from considerable experience of the area, there will be a big thunderstorm and the next day the temperature will be substantially cooler. This year we had the usual thunderstorm except that the next day it was just as hot and muggy as it had been the day before.

We sailed from Dieppe back to Newhaven and it isn’t a trip we’ve done before but we had a great cabin and despite a poor forecast, the English channel was pretty calm.

In the UK the traffic on the M25 was an absolute nightmare and what made it worse was that for the previous three weeks in France, driving had been an absolute joy. Yes, there was the occasional traffic jam, a bouchon as the French call it, but nothing like the endless queues on the M25. Rather than complete the trip to the North West in one drive, Liz found us a small village which boasted a cosy pub with lovely food and real ales and was happy for motorhomers to park overnight in their car park.

The next day we carried on north and found that the M6 boasted as many traffic jams, if not more than the m25. Anyway, after various diversions we finally found our way home and after swapping my t-shirt for a fleece we started thumbing through three and half weeks of mail and it’s probably round about then when we started thinking about the people, who were using our sun loungers and our pool, who I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

A few days after returning home I had to start preparations for a visit to the hospital. Prior to going away on holiday I had been for a routine test for bowel cancer and the result was that further investigations were required. I had thought that perhaps an x-ray was required or something like that but it turned out that the further investigations involved a colonoscopy. I’ve got to say that I didn’t like the sound of that at all. As you may know, it involves slipping a camera up the rear end to have a good look round inside your bowels.

The whole thing put a bit of a dampener on our first weekend at home. On the Sunday I had to stop eating at 3pm and then at 7pm drink a not very appetising potion designed to empty my bowels. It took a while to get working and one of the side effects was a rather intense belly ache. Not long after I thought I’d better visit the toilet.

The next dose of the potion was due at 6am so I set my alarm and when it went off Liz had already been up and got the dreaded mixture ready for me to drink. Thanks Liz!

After taking the mixture there was nothing to do but wait for it to do its work. The Japanese Grand Prix highlights were due on TV so I moseyed over to the lounge hoping to crank the race up. The race wasn’t broadcast until 10am so scanning through my recorded items I saw that the final episode of And Just Like That season 2 was ready and waiting to be watched. A cup of tea and a slice of toast would have gone down great guns but sadly, that wasn’t allowed.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m still watching And Just Like That. My favourite character, Mr Big has gone and although it’s has been good to see the return of Aidan, things just aren’t the same somehow. The dynamic of Sex and The City has been lost partly because Samantha is not in the series and the new characters are ones I don’t really have any interest in. Not only that, there seem to be very few male characters in this new series when back in the old Sex and the City days there seemed to be a lot of interesting men engaging with the central quartet of girls.

This episode was in the news before it had even been broadcast as it had a special appearance from Samantha who made a quick phone call to Carrie. Apparently Kim Cattrall who plays the part declined to take part in the series as she felt she was done and dusted with the character as well as not being paid enough money. Anyway, some executive asked her to make a cameo appearance which she did and for a moment it felt as if the series was finally back on track. The moment didn’t last long though.

Later in the episode, Charlotte’s gay friend Anthony is in a relationship with a new boyfriend who wants anal sex but it turns out that Anthony doesn’t do anal sex. Now, I know this is a delicate subject but I thought all gay people had sex that way so that just shows how much I know about homosexual life. Anyway, Anthony submitted to the ordeal and going by the look on his face he wasn’t enjoying it at all. In fact, I’d guess he felt just like me with a camera going up my bottom.

The nurses and staff were all very nice and friendly and made a great effort to treat me with a lot of dignity despite this very undignified process. Even so, that camera bloody well hurt, certainly at first. The worst thing was that as it went up my bowel it pushed a load of air into my stomach giving me really painful wind. The nurses encouraged me to break wind but I struggled to do so, although eventually I was able to shift position which in turn helped to release some wind. After that it wasn’t so bad although I had to turn over so I struggled to watch the camera pictures. Yes, welcome to 21st century healthcare where you can actually see the inside of your bowel on a TV screen.

The ordeal was soon over and apart from finding a small hemorrhoid which caused all the concern in the first place, everything was ok but believe me, that was not a pleasant experience.

Generally I like to finish these kind of posts with a link to the cinema world but I found it hard to think of anything appropriate. However, the other night I sat down to watch one of my favourite feel good films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Maybe you have to be a certain age to enjoy a film about retired people choosing to spend their last years in India but I’ve always enjoyed it. One thing I noticed on this latest viewing was something I hadn’t picked up on before. Towards the end of the film there are numerous repetitions of a phrase that I’ve always attributed to John Lennon and which I’ve used many times on my Twitter feed.

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7 Directors Who Acted in Their Own Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I thought I’d try to write or at least start this post off by writing from memory without using Google. I could only come up with 6 directors so I added another who acted but not in his own films. I decided to exclude actor/directors like Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood but then I broke that rule by adding Orson Welles. Now that the parameters are clear for this post, well fairly clear, let’s get going . . .

Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock was a British director who began in the days of silent films and came to be known as the master of suspense. Blackmail made in 1929 was the first British Talkie and 10 years later producer David O Selznick lured him to Hollywood where he made many films that are now regarded as classics, films like North by Northwest, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, The Birds and Pyscho. Hitchcock might also be seen as one of the first celebrity directors. He became popular because of his habit of appearing, however briefly, in all of his films, sitting on a bus for instance, just missing the bus in another. He also became well known by introducing his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He is probably the most famous director to appear in his own films. He never played a speaking role but he appeared in every one of his films in some small way.

Hitchcock was knighted in 1980 and died in March that same year.

Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino is an interesting filmmaker in many ways, writing and acting as well as directing. His films also seem to follow an unconventional path with many extended scenes and dialogue to fill in character background. I haven’t seen many of his films but Pulp Fiction from 1994 is one of my favourites and it involves a number of overlapping storylines. Tarantino plays the part of Jimmie, a friend of two gangsters played by John Travolta and Samuel Jackson. Travolta’s character accidentally shoots someone in the back of their car and the two turn to Jimmie for help who then calls another gangster played by Harvey Keitel who sorts out the situation.

Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone is one of my very favourite filmmakers, responsible for directing such films as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and JFK. In Wall Street Stone takes a close look at the American stock market and the world of stocks, shares and stockbroking. A young ambitious trader dreams of working with big time corporate trader Gordon Gekko,

The young ambitious trader is Bud Fox played by Charlie Sheen and he manages to wangle himself into the world of the high flying Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas who won an Oscar for his portrayal. The two find that rival stockbroker Sir Lawrence Wildman is buying Anacot Steel and they buy shares and then leak information to the press which drives up the price. In a montage of shots, Oliver Stone himself appears as an investor who is buying shares.

Stone also had a cameo in the film Dave in 1993 in which the President of the USA has a stroke and an impersonator takes over until the President is well enough to return. Stone plays himself as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ claiming that the President has been replaced by a doppelganger.

Martin Scorcese

Scorcese is one of the great filmmakers of all time having directed numerous classic films such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Aviator and many others. In Taxi Driver, Scorcese follows a disturbed former Vietnam veteran called Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro. Bickle works nights in New York City as a taxi driver and as he drives around we hear his voice on the soundtrack lamenting the moral decay of the city and his desire to rid the streets of the scum that he sees nightly. Later he plans to assassinate a political candidate but eventually shoots the pimp of a young girl. Wounded by the pimp, he falls into a coma but awakens to find he has become a hero to people in the city.

In one scene, Scorcese plays a passenger in Bickle’s cab who asks to stop below an apartment where his wife is apparently involved with another man.

Martin Scorcese continues to make films and his latest release in 2023 is Killers of the Flower Moon.

John Huston

Born in 1906, John was the son of the Walter Huston and his wife Rhea. Walter was an actor and Rhea a sports editor for various magazines. His parents divorced when he was young but Huston spent time with both his parents. He wrote stories for various magazines and decided to try his hand with the new film business starting up in Hollywood. Huston had a contract with Universal, his father’s studio, and wrote dialogue for various films but after a drunken incident driving a car which left an actress dead he left to live in Paris. Later he returned and began writing for Warner Bros with great success. After the hit film Sergeant York starring Gary Cooper for which he wrote the screenplay, he managed to convince the film company to let him direct a picture. Huston chose The Maltese Falcon and the result was an absolute classic film starring Humphrey Bogart.

In 1948 Huston directed The Treasure of The Sierra Madre. He adapted the book by B Traven for his own screenplay and also cast his father, Walter Huston, as the old time prospector who takes two others, Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt, on a search for gold.

In the opening scenes Bogart is down on his luck in the Mexican town of Tampico and approaches a smartly dressed American asking ‘could you stake a fellow American to a meal?’

Later Bogart, as Fred C Dobbs, approaches the same man again until the man asks ‘can’t you occasionally go to someone else?’ The smart American was played by Huston himself.

Huston had various other roles as an actor, one I remember was in the 1960’s spoof version of Casino Royale. Various directors contributed to the chaotic film including Huston. He was to shoot a segment about M, the head of the Secret Service but Robert Morley was unable to play the part so Huston played it himself.

Huston directed numerous films but died in 1987 aged 81.

Orson Welles

Primarily Welles was known as an actor but he directed many films, including his very first one, Citizen Kane which has become known as one of the greatest films of all time. Welles was known for having one of the most incredible contracts in Hollywood history, not in terms of money but for the creative control that Welles had. In Citizen Kane the film opens with the death of Kane, a millionaire newspaper magnate. His last words were ‘Rosebud’. The makers of a cinema newsreel decide to find out what or who Rosebud was.

To do so they research Kane’s life; his inheritance of a huge fortune, his takeover of a newspaper, his great wealth, his power and influence, his marriage and divorce and ultimately his death. The reporters never find the answers to their questions but we, the cinema audience, have the secret revealed to us right at the end of the picture.

Citizen Kane is a wonderful piece of cinema with an outstanding visual style and the only criticism I can put forward is that for all its visual fireworks it is a film with a cold centre, a cold heart. Does the viewer feel sympathy for Kane? I’m not sure he does.

Welles went on to make many films but never again achieved the directorial success he had with Kane. He died on the morning of October 10th, 1985 from a heart attack. He left behind numerous unfinished films and screenplays.

Cecil B DeMille

Cecil was born in 1881 and is known as one of the founding fathers of American cinema. He was famous as a director of epics from the silent Ten Commandments in 1923 to Samson and Delilah and another version of The Ten Commandments, this time with sound and shot in colour in 1956.

DeMille actually appeared in many cameos doing prologues or trailers but in 1950 he starred as himself in Sunset Boulevard directed by Billy Wilder. In the film, retired silent star Norma Desmond wants to return to the screen. She has written a screenplay which she has asked Joe Gillis, a writer desperate for some income, to edit. The script is terrible but after a phone call from the studio, Desmond arrives at the Paramount lot to see DeMille. DeMille finds that the phone call was actually a request to hire her grand old car for use in a film and not, as Norma thought, a call for her to return to films.

DeMille of course is the odd one out in this group as he is the one who did not act in his own films, as far as I know anyway.

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ULEZ, the Lottery and More Thoughts From a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It always happens to me when I’m away. I know I’ve written about this before but the National Lottery has been annoying me. Here I am away from home and I get an email saying check your account, you’ve won a prize. Great! I wonder what is it? The million-pound jackpot or £3.42 on the Thunderball? I’m guessing it’s the £3.42. Either way, the National Lottery site cannot be accessed from abroad so I’ll just have to wait until I’m back in the UK before I find out if I’m a millionaire -or not.

What would I do though if I won a huge amount, millions of pounds? Well, it would be brilliant of course but me with my council house mentality, what could I do with say three million pounds? Well, the first thing would be to give away a third to charity. Yes, sounds good, doesn’t it? Really commendable but the thing is, I’ve already promised the Almighty that if he stopped for a minute and gave me a multi-million pound win, I’d give a third to charity.

I’ve promised so I could hardly say no and keep all the dosh could I? He would probably bump me off in a car crash or something. The big problem there is that I’ve also promised a third to the other side, you know, Lucifer, The Devil, Satan. I’ve promised him a certain amount of wickedness if he, the devil, will give me the jackpot. It’s shocking I know but I won’t be doing anything really nasty, just something moderately wicked like blocking up a post box on the last posting day before Christmas, just a little something that could be accepted as being wicked. Know what I mean?

Still, once I had the money, what would I do with it? Its ok for these rich people who are used to money. They will invest it and even if they invest it and go bankrupt, they will be still riding around in Rolls Royces and staying at top hotels whereas little old me would be in the nick for insider trading before you can say Gordon Gekko!

So, imagine I’ve got three million burning a hole in my pocket. Well, my old HP laptop is a little behind the times and slows down quite a lot when I try to edit my YouTube videos so a new PC or laptop must be on the cards. A new house? Of course, in fact the lovely villa that we rent here in Parçay Les Pins is a wonderful place. Perhaps I’d offer Rebecca the owner a few quid to take it off her hands. A little updating would be good. The lounge needs a makeover as do the bedrooms and the bathroom. Yes, I could see myself settling here quite happily. Then of course I’d need a nice car. My current vehicle, a Skoda is looking a bit long in the tooth, I quite fancy one of those cars with a lot of leg room. A few years ago the government was encouraging us to buy diesel cars, now those of us who still own them are being penalised by idiots like the Mayors of London and Manchester, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.

Both want new low emissions in their towns and Khan has already gone ahead and expanded ULEZ, the Ultra Low Emission Zone from the centre of London to the Greater London area. Now, if you want to use a diesel car in those areas you will have to pay £12.50 per day. Yes, £12,50 per day to drive in the low emission zone, even though your vehicle has an MOT and has passed the ministry of transport emissions test. I’m all for cleaner air but what Khan is trying to do is get the working man who mostly drives a second hand car or van to contribute towards the London Mayor’s almost bankrupt set up. How fines will change the air quality though I’m not sure but what about the companies who designed and produced our polluting vehicles in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better if the government decided to say to the manufacturers, reduce the emissions on your vehicles by 2025 and then allow those vehicles time to gradually drop down into the second hand market? After all, we can’t all afford brand new electric vehicles.

Andy Burnham wanted to do a similar thing in Manchester but the outraged response of the residents of Manchester forced him to back down. Now he will tell you he didn’t want a low emission zone. Actually he did, certainly when he was MP for Leigh. Now as Mayor he says ‘I was forced into this by the Government.’ No, not really, the Government didn’t ask for a charging zone, just a small city centre low emissions zone, it was Andy Burnham who extended the zone to the whole of Greater Manchester, no one else. Sorry but Andy Burnham is a liar.

Funny how you can get onto a rant without meaning to. Time to calm down and read a book.

Faithful by Marianne Faithful.

I picked this book up after reading a blog post that made it seem like the most wonderful book ever written about the 1960s. I knew very little about Marianne Faithful except that once upon a time she was involved with Mick Jagger and I was surprised to find that Marianne was actually a singer. She had a hit in 1964 with a song called As Tears Go By which I thought I’d never heard of but when I played it, I realised I had. I’d always thought this was by the Seekers but of course it wasn’t. Good job that song hasn’t been played on our weekly quiz night as I would have got it wrong.

Marianne seems to have made friends with someone who was a record producer and in the crazy world of the 60s a couple of tracks were recorded, a single was put out and made the charts. Later, caught up in the swinging London scene she met Mick Jagger and began seeing him regularly. This being the rock and roll scene, booze, drugs and sex make a lot of appearances. Marianne was initially attracted to Keith Richards but after the two hit the hay together Keith remarked casually while getting dressed that he thought Mick really fancied her so despite her rather liking Keith she began seeing Mick.

Mick comes over in her book as quite a nice guy really. He seems to have been happy to enjoy booze, drugs and sex just like your average rock and roller but he seems to have always been able to step away from anything, like drugs or booze in particular, and stop it taking over his life.

Marianne did let drugs take her life over later on but at the beginning things seemed pretty amateur. For instance in the famous police drugs raid on the Rolling Stones, circa 1967 I think, Marianne had bought some travel sickness pills quite legally in either Italy or Spain but because they contained speed, they were illegal in the UK, not that anyone knew that of course.

Marianne stayed with Mick for quite a while but her life seemed to be going out of control as she seems to have been stoned for most of the 60s. Eventually she became a major drug user and at one point ended up living in a squat but still seems to have found the time and money to score drugs.

Actually, this book is very like a book I read not long ago about John Cooper Clarke in that when people are drug addicts, all they can think of is getting more drugs. Even though Marianne gets in quite a state, she never thinks that the reason might actually be her drug taking and neither does she ever even entertain actually not taking drugs.

Somehow, even when Marianne is living in a squat someone thinks she might be able to put an album together and make some money which she does. She ends up in New York and eventually manages to get into a detox place from which she finally emerges, in later life, clean and drug free.

Her life has been  -and here I have to use a phrase that I hate but here is actually relevant- a sort of roller coaster ride and the book is written in a sort of stream of consciousness way in which she describes her LSD trips with quite mesmerising clarity.

At the end of the book, she is happy that her albums have done well and people regard her now as a serious artist and not just Mick Jagger’s druggie girlfriend which, sorry Marianne, was my conception of her before reading this book.

One final thing. I clicked onto Spotify and listened to a few of her music tracks and I have to say, even though Marianne seems to be nowadays up there with the gods of rock and roll, I didn’t find anything that resonated with me. Sorry, Marianne.

Here in France we have been really lucky with the weather, it has been lovely, sunny and warm. I’ve been to France at this time of the year many times and usually the summer ends with a big thunderstorm. One day it’s hot, the thunderstorm comes and the next day it’s considerably cooler and the summer has gone. This year we had the usual storm but afterwards it was still muggy and hot. As I write this on the 13th of September, we’ve sat outside for our usual evening meal but as we came to the cheese course I felt cold. After a while I was so cold, I had to nip inside and dig out my fleece.

Yes, the summer is finally over.

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Noel Coward, Pools and Flying Creatures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This could really be a Sun Lounger Post  but for clarity I thought I’d give it the title above because it’s actually mainly about Noel Coward and his autobiographies.

Here in the quiet village of Parçay-les-Pins, Liz and I are having a relaxing time. The weather is good, well actually, it is fantastic. Sunny and warm, perhaps a little too warm but either way, the perfect weather for barbecues, eating outside, reading by the pool and relaxing.

Here’s the itinerary: Up at whatever time we want. Breakfast later, usually before 12 noon but not always, a quick washing up of the pots and then out to the pool. I’ve spent most of this holiday reading the autobiography of Noel Coward and it’s actually three books in one. The first part is his first autobiography, Present Indicative, part 2 is an unpublished segment of his unfinished third autobiography, Past Conditional and finally his second published autobiography Future Indefinite.

Book one, Present Indicative was published in 1937 and concerns Noel’s early years, his childhood and his first tentative steps into the theatre. It’s an account of a vanished world of repertory companies, writers, actors and actresses who have long gone and whose names mean little today in the 21st century. Even so it is hugely fascinating and interesting and as always enlivened by Noel’s supremely witty text. Noel was a homosexual in a time when homosexuality was illegal and most of his private life he keeps private although armed with a little knowledge of Noel we can read between the lines and assume that Jack Wilson who comes to live with him at his home, Goldenhurst in Kent, was presumably his lover.

It is pretty hot here in Parçay-les-Pins and after a little reading it’s time to slip into the cool waters of the pool and have a swim. Just lately, on a physical level I’ve been very inactive. I keep meaning to cycle or take a walk every day but I can never get around to it and I’m conscious my health is suffering. Now, every 20 minutes or so I slip into the pool and do 8 to 10 lengths and go back to my sun lounger for more relaxation and reading.

Book two, Past Conditional is an unpublished and unfinished autobiography that was intended to fill in the gap between his first two autobiographical books. It starts where the first one finished off, in the early 1930s and differs considerably in tone as it was written much later in the mid-1960s and Noel was able to look back at himself in the 1930s and examine himself from a more in depth perspective. Such a pity it was unfinished.

An interesting segment concerns the death of his brother who is scarcely mentioned in the text as he and Noel were never close. The brother was clearly never part of Noel’s theatrical world and the family sent him off to South Africa only for him to return and die of cancer.

In Parçay-les-Pins, we have been tempted to visit our favourite local restaurant however, a couple of things have stopped us. Firstly, it is very hot and the Station Restaurant is only open at lunchtimes so we have decided to wait until next week when the weather forecast is not looking so good. Why waste all that precious sun-bathing time?

Tea time at Parçay-les-Pins

Round about 6 pm or sometimes later, we tend to move from the pool back to the house and crank up the barbecue and decant some wine and eat in the warm evening. One of the great pleasures in France, at least for me, is to sit outside until the sun slides over the horizon and then in the darkness, a darkness here in the countryside so velvety and complete that the view of the sky and the stars is uninterrupted by any ambient light such as traffic or streetlights. Then I can look up at the great vista of the night sky, the heavens displayed above us in such a way that can never been seen from a great city like Manchester in the UK.

The big problem I have found is that this is just the time for the insects of the night to come out and nibble at my legs. One night Liz mentioned that she had some of those citronella candles that are supposed to deter the bugs so at once I dug a few out and lit them. It was rather nice for a while sat in the dark with the candles fluttering away with a rather nice scent. What happened was that the rather nice scent seemed to encourage even more bugs, especially a great number of what I can only describe as hornets. They were two to three times bigger than a UK wasp and then seemed to be honing in on the scented candles. Luckily, Liz is a master of the fly swatter and after a short while a whole flight of the hornets lay dead on the windowsill although by then, I had shot inside to safety.

The final book in the autobiographical series was Future Indefinite in which Noel recounted his time during the Second World War. He seems like many to have had a very low opinion of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, although to be fair to Chamberlain, he was doing his utmost to avoid the horrors of war. Sadly, and clearly unknown to Mr Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler did not want to avoid war, he was in fact wanting war very badly and happily it was Mr Churchill who understood this only too well.

In June of 1939 Noel who was a great globetrotter decided to take a tour of Europe in the light of Mr Chamberlain declaring ‘peace in our time’. He visited Warsaw and Danzig, Moscow, Leningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. He found that many of the people in those places were just waiting for Hitler to invade, particularly the Poles. In Russia he found a state that declared it had found freedom in Communism but was in fact quite the opposite as the Stalinist regime had choked any kind of criticism or free thinking whatsoever.

When war was declared Noel was asked to be part of an Anglo-French PR unit in Paris which he seems to have enjoyed for a while and then become a little bored with. He was sent on a tour of the USA to gauge opinion there on the war and was on his way back when the Nazis invaded France. He also did a tour of Australia and New Zealand to entertain troops and did charity work for various organisations helping those who were bombed out in London.

By far the most interesting part was his account of the filming of In Which We Serve, a very patriotic film showing the activities of a ship in the Royal Navy and the lives of those who served in her, all the way through to the ship’s sinking. In his very first autobiography, the names of the many actors and actresses he worked with meant very little to me but now I began to recognise a few names, John Mills and Richard Attenborough for instance and David Lean who co-directed the film with Noel although in actual fact, Lean directed most of the film when Coward became bored with the long-winded filming process.

Lying by the pool after a lot of reading and swimming I invariably start to feel tired round about the 4pm mark and tend to nod off although I’m usually awoken by flies buzzing around my ears. What insects seem to find fascinating about my ears I will never know but they always seem to strike just as I am nodding off.

Books, Sudoku and a pool. What could be nicer?

As well as the flies a great horde of swallows seem to be fascinated by our pool and round about 5pm they gather on the telephone line above us, divide themselves into squadrons and make various sorties down to the pool, skimming just above the surface or sometimes dipping into the water with either their wings or their tiny feet. This performance is very remarkable indeed and quite a few times I’ve had to duck as the swallows make their dives from just behind my head.

It actually reminded me about the Dambusters, the raid by 617 squadron of the RAF on the dams of Germany. They had to drop low over the waters of the dams and hit a consistent height of 60 feet before dropping their ‘bouncing bombs’.

Coward goes on to talk about Blithe Spirit, my favourite of Coward’s plays which was made into a film in 1945. Coward was not keen on the resulting film. David Lean added an ending in which Charles Condomine played by Rex Harrison dies and joins his ex-wives in the spirit world. Coward complained that David Lean had f**ked up the best thing I had ever written!  Personally, I loved it.

Final verdict of the Noel Coward biographies; fascinating, always interesting and hugely entertaining.

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Writing Heroes and Making that YouTube Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

What makes someone want to be a writer? Is it a need to emulate our own writing heroes or something else. I mentioned in a post last week that it’s important to be creative and we can be creative in a huge number of ways, not just in traditional artistic pursuits but also in everyday things, decorating our homes for instance, posting on social media, putting together a CD music mix or many other things.

I’ve always been a writer. As a child I used to scribble stories in notebooks and I even wrote short TV and film screenplays. I used to cast the characters from the film and TV actors of the time and I even remember one in particular. I was fascinated by the espionage fiction of the time, things like The Man From Uncle and James Bond 007 and I wrote about my own secret agent, Agent 80.

I cast Steve McQueen in the role as Agent 80 and put together a dossier on his secret agent character choosing which car he would drive and what sort of a place he lived in, cutting out pictures from magazines to make up the fictional file. Back then I was really interested in espionage and sci-fi and all my writings were pretty much about things like that. Later, as an adult, I started to write about things that happened to me; working in an office and working for the bus company and the pubs and bars I used to frequent. One of my favourite essays that I produced back then was something I wrote while waiting in a pub and I scribbled down notes about two people sat opposite and their smoking ritual involving getting out the packets, taking the cigarettes, flicking the lighter and then lighting up and the way they smoked, the way their hands moved and so on.

These days a lot of people in bars place their mobile phones carefully on pub tables looking over occasionally for messages. Back when I was a young man smokers placed their drinks carefully by their cigarettes and lighters, their table becoming a sort of personal shrine saying this is my space.

Two people who became writing heroes to me were Dylan Thomas and James Hilton. I won’t go on about them too much as I’ve written about both before (click the highlighted links for previous posts) but here are some basic thoughts;

Dylan Thomas

Dylan was a hard drinking, pub going writer and it was perhaps that image which first appealed to me. The other thing which really interested me was the incredible power of his writing but add that to his spirited readings from his work and his radio broadcasts and well, I was totally hooked.

James Hilton

Hilton is the author of one of my favourite books, Lost Horizon and he is also a fellow northerner like myself. Hilton was born in Leigh in Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester and he made a journey I would love to have taken. He went from Leigh to Hollywood, California and he wrote a number of books and screenplays that were made into classic films. He wrote Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Goodbye Mr Chips starring fellow Englishman, also a northerner, Robert Donat who hailed from Didsbury in Manchester.

Charles Dickens

Dickens is of course a great and famous classic writer. I’ve got to say that some of his books I’ve found a little hard to read. I’ve tried and tried to read Pickwick Papers but I just couldn’t get through it. Not long ago I picked up Bleak House and once again I couldn’t really get started on the book. I have read A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and my absolute favourite, David Copperfield.

My favourite character, apart from Copperfield himself is Steerforth, a friend of David Copperfield but one who ultimately betrays him. The best part in the book probably, for me at any rate, is the storm when David returns to Yarmouth. Dickens builds the storm slowly and each word and phrase adds a new layer to the sense of danger and foreboding and when Copperfield is finally reunited with his old friend Steerforth at the height of the storm’s ferocity, death comes between them and Steerforth is sadly drowned.

My well thumbed copy of David Copperfield

Dickens reveals this in a very unique way, he does not tell the reader Steerforth is dead. He leaves the reader to realise this themselves and, in the process, makes the reader almost at one with the narrative. Throughout the book, Dickens mentions in passing about Steerforth’s habit of sleeping with his head on his arm. It’s referred to many times in the narrative almost as a matter of non interest, something unimportant that the reader doesn’t really need to know, but when David Copperfield spies someone aboard a stricken ship trapped in the fierce storm who evokes some faint remembrance for him, a tiny warning bell is set off.

Finally, when the body of a drowned man is brought ashore and lies mutely on the sand, his head upon his arm, we know just from that simple bit of information, without the author telling us anything more, that Steerforth is dead. The prompts and clues that Dickens has hinted at have paid off for the reader in the most satisfying of ways.

Noel Coward

Coward has really been a surprising writing hero to me. I’ve been aware of him for years through film and television and his slightly eccentric persona has always been a little amusing to me. I remember once seeing an interview with him on the stage at the BFI, (British Film Institute) Richard Attenborough was interviewing him and seemed to me to be treating him as some sort of God that had been beamed down from the heavens. Coward was puffing away on a cigarette and lapping up all the praise.

A favourite film of mine is Blithe Spirit. The film starred Rex Harrison as a journalist who wants some background for a novel and he invites a medium, Madame Arcarti to officiate at a séance at his house. Unfortunately for Rex, Madame Arcarti evokes the spirit of his dead wife who at first is only visible to him. The film and of course the stage play that came before is a wonderful witty comedy. I liked it so much I wondered if the play or the screenplay was in print. I was happy to find that it was and I bought a paperback copy which also contained two other wonderful plays, Hay Fever and Private Lives. Again, these other plays were outstandingly witty and humorous and off I went in search of more works by Coward. As I write this, I’m currently reading a collection of his autobiographies.

Coward liked to arise early in the morning and then write until lunchtime, after which he would then enjoy his lunch and relax for the afternoon. Not a bad set up really and one I could do with taking up myself. Of course, I’m not so keen on lunch as Noel, I’m more of a late breakfast kind of guy, brunch I think they call it in places like the USA. Also, I don’t get up that early. I have done in the past, in fact I once did a regular 6am shift which meant getting up very early indeed.

Anyway, after writing about these four great authors it’s got me in a creative mood. I’ve done quite a bit of writing lately but I’ve realised that I’ve been neglecting the video producing aspect of my creative side. It’s clearly high time I produced something new for my YouTube page. After all, video is important for plugging my media profile as well as the two books I have for sale on Amazon.

I got out my video camera and thought what could I do. Yes, a piece to camera. I’ve been reading up lately about Marilyn Monroe which is why the late Hollywood star has featured in quite a few recent posts. I decided I could talk about my Monroe book collection and articulate a recent post I did concerning an internet debate about Marilyn’s death. I worked out what I was going to say in my head and then shot the whole thing in one take as a sort of rehearsal. I took off my scruffy polo shirt, changed it for a nice shirt and did the whole thing again. Not bad I thought.

Next I went about editing the video. The light wasn’t good so I upped the exposure and added some contrast. I cropped a few of the shots and closed in to a tighter shot covering me and the books I mentioned in my collection. I added the titles and credits and then settled back to review the entire thing. It was a good few hours work and I was ready to upload to YouTube when I spotted something.

During the video I mentioned a BBC documentary a few times. The documentary was called Say Goodbye to The President but for some inexplicable reason I realised that in the video I had somehow managed to refer to it as Shall We Tell the President, which happens to be the title of a novel by Jeffrey Archer, which as far as I know, has nothing whatsoever to do with Marilyn Monroe.

I wonder if any of the writers mentioned above ever had problems like this?

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Writing and What Happened in 1977

Posted on by Steve Higgins

1977 was a different world. There was no internet and there were no mobile phones. The only phones were landlines and they were big and heavy with great rotary dials with which you had to laboriously dial a number. As more people wanted telephones they needed more numbers and so numbers got longer and longer. 061, the dialling code for Manchester became 0161 and the code for London which was 01 became two new codes 071 and 081

I should tell you that I’m actually quite interested in telephones, especially those big heavy ones with a dial. I used to collect them and in fact I have quite a few; my two favourites are an old Bakelite phone from the 1940s and a Trimphone from the 1970s. The Trimphone was a new style telephone created by BT. It was a wedge-shaped light phone and the handset fitted neatly across the dial. Although it’s a phone I’ve always associated with the 1970’s, it was actually first introduced in 1965 and had a warbling ring tone instead of the traditional bell. The original versions had a green dial which lit up in the dark although this was discontinued due to concerns about radiation as the phosphorous which gave off the green glow was energised by a small tube of tritium gas which was mildly radioactive. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought anything could be ‘mildly’ radioactive but happily my two trimphones do not glow in the dark.

Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:

Once in 1977 I had a bit of a crush on a girl named Anne. I was a bus driver and my conductor had gone out with Anne a few times before moving on to someone else. I asked my friend Des for her number and I called her up one evening. I didn’t have a phone so I had to use a call box. I dialled the number and the phone rang for quite a while and finally someone answered.

‘Can I speak to Anne’ I asked.

‘Anne?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Anne. Tell her it’s Steve.’

‘Steve?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Steve.’

‘Just a minute.’

I could hear someone in the background asking who is it? And someone saying it’s for Anne and I had the feeling then that Des was playing a trick on me but hopefully the girl, whoever she was, had gone to fetch Anne.

A vintage bakelite telephone bought in France

I waited for quite a while and soon the pips went on the phone and I had to put more money in. I was still hanging on when the pips went again and in went my last coin. After what seemed like ages Anne came to the phone. I told her I didn’t have any money left so I quickly asked her out, she agreed and we set a place to meet, just before the phone finally cut off. When I finally went out with Anne, she told me that the phone wasn’t hers, it was her auntie’s phone and her auntie lived around the corner so Anne’s cousin had to nip round to Anne’s house, tell her there was a phone call and bring her back to the phone!

I remember telling Des about it and he laughed his head off. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was her Auntie’s phone, you twit?’ I said.  Des just laughed even more.

Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book Floating in Space. Floating was set in the year 1977 and as I mentioned earlier there was no internet, there were no mobile phones and wireless was an old-fashioned name for the radio. What else happened in 1977?

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the USA and he had won the election the previous year, taking office on January 20th, 1977. He was a peanut farmer who defeated President Gerald Ford who had served as President after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. As I write this, Carter is currently the oldest living former President.

In the UK the Prime Minister was Jim Callaghan. According to Wikipedia, he was the only Prime Minister to have held all the four main offices of state; Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and of course, Prime Minister.

A previous Prime Minister, Anthony Eden died in 1977.

Today’s blog is my 578th post over here on WordPress. It’s my 578th time of reaching out and showing readers a little of my work and hoping it might stimulate a few of you to click the links above and perhaps buy a copy of one of my books.

Creativity is important to everyone and my creative outlet is here in these weekly pages. For others it might be painting or photography. It might be working on a car or motorbike or even a little woodwork or home improvement. Creativity can take many forms, even making a post on Facebook can be creative. If you are on holiday and take a picture of a sunset and make it into a post, that is creativity. You can even take it further, crop the picture, add a filter to the image. Add a quote, Oscar Wilde is always good for one and so is Noel Coward or the big daddy of the written word; Shakespeare. The more you add the more creative you are. You can even write more on the post, another sentence, another paragraph, even another page. Soon you are on the way to a chapter, then more chapters and in time you will find that you have written a book. You’ve become a writer which, let’s face it, is a big achievement but then you need to write more, you need more pages, more chapters and more ideas.

Some people might write more than 578 posts, others may fall by the wayside after a mere eight, after all we all have things to do, jobs, work, life. All of that gets in the way.

Perhaps it’s time to get back to 1977:

On the 16th August 1977 at 6am, it was time for Elvis Presley to get some sleep. Night and day were reversed in Elvis’ world. He spent most of the night awake doing all the things he wanted to do. If he wanted to see a film at the cinema, he paid the cinema to run a film for him and his friends at night. He ate and played games at night, like the racketball he played with his step brothers and friends before going to bed that morning.

His fiancée, Ginger Alden was with him and Elvis who had trouble sleeping, took his usual assortment of sleeping pills before turning in. Sometime around 9am, Elvis awoke and told Ginger he was going to the bathroom. His bathroom was huge and he had made it into a truly personal and private place. In the bathroom was a circular shower. One wall was mirrored and fringed with those lightbulbs that one sees on the dressing table of a stage or film star and Elvis’ toilet things were clustered around the basin. The room was carpeted in purple and as well as a circular shower there was a couch and a TV set.

Elvis may have been sat on a chair reading The Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson or he may have been using the toilet however, sometime during the morning he keeled over and fell face down to the floor wearing only a pair of blue cotton pyjamas. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll had died.

A few months before Elvis died, my friend Chris and I decided to pack in our jobs and travel to Spain and look for work there. His sister had already made the trip and assured Chris that there was a big British contingent and plenty of jobs available in bars and restaurants. Accommodation was readily available too. Chris and I hitchhiked to London where we caught the boat train to Paris. We wandered about in Paris trying to get a ride further south but after waiting for days trying to get a lift, we caught the train down to Spain.

We had a big reunion in a place called Lloret de Mar with Chris’ sister. Two Scots guys fixed us up with a pension, a small place to live and we met them later in the bar and bought them drinks as a thank you. After a while I became a little fed up of buying them drinks, yes, they’d helped us get a place to stay but that didn’t mean I was committed to providing them with free beer for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure they appreciated being told that and afterwards even though Chris got on with them pretty well, I didn’t. The incident contributed towards a certain unpopularity on my part in the local community but at least it kept the cadgers from mythering me. Still, other newcomers to Lloret were pretty popular, they had money in their pockets and the local Brits didn’t.

Quite a few notable people died in 1977. Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Wernher von Braun, Roberto Rossellini, Marc Bolan and of course, Elvis Presley.

I stayed in Lloret for two weeks and it was fun. Every night was like a Saturday night but after two weeks I realised I didn’t just want Saturday nights. Sometimes I wanted a normal Tuesday night watching TV. Sometimes I wanted a Sunday night and my mother’s Sunday dinner and sometimes I wanted a rainy Thursday afternoon. After a few weeks in the sun I left Chris in Lloret, hitchhiked north through France and finally back to Manchester.

We didn’t have a telephone at home so I couldn’t call to say I was on my way back. I always remember knocking on the door of our house. Mum opened the door and said ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be gone for six months. ‘It didn’t work out Mum,’ I told her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. I threw your old bed out!’

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Re-reading Old Books and Re-watching Old Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always been a great reader and even though I look forward to reading something new, I like to re-read my favourite books just like I re-watch my favourite films. The other day I happened to pick up a book that is one of my favourite ever reads, Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

James Hilton is one of my personal writing heroes and yet his name may be unfamiliar to many of you reading this blog. He was a journalist and an author and made the trip from his home in Leigh, Lancashire, (now Greater Manchester) in the UK to the Hollywood hills in the United States to become a screen writer. He is probably more well known for his book ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ which was made into a film with Robert Donat (actually another northerner from Didsbury in Manchester) but my favourite of his books and quite possibly my all-time favourite book is ‘Lost Horizon’.

Lost Horizon is a book I found in a second-hand shop many years ago. A battered 1940s paperback I paid twenty-five pence for and yet that small investment has paid me back many times over for sheer reading pleasure as Lost Horizon is a book I re-read every year or so and I often pull it down from my bookshelf when a current read fails to entertain me.

Lost Horizon is a completely original idea and is about British consul Robert Conway in the dark days before World War II. Conway is helping his fellow British citizens escape from civil war in China and he and his small party escape in the last plane only to be kidnapped and taken to a distant Tibetan monastery. Conway meets the High Lama and after a time it is revealed that the Tibetans want to preserve the best of world culture and art and make it safe from the coming war.

Hilton is one of those few people who have invented a word or coined a phrase that has become part of the English language. In this case it was the name of the Tibetan monastery, Shangri-la which has since become a byword for a peaceful paradise, a distant haven. Camp David, the US President’s retreat was originally called Shangri-la until renamed by Eisenhower for his son, David.

Hilton’s journey from Leigh to Hollywood must have been a magical one and one I envy, especially as his time in Hollywood was a golden age for movie making. Lost Horizon was made into a movie by Hollywood director Frank Capra and starred Ronald Colman as the urbane British diplomat of the novel. It’s a movie that was restored some time ago and is a great DVD if you happen to see it. Colman also starred in another movie authored by Hilton, Random Harvest, which I mentioned last week in my post about VHS recordings.

Hilton settled in Hollywood and wrote a number of screenplays for classic Hollywood movies such as ‘Mrs Miniver ‘. Sadly he died from cancer in 1954.

 

All of Me an autobiography by Barbara Windsor

I’ve got a few new books to read but I thought I’d save them for my next holiday. I had an idea recently for a blog about the Carry On films so I picked up this book for a bit of research even though I read it a few years ago.

Barbara Windsor is probably best known as the blonde from the Carry On films. It’s a niche that stuck with her despite her appearances in later years in the TV soap Eastenders. Maybe she liked that, maybe not but either way, she was rather good at what she did. In this book, she tells her life story and it’s very frank and pretty entertaining.

‘Bar’ as her friends called her, doesn’t hold back and basically tells it like it is. She talks about her climb to fame and the husbands she has had along the way. First was Ronnie Knight, an East End gangster and friend of the Kray twins. Ronnie and Bar seemed pretty good together for a while but neither of them were interested in each other’s careers. Barbara would be off filming and Ronnie it seemed wasn’t bothered at all about that. He would be off to sort his nightclub out and Bar would be happy at home having to get up early for a film or rehearsing for one of her many stage roles. On one occasion in the early morning, the police burst in and carted Ronnie off to the nick for armed robbery. Barbara stuck by her man then but soon after, she’d had enough.

After Ronnie got the push, he was involved with a blonde down at his club; Bar moved on to a younger guy and when that didn’t work out, she moved onto an even younger guy. That younger guy, Scott, was still with her a few years ago when Barbara was sadly stricken with dementia and went into residential care.

One surprising aspect of the book is that although I’d always thought of Barbara as a film and TV star, in fact a great deal of her career involved the stage and she appeared in many stage productions including her own one woman show.

This book, written in 2000 is a great little read and well worth picking up if you see it in the book shop. It’s written in a friendly talkative chit chat style, almost as if Bar has dictated it to someone and that’s something I particularly like about the book. The last quarter of the book though feels a little as if it has been tagged onto the end of another book. It mainly concerns her relationship with final husband Scott and is perhaps a little gushing and overly romantic and Woman’s Weekly style but I reckon Bar deserved a little romance in the twilight of her days.

Barbara died in December, 2020 but the Carry On films just literally carry on. Most weeks you can find one showing on one of the many TV channels now available. In her book, Barbara has a bit of a moan that despite the longevity of the films, the stars never made a pennly from all the numerous TV repeats of the films. Still, how many people thought the films would be still popular years after their first release? The first film was Carry on Sergeant made in 1958 and the last one, Carry on Columbus was released in 1992. Altogether there were 31 films, four Christmas specials, various stage versions and numerous TV shows. All the main stars, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor and many others are long gone. The only major star of the films still alive in 2023 is Jim Dale, now aged 87.

My personal favourites in the franchise were these:

Carry on Cleo was a spoof on the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor film Cleopatra and utilized a great deal of the sets and costumes used in the original. Look closely and you can see Sid James wearing one of Richard Burton’s outfits. There are some great lines in the film especially the one spoken by Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar, Infamy, infamy; they’ve all got it in for me! I love it.

Carry On Screaming. Sid James was unable to appear so his role was taken by Harry H Corbett, the star of TV’s Steptoe and Son. The sultry voiced Fenella Fielding played a character called Valeria in a spoof on horror films. Kenneth Williams plays a Dracula like character and Corbett was Sergeant Bung, a detective investigating various disapearances.

Carry on Up the Khyber. Kenneth Williams starred as an Indian leader, the Khasi of Kalibar and Sid James is the British Governor, Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond with Joan Sims as his wife. In my favourite sequence Williams and James have this exchange;

Yes, I think its time for a cup of tea, a cheese sandwich and a watch of whatever Carry On film is currently showing!

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