Author Archives: Steve Higgins

Sun Lounger Thoughts: Stephen Fry, Highways and that Solitaire App

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Last week I finished reading the four books I had brought with me to read here in Lanzarote and so I scoured the bookshelf in our rented villa for something else to read. I came across Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry. It’s an autobiography of his life up till the age of 20 but it’s not in any way a conventional autobiography. It’s a sort of full throttle, stream of consciousness monologue which Fry kicks off in his second year of public school and proceeds to tell us a great deal about his thoughts and feelings, making numerous right and left turns along the way to discuss various issues and subjects that he decides to talk about. It’s very like a sort of confessional and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was taken down verbatim (or perhaps tape recorded) during a session with his psychiatrist.

Fry reveals his thoughts about homosexuality and his feelings, either obsession or lust over a boy at his school. Fry went to a public school which confusingly for our American readers is actually a private school. Actually, a private boarding school which eventually Fry was expelled from.

I’ve no idea where the title comes from although Stephen does mention various exotic authors, none of whom I’ve ever heard of so perhaps the title comes from a quotation from some esoteric book that only university bookworms are familiar with. Sprinkled throughout the book though are numerous authors I have heard of as well as many references to popular films and TV shows, all of which made the book, in my mind anyway, very relatable.

A good one comes later in the book when he is arrested for theft and declines to give his name. One of the cops calls him Stephen and he replies ‘yes’ so the cops say ahh, you’re Stephen Fry then. He compares it to a scene in The Great Escape in which Gordon Jackson as an escaped POW pretends to be a French worker and gets caught out when a gestapo man says ‘good luck’ to him in English. Jackson replies -in English- ‘thank you’ and reveals himself instantly to be an escaper. That was one of my late brother’s favourite parts of the film and one he always used to quote to me.

Anyway, Fry’s book was a real no holes barred, full throttle read.

Over the years I’ve written quite a few of these sun lounger thoughts posts which are basically the kind of thoughts that have arisen in my mind while lying on a sun lounger.

Today I found myself, after a swim and relaxing on my lounger in the sun, thinking about my old job at the Highways Agency.

When I was a child I used to have, just like Stephen Fry, lots of daydreams and fantasies. One of them was that the school would be taken over by terrorists and that they would be methodically trying to find someone who was actually a secret agent. That secret agent of course would be me and after biding my time I would, just like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films, sort out the terrorists one by one. My daydream would usually be shattered by one of the teachers asking me a question like ‘how many degrees in a right-angled triangle?’ and I would suddenly be brought down to earth and desperately try to answer before revealing the inevitable truth that I had not been paying attention.

When I worked at the Highways Agency, no two days would ever be the same. One day would bumble along and nothing much would happen and the next there would be crash after crash after crash.

Bad weather always plays a part in motorway crashes, the main reason being that your average driver whose journey from home to work normally takes 35 minutes, expects that same journey to take 35 minutes no matter what. Come the day when the network is covered by 3 inches of snow or a major downpour with various lanes closed due to flooding then that journey will not take 35 minutes and the average driver really cannot understand why.

If there is a major downpour many drivers tend to sensibly slow down. This slows the traffic movement down as a whole making journeys longer. Mr Average gets impatient, decides to speed up to 80 mph and either realises too late he is going to miss his junction, cuts in to his left and hits another car causing a crash on the inside lane (RTC in our Highways lingo) or possibly hits a puddle in the outside lane spins and causes a crash (Road Traffic Collision to use the full title) in lane 3.

On those summer days with perfect visibility things usually go reasonably well and that’s the time when the terrorist daydream would raise its ugly head. A team of terrorists take over the RCC (Regional Control Centre) and interrogate and torture people in order to find that ex secret agent (this is a subtle twist on the earlier daydream) who has retired from MI5 and joined the Highways Agency.

If I happened to be the radio dispatcher that day my assistant would usually nudge me and say Steve-debris incident or RTC.

The thing is, that daydream could easily have been avoided. Back in the early days when the RCC was brand spanking new, many dignitaries, councillors, police officers, firemen and other emergency services staff would be invited upstairs to a viewing area to look down on what was happening. Invariably this always happened on days when the network was calm and nothing out of the ordinary was going on, save for the odd breakdown here and there. The dignitaries used to look down and senior management would be horrified to find the dispatcher and his assistant playing solitaire on the screens.

Me at work in the Highways Control Room

Now this might have seemed a bad thing but back then we could float a solitaire game right on our command-and-control screens so if a job popped up, we would see it straight away because we were already looking at the correct screen. Anyway, management decided to delete solitaire from the system so then when things were quiet, we would either stare at the ceiling, talk to each other or, well that’s where the daydream came in.

The wall of the Highways control room (RCC) has various screens where we can highlight CCTV images of the incidents we are dealing with. In the centre is the TV screen usually set to Sky or BBC News. This being an operational control room the TV has no sound and it was sometimes quite amusing to watch the subtitles appear with the wrong word or sentence. Some of the best I’ve seen include MP Ed Miliband described as the Ed Miller Band and the BBC welcoming viewers to the ‘Chinese New Year of the whores!’

Later in life the RCC became the ROC (pronounced rock) actually the Regional Operations Centre. I’m not sure why that name change took place unless some nameless senior manager had found that his solitaire app had been deleted and unable to play a card game decided that it might be a good idea to rename the control room. As it happened, the Highways Agency was renamed Highways England and later National Highways meaning a great deal of taxpayer’s money had to be spent on new signage: on our premises, on letterheads and repainting our vehicles as well as rehashing all our uniforms.

Yep, they really shouldn’t have deleted that solitaire app!

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My Holiday Book Bag 2026

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Many years ago when reading a biography about Richard Burton, I was interested to hear about  Burton’s love of books and that when he 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 sun bed is a good undisturbed read. So without further ado, let’s take a closer look at the  books I have been reading in Lanzarote this winter.

The Thursday Murder Club

I know I’ve written about this first book already but as it’s part of this month’s holiday read, I feel I have to talk about it once again. As I mentioned in a previous post, I saw the film version over on Netflix and enjoyed the first part but then lost interest during the middle and finally picked up again to watch the end. It is a rather complicated plot so I picked up the book hoping to understand things better but also I’ve always found it interesting to compare book and film versions of the same story.

The book and film are about a group of people in a retirement village who meet to discuss cold case crimes but then find a murder committed on their very own doorstep. The group of mostly eighty-year-olds then get on with the task of solving the murder. There seem to be a lot of things going on and a great deal of characters to remember which put me off a little at first but a great device used by the writer is having alternate chapters written as diary entries by Joyce, one of the club members. She goes over the past events, adding in details of her own life along the way, talking about her neighbours and daughter amongst other things and sometimes previewing the next chapter for us.

It’s a very original and witty novel and I’m already thinking about getting the follow up book. One minor complaint though; there is a large cast of characters and things do get complicated, making it not always easy to follow. After reading the book and realising that our villa here in Lanzarote comes complete with Netflix, we watched the film again and this time I managed to pay attention all the way through. Both the book and film are very enjoyable but I’d have to say I think the book is generally better than the film.

Verdict; 8/10. Great read but complicated plot.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

I sought this book out on the internet after reading Bennett’s The Lady in the Van which was a very enjoyable although short book. This volume is a collection of various essays and diaries by the author and it begins with the title essay, Untold Stories which is a series of observations mostly about his mother and father. He describes the life of his family in Yorkshire as he saw it evolve. It is perhaps a very ordinary story of a working class family and their fairly uneventful journey through life. It is very sharply observed and the author takes us through the lives of not only his parents but also of his two aunts as well as other family members. I found this section hugely interesting and with many parallels to my own life, especially when Bennett deals with his aging parents and he has to take them to numerous hospital appointments. His mother suffered with depression and was even hospitalised on a couple of occasions. Later in life she begins to suffer with dementia.

He ponders about the worth of a life, are children in some ways worth more than older people? If a child went missing there would be a public outcry but if an older person goes missing, no one is interested. His aunt, suffering with dementia in old age goes missing from a nursing home and the police seem uninterested. Later, Alan and his brother go searching for her themselves, taking what they think might be a logical way to walk from the home where she resides. They find her dead body in a field and the author wonders, why wasn’t there a search, why didn’t the police find her? Was it because she was just an old lady and they assumed that she would just ‘turn up’ one day?

There is a lot of humour also and I enjoyed hearing about the author’s father who had two suits, his ‘suit’ and his ‘other suit’.

His diaries were not so interesting, in fact most of the entries were rather boring and I found myself skipping various entries. Another section deals with his work in TV and the portrait he paints of actress Thora Hird is one of great warmth and affection.

Overall this was a good read but I found myself unable to agree with the comment on the back cover by a reviewer from The Sunday Times who says ‘I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret.’ I was glad to move on to something else.

Verdict: Interesting in parts. 7/10

Letter From America by Alistair Cooke

I picked this book up in a sale ages ago, in fact actually a few years ago. I think it was one of those offers like ‘buy two and get one free’. This was my free choice and as such it’s been lying around waiting to be read. It’s a collection from the author’s radio series ‘Letters from America’ which used to be broadcast many years ago on BBC Radio 4. I can’t say I’ve ever listened to the broadcast but I do remember watching a quite exceptional TV documentary series called ‘Alistair Cooke’s America’ which detailed the history of the USA.

The book is divided into decades starting with the 1940’s and records Cooke’s views of various things and people in the USA.. Some of the letters, which incidentally would be perfect for modern day publishing as a series of blog posts, are hugely interesting, others not. Cooke is a very eloquent writer and like one of the reviews on the back cover said, I felt I could actually hear his voice as I read them.

Cooke was in the Ambassador Hotel in California the night Bobby Kennedy was shot and he records what happened but little else. It mentions Watergate also on the back cover but I’ve just finished his 1970s writings and there was no mention of Watergate so perhaps he returns to it much later. The assassination of JFK is mentioned but Cooke seemed to be more interested in President Johnson than Kennedy but then perhaps that was the feeling of Americans back then, shocked by the murder of Kennedy and looking to Johnson to move the country forward.

Verdict: I felt the book was a case of more style than content. 7/10

The Outsider by Frederick Forsyth

This is not one of Forsyth’s thrillers but an autobiography and it was a really interesting read. Forsyth spoke many languages and he puts this down to learning them with local people. He studied French and German at school of course but then spent the summer holidays in France learning from a French family and then later did the same with a German family and even later with a family in Spain. His observations in France were really interesting. The French welcomed Forsyth as an English hitchhiker with the union flag on his backpack but later when travelling in what had been Vichy, France, he felt the English were not as popular.

His ambition was to be a fighter pilot and he trains privately as a pilot and then later gets accepted into the RAF indeed becoming a fighter pilot. He spends only two years in the RAF and then leaves to follow another ambition, that of being a foreign correspondent. After training with a local newspaper, he moves to Fleet Street and with the advantage of his language skills joins Reuters, first in Paris and later in a very fascinating chapter, he is stationed in East German Berlin.

He joins the BBC which he is not complimentary about, especially their civil service style hierarchy. Forsyth covers the Nigerian/Biafran war but is not happy with the BBC coverage and so resigns to work as a freelance. He clearly blames the Wilson Labour government for escalating the war in Biafra and supplying weapons to Nigeria which the Wilson government denied.

Out of work and broke, he decided to write a novel based on his time reporting in Paris. The Day of the Jackal was rejected by many publishers but then he explains why he thinks that was. Who is charged with reading submissions at a publishing company? The lowest of the low, students, new employees charged with making suggestions after reading perhaps one chapter.

Forsyth was lucky in that he met a publishing executive at a party and then decided to visit him and try to cajole him into reading his manuscript. Happily, the executive agreed, was duly impressed and The Day of the Jackal was finally published.

The final part of the book was not so good. It was as if the author had run out of ideas and decided to add some quick chapters detailing various situations, once when he was under mortar attack, another on a fishing boat when a cyclone hit and a chance he got to fly in a Spitfire.

Overall, a great read but a pity about the last few chapters.

Verdict: 9/10

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A Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really do love it here in Lanzarote. Warm but not too hot. OK there’s a little rain but it only lasts for 5 or so minutes and then the sun is out, drying everything up. If I had the money I would be buying a place here and settling down to a life of sunbathing, swimming and dining out. I could invite all my friends over, for limited times of course. Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t. Either way, I think I’d be very happy.

Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.

Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacking roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brew can. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brew can.

I reckon he would have loved it here in Lanzarote. Back in Manchester the Highways depot where he worked closed down years ago and now a small private housing estate occupies the spot where he used to work. Funnily enough, just next door on Fenside Road was my old school, Sharston High School. It was demolished years ago and on the spot there is now another private housing estate which is surrounded by the old iron fence that encircled our school many years ago.

Dad

My Dad, working on the road, directing traffic.

Our school gym still stands on Fenside road. It is now some sort of fitness or sports centre. Apart from those railings I mentioned it is the only surviving reminder of our old school.

The school was large and was built in a sort of ‘C’ shape. There was a north and a south side and inside the ‘C’ were the school playing fields; cricket and football for the boys and rounders for the girls.

On the north side -to be honest I’ve always got the north and south sides mixed up, but the top of the ‘C’ anyway- there now stands a nursing home and it was here that my mother spent the last years of her life suffering with dementia.

I took semi retirement from work to help look after her and my brother and I shared caring duties. We had carers coming in four times a day. Morning to help get her up and have breakfast. Another at lunchtime, one at teatime and a final visitor at night to help get mum ready for bed. The final carer was due at about nine but they started to get earlier and earlier. Once we had someone round at about 5:30 to help mum with tea and then instead of 9 the final carer turned up at about 6:30. I remonstrated with them and said no, you need to come back at 9. I guess it was the last visit and they were eager to get off early.

Believe me, it was very difficult dealing with mum back then. She would forget she had eaten and would demand more food after being fed. Getting her clothes off her to put into the washer was a nightmare and when they had been washed, she complained that the clothes were not her clothes after all but someone else’s.

Once it worked out in my brother’s favour. I used to work shifts and would arrive home about 10:30 and take over from my brother. That night he wanted to leave early at about 8pm. Could I get time off to get to mum’s earlier? As it happened I couldn’t but he and the carers put mum to bed early and when the carer had left, my brother let mum nod off and then he left too.

Some months earlier we had brought a small bed downstairs into the lounge for mum. When I got in at my usual time, mum had woken up and, thinking it was early morning, was trying to get up.

I tended to have a small supper when I got in from work so I calmed mum down, explained that it was late at night and together we had a small supper of sausage sandwiches and we watched some television. I’d recorded a documentary about the comedian Bob Monkhouse and when it finished, we chatted for a while about Bob and his rather difficult life, then we both went to bed.

The next morning when the carers arrived, she had reverted to her slightly mad self, complaining once again that her clothes weren’t her clothes and that this wasn’t her house but some other strange house and that she didn’t live here.

The conversation about Bob Monkhouse the previous night had been one of our last sensible conversations ever.

I think it was 2021 when she moved into the nursing home. She had been very poorly with a cold that had gotten worse and worse. I personally thought it was one of the first Covid cases. She went to hospital and began to recover. We went to see her on Christmas day. We brought her a Christmas present, I can’t even remember what it was but I was surprised to find the nurses in her ward had brought presents for all the patients, hers was a pair of woolly gloves. Sadly she never got to wear them.

When she began to recover her social worker moved her to a nursing home saying she only had 6 months to live although she went on to live another two and a half years. At the nursing home she recovered rapidly and even attained something almost like her normal self. When Covid and the lockdown struck we were unable to visit her. When things eased we could visit but only outside of the windows. What was mad was that Mum was profoundly deaf and without her hearing aids couldn’t communicate. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t seem to get it across to the staff how important her hearing aids were and there we were, separated by a window, mouthing and gesticulating but poor mum, without her hearing aids could only wave.

When the lockdowns ended we could finally visit mum again but sometimes her hearing aids would be lost or without batteries. I decided to take one of her aids home and just fit it when I visited so we could have something like a normal conversation.

My mother in her last years

When I visited mum I used to ask her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. One day 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 to leave. The disappointment of not being able to remember her times table was still 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. She was a very determined lady.

After she died I put a picture of her on the Facebook Wythenshawe page, announcing her passing. Various people commented but one lady in particular said that she used to work at mum’s nursing home and that she counted it a pleasure and a privilege to have looked after this lovely lady.

As you can perhaps imagine, I was moved to tears.

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Blog 703: Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.

For our first night out we went along to the Gourmet Indian Restaurant where we had so much fun last year with the staff. We were rather surprised to find that this year, all the staff that had made us so welcome had now left. That is probably the same in restaurants the whole world over. Staff come and go but happily, the new staff, especially our waitress were fun and friendly and the food was just as superb as it was previously.

Last year’s Indian restaurant staff, sadly missed

Another favourite of ours is the Café Berrugo down in the Marina Rubicon. The manager Juan greeted us as warmly as usual. Last year the food wasn’t quite as good as it normally is so I wasn’t sure what to order but anyway, we went for five tapas dishes and they were all excellent, so much better than our last visit. Perhaps the café has gained a new chef during our absence, anyway, we were really impressed and happy and Juan gave us an extra shot of vodka caramel, a drink I don’t think I’ve had anywhere else except Lanzarote.

The interesting thing is that a few months back I was writing about a run of bad meals and I have to say, I much prefer this, a run of lovely meals.

Before we left the UK we switched on our Sky box and I was pleasantly surprised to see the film Nuremburg available to watch. I was surprised because it was only on at our local cinema a few weeks previously and it was something I wanted to watch. So, we poured ourselves a glass of wine and settled down to watch. The film is the story of the Nuremburg trials held in Germany after the Second World War. Hermann Göring, played in the film by Russell Crowe, is the most prestigious prisoner in the dock. He was the number 2 in the Nazi government until the last few days of the war when Hitler, incensed by a telegram from Göring in which he asked permission to take over the Reich, ordered his arrest.

By Charles Alexander, Office of the United States Chief of Counsel – Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, accession no. 72-911 (Retrieved 2017-04-26), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=161339177

Even so, when Göring handed himself over to the Americans, he was perhaps thinking of the events of the First World War when the Kaiser abdicated and fled Germany and left others to run the country in defeat. Göring, perhaps thought that he was the man to take over Germany in this new defeat. Things would not turn out that way however and Göring, amongst many others, was to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

The film is based on the story of Douglas Kelley, a psychiatrist who was tasked with examining the nazi prisoners with a view to determining whether they were competent to stand trial. Kelley also tried to get to the bottom of the nature of the evil they had practised. His theory was that they were just ordinary men rather than particularly evil men.

Kelley is played in the film by Rami Malek and the film focusses on his relationship with Göring. It was a good film though for me not in any way outstanding although Russell Crowe’s performance was excellent, I don’t think Malek’s portrayal was in the same class.

To be honest I remember a similar film, perhaps a made for TV film from some years ago which was much superior. I think it was a two part mini series also titled Nuremburg starring Alec Baldwin as supreme court justice Robert Jackson and Brian Cox as Göring.

Göring of course commits suicide rather than be hanged and in the mini series, they made much of the relationship between Göring and his American guard. Did the guard slip Göring a cyanide capsule with which to evade the hangman’s noose? It was probably more likely that Göring had it concealed all along. He was a charismatic character but at the end of the day, he went along with Hitler like many others.

Before leaving for Lanzarote, one of my friends asked me how many books I would be taking along to read. I wasn’t sure at the time but at least four I thought. So, she answered, we can expect another Book Bag post then! There will be a Book Bag post but to carry on from Nuremburg, I was surprised to see it on Sky cinema so soon after its theatrical release. I thought it might have been a Sky original production but it wasn’t so I was even more surprised to see it on Sky so soon.

Another film I watched recently on Netflix was the Thursday Murder Club. Again, it was on TV very soon after its cinema release, in fact I think it was actually a Netflix production. I enjoyed the opening part of the film but then lost interest somewhere around the middle. I might have picked up my iPad and started surfing and then got interested again towards the end. It was a good film with an impressive cast and its one that I should watch again and perhaps pay more attention to the next time.

It just so happens that I picked up the book to read here in Lanzarote. It’s written by Richard Osman who is more famous as the frontman on the BBC’s Pointless quiz show as well as various other TV shows. The book and film are about a group of people in a retirement village who meet to discuss cold case crimes but then find a murder committed on their very doorstop. The group of mostly eighty year olds then get on with the task of solving the murder. There seem to be a lot of things going on and a great deal of characters to remember which put me off a little at first but a great device used by the writer is having alternate chapters written as diary entries by Joyce, one of the club members. She goes over the past events, adding in details of her own life along the way, talking about her neighbours and daughter amongst other things and sometimes previewing the next chapter for us.

It’s a very original and witty book and even though I’m only half way through I’m already thinking about getting the follow up book. One minor complaint though, there is a large cast of characters and things do get complicated making it not always easy to follow.

You might have seen some horror stories on the internet and social media about Lanzarote lately. I’ve seen so many posts about the dreadful weather and the rain. OK, there has been rain, quite a lot of it which is pretty unusual for Lanzarote. The thing is, when it rains back home in Manchester, it tends to rain and rain and get pretty cold at the same miserable time. Here in Lanzarote, it rains for about five minutes and then the sun comes out and dries everything. It might get cloudy again and we might have another five minute shower but it soon slips away and despite what you may have heard, Liz and I have spent each day out on the patio swimming and sunbathing and occasionally moving our towels away from the edge of the patio canopy when the rain showers have encroached a little too close.

Now, time for another read or should I do a few more laps in the pool? Decisions, decisions . . .

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8 Random Films: Can you Guess the Connection?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve done a few of these posts where I connect one film to another through either the actors or directors or other random things. This week I’m going to talk about two groups of four films and see if you the reader can guess what links them together. I’m hoping this might be a bit of a challenge, even for the most ardent film fans but anyway, here we go.

Top Hat

Top Hat was a film produced in 1935 and starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It is one the great song and dance musicals of all time. The premise of the film is just Astaire following the girl of his dreams, Ginger Rogers, across Europe but the story is just background to the wonderful songs of Irving Berlin. Two stand out favourites are Cheek to Cheek and Top Hat, White Tie and Tails. The film was directed by Mike Sandrich who also directed 5 of Rogers’ and Astaire’s films.

Together Astaire and Rogers made 5 films together but the most successful was Top Hat.

Red River

One of my favourite westerns, Red River stars John Wayne and Montgomery Clift who have to drive a shed load of cattle from Texas to Missouri. There’s a great moment when Wayne says to Clift ‘Take ‘em to Missouri Matt!’ and the cattle drive begins. The film was produced and directed by Howard Hawks way back in 1948. Taking a quick look on Wikipedia, it was interesting to find that there were various versions of the film but the original theatrical cut was reassembled by Janus films in 2014 for the DVD release.

Singin’ In the Rain

This is another film classic, perhaps even the ultimate Hollywood musical. Released in 1952 it is set in the 1920s and stars Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor. The film has some hugely famous scenes, like that unforgettable opening number where Gene Kelly splashes through puddles and sings the title song. It’s also got a super fun storyline about the transition from silent films to “talkies”. The film was directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan.

The Shining

This was a film directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the book by Stephen King. King apparently hated the film which is why he went on to produce another version years later. The film stars Jack Nicholson who gives an eerie performance as author Jack Torrance. The plot revolves around the Overlook Hotel which closes during the winter as the location becomes inaccessible due to heavy winter weather. Jack and family are chosen as caretakers to look after the hotel until it reopens in the spring. Throw in a child who ‘shines’, that is to say able to communicate with the spirit world and an evil spirit who apparently takes over Nicholson’s character and you have a pretty terrifying film.

The film was actually shot in the UK at Elstree studios although a second unit did some exterior shots in the USA. At Elstree huge sets were built to represent the interior and exterior of the hotel.

A famous scene involves Jack chopping through a door to reach his wife played by Shelley Duvall. The scene was originally shot with a fake door but Nicholson who was a former firefighter in the national guard chopped through it too quickly and so a thick solid door had to be used.

Kubrick demanded numerous takes of many scenes and Shelley Duvall in particular argued with Kubrick about retakes, dialogue and her acting style.

Ok that’s the first of four films I want to talk about. Any idea of the connection? Let me carry on with a second group of four films and the connection might finally become clear.

The Last Picture Show

Another modern classic. This film was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and is set in a small town in northern Texas in the early 1950s. The film has an ensemble cast but the two main characters are Sonny and Duane played by Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges. The two are teenagers and old friends and various things happen to them. They fall out over a girl called Jacy played by Cybill Shepherd. Ben Johnson plays ‘Sam the Lion’ who owns the bar and cinema in the town. Sam has a mentally disabled son who Sonny has befriended. Various things happen to the pair but towards the end of the film Duane enlists in the army and is due to leave town so the pair decide to visit the town cinema for the very last picture show as the cinema is about to close after Sam’s sudden death.

Crimes and Misdemeanours

This is one of Woody Allen’s darker films. There are many interlocking stories but the central theme involves Judah Rosenthal played by Martin Landau who has an affair with a woman played by Anjelica Huston. The woman -Dolores- is threatening to confront Judah’s wife and Judah, desperate to save his marriage isn’t sure what to do. He asks his brother, a gangster and he recommends violence and even murder. Other stories include a rabbi facing blindness and on a lighter level, Woody plays a documentary film maker who falls for a woman played by Mia Farrow. She in turn is romanced by Alan Alda, playing a TV producer, who Woody’s character despises. It’s one of my favourites of Woody’s films but don’t expect too many laughs.

The Green Mile

Like The Shining, this is another film based on a book by Stephen King. Tom Hanks plays the head of a death row section of an American penitentiary. One of the inmates is John Coffey, a huge black man who appears to have healing powers. He cures Tom Hanks’ bladder infection but the mood in death row is not good after sadistic Percy Wetmore joins the team and deliberately sabotages the execution of another inmate causing the prisoner to die in terrible agony. The warden’s wife is terminally ill and Hanks and his team wonder if John Coffey could cure her.

Twister

Twister is a disaster film made in 1996 which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as storm chasers. They and their team are trying to get first hand information about tornados and cyclones. The two are separated and are about to divorce but together they are in competition with another group of storm chasers. The special effects are good and I’ve always found it to be a hugely entertaining film.

Ok. That’s my final four films. Are you any the wiser? Do you have the connection yet?

Here’s the answer, the first four films were all featured in the second four films.

In The Last Picture Show the town’s small cinema is about to close down and Duane and Sonny pay a visit to see Red River.

In Crimes and Misdemeanours, Woody Allen’s character Cliff Stern invites Helley Reed played by Mia Farrow to watch Singing in The Rain on his editing machine while they eat a take away curry.

In The Green Mile, the story is told in flashback and Tom Hank’s character Paul, who was cured of the bladder infection is now 108 years old. He watches the film Top Hat and tells the story of John Coffey to his friend Elaine.

In Twister, the team of storm chasers relax and stop at a garage area. By the garage is a drive in theatre and the team enjoy snacks and coffee while the picture is playing. A storm begins to approach and strong winds quickly develop. What film was playing? Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The theatre is destroyed just as Jack is chopping through the door in The Shining’s most famous scene.

They were my film connections for this week. Hope you enjoyed reading and tune in again next Saturday for another post.

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The Big 700/701

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Today marks my 700th blog post, and I reckon it’s probably the perfect time to take a look back and perhaps even re-evaluate exactly what I’ve been doing over the past 12 or so years.

700 is quite a milestone, certainly for me anyway. I started writing my blog posts back in 2014 and I’m quite pleased to have got to this point. 700 hundred blog posts. Anyway, after all that and a quick recount later I see that this is actually blog 701. Last week was my 700th post and I didn’t realise. It’s a bit like missing my birthday or waking up on the 2nd of January and realising you’ve missed New Year’s Day.

Seven hundred and one. It’s a number that made me stop for a moment when I began writing this morning; it’s not quite as round and flashy as 700, but somehow more meaningful. Like that first step after reaching a mountain top, it feels like a quiet, intentional nod to where I’ve been and a fresh start for where I’m heading next.

The whole point of this blog, at least when I first set out blogging, was to have a sort of platform to talk about my book Floating in Space. I wanted to introduce myself to the world, promote my book and then settle back and enjoy the millions of pounds that would surely pour in.

As you might imagine, the millions haven’t appeared and although I have had a little success initially with Floating, my other books Timeline and A Warrior of Words have yet to make their mark even though there are links to them within this website as well as more links at the end of every weekly post.

Timeline is a collection of blog posts and short stories and I have to say I really feel quite proud of my posts. I have written about all kinds of things although I mainly stick to books, classic films, Formula One and me and my little life. Some of those posts I have worked quite hard on and I’ve written and rewritten them and researched and sometimes rewritten again. At other times I have found myself on a Friday staring at my laptop wondering what on earth can I write about and then, right at the last moment, I have either thought of something or remembered a post that was made up of various short elements and decided to take one of those elements and develop it into a new post.

Blogging has so taken over my life I’ve noticed that even when I’m not sitting in front of my laptop I find myself writing a post in my head at various odd moments. For instance, a few weeks back Liz and I went to a Christmas party at a hotel in Blackpool. There were about fifty in our group and the hotel and its entertainment area was filled to capacity. We had a three course meal which was excellent followed by a cabaret style entertainment and then the usual disc jockey playing music. Something came to me while we were eating and when I looked up from my food I realised that a lady opposite was talking to me and I hadn’t heard a word. I sort of started nodding and murmuring yes and getting very funny looks back. It turned out she was actually asking for something, the salt or pepper or something that was right by me. Oh well. The really annoying thing is that whatever I had thought of went right out of my head.

Occasionally, and I do mean occasionally, I’ll have a whole raft of ideas come to me and straight away I am able to pump out two or even three rough drafts of a new post. Then over the next few weeks I’ll work on each one and gradually finalise them for publication. I love it when lots of ideas come especially when we are about to go travelling and then I usually set them up to publish on subsequent Saturday mornings while I enjoy my holiday.

I always jot down notes for blogs, especially those where I try to connect various classic films together so for instance I’ll start with a director or an actor, let’s say Noël Coward for example and then try to go through various films and link together different actors or personalities and eventually end up back with another Noël Coward production. The links on the right are a bit thin but Coward worked with director David Lean, Lean worked with Jack Hawkins on The Bridge on the River Kwai. When Hawkins contracted throat cancer later in life and was unable to speak, his voice was dubbed by Charles Gray. Gray played Blofeld in the Bond film Diamonds are Forever. Diamonds was written by Ian Fleming who was a friend and neighbour of Coward in Jamaica. Click here for the full post.

Sometimes when I wake early in the morning or the middle of the night, I’ll begin to write a blog post in my head. When I’m done and ready to go back to sleep, I’ll save it. In my head I have a house I created after reading a book called Mindstore. Mindstore is a technique for personal improvement designed by a man called Jack Black and it involves creating a house with various rooms for certain activities. The house has a video room in which one can prepare for a job interview for instance by rehearsing the interview and then viewing the future result -the getting of the job- on the video screen.

In my house I created a room where I can store the posts I write in those early mornings and so far it seems to have worked.

In 2024 my readership hit an all time high, in fact since 2014 when I began blogging, my stats have begun a steady climb upwards but this last year, 2025, readership has dipped a little bit. Have my posts not been as good? My all time most read post was one from a few years ago. It was called Manipulating the Image and was about exactly that. I talked about an Instagram model called Olivia Casta and a claim that her face was a creation of artificial intelligence. That led to Lee Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy and his claim that a picture of his with the murder weapon was manipulated and then I went on to outline other similar stories of image manipulation.

My next most read post was actually my introductory page and then a post from quite a few years back about David Cassidy and a Haircut in 1975.

Quite why a post has had so many hits I’m not sure but that is something that really gets under my skin. I get lots of readership highs and lots of lows but what makes the highs? Why does one post do better than another? Posts aside the big question is do my successful posts link to bigger sales of my books? When it comes down to it, in the world of sales and marketing, I’m just an amateur but what can I do except just carry on blogging until I don’t want to blog any more.

The flip side is I actually really like writing and one aspect of my stats that was really pleasing is that the page dedicated to my book Timeline has recently been pretty popular but then, is that because people like the idea of a collection of blogs and short stories or is because I recently used one of my Timeline videos in an advertisement?

I’ll tell you what, I bet Charles Dickens never had this trouble. Not only that, I need to start thinking about blog #701. (Or is that blog 702?)

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6 Christmas Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

By the time you are reading this, Christmas and New Year will all be over. We’ll be fed up of turkey and sprouts and thinking about taking down the Christmas decorations. So before Christmas becomes a distant memory here’s a quick look at 6 Christmas films that were all shown, with perhaps just one exception, over the last few weeks.

It’s a Wonderful Life

It’s always surprised me that this film was apparently a box office flop but gained success in later life through numerous television showings. The film is a Christmas fantasy drama directed by Frank Capra and it’s about George Bailey, a small town business manager played by James Stewart who has ambitions to travel the world but due to various circumstances, never leaves the small town of Bedford Falls.

When George is first about to leave Bedford Falls he is shocked to find that his father has died. His father was the manager of the Bailey Building and Loan company and the company is about to be swallowed up by the town’s richest man, Mr Potter. George gives an impassioned speech to the assembled boardroom and they decide to keep the company going only if George stays on as manager. George of course stays on and all his dreams of travel seem to melt away. He supports his younger brother through college and employs his eccentric uncle Billy but on Christmas Eve 1945 everything goes wrong and George contemplates suicide. His guardian Angel arrives to help and decides to let George see what his life would be like if he had never been born.

The film tells the story in flashback as Clarence, the trainee angel, is shown what has happened to George and the secret of this film is, I think, the fact that despite the fantasy premise of the story everyone plays their parts as if they were in a serious drama. The result is that the drama and emotion of the situation rise to the surface and we are left with a vibrant and dramatic piece of cinema. It never fails to bring a tear to my eye.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol was published over a hundred and seventy years ago. It’s a wonderful story by that master storyteller Charles Dickens. Within six days the entire print run of 6,000 copies had sold out and within six weeks theatre adaptations had hit London’s theatres. In many ways the book is Dickens’ defining vision of a Victorian Christmas.

There are a whole lot of film and TV versions of a Christmas Carol, 73 in all according to a BBC news item I saw a while ago but the definitive version is the one with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. That film was released in 1951 and called Scrooge after the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, who was played by that comedy master Alastair Sim. Various other familiar names appear in the cast such as Michael Hodern, Kathleen Harrison, George Cole, Jack Warner and Mervyn Johns.

Scrooge did well at the box office in the UK but gained popularity in later life through television.

One thing that I find rather annoying is that some years ago I picked up Scrooge on DVD only to find that it was a very poor quality version. Recently the film was remastered and the version shown on the BBC in 2024 had an image quality much superior to my copy. I think it might be time to clear that old DVD out and buy a new remastered version. Then again, films are shown and reshown on TV so many times, do I really need a DVD?

Home Alone

Home Alone is one of those films that has slipped into the TV cultural canon whether you personally asked for it or not, and yes, I get why; it’s engineered to delight kids while adults half-watch with a glass of something festive. Macaulay Culkin’s cherubic menace is undeniably effective, and the slapstick booby-trap ballet has a cartoonish precision that is likeable. Still, once the sugar rush fades, it’s hard not to notice how thin the whole thing is; a single joke stretched to feature length, padded out with shrieking villains and a weirdly sentimental shrug at the end. It’s not that Home Alone is bad, it’s just a film you accept as part of the holiday furniture, even if you’d never choose to sit on it for too long.

Die Hard

Around this time of year there are so many posts on social media about whether or not Die Hard is really a Christmas film. Well, we always like a good action film on the box at Christmas, don’t we?

Die Hard is set in the Nakatomi Tower in Los Angeles which is taken over by terrorists during the staff Christmas party. Bruce Willis plays New York cop John McClane who sorts out the bad guys with a smile on his face most of the time, unlike in the later follow up films where his face wears nothing but a grimace.

There’s a lot of shooting and blowing up stuff but I’ve always liked it. Like they say, it’s not Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off the Nakatomi tower!

Love Actually

I know some people love it, but this film has just never really done it for me.

The story follows the lives of eight different couples in the weeks leading up to Christmas, all slightly intertwined in a very cheesy way.

It’s got a great cast and I do actually like one or two of the stories but Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister? No, I’m just not having it. And as for the story about the guy who is best man at the wedding and actually secretly fancies the bride, well that’s just plain weird. The centrepiece of the film is probably the moment when Emma Thompson opens a Christmas present from hubby Alan Rickman in the sure knowledge that it’s a necklace that she knows he has bought but then finds its only a CD which means of course that he has bought the necklace for someone else. It’s a sad moment but to be honest, what happened after that I don’t really know, I was probably flicking through my emails towards the end of the film.

Overall, I’d give Love Actually 2 out of 5 stars and I know it’s a firm favourite with some people, just not me.

White Christmas

Time to finish off with what must surely be the ultimate Christmas film, at least it certainly is for me. I’m not sure how youngsters would view it these days but for me it just brings back memories of childhood Christmases in Manchester. I can just see myself now, lying on the rug in front of the fire. My father reading the newspaper but still watching the film and crooning along with Bing Crosby. My mother making tea and my brother and Bob, our dog, both wanting my place by the fire. Eventually I’d get up to drink tea or eat Christmas cake and my brother would nip into my spot and then Bob would usually squeeze in between him and the fire. Bob would adopt a thoughtful look and gaze into the coals until my mother would tell him off and drag him away. When she would go back to the kitchen Bob would slip back into his spot and resume station.

To get back to the film, Bing Crosby is joined by Danny Kaye and the two are theatrical producers and performers and they take off to Vermont following two girls that they have become romantically attached to. Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Allen are the girls in question and together they find that the hotel where they are staying is run by Danny and Bing’s wartime general. They decide to put on a show to help his ailing business and they all sing some wonderful songs, all penned by Irving Berlin.

Talking of Berlin. My dad always used to listen to White Christmas and inform me and my brother that the writer was that famous songwriter Ivan Berlin! No dad, it’s Irving, we would all say but he wouldn’t believe us. Did he know it was really Irving or was he just having fun?

What is your favourite Christmas film?

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2025: My Blogging Year

Posted on by Steve Higgins

So here we are fast approaching the end of 2025 and I think it’s time to look back over my year and the blog posts I have published over the past 12 months. It’s almost unbelievable but this is my 699th Blog post. All the links to the posts mentioned below open up in another window.

January

Back in January Liz and I had jetted off as usual to Lanzarote but sadly, a fabulous villa we had found the previous year was fully booked and so we had to settle for another property. On paper it looked like a lovely place and to a great extent it was. A nice living space, comfy bedroom and a nice patio with comfy sun loungers. The pool was a little small but the big problem was that it was an end property at the top of a rise and next door and across the way was a big expanse of empty ground. It looked good but it meant that as Lanzarote tends to get a little windy in the winter a regular gale force wind often seemed to blast across our small terrace which sadly, in the afternoon, tended to be in the shade. Happily, in 2026 we look forward to occupying our favourite villa which not only gets the sun all day but has other properties around which act as a windbreak.

As usual in Lanzarote I was able to combine swimming, sun bathing and blog writing and produced my usual weekly post including January: Don’t You Just Hate it! and The Democratic Way, a post about the election of Donald Trump to another term as president of the USA.

February

In February I wrote Underwater Adventures which was a post about films and TV that involved underwater stuff, things like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I even threw in an anecdote about the time I tried to get my scuba diving licence. Another post that month was one of my favourites, Changing the Narrative, which involved how the storylines of film and TV and even books can change when required. When it comes down to it, there have been times when I wouldn’t have minded changing my own narrative too.

March

In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, The Men in White Suits, a post that linked people like Alec Guinness who starred in the Ealing film comedy, The Man in the White Suit and David Essex who used to wear a white suit back in the 1970’s and other similar situations and characters.

April

In April I was reliving some old bus driving memories in Driving the Bus and in Painters and Paintings I published an art post looking at my favourite artists and pictures.

May

In May Liz and I were off to France in our motorhome. We had hardly arrived when I became a little concerned as my brother Colin wasn’t answering my calls or messages. This led to a really upsetting situation in which we had to ask one of his friends to go and check on him and later when he got no response we had to ask him to call the police. A really odd situation began to commence. The police wouldn’t attend but said they would send an ambulance. The ambulance service wouldn’t attend as they couldn’t gain entry so the fire brigade were called. After about two hours the fire service turned up, forced open the door to Colin’s flat and found him dead on the bedroom floor. He was my younger brother and only 64 years old.

June

In June I wrote Sadness and Telephone Menus, about the difficulties faced dealing with the practicalities of death; reporting the death, closing bank accounts, arranging the funeral and so on. I don’t publish much fiction on WordPress but another post was A Genie Called Ralph, a quirky fantasy story. By the way, if you’d like to read more of my fiction head over to the downloads page where you download a few of my stories to read at your leisure.

July

It was a fairly good summer in the UK and most of the time it was sunny and warm; in other words, perfect barbecue time. Heatwaves and Barbecues was a post I wrote in July and in another I wrote about memories of past Saturday Nights as well as linking in films and music on the same theme.

August

I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. I must have been in a pretty nostalgic sort of mood that month because another post was Comfort Food, talking about the memories that my favourite food conjures up for me.

September

In September I was Travelling and Writing in France and another post was Working with AI Images. My latest obsession is making AI pictures and short videos to use on social media, hopefully to tempt more visitors to my blog page and maybe even buy my books.

October

October was another sad time as my late brother’s birthday was on the 10th. I’ve always tried to get him a birthday present, even if it was only just something simple like aftershave or something. Last year I didn’t get him anything but I didn’t feel bad because he rarely if ever got me anything. Even so, he seemed really hurt about it so I picked up something simple from Asda, a toiletry set, wrapped it up and gave it to him. He must have liked it because after his death I found a lot of the same product in his bathroom. Back to my blogs and another film post I wrote in October was one about the films of Ridley Scott.

November

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Image courtesy Wikipedia Creative Commons.

November was the centenary of the birth of Richard Burton. He was born on November 10th, 1925 and I’ve always loved his wonderful speaking voice. Someone else with an interesting voice although hardly in the same class as Burton was Woody Allen and Woody got a mention in a post called Bad Meals, North Roxbury and Woody which was inspired by a remarkable autobiography of Mia Marrow called What Falls Away.

December

The Formula One season finally finished in December and so I wrote a post about the World Champions, McLaren and their champion driver Lando Norris. In another post I remembered the sad death of John Lennon in New York 1980 in a post about 4 Things That Happened in December.

That brings me to the end of this little review. I hope you have enjoyed reading my posts this past year. If they have given you as much pleasure as it was for me to write them then I’ll be very pleased. I hope you had a great Christmas!

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4 Things That Happened in December

Posted on by Steve Higgins

John Lennon shot dead in New York December 8th 1980

One day in December 1980 I was working as a bus driver and I was driving one of our old half cab buses into Manchester. My conductor, Bob, was kept pretty busy as we took a bus load of passengers into Manchester city centre for their jobs in shops, offices and other places. At one point Bob poked his head through the little window into the cab and told me that he had heard from a passenger that John Lennon had been shot in New York. It was shocking news and when we arrived in Piccadilly, we both ran to the news stand to read the news in the morning papers. There was nothing about Lennon in any newspaper and we wondered if it had been just a mad rumour. Later when we went back to the canteen for our break, we heard the news either on the TV or the radio. Lennon had indeed been shot and was dead.

I can’t claim to be a great fan of John Lennon. I liked him and his music and had a copy of one of his albums, Walls and Bridges and a few years later I bought Double Fantasy, his last album and the last vinyl album I would ever buy but what did happen that day back in December, 1980?

It was a cold day in New York and a man called Mark Chapman took a .38 calibre revolver out of his pocket and calmly fired five shots at John Lennon who had just exited a limo outside his home in the Dakota building, just across from Central Park.

Chapman had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a novel by JD Salinger with him when he shot Lennon. In his copy Chapman had signed ‘from Holden Caulfield to Holden Caulfield (a reference to the main character in the story) This is my statement’. He had hung around the Dakota building in New York where Lennon lived with his wife Yoko Ono and son Sean and when Lennon left for the Record Plant recording studio, he had pushed forward his copy of Double Fantasy, Lennon’s latest album, for the singer to sign.

The last vinyl album I ever bought and the last one that John Lennon made. Double Fantasy. £2.99, what a bargain!

Lennon wrote ‘John Lennon 1980’ on the record and handed it back to Chapman asking ‘Is this all you want?’ Chapman took the album back and Lennon jumped into a limo and was gone. A photographer named Paul Goresh was there and snapped a photo of Lennon signing the album. Chapman was excited about it and asked for a copy before Goresh left. Goresh promised to return the next day with a print.

Later the Lennons returned to the Dakota and Chapman was still there waiting. Yoko entered the building and Lennon was following when Mark Chapman pulled out his .38 revolver and fired five times at the ex-Beatle. Lennon staggered into the Dakota entrance saying ‘I’m shot’. Chapman dropped his gun and began reading The Catcher in the Rye until the police came and arrested him. Another Police car arrived and seeing that Lennon was losing a lot of blood carried him to the police car and took him directly to Roosevelt Hospital. Staff there tried to revive Lennon but the wounds were too severe and he was pronounced dead at 11:15pm.

Mark Chapman is still alive today. He is still serving his life sentence in Wende Correctional Facility in New York and first became eligible for parole in 2000. All Chapman’s applications for parole have so far been denied.

King Edward 8th Abdicates December 11th 1936

The story of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson remains one of the most dramatic turning points in modern British history. A collision of personal desire, constitutional duty and public expectation. Edward was charming, modern and hugely popular but it seemed to me that he wasn’t strong enough to carry the weight of the monarchy on his shoulders. His deep attachment to Wallis, an American divorcee, placed him on an unavoidable collision course with the Government and the Church of England. At a time when divorce was still not really socially acceptable, the idea of a king marrying a twice-divorced woman was more than a social scandal, it was seen as a direct threat to the stability of the Crown itself.

It was all terribly inconvenient for Edward, who seemed far more interested in cocktail parties and Wallis’s company than in matters of state.

His radio address to the nation was quiet and deliberate with a hint of regret. He emphasised that he could not carry on his duties ‘without the help and support of the woman I love.’ The episode left deep rifts within the royal family and cast a long shadow over the Windsors for decades, a reminder of the delicate balance between individual freedom and constitutional responsibility.

The former King, now the Duke of Windsor, left for France and prepared for his marriage to Wallis, while his shy younger brother suddenly found himself as George VI, the new King. Edward spent the rest of his life swirling around Europe in a haze of glamour, gossip and lingering tension with the royal family. When his mother, Queen Mary, died the Duke was not allowed to bring his wife to the funeral. The next time Wallis came to England was in 1972 for the funeral of the Duke himself. Honestly, it’s one of those moments in history that still feels like a cross between a constitutional crisis and a tabloid love story.

December 16th 1984 Gorbachev visits the UK

Image courtesy Wikipedia creative commons.

When Brezhnev the leader of the Soviet Union died, a succession of old men took over the leadership and within a few years, all of those had followed Brezhnev to the grave. Mrs Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, felt it was time to try and improve relations with the USSR and so she decided to attend the Moscow funeral of Yuri Andropov in February of 1984. To build on this she invited Mikhail Gorbachev to visit the UK. She guessed that Gorbachev might be a possible future leader and a break from the old elderly Soviet leaders of the past.

Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, arrived in the UK on December 16th 1984 and Mrs Thatcher announced famously after their meeting that ‘I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.’ Gorbachev spent a week in the UK visiting places that Lenin and Karl Marx had frequented. Mrs Thatcher later flew to the USA to brief her ally President Reagan who later began his own talks with Gorbachev.

Gorbachev became the General Secretary and leader of the USSR when Konstantin Chernenko died in 1985 and he began a policy of openness (glasnost) and democratisation which ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet regime.

First episode of Coronation Street 9th December 1960

I thought I might finish with something a little lighter than Lennon and Gorbachev and King Edward 8th and so that brings me to Coronation Street. I can’t say I’m the greatest fan of TV soaps in general although I do watch Coronation Street. When you watch something like Corrie over a long period of time you do get quite attached to the characters. Soaps, I suppose, do have their place in the TV schedules.

Coronation Street was the idea of writer Tony Warren who wrote the first 13 episodes. He based the fictional suburb of Weatherfield on his home town of Salford, just over the river Irwell from Manchester. Coronation Street is a small cobbled street in Weatherfield and the stories of the various residents have entertained many of us over the years. Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker, Bette Lynch, Mavis Riley and the Jack and Vera Duckworth have long gone to be replaced gradually with new characters, some good and some not so good. I like Corrie because Manchester is my home time and it’s nice to hear the characters talk the way I talk although proper Mancunians on the show are sadly becoming fewer. These days Coronation Street is broadcast in three hourly chunks per week and as much as I enjoy it, I doubt we will ever see a moment as memorable as that one back in 1984 when Hilda Ogden returned home from hospital after the death of her husband Stan. She opened a small parcel containing Stan’s effects including his old spectacles and slowly began to cry her eyes out. Probably the saddest thing I have ever seen on television. (For some reason I couldn’t seem to add the video clip of that moment but click here to see it on YouTube.)

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McLaren, Big Ron and Lando

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do find it really strange that the F1 season should still be going on in December. Still, the F1 season these days is a long one. It starts off in March and winds its way around the world until it ends up in Abu Dhabi at what is essentially a twisty turny mickey mouse sort of track in the middle east.

The first full season of Formula One that I personally followed was in 1970 and so 2025 was the 55th season that I have been a motor sport fan. Back in 1970 the final race of the season was in Mexico which was round 13 on the calendar. The eventual world champion that year was Jochen Rindt who was sadly killed during practice for round 10, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. It was thought that a brake shaft failed on the car sending Rindt’s Lotus into the barriers. The car hit a solid stanchion holding up the crash barrier and Rindt, who had not fully fastened the crotch straps on his seat harness, slid down into the cockpit in the crash and suffered a fatal neck injury.

Jochen Rindt (Picture via creative commons)

This year the final race of the season at Abu Dhabi was the 24th round of the championship which has made it a heck of a long season. Back in 1970 I was a major motor sporting fan, subscribing to various magazines and writing to my favourite drivers asking for pictures and autographs. These days I still follow the sport but I’m not quite as enthusiastic as I once was. I don’t subscribe to the Sky F1 channel and I’m content to watch the race highlights on channel Four.

Last Sunday this meant that I had to put down my phone and iPad after the race started about 1pm UK time so I could watch the later Channel Four broadcast without knowing the outcome. Lando Norris came home third which was enough to secure him the world championship by 2 points. Strangely, I actually found myself almost wanting to root for Max Verstappen. In the past I have not considered him to be a particularly likeable character but recently he seems to have matured quite a lot. The commentators on Channel four made great play about how Max has recently made up a deficit of over a hundred points to become a contender, along with Lando and Oscar Piastri, for the ultimate title in motorsport. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Lando turned out to be the champion but I always find myself wanting the underdog to win and this year, Max was the outsider who just could have done it. All it needed was a bad pit stop for Lando or maybe a puncture or something to drop him outside of the top three and Max would have won a really incredible victory. As it was, he won the race but Lando was able to secure the championship. It was good to see Max magnanimously congratulate the new holder of the crown and I’m gradually starting to find four times champion Max much more likeable.

picture courtesy monsterenergy.com

After the race various pundits gave their opinion of how Lando did it but there was one aspect of his win that was never mentioned and which I personally think was the key to his victory and that was loyalty. Lando joined McLaren in 2019 when the team were just middle of the grid runners hoping to move up towards the front. Lando stuck with them unlike his team mate at the time, Carlos Sainz who I bet was probably wishing he had stayed put instead of moving to Ferrari and later getting dropped in favour of Lewis Hamilton. Lewis of course is probably wishing that he had stayed put at Mercedes as this season has been his worst in F1. It turns out that Sainz has actually had a better season at Williams than Lewis has had at Ferrari.

Fernando Alonso. Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Another driver who may be looking at McLaren wishfully is another of their former drivers Fernando Alonso. Alonso is one of the all time greats of the sport, still soldiering on and looking for success in his twilight years. He is the winner of two world championships but he has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ron Dennis, the former boss of McLaren, enticed Alonso over to McLaren in 2007. Alonso wanted to be the undisputed number one driver there but his new team mate Lewis Hamilton had other plans. Alonso left but came back again with the promise of Honda engines in 2015. Sadly, Honda arrived late into the hybrid F1 era and their engines lacked development so after enduring a torrid time round the back end of the grid, Alonso moved on as did the great Ron Dennis who sold his shares in McLaren and retired from the sport. Ron had previously merged his old team Project 4 Racing with McLaren back in 1980 which is why all the cars were designated McLaren MP/4’s. Dennis took Bruce McLaren’s old team and made it one of the most successful in the sport taking Niki Lauda, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton to multiple world championships.

By Matthew Lamb – FoS20162016_0626_105537AA, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49763509

In 2007 the ‘spygate’ scandal emerged in which a former McLaren employee, Nigel Stepney, then working for Ferrari, decided to send his former colleague at McLaren, Mike Coughlan, copies of the latest technical designs at Ferrari. The FIA fined McLaren 100 million dollars for having had private information about a rival team although according to Wikipedia, they only paid half that, 50 million dollars, still a huge amount of money. No evidence that Ferrari’s designs were used on the McLaren cars was ever found. In 2017 Ron sold all his shares in the McLaren Technology Group and McLaren Automotive and effectively retired from motorsport.

The current CEO of McLaren is Zak Brown and it is he who has led McLaren back to the winners circle, winning back to back Constructors’ Championships in 2024 and 2025 and of course winning the 2025 Driver’s World Championship with Lando Norris.

In 2026 there is a big rule change coming to F1 so all the teams with their designers and engineers will be starting with a clean sheet of paper. Will McLaren still be on top? Well the Aston Martin team have paid a huge amount of money for the sport’s number 1 engineer and designer, Adrian Newey to build their new car so could Fernando Alonso at the very end of his career find himself back in the winners circle? Well, we won’t have long to wait. The first Grand Prix of 2026 opens up for practice on March 6th 2026 in Melbourne Australia. Will I be tuning in? Well I wouldn’t want to miss my 56th season, would I?

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