Author Archives: Steve Higgins

4 Things That Happened in November

Posted on by Steve Higgins

November is not my favourite time of the year. It’s getting colder and dark evenings are drawing in. Anyway, I got to thinking about things that have happened in November in the past and so here are four things that came to mind.

The Armistice of November 1918

The Armistice that ended the First World War was signed in Compiègne in France on the 11th November, 1918. It was signed aboard a famous railway carriage in a forest clearing. The railway carriage was designated 2419D and was part of Marshal Foch’s personal train. Foch decided on the spot for the surrender as he wanted to keep the negotiations away from the prying eyes of the press. The negotiations began on November 8th and were finally finished and the document of surrender signed at 5:45am on the 11th November, 1918.

The surrender came into force at 11am and fighting continued until that time with 2,738 men dying on the last day of the First World War.

The railway carriage went back into regular service for a while but was then attached to the French Presidential Train. Afterwards it was put on display in Paris until 1927 when it was returned to the glade at Compiègne.

Marshall Foch. Photo by the author

The Second World War began in 1939 when Hitler and the Nazis invaded Poland. The railway carriage was still in Compiègne on the 22nd June, 1940 when Hitler ordered it to be brought from its shed back to the glade and it was there that he and his generals accepted the surrender of the French. Three days later the site was demolished on the orders of the Führer and the railway carriage was taken to Berlin. A statue of Marshall Foch installed years earlier by the French was left standing intentionally, so that it would appear to stand in honour of a wasteland.

After the war, the site was restored by German prisoners of war and in 1950, an identical carriage was returned to the site. Carriage number 2439 was built with the same batch as the original and was also part of Marshall Foch’s train in 1918.

The carriage is housed in a small museum and when I entered early one Saturday morning back in 2022, I was the only visitor present. The staff asked me my nationality and when I stepped into the main area, a recording began telling the story of the site in English. It was really fascinating and as I walked around, I started up my camera and took numerous pictures and video.

Outside in the Glade, the statue of Marshall Foch is still there and today looks down on a beautiful clearing. It was a calm and peaceful place and it was strange to stand on the spot where Hitler and his Nazi cronies once stood.

The Death of Dylan Thomas 1953

Dylan was a slow worker when it came to writing and there was always something, usually a pub, to draw him away from his work. In his last days he was concerned that his talent, or his inspiration, had gone and that all his best work was perhaps behind him. He was short of money as usual and so he decided to accept an offer to go to the USA on a poetry tour. It was Canadian poet John Brinnin who made the offer to Dylan. Brinnin was the director of a poetry centre in New York and the trips Dylan undertook there were very lucrative for the always hard-up poet. Thomas had a number of wealthy patrons, in fact his famous house in Laugharne was bought for him by an admirer.

He had travelled to the USA before and on his penultimate visit had become romantically involved with a lady called Liz Reitel who worked for Brinnin at the poetry centre. When Dylan arrived for what would be his last visit Reitel was shocked to see the poet looking poorly and not his usual self.

Over the next few days Dylan’s mood alternated between being tired and poorly and getting drunk with some moments of normality in-between.

I get the impression from the book The Last Days of Dylan Thomas that Dylan liked attention, he liked admirers and although he was in the middle of an affair with Liz Reitel, he was not averse to enjoying the attention he received from other women.

At the poetry centre preparations were under way for a recital of the newly finished Under Milk Wood for which Dylan had produced some new edits and updates. The recital went well and was in fact tape recorded by someone at the time with Dylan taking the part of the narrator.

Liz called a doctor when Dylan became unwell again and the doctor gave Dylan an injection of morphine sulphate which may or may not have helped him.

After a night of drinking at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, Dylan returned to the Chelsea hotel claiming famously that he had downed ‘eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record!’

Dylan’s breathing became difficult later in the evening and an ambulance was summoned. He slipped into a coma from which he never awoke and later died on the 9th of November, 1953. He was only 39 years old and died with assets of only £100.

I was always under the impression that Dylan had drunk himself to death but that may not be the case. The autopsy did not find any evidence of liver cirrhosis and his death may have been due to a combination of pneumonia and bronchitis.

The Assassination of President Kennedy, 22nd November, 1963

The graphic murder of President Kennedy was the cataclysm of our age, imprinted on the minds of a generation by the flickering incarnation of amateur cine film. Despite two official investigations which concluded that Lee Oswald killed Kennedy, doubts still remain even after 62 years. Did Oswald act alone?  Was he a patsy as he himself declared?

So what are the facts of the assassination? Perhaps the only undisputed fact to emerge from the tragedy was that John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, was shot in the head and killed. President Kennedy was hit by rifle fire in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, while riding in an open topped limousine, part of a motorcade that had just turned onto Elm Street by the Texas School Book Depository. Almost every other fact, every statement, every report, every document, every exhibit, every disclosure, is open to question. Were there three shots or four? Were there more? Was the President shot from behind or from the front? Was he shot from the sixth floor of the book depository or from the so called ‘grassy knoll’?  Did twenty-four-year-old ex-marine Lee Harvey Oswald fire the shots? Was he alone or were there other assassins? Why did Jack Ruby, a local night club owner subsequently shoot Oswald? Was it to silence him, to stop him from telling what he knew? Did Ruby act out of rage or was he part of a conspiracy? Was he in the pay of the Mafia? Was the CIA involved? The questions are endless, the answers are few.

A frame from the famous Zapruder film

The President was shot at 12.30 pm, but Lee Oswald, who worked at the Texas School Book Depository, was seen by witnesses in the second floor lunch room as late as 12.15, which left him only fifteen minutes to ascend to the sixth floor, produce his rifle and take up position. Of course fifteen minutes might have been enough time for a cool and organised killer, but the President was actually due to arrive at a reception at the Dallas Trade Mart at 12.30, which meant he would pass through Dealey Plaza at about 12.25, giving Oswald only ten minutes to be in place, and he had no way of knowing the President would be late. Immediately after the shooting, patrolman Marrion Baker entered the Book Depository, drew his gun and with building superintendent Roy Truly hot on his heels, confronted a young man in the lunchroom calmly drinking a coke. Truly explained that this was Lee Oswald, an employee. Had Oswald rushed down from his ‘snipers lair’ on the sixth floor or had he been in the lunch room all the while?

Perhaps the strongest evidence linking Oswald to the murder was the supposed murder weapon, a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt action rifle, a World War II vintage carbine found on the sixth floor of the book depository at 1.22 pm, almost an hour after the assassination. The officer who first found the rifle, Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, identified it as a 7.65 mm Mauser, and was confident enough to make a sworn affidavit to that effect. The day after the shooting, November 23rd, District Attorney Henry Wade also described the weapon as a Mauser at a televised press conference. How then does a 7.65mm Mauser become a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano? I personally know nothing about guns at all but I have seen enough war films to know that a Mauser is German, and stamped clearly on the side of the Mannlicher-Carcano are the words ‘MADE ITALY’ and ‘CAL 6.5’. And surely a police officer, particularly an American policeman, would know what he was talking about concerning guns?

There is much more to talk about in the assassination, the Zapruder film, the murder of police officer JD Tippet, secret service men on the grassy knoll when no secret service men were deployed there. Was the assassin in the Texas School Book depository or was he on the grassy knoll? Were there multiple shooters?

In recent years the US authorities have been reviewing the final records ordered to be released by President Trump. Will anything be released that will prove conclusively who shot the President? I doubt it. Did Lee Oswald do it or was he like he said himself, just a patsy? Your guess is as good as mine. (Click here for a full post about the assassination.)

The Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989

It’s hard to imagine now, but for nearly three decades, the Berlin Wall divided a city and a country in two. Built in 1961, it stood as this cold, grey symbol of the divide between East and West, communism and democracy. Then, in November 1989, everything changed almost overnight. Word spread that East Germans would be allowed to cross freely into the West, and people rushed to the checkpoints. At first, the border guards didn’t even seem to know what to do, they just opened the gates. Suddenly, crowds poured through, cheering, crying, hugging strangers. Some climbed up on top of the wall, hammering at it with whatever tools they could find, breaking off chunks to keep as souvenirs.

The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t just mark the end of a barrier; it marked the end of an era. Within a year, Germany was reunited, and the world felt like it was shifting into something new and hopeful. People around the globe watched those scenes on TV. Who brought the wall down? Well, it was US President Ronald Reagan who called for Mikhail Gorbachev to bring the wall down but really the wall came down because the East Germans wanted it down. Long time hardline East German leader Erich Honecker had died and new leader Egon Krenz decided to open the border with Czechoslovakia.

In Berlin on the 9th of November 1989, crowds gathered at the checkpoints urging the guards to open up. Eventually, overwhelmed by crowds of people, the checkpoints were opened and people began to pass through. I remember watching on TV over the next few days, Germans knocking down parts of the wall and it was only nearly a year later, on 3rd of October 1990 that East and West Germany were reunited.

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Noël Coward in Literature, Film and Theatre

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I can’t remember when I first discovered Noël Coward. I had known about him for a very long time of course but perhaps I really only discovered him after picking up a paperback copy of Blithe Spirit. Included in that slim volume were two other plays, Hay Fever and Private Lives. Together they are a lively, witty and hugely enjoyable read. A few years ago, Liz and I were on holiday in France and I took along his autobiographies to read. This is what I wrote about them back then.

I’ve spent most of this holiday reading the autobiography of Noël 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 Noël’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 Noël’s supremely witty text. Noël 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 Noël 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.

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 Noël was able to look back at himself in the 1930s and examine himself from a greater 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 Noël were never close. The brother was clearly never part of Noël’s theatrical world and the family send him off to South Africa only for him to return and die of cancer.

The final book in the autobiographical series was Future Indefinite in which Noël 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 Noël, 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 those people 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 Noël was asked to be part of an Anglo-French PR unit in Paris which he seems to have enjoyed for a while and then became 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 that was eventually sunk and the lives of those who served in her. In his very first autobiography, the names of the many actors and actresses he worked with meant very little to me but now I can recognise a few names, John Mills and Richard Attenborough for instance and David Lean who co-directed the film with Noël although in actual fact, Lean directed most of the film when Coward became bored with the long-winded filming process.

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 Noël Coward biographies; fascinating, always interesting and hugely entertaining.

Just recently I’ve finished reading The Letters of Noël Coward edited by Barry Day. It’s a massive volume and I’ve read it over a long period of time, sometimes turning to other books but this year I decided I would make a big effort to finish it. How the author/editor would even go about collecting Noël’s letters I really don’t know unless Noël typed his letters and kept carbon copies. Anyway, this collection goes from Noël’s youth to his final days. Some of his letters describe his theatrical successes as well as disappointments when things didn’t go so well. Coward made friends all over the world and was fond of visiting them, especially those in the warmer climes of the world when England was cold and frosty. His letters cover his love of the theatres of London and also those of Broadway. After many months of hard work Noël would travel, sometimes with friends but many times on his own and he would talk about the places he visited in his letters. Travelling was his way of relaxing although he always found time for writing new plays.

The book is a huge volume and the editor has woven Noël’s letters with some interesting text about what was happening to Noël in between his letter writing. In 1941 Noël was invited to stay at the Welsh resort of Portmeirion where, many years later, the famous TV show The Prisoner starring Patrick MacGoohan would be filmed. His friend, Joyce Carey was hoping to write a play away from the bombs that were dropping on London. Her play never materialised but Noël wrote Blithe Spirit during the five days that he was there.

The original theatre production starred Cecil Parker as Charles Condomine and Kay Hammond as Elvira. On July 18th, 1941 Noël wrote to Jack Wilson to review the performance. He praised everyone but wasn’t happy with Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcarti. He finished by mentioning that “I need hardly say that she got a magnificent notice. So much for that.”

My first introduction to Blithe Spirit was the wonderful film version made in 1945 by David Lean. The two stars of the film, to my mind anyway, were Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford, although Constance Cummings as Mrs Condomine and Kay Hammond as Elvira, Mr Condomine’s late wife, were equally good.

If you don’t know the story to the play then here it is. Author Charles Condomine is writing a novel and one of the characters is a medium. To obtain information for his book, Charles asks local medium Madame Arcati round for dinner to perform a séance. The outcome is that Charles’ late wife Elvira is conjured up but only Charles can see her. Even so, she manages to cause mayhem in the Condomine household and upset Ruth, Charles’ current wife, no end.

That brings me to what you might call the punch line to this post. Last Thursday Liz and I went to see a production of Noël’s fabulous play at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool. Apart from a few pantomimes when I was a child this was my first visit to the theatre. (Having said that, I did go to a performance of Calendar Girls, the musical version, in Lytham a few years ago.) This however was a classic play written by an outstanding author at a venerable classic theatre. I was excited as we entered and found our seats.

A scene from the recent production at the Blackpool Grand Theatre

Blithe Spirit at the Blackpool Grand Theatre

The stalls were 90% full. The announcement came to take our seats, the lights went down and the performance began. It was an enjoyable performance but a couple of things struck me. Although the actors were good, they weren’t in the same class as the actors in David Lean’s film version. The action is set in the 1940s and Rex Harrison and the British actors from that period seem to have a unique smooth diction and rhythm of speech which however hard they try, actors today just really cannot reproduce. Adam Jackson-Smith as Charles Condomine was pretty good but the play needs a really good comic actor to play Madame Arcati and Susan Wooldridge was good but hardly the equal of the wonderful Margaret Rutherford.

Bridgette Amofah played Elvira quite well but in Noël’s original production the character had pale makeup with a hint of green and was followed around the stage by a green spotlight. Bridgette is a black woman so perhaps the make up wouldn’t have worked but I do feel that something could have been done with makeup and lighting to make her look a little more ghostly.

These minor things apart, I enjoyed my visit to the theatre and it was good to see that Noël Coward can still entertain the public many years after his death in 1973.

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F1 in Numbers

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I wrote a post called Blogging by Numbers in which I wrote about various numbers that linked to the world of writing and blogging. This week I thought I’d try and do a similar thing with Formula One racing. I haven’t written much about the sport this year even though it has been quite an interesting season. Recently, Max Verstappen, who a few races ago was really out of contention for the World Championship, now seems to have caught up with the top two drivers, Norris and Piastri and it is even possible he could swipe the title from under the noses of those two, both driving for McLaren. Currently, Lando Norris leads Oscar Piastri by a single point so it looks like a three way fight for the title. Anyway, let’s take a look at those numbers.

1950

That’s a pretty good number to begin with. The world driver’s championship commenced in 1950 and the very first winner was Nino Farina who won the title after only 7 races. The very first race of the season was the British Grand Prix held at Silverstone and Farina won that one driving his Alfa Romeo.

5

Nigel Mansell German GP 1988 photo by author

The famous Red Five was Nigel Mansell’s race number. In the 1980s Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet were a quartet that dominated the sport for many years. Piquet won three titles in 1981, 1983 and 1987. Mansell joined Piquet at Williams Honda in 1985. Honda felt that Piquet could have won the championship in 1986 if Williams had nominated a number one driver. Frank Williams declined to do so and so Honda withdrew their engines prematurely at the end of 1987 and began a new relationship with McLaren instead. Together, McLaren drivers Prost and Senna dominated the 1988 season winning every race between them but one. Williams were forced to use the engine of a privateer, John Judd, and were hopelessly outclassed. Mansell signed for Ferrari, the last driver to be personally signed for the famous team by the Commendatore himself, Enzo Ferrari.

Designer Adrian Newey joined the team in 1990 and with a new Renault engine the Williams team began to return to form. Mansell was tempted back to Williams from Ferrari. He won the world championship in 1992 but was dismayed to find that Frank Williams had signed Alain Prost as his team mate for 1993. Mansell had been teamed with Prost at Ferrari and was not happy at the way Prost schemed behind the scenes. Mansell declined to sign for the 1993 season and instead opted to move to the USA and compete in Indycars. There the Haas team made him a gift of his new race number, Red Five.

Fangio (Picture courtesy Wikipedia)

Still on the subject of number 5, that was the total of world championships won by the Argentine driver Juan Manuel Fangio. He was the original Formula One legend, the one everyone else spent decades trying to catch. He raced in the 1950s, when cars were twitchy beasts with no seatbelts and drivers wore polo shirts instead of fireproof suits. And yet, Fangio made it look effortless. He won five World Championships with four different teams, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati and Mercedes, an incredible effort which no other driver got close to until Alain Prost won his fourth in 1993 and finally Michael Schumacher equalled in 2001.

Decades later, when people discuss who the greatest driver of all time is, Fangio’s name still floats effortlessly to the top, a reminder that grace and talent once shared the same racing seat. Fangio retired from racing aged 47; he died in 1995 aged 84.

105

Image courtesy Wikipedia ceative commons

Lewis Hamilton currently holds the record for the most ever Formula One wins, 105. The previous record was held by Michael Schumacher at 91. Hamilton’s last win was the 2024 British Grand Prix. It was also his last win for Mercedes. In 2025, Lewis Hamilton moved to Ferrari. With the exception of a single sprint race victory, he has yet to win a full Grand Prix.

7

The record for the most world championships is held jointly by Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton. Many feel that Hamilton’s 7 championships should really be an 8. The result of the final race of the 2021 season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, was controversial. Title contenders Hamilton and Max Verstappen both had 369.5 points coming to the race meaning that whoever won would take the title. It would either be Verstappen’s first or Hamilton’s eighth.

What happened was that Lewis Hamilton was leading the race but on lap 53 of the 58 lap race, there was a crash and the safety car came out. Mercedes realised there was no time to restart the race and so Hamilton would win behind the safety car. The Red Bull team decided to change the tyres of their driver, Verstappen, and he rejoined the field, still in second place but with 5 lapped cars ahead of him. The race controller controversially decided that the cars in front of Max, and no others, could unlap themselves and restarted the race with a final lap remaining. According to the rules there should have been a mandatory final lap behind the safety car but this was ignored and the race restarted for one racing lap. With fresh tyres Verstappen overtook Hamilton and won, taking his first world championship.

Various protests were made by Mercedes but the race result was upheld although the race controller, Michael Masi, was later sacked.

65

65 was the tally of pole positions made by Ayrton Senna which at the time of his death in 1994 was the record. Together, Senna, Alain Prost, and Nigel Mansell dominated most of the eighties and early nineties in Formula One racing. Mansell had left the stage for Indycar racing in the United States and Prost had retired, leaving Senna to take his vacant seat at Williams, or perhaps he retired because Senna had been offered a seat at Williams. Certainly, after the intense animosity that developed between the two at McLaren you can hardly blame Prost for not wanting to work in that same situation again.

Ayrton Senna 1988. Photo by the author

Those retirements left Senna in 1994 as the Elder Statesman of Grand Prix motor racing. Now that his two closest competitors had gone perhaps Senna had hoped that he could relax, let up the pace a little bit, just as Prost had thought in 1988 before Senna began to push him harder. But a new phase had begun for Aryton Senna, a new Young Pretender had appeared to challenge him in the shape of Michael Schumacher. Schumacher had won the first two Grands Prix of the year and Senna came to Imola for the San Marino Grand Prix without a single point. “For us the championship starts here,” he told the TV cameras, “fourteen races instead of sixteen.” Further pressure mounted on Senna when fellow Brazilian Rubens Barrichello was injured in a crash and then Roland Ratzenberger was killed, the first fatality at a Grand Prix meeting since that of Riccardo Paletti 12 years before.

In the race as we all know, Senna went off the track at Tamburello and was killed when a suspension arm, crushed in the impact, flipped back and injured the Brazilian driver fatally in the head.

1

I thought I’d finish with some one hit wonders, drivers who only ever won one race. According to my research there are currently 25 drivers who have won just a single F1 race. The most recent single race winner is current Alpine driver Pierre Gasly who won the 2020 Italian Grand Prix. Gasly started the race in tenth, but gained positions due to a well-timed pit-stop prior to a safety car. Lewis Hamilton, who led the race until this point, was given a penalty for entering the pit lane when it was closed and so passed the lead to Gasly.

Jean Alesi was a hugely promising driver who sadly signed for Ferrari just as they entered a very dismal period in the Italian team’s long history. His one win came in 1995 at the Canadian Grand Prix when he was running second to Schumacher in a Benetton and the German retired with a gearbox problem.

Peter Gethin courtesy creative commons

Here is one final one hit wonder and the winner was a driver you may never have heard of but the race he won has been considered by many to be one of the most exciting of all time. Peter Gethin was driving for Yardley BRM in 1971. Back then before the arrival of the chicanes, Monza, the venue for the Italian Grand Prix, was a super fast slipstreaming event.

Gethin in his BRM won the race from Ronnie Peterson in a March 702 by an incredible by 0.01 seconds. The top five were covered by just 0.61 seconds, with François Cevert finishing third and Mike Hailwood in his debut race for Surtees finishing fourth and Howden Ganley fifth. With an average speed of 150.754 mph, this race stood as the fastest-ever Formula One race for 32 years, until 2003. The following year, 1972, chicanes were added to the Monza circuit to reduce the ever growing speeds of the cars.

Gethin retired from F1 in 1974.

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Ridley Scott in 4 Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Ridley Scott was born in South Shields, England, in 1937. He studied at West Hartlepool College of Art and later at London’s Royal College of Art, where he first began experimenting with film. While there, he contributed to the school’s magazine ARK and made a short film, Boy and Bicycle (1962), featuring his younger brother, Tony Scott.

After graduating, Scott joined the BBC as a set designer and director, working on popular series such as Z Cars and The Troubleshooters. His time in television taught him the mechanics of production and in 1968, he left the BBC to establish Ridley Scott Associates (RSA), a commercial production company. Over the next decade, he directed hundreds of adverts, developing a style of lighting, atmosphere and composition, qualities that made his transition to cinema with The Duellists (1977) both natural and visually striking.

Scott is a prolific film maker and has created some classic films. I have to say there are many of Scott’s films that I haven’t seen so in this post I’ve focussed on four particular films that I have seen and enjoyed.

Alien

Alien is a really different kind of sci-fi film. It’s not Star Trek or Star Wars and it’s not littered with sci-fi terminology. It’s a very slow burning earthy film about a spacecraft on its way back to earth with a payload of something, I’m not sure what. On the way back home, the crew are awakened from hibernation to find that the ship’s sensors have detected a beacon which maybe some sort of SOS and the company regulations state this must be investigated. Next thing we’re down on a hostile planet and one crew member has been hit in the face by some kind of creature which has attached itself to his face. Later it falls off and all is ok except that something is growing inside the crewman which bursts out of his chest in a horrible spectacular scene and suddenly, an alien creature is onboard.

It is all done really well and one by one the crew fall victim to this creature in the dark confined spaces of the ship. It’s sci-fi mixed with horror and the only survivor turns out to be Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver. Ripley is a sort of female John McClane, the Bruce Willis character from the Die Hard films. Weaver creates a really memorable character which was revived in various sequels but the real core of the film and the scene everyone remembers is probably that gruesome scene when the alien bursts out of John Hurt’s chest. Apparently, Ridley Scott didn’t tell the actors what was about to happen so the shocked faces on the actors are all really authentic.

Some years later, Scott decided to revisit the franchise with two prequel films. Both were dismal in my opinion but it makes me wonder why was Alien so good and Prometheus and Alien Covenant so bad? The effects in those two latter films were good but perhaps the actors weren’t as good as Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt and Ian Holm and the other crew members in the original, or is the classic chest buster scene so burned into cinematic lore that it can’t be topped?

The Martian

The Martian is surprisingly similar to that old film Robinson Crusoe on Mars in many ways. The crew of a Mars mission is on the surface when a major dust storm threatens to topple over their space vehicle. The crew decide to abort the mission and take off but one crew member is hit by debris and presumed dead and they leave him behind. Later, Mark Watney played by Matt Damon, awakes from unconsciousness in the desert and makes his way back to the martian base camp. The bio-data telemetry from his space suit had been damaged and so made mission control assume that he was dead. Now the martian base camp is pretty basic and although it has computer stations and food and water and so on, there is no communication to earth. The next mission is not due for four years so Watney must find a way to survive until then on the camp’s meagre supplies.

He decides to make part of the camp into an area where he can plant some potatoes and hopefully produce more food. Just like in Crusoe, Mark Watney keeps us interested in what is happening by recording his thoughts in a video diary. Not only that but back on earth, observatories notice the activity taking place on Mars and realise he is still alive.

Still unable to communicate with earth the marooned astronaut decides to dig up an old space probe, drag it back to base, plug it into a power cable and use it for communication. I won’t ruin everything for you by telling you the whole story but again, if you like sci-fi and perhaps even if you don’t, this is such a well made and enjoyable film and is well worth watching. The visual look of the film is great and the director manages to keep the viewer interested despite the fact that for much of the time there is only Matt Damon up there on the screen.

External scenes of Mars were filmed in Wadi Rum in Jordan and NASA decided to collaborate with the producers as they saw the film as promoting real space exploration. The author of the book which the film was based on was Andy Weir who tried to be as scientifically accurate as possible, researching orbital mechanics and the planet Mars as well as botany, all elements which interested Ridley Scott.

A Good Year

One of the great things about Ridley Scott is that not only is he a prolific film maker, he doesn’t just stick to one particular genre. The first time I saw this particular film I would never have guessed that it was a Ridley Scott film. It’s based on a book by Peter Mayle who wrote the wonderful A Year in Provence. Scott had wanted to make a film in Provence as he owned a house in the area. Peter Mayle was approached to write a screenplay but he declined but decided to write a novel and for Scott to buy the film rights and have a screenplay written based on the book. The screenplay was written by Marc Klein and both the book and the film incorporated some of Ridley Scott’s own ideas. The basic story is about a London stockbroker who inherits a property in France belonging to his late uncle. The stockbroker, Max, played by Russell Crowe, goes back to France and after a while begins to fall for the old place again. A gorgeous local waitress plays a large part in his feelings too. His late uncle is played by Albert Finney and his scenes are all shown in flashback.

I have to say I didn’t like this film the first time I saw it. I thought the flashback scenes were confusing because I didn’t realise they were flashbacks at first. I didn’t like Russell Crowe and thought he was miscast. I feel the role was more something perhaps Hugh Grant could have played effortlessly. Over time though I’ve warmed to this film and now it is one of my absolute favourites.

Gladiator

This is a film which really revived the kind of classic epics that Hollywood and directors like David Lean used to make. It’s a really fabulous film with these huge set pieces set in the Roman arena, beautifully photographed and acted. It concerns Russell Crowe as a Roman general, Maximus Decimus Meridius who Marcus Aurelius decides to nominate as his successor as emperor of Rome. Unfortunately, Marcus dies at the hand of his son, Commodus who quite fancies being emperor himself. Commodus has Maximus arrested and sentenced to death but Maximus fights off his executioners and escapes. He returns home to find his family murdered. Various events then see Maximus become enslaved and later a gladiator determined to seek revenge.

One of the main characters was played by Oliver Reed who died during the production. During a break from filming in Valletta, Reed had encountered a group of Royal Navy sailors and challenged them to a drinking match. He suffered a heart attack in the bar and died in an ambulance en route to the hospital.

His role had not been completely filmed and so a body double was used in some shots and in one scene Reed’s face was digitally inserted into the film. I have Gladiator on DVD so I thought I’d give it a watch just to refresh my memory. Gladiator was just as good as I remembered and the secret of the film, for me at any rate, is that even though this is a great epic in the same tradition as David Lean’s later films, at its core is a very human story about a man betrayed who longs to be reunited with his murdered family which makes his death a sort of victory.

Other Films

I could of course have mentioned many other classic Ridley Scott films. Thelma and Louise is one I have seen. I always thought it was a good film, nothing less and nothing more but watching a TV show on Sky Arts not long ago the reviewers thought it was a work of genius. It was certainly new in that it was a road movie featuring two women rather than two men. Blade Runner is another classic sci-fi drama directed by Scott and I look forward to the day I see it listed on my TV schedule.

Scott directed Hannibal, the follow up to Silence of the Lambs which I thought was a little gruesome and so apparently did Jodie Foster who declined to reprise her role as FBI agent Clarice Starling.

All the Money in the World was a pretty good film which was about the kidnapping of J Paul Getty’s grandson and his refusal to cough up a multi million pound ransom. Interestingly Kevin Spacey played Getty but after allegations of sexual misconduct Scott cut Spacey from the film and asked Christopher Plummer to play Getty,  calling for some last minute refilming of parts of the film.

I was hoping to see Ridley Scott’s Napoleon at the cinema but these days films seem to have such a short cinema showing. It doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere so I’ll just have to look out for the DVD.

What are your favourite Ridley Scott films?

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Things that Happened in October

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Here I am, raring to go. Laptop at the ready, focussed, ready to write this week’s blog. The thing is after 688 posts I’m not that sure what to write about. OK, so what about . .  things that happened in October? Let’s dive in.

One thing that happened in October was me! I was born on October the 3rd, quite a considerable time ago which is annoying on a number of levels. One, I’m getting a bit knackered. My back hurts, my knees ache. It’s hard to stand up straight but what is a real pain is when you get one of those things on the internet where you have to add your date of birth and I have to scroll back through the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, the 60s and finally to the 1950s.

Anthony Eden was the prime minister when I was born. He carried on until his resignation in 1957 due to ill health. At the top of the music charts or hit parade as they called it back then was Doris Day and Whatever Will be, Will be, Que Sera Sera.

My brother Colin was also an October child. He was born on the 10th of October but sadly wasn’t around to celebrate it this year. He would have been 65. My mother too was also born in October but more about her later.

John Lennon

Lennon was born on the 9th of October in 1940. His mother and father were Alfred ‘Freddie’ Lennon and his wife Julia. Alfred was a merchant seaman and was away at sea when John was born. He apparently went absent without leave but later turned up back in Liverpool. By then Julia was involved with another man, John Dykins and actually pregnant by him. Julia’s sister, Mimi decided to take John home and look after him in order to give Julia a chance of happiness with her new love John Dykins.

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

Mimi told Philip Norman, author of the book Shout, the True Story of the Beatles that ‘no man wants another man’s child’. Perhaps the fact that she had no children of her own played a part too. Julia continued to visit her son at Mimi’s house at 251 Menlove Avenue until 15th of July 1958.

John was staying with Julia and John Dykins for the weekend but Julia had called round to see her sister Mimi. When she left to catch her bus home she was hit by a car and killed. John Lennon’s world had been tragically changed.

Many moons ago when I worked for a cigarette vending company, I used to visit a small pub in Woolton in Liverpool and the owners of the pub were two retired ex shell tanker drivers. They were both friendly guys but one in particular was outgoing and talkative and if he was on duty at the bar we would always have a good chat while I sorted out the cigarette machine. One day we got onto the subject of the Beatles and I was surprised to hear that John Lennon’s house was just around the corner. Woolton is a very pleasant middle class suburb of Liverpool and I remember thinking what! This is where Lennon was brought up?  Lennon’s image as a sort of working class hero led me to assume he had a background in a rough and tumble area of Liverpool, like the Dingle where Ringo lived. The truth was different. Perhaps Lennon fermented the working class hero thing, perhaps the fault was mine, I just assumed something without knowing the facts.

Driving round the corner I found Lennon’s old house, 251 Menlove Avenue. He was living here when he started his first band, the Quarrymen and also when he met Paul McCartney. Lennon’s life was one heck of a journey taking him around the world with the Beatles and finally to New York with Yoko Ono where he was shot and killed in 1980.

Marie Antoinette executed 1793

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in the film version directed by Sofia Coppola

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette, the deposed Queen of France, was executed by guillotine in Paris’ Place de la Révolution. After a swift and merciless trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was found guilty of treason. Dressed in a simple white gown, her once-elaborate hair cut short, she was taken through the streets in an open cart, exposed to the jeers and insults of the crowd. Despite the humiliation she endured, she remained composed. When she accidentally stepped on her executioner’s foot while mounting the scaffold, she turned to him and said politely, “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose.” It was a final gesture of grace amid the chaos of the Revolution. Moments later, the blade fell, and with it ended the life of a woman who had once embodied the grandeur of Versailles and become the Revolution’s most reviled symbol. Her death marked both the destruction of the monarchy and the deepening ferocity of the revolutionary cause.

A famous phrase she is said to have spoken is ‘let them eat cake’ after being told that her subjects were starving and had no bread. Did she really say that? Probably not but in the original French, Marie referred to brioche, not cake. Brioche is a sort of sweet bread popular in France but either way, the phrase has been used as propaganda by the revolutionaries to show that the Queen had no time for the peasants.

Ghandi born October 2nd 1869

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a leader of India’s struggle for independence and a global symbol of nonviolent resistance. Born in 1869 in Porbandar, India, he trained as a lawyer in London before developing his philosophy of satyagraha—the power of truth and peaceful protest—during his years in South Africa. Many people think his name is Mahatma but this was in fact a title bestowed upon him in 1915 and means ‘Great soul’. Gandhi became the moral and political heart of the freedom movement, leading campaigns of civil disobedience, boycotts and marches that challenged British colonial rule without resorting to violence. Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 shocked the world, but his ideals of peace, equality, and nonviolence continue to influence movements for justice and human rights across the globe. Quite a few years ago I picked up Ghandi’s autobiography and lost it before finishing it. I know I still have it somewhere and one day I will find it and finally finish it.

A biographical film about Ghandi directed by Sir Richard Attenborough was released in 1982. Attenborough had been trying to make the film since 1962 and the final production marked the realisation of a dream for the director. Ben Kingsley starred as Ghandi and the film won 8 Oscars at the Academy awards although there was some criticism of the film. I was surprised to find that the opening sequence where Ghandi is thrown off a train in South Africa was entirely fictional.

1990 East and West Germany Reunited

When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, it marked not just the collapse of a barrier but the beginning of a profound transformation. For nearly three decades since the end of the Second World War, Germany had been divided, East and West separated by ideology, politics and a concrete wall that sprang up in 1963. The fall of the Wall was followed by a wave of hope and uncertainty as both sides faced the challenge of becoming one nation again. On October 3, 1990, reunification was officially declared, and the Federal Republic of Germany absorbed the former East German state.

The process was far from simple. Economically, the East lagged behind after years of communist rule and integrating two very different systems tested the country’s resilience. Yet, despite the struggles, rising unemployment, cultural adjustments and political growing pains, the spirit of unity prevailed and Berlin once again stood as the capital of a single, democratic Germany. Today, the reunification remains one of the most remarkable examples of peaceful transformation in modern history.

24th October 1929 Wall Street Crash

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a catastrophic collapse of the U.S. stock market that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, the American economy had boomed, and millions of people invested heavily in the stock market, even buying shares on credit. This speculation drove prices far above the real value of companies, creating a dangerous bubble. In late October 1929, confidence began to crumble. On October 24, known as Black Thursday, panic selling set in and by October 29, or Black Tuesday, the market had completely collapsed. Billions of dollars in wealth vanished overnight, leaving investors ruined and banks in crisis. The crash didn’t cause the Great Depression by itself but it exposed deep economic weaknesses and triggered a decade of mass unemployment, poverty and hardship across the United States and much of the world.

One of those who escaped disaster was Joe Kennedy, father of President John F Kennedy who apparently had invested in property, real estate as they call it in the USA, rather than stocks and shares.

Finally, bringing this blog back to a personal element, in 1929 my grandfather and grandmother had gone to Cheltenham to find work and on the 24th of October, the very day of the crash in the USA, my mother was born. She died in 2023 aged 93.

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F1, The Crown and Watching the Box on Holiday

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My original title for this post was Watching the Box in France. That however seemed to give the impression that this post was about French TV which it isn’t. Liz and I don’t normally watch much television on holiday, we are far more interested in swimming, going out for meals and barbecuing. On this holiday however, the weather was a little mixed and on quite a few evenings we settled down in the lounge of our rented house and decided to pop the TV on.

Just to backtrack a little, we rented this same house back in May and usually, the only time I put the TV on is to watch F1 racing. May is the usual month in the calendar for the Monaco grand prix, one of my favourite races of the year. There is actually plenty of talk recently about cancelling the race as nowadays, the F1 cars are faster and much bigger and so there is very little room left to overtake.

Back in the 1960s, cars were much smaller, in fact in those days there were three cars on the front row of the starting grid, the cars lining up in 3-2-3 formation. Fast forward to the present day and F1 cars and their aerodynamic fins and wings have spread out hoping to grab that extra bit of air in order to generate more downforce and push themselves down to the track so they can corner ever faster.

Many people have called for the race to be cancelled as bigger cars combined with a narrow track makes it virtually impossible to overtake which reduces the racing to just a procession of high speed cars and of course whoever is on pole position is pretty much guaranteed a win. Push that to one side and I must tell you that I happen to love the Monaco grand prix, I love the track, I love the exotic names of the corners: Saint Devote, Mirabeau and Rascasse. I love the run down to the Casino Square, the dash into the tunnel and the following tight chicane, the prize giving, the boats in the harbour, the glamour; in short, I love it all.

Back in May then I was disappointed to find that the Skybox in this lovely house did not seem to be working. I switched it on and off, rebooted it, checked the connections but all to no avail. I was forced to watch the 8 minute highlights on YouTube and quite frankly, I was gutted. OK back in England our own trusty Skybox had recorded the race but by then I knew the outcome, I knew the winners and the excitement had all been lost.

Anyway, we came here once again in September and I was looking forward to watching the Italian Grand Prix, another of my favourite races. The TV worked ok but the skybox was no more, lying abandoned and disconnected on one side. A new TV set up had been sorted with the TV connected to the internet. I quickly ascertained that in France, F1 was available on Canal+. Yes, Canal was there, ok so far. I clicked on the channel only to find that a subscription was required. I would have to pay and subscribe to Canal to watch the racing!

My inner tightwad kicked in and declined to open up my wallet so once again I had to make do with the 8 mins of YouTube highlights. Oh well, we didn’t come on holiday to watch TV but even so, I was disappointed.

The other thing we noticed on one rainy evening was that Netflix was available. Now just recently when Liz renewed her Sky package, some negotiation was involved and to sweeten the deal, Sky threw in a Netflix subscription. I have to say I haven’t looked at Netflix much but I always assumed it was just an ordinary channel like BBC1 for instance, in that there was a schedule and certain programmes were broadcast at certain times. Not so, Netflix is more like YouTube, you can watch programmes on demand but what to watch, that is the question.

Liz wanted to watch The Crown which I can’t say I was really interested in at first but after a while I realised what a really excellent production it is. The actors are really good especially the portrayals of the Queen, Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill.

The younger Queen was played by Claire Foy and Princess Margaret by Vanessa Kirkby and Margaret’s situation as the Queen’s sister was explored in a few episodes. Her love affair with Peter Townsend was doomed because Townsend was a divorcee. The Queen was advised to ask Margaret to wait until she was 25 and then she could marry. When the time came the Queen’s advisors brought up more issues and then ultimately the two lovers had to separate which of course didn’t help the sisterly relationship between the Queen and Margaret. Margaret actually could have married Townsend but that would have meant giving up her royal status so it seems to me that perhaps being a royal meant more to her than being with Peter Townsend.

Prince Philip courtesy creative commons

Before watching The Crown I had no idea of the background of Prince Philip. I always assumed he was English and a member of some family which was eligible to marry into the royals. In actual fact he was Greek and aged only eighteen months old he and his family were exiled from their homeland which left him with a lifetime fear of revolution and anything that might threaten the royal family.

His and Charles’ school days at Gordonstoun were really well done especially the interplay and flashbacks between Philip’s and his son Charles’ time there. Philip apparently loved it but Charles hated it.

A real stand out story was the one about the retirement of Churchill which was cleverly linked to the famous, or infamous painting of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland. Churchill, played by John Lithgow, was coming up to his 80th birthday and various people wanted him to retire but he was adamant that he would carry on. Churchill had various sittings for the painting with the artist and Churchill himself was an amateur painter of some merit. The two, one a professional and the other an amateur, tried to examine each other through their works. Churchill was hugely disappointed with the result which portrayed him as a very old man and came to see at last, according to The Crown anyway, that the time had come for him to retire and hand over the leadership of the country to Anthony Eden. Everything was beautifully done.

The other thing about The Crown was even the quick cutaway and establishing shots of cars driving up to the Palace or through London in the 50s and 60s, were expertly done. I’m sure there was an element of special effects involved especially in scenes of crowds in London but even so, everything looked so good.

An interesting episode concerned Lord Altrincham who was concerned enough to put forward a little criticism of her Majesty when she seemed to brand the workers at a car factory ‘ordinary’ instead of praising their work. He said himself that he didn’t blame the Queen but those who were writing her speeches and he added; “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation.”

In the show, Lord Altrincham is invited to the palace to meet the Queen’s secretary, however when he arrives, he finds himself face to face with the Queen.

I doubt that ever actually happened but if it did then full marks to the Queen for meeting criticism head on. Many of the Lord’s recommendations, such as making a Christmas TV broadcast, were accepted by the monarch and surely must have helped her feel not as remote from her people as she had up till then. Another broadcast which was dramatised was the one made by the Duke of Windsor when he abdicated. The Duke flips in and out of the story. The Queen Mother detested him as he had forced the mantle of kingship onto her husband when he was ill-prepared for it. Prince Charles however, did strike up a sort of friendship with the Duke. I should imagine that a former King and a future one would have much in common although how much was fiction and how much was accurate, I don’t know. Charles was played by Josh O’Connor extremely well and the Duke in his later incarnation by Derek Jacobi.

Our last evenings in our gite at Parçay-les-Pins were made all the more enjoyable by this splendid series which I’m sure everyone has watched ages ago but for me, a latecomer to Netflix, is very new.

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Working with AI Images

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This has been a busy week for Liz and me. We had to say goodbye to our rented gite in France with its lovely relaxing gardens, patio and heated pool and make our way back to what will probably be cold and wet England. What then could I write about this weekend? Well, as I spend a lot of time making images with AI I thought I could give you a quick account of my experiences, good and bad, with AI imaging.

The idea of AI imaging is pretty simple; on a site like Freepik or Nightcafe, you type into a text box and describe your image and AI or artificial intelligence will do the rest. Here’s a recent example of an image I made for use on social media.

The description was pretty simple and, in my experience, the simpler you can make your description, the better. Once you get complicated, anything can happen. Here it is:

A solitary lighthouse keeper, weathered and wise, stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking a turbulent sea. The lighthouse beam cuts through a thick, mystical fog and the beam projects the following words into the sky: ‘READ A NEW BLOG POST!’ The scene is rendered in a hyper realistic fantasy style. The overall mood is one of stoic endurance and ancient mystery.

The image came out pretty much the way I wanted it. I added the web address later in Microsoft Designer. I also made it into a video which didn’t really work as the lighthouse lamp only turned halfway but the actual light it sent out turned a full circle so it all looked a bit odd. Oh well!

Another idea I had was of a girl hitting a tennis ball and the ball is frozen close to the camera with the words ‘READ A NEW BLOG POST’ seen clearly written on the ball. I must have tried the prompt for this about 30 times and have never really got what I wanted. Here are a few versions.

In the end I thought what about just using the ball without the tennis player? That turned out to be much easier.

Another idea I had was a girl in an art gallery looking at paintings. One would say the usual, A NEW BLOG POST AVAILABLE NOW or something like READ A NEW BLOG POST. The poster would be sharply focussed, the girl blurred but believe it or not every time I tried that prompt, the poster came out blurred and the girl sharp.

Anyway, let’s take a look at some which came out pretty well.

Many of these images I use in my promo videos which can be found in places like Facebook and X. Here’s a recent example.

Freepik is a site where I have always got some good results and recently I spotted an AI voice section on their site. I sorted out quite a few good voices which can be edited and made faster or slower and other refinements but sadly, just as I was getting started, I ran out of credits which was really annoying especially as being a major tightwad I wasn’t inclined to pay for more. Oh well, here’s one voice I used that I thought might resonate with my American readers.

Here’s another video which used an AI image of a bottle floating in the water which came out pretty good as a video. The sound effects were added from a sound effects CD I bought from eBay years ago.

This next one features a pulp fiction paperback with the title, new blog post out now. I tried this prompt a number of times but somehow the text always came out mixed up. This one isn’t perfect; it was supposed to show my name on the spine but shows it on the side where the pages are.

Here’s a final one which will probably reflect the UK weather back in Manchester.

Of course, they don’t call Manchester The Rainy City for nothing!

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My Holiday Book Bag Summer 2025

Posted on by Steve Higgins

One of the great things about having a lazy relaxing time in France is that I have plenty of time to settle down after a meal or a swim and have a long relaxing read. Here are a few more of my holiday reads.

The Eagle has Landed by Jack Higgins

I’ve seen the film of this numerous times and although it isn’t a particular favourite I’ve always enjoyed it. My brother died earlier this year and when I cleared his flat out, I noticed this book. He had urged me a number of times to read it as he said it was rather different to the film so I brought it along on holiday and thought I’d give it a read.

It actually reminded me a little of The Day of the Jackal, in that the book focusses mainly on the preparations for the operation and the action only occupies a small portion of the book.

In the opening pages Hitler has a rant about various things but praises the operation of Otto Skorseny who brilliantly freed the Duce, Mussolini, from captivity and brought him to Hitler. He chastises Admiral Canaris for not being able to do a similar operation such as kidnapping Churchill and Himmler, always wanting to please his Führer, takes note.

Canaris feels he has to placate Hitler and following on from a comment from Himmler decides to put forward a feasibility study. He assumes Hitler will forget about the whole project but Himmler gets wind of the study which he feels could work and forces one of Canaris’ aides to follow through with the project.

Colonel Radl, the aide in question, recruits Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Steiner and his team who are veterans of fighting in Russia and various other places but due to Steiner’s defence of an escaping jewish girl, have now been relegated to a penal unit. Radl also engages Liam Devlin, an IRA soldier, to act with a British spy who has advised the details of a visit by Winston Churchill to a remote English village.

Verdict: The author builds up all the elements of this story in a tense and exciting fashion and the result is a really enthralling read. This result was much better than the film version even though the film is a great watch. I think I might look out for more books from Jack Higgins.

Mandy by Mandy Rice-Davies and Shirley Flack

This was another of my late brother’s books. He had mentioned to me that he was interested in the Profumo scandal and in fact, many years ago, he and I went to see the film Scandal at the cinema.

This book is an autobiography of sorts by Mandy Rice Davies who wasn’t really connected directly to the Profumo affair although she was a friend and flatmate of one of the principals, Christine Keeler.

As a young girl Mandy aged 16, real name Marilyn, left home in Birmingham and caught the train into London. That same day she auditioned for a job as a dancer in a night club and after getting the job she was given lodgings for 12 weeks after which she and Christine Keeler, a fellow dancer, became flatmates. There was a strict rule at the club which was that employees could not fraternise with the club’s members. The members were all very well-off gentlemen and many of the dancers flouted the rules. Christine and Mandy were invited out by various people and taken to exclusive clubs and restaurants and met many of the rich and famous of the day.

Marilyn did a lot of modelling assignments and was encouraged to use a different name to Marilyn so after some thought she came up with Mandy. She and Christine were youngsters who sought out fun and adventure and the two befriended an osteopath by the name of Stephen Ward.  Ward introduced the girls to many celebrities of the day and one day Christine confided in Mandy that she was having an affair with a government minister, John Profumo.

Mandy was called a sex worker in the famous court case but as she points out in this book, she was not a sex worker or prostitute even though she was promiscuous and had a number of affairs. Neither was Stephen Ward a pimp or someone who lived off the earnings of prostitutes. Mandy was famous for admitting in court that she had had sex with Lord Astor. When she was told that Astor had denied the claim she famously replied ‘well, he would, wouldn’t he’?

Mandy had a long affair with Peter Rachman who later became infamous as someone who rented out run down properties to immigrants and used various thugs to make sure the rent was paid. Rachman was a self-made millionaire who survived concentration camps in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He died of a heart attack aged only 43 and Mandy was shut out of his properties by Rachman’s widow. Not only that but various gifts Rachman had made to her including a brand-new Jaguar car were swiftly repossessed.

In later life Mandy married and moved to Israel and describes life there as the owner of one of Tel Aviv’s first nightclubs as well as life during the 6-day war and other conflicts.

Verdict: This was a really well written and insightful book, whether that was due to Mandy or her co-writer I’m not sure but it was a hugely interesting and enjoyable read.

Death of a Celebrity by MC Beaton

This was another Hamish Macbeth mystery and I’m slowly ploughing on through the entire series. In this one a brash young TV presenter decides to make a new TV series exposing various scandals in Scotland and when she appears in the village of Lochdubh in search of new stories for her TV show, many people are not happy. When she gets murdered Macbeth has to find the culprit.

Verdict: This was a pleasant enough read but I began to lose interest somewhere in the middle and although the case was finally wrapped up, I didn’t find it quite as enjoyable as some of the previous entries in the series.

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

You wouldn’t think that new information about a character like Stalin could be forthcoming in this day and age, however, with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the author has searched various archives in Russia and Georgia and unearthed much that is new about Josef Vissarionovitch Djhugashvili.

The future Soviet dictator was born in Georgia. His father was a shoemaker and his mother wanted him to become a priest. Stalin did study as a priest but later became an atheist and left the church to join local revolutionaries in Georgia.

Stalin became one of the leading providers of funds for the revolutionaries. He did this by masterminding numerous bank robberies and sending the funds on to Lenin.

He eluded the Tsarist authorities many times but even so, he had to endure prison as well as exile to Siberia.

Later Stalin ran various printing presses and also edited newspapers for the revolutionaries. In 1917 he was exiled to a place close to the Arctic circle. In exile he read voraciously and became close to the hunters who used the reindeer in much the same way as the Native Americans used the buffalo. They used them for food, their used skins for clothing and protection from the cold and to a great extent worshipped these creatures for their sustenance.

When the revolution of 1917 broke out, Stalin headed for St Petersburg to link up with Lenin, even at one point disguising Lenin and helping him evade the police.

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks were able to take power from the provisional government after convincing the Soviets, councils of workers and soldiers, to side with them, Stalin was made a commissar, a minister, in Lenin’s new government.

The various faces of the young Stalin

It has always seemed to me that Stalin was the cruel and hardline man and Lenin was the thinker, the politician. In fact, Lenin was a hard and ruthless man too. When someone decreed that no more shootings would take place under the Bolsheviks it was Lenin who called for more shootings. It’s a revolution he said, people must be shot! He liked Stalin because he knew Stalin was ruthless and could get things done. Later, when he realised that Stalin craved power for himself, he tried to have him removed from the leadership but by then he was sick and dying and it was too late.

This is a book about young Stalin and so the book finishes with the October revolution and Stalin’s appointment as one of Lenin’s commissars or ministers. There is an interesting epilogue though and reveals Stalin as an old man visiting his Dacha on the Black Sea coast. He invites many former friends and comrades who he had known in the past and even laments the death of many old comrades even though they were all shot on his orders.

It also gives the chance for the author to reveal the fates of various characters that have crossed paths with Stalin during his early life.

One interesting story which I read in the author’s other book, The Court of the Red Czar, occurred in 1941 when the Nazis invaded Russia. Stalin was a great reader as I mentioned earlier and he was sure after reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf that the Nazi leader would never attack Russia when he was still fighting a war with the west. Despite many warnings, the attack came and Stalin was silent for many weeks. Eventually his generals came to see him. They wanted orders and plans to combat the Nazis. Stalin clearly thought they had come for another reason. His first words were ‘have you come to arrest me?’

It would probably have been better for them and the country if they had.

Verdict: A excellent and well researched biography.

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Reading Books and Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I thought for this week’s post I’d do a combination post, a little of my book bag mixed with some sun lounger thoughts. Let’s see how it all pans out.

Just now we have finished our touring part of the holiday and we have come to our rented gîte where we have parked the van and are spending time in this wonderful house that we regularly rent just outside the small village of Parçay-les-Pins.

I quite often, back in England, watch that TV show about people who want to buy a new house abroad. It’s called A Place in the Sun and it’s aways interesting to watch couples look for a dream home, especially when it features a location we know a little about like France or Lanzarote for instance. Sometimes the contestants -for want of a better word- will come across what I think is a really nice place and will criticise it and start saying how they will rip the kitchen out and knock this wall down and I really want to slap the pair of them. Now and then, the show will produce something really nice and the couple will fall in love with it, put in a bid and find themselves the new owners of a fabulous house in the sun.

Sitting by the pool outside this house in France I do feel that it’s really a place that Liz and I have both fallen for. It’s an old country house with very thick walls and our bedroom is a modern extension with an en-suite bathroom. In a morning our usual routine is for me to get up, make a brew and bring it back to bed and for Liz and I to check our emails and then see who will be victorious in a card game we play together on our iPads. Those thick walls come into play here though as being so thick we don’t get much of an internet signal in the bedroom so one of us will have to reach out for our phone and switch on our internet hotspot so we can play.

Card game done it’s time for breakfast and then out to the pool for a swim, a read and some sunbathing. Here’s the first of my holiday reads;

The Lady in the Van

I saw the film version of this a few years ago which was pretty good, if a little odd. It was presented in a very peculiar way in that the author, Alan Bennett, is portrayed as two people, one as himself as he appears in the story and two, as himself as he writes the story. That oddity aside it was really a rather good and original film. When I heard there was a book version I quickly went to one my usual internet book stores and promptly bought it.

I was disappointed to find that it was a very slim volume, only 100 pages in fact and the author might have been better saving it for a collection of short stories. Anyway, it actually made me feel better about my own book, Floating in Space, which is also a rather thin book, though I might add, much longer than this.

Anyway, moving on to the story it was a rather good read. It’s about an oddball character, an old lady who parks outside Alan Bennett’s house in a van and stays there for some time, actually living in the van. She appeared sometime in the 1970’s and when double yellow lines appeared moved into the author’s driveway, staying there until her death in 1989.

The lady, the enigmatic Miss Shepherd, lived in her van continually throughout the year, rain or shine, hot or cold and the author tells her story using his own diary entries. It’s a funny story but also a sad one too. When the lady passes away, he is forced to go through her things in the van;

“…I realised I had to grit my teeth (or hold my nose) and go through Miss Shepherd’s possessions.
To do the job properly would have required a team of archaeologists. Every surface was covered in layers of old clothes, frocks, blankets and accumulated papers, some of them undisturbed for years, and all lying under a crust of ancient talcum powder. Sprinkled impartially over wet slippers, used incontinence pads and half-eaten tins of baked beans, it was of a virulence that supplemented rather than obliterated the distinctive odour of the van. The narrow aisle between the two banks of seats where Miss Shepherd had knelt, prayed and slept was trodden six inches deep in sodden debris, on which lay a top dressing of old food, Mr Kipling cakes, wrinkled apples, rotten oranges and everywhere batteries – batteries loose, batteries in packets, batteries that had split and oozed black gum on to the prehistoric sponge cakes and ubiquitous sherbet lemons that they lay among”

In the van he finds about £6000 in cash and a name and telephone number. Bennett calls the number to find the man at the other end has never heard of Miss Shepherd but then after he describes her, the man realises Miss Shepherd was his sister, although she had for some reason been using an assumed name. Alan Bennett had a love/hate relationship with this strange old lady for many years and came to -I was going to say like, but that’s not the right word. He came to be connected to her in a strange way until one day her social worker arrived with some clean clothes only to find her dead in the van.

To sum up, this was a lovely read even though it only lasted a couple of days for me but I think now I might look out for more of Alan Bennett’s books.

Vide Greniers and Brocantes

Liz and I always visit a village fête at the weekend, usually those with a vide grenier or brocante attached. A vide grenier is just a car boot sale which we both love. I usually pick up connecting leads for my laptop or iPad, after all, you can never have enough electrical leads. Brocantes are more like flea markets or antique fairs. Just the kind of place to pick up those old telephones that I still love, especially those Bakelite ones.

We visited a couple of vide greniers last weekend although the rain put off a great many sellers. The refreshments area was still open though and I ordered sausages and frites undercover from the rain while Liz nipped over to the covered bar across the way and ordered two glasses of vin rouge.

Over the years I’ve picked up various things at French vide greniers including pin badges, glasses and decanters as well as old telephones, cables (of course) old photos and paintings including a framed poster from the Le Mans 24 hour race. What else? A small bust of General de Gaulle which sits on my mantelpiece back home and numerous other things which took my fancy.

Plenty of times we have sheltered in makeshift bars until a rain shower has passed over and the sellers have peeled away plastic covers to reveal their goods.

My Word is my Bond by Roger Moore

I picked this book up ages ago and thought it would be a good holiday read. I’ve always liked Roger Moore even though I absolutely hate his James Bond films. I love Moore’s self-deprecating humour, plenty of which is evident in this book. The first part of the book was really interesting and entertaining but like a lot of celebrity autobiographies, this one just gets a little tedious when Roger just seems to list the films and locations and other celebrities he seems to know. On the back of the book was a review claiming this to be the best film autobiography since David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon. Sorry but I can’t agree. Roger reveals numerous ‘funny’ incidents from behind the scenes of his films, all of which must have been from the ‘you had to be there’ category because I didn’t think they were that funny. His marriage to his third wife fizzles out with no explanation and the last section is just an endless list of his various travels as a UNICEF ambassador.

He seems to have had a great deal of fun making the Bond films but for me his tenure as 007 marked the series fall from serious spy films into farce. The crazy thing is that after making his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, in which he comes over as a sort of stuffed dummy rather than an action hero, he made a film called Gold. In Gold he starred as the boss of a goldmine and really looked the part of a very tough guy indeed so why he couldn’t have done that as Bond is beyond me.

I prefer to remember Roger as the star of The Saint and The Persuaders, two TV action and adventure classics I loved. Anyway, this was for the most part an entertaining read but don’t think for a moment that it comes anywhere close to David Niven’s classic book.

That’s all from me. The sun has come out so it’s time to put my laptop away and enjoy the pool.

Bye for now!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Travelling and Writing in France

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again Liz and I are in France in our small motorhome. This week I thought I’d talk about our journey and also about my personal journey as a writer.

We came over on the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen after spending the night in a small pub called the Jolly Boatman somewhere in the south of England, actually Kidlington, I think. We have visited this pub once before back in May and it was nice to find that the staff remembered us even after just one visit. The trip over on the ferry was good. We paid a little extra for a top of the range cabin and it was well worth it. We had a little balcony, a tv, kettle and various cold drinks in the fridge. After a bit of a sleep and a shower, we awoke refreshed and ready to find a place to stop for the night in France.

The great thing about France is that motorhomes are welcomed with plenty of free overnight stopping places with toilet emptying facilities and fresh water. Some places require a jeton, a token that can be bought in local shops to obtain fresh water but otherwise most places are free. In England, many seaside places seem to just complain about motorhomes parking up for free but surely those motorhomers are using local shops, bars and restaurants and bringing trade into these local communities.

The Jolly Boatman

The weather wasn’t great at first so we ploughed on south towards Bordeaux in search of the sun. Liz is a great navigator and a real master of google maps and she found us some lovely stopping places, one in particular with a man made beach and a lovely swimming lake. We needed that lake to cool down as the weather became seriously hot.

When I’m away I like to have a couple of blog posts written in advance as travelling in our van I don’t always have time to write. Not only that sometimes it’s hard to get a good wifi signal to upload my posts. Recently I’ve been not only lazy but actually struggling a little  for blog post ideas. A few months ago I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a while and he seemed less than convinced that I could write a new post every week. I’ll bet you use ai to write them he joked. I wasn’t amused.

To be honest, I do use ai, not to write posts but to make the quirky memes and graphics that I use to promote my blogs. This is one over to the right. I had never even thought about using ai to actually write a post. Even so, I thought as I was a bit low on ideas it might be interesting to ask ai what I should write about. It came up with a plan for a post asking me to answer various questions about my work. Anyway, here are a few of them.

Share how you got started writing and what inspired your first book.

I can’t really remember what inspired me to write. I can only say that having been a great reader, I wanted to be on the other side of the coin, so to speak: Not just reading the thoughts and ideas of others but also sending my own thoughts and ideas out there too. I like the feeling of communicating not only to others but communicating over the years. I remember reading Homer’s Odyssey and thinking that here was this man, Homer, sending me his thoughts and ideas across the centuries that lie between us and that his ideas carried on after his death.

Talk about your creative routines (or lack of them) — do you write in bursts, or steadily each day? 

I’d like to tell you that I have a routine but actually I haven’t, although I do try to create a sort of routine. What I tend to do is think a lot about writing. I’ll think of a story or a blog, usually the time in a morning when I have woken up far too early and I’ll ‘write’ a blog or a story in my head. I’ll file that away in my head and then either go back to sleep or get up and after breakfast I’ll open up my laptop and write it all down. Sometimes I’ll spend weeks writing a story in my head and when I’ve got a lot of ‘copy’ I’ll start actually writing or typing it out. Years ago I used to use a technique by a self improvement guy called Jack Black who invented something he called Mindstore, a way of using positive thinking to improve your life.

It involved creating an entire imaginary house inside your head with various rooms, just like in a real house. In the bathroom for instance, you could take a breathtaking shower that energised and restored you ready for a big meeting or interview. One room I created was a room for storing my stories and when I’m not in front of my laptop that’s the room I use to write and save my work. My website and my one deadline of 10:00am on a Saturday morning gives me a focus to work at my stories and blog posts and get them ready for publishing. Writing this week has been difficult as Liz and I are working our way across France in our little motorhome although by the time you read this we will have arrived at the lovely gîte we rent in the village of Parçay-les-Pins.

Explore what you love (and what you struggle with) about being self-published.

I love writing and I love publishing my work. I write purely for myself and I write about things I like reading about but I do get a particular buzz every time someone hits that ‘like’ button. What do I dislike about it? Well, I did hope that I could actually make money from writing but so far, that’s just a dream although I do make a few pennies every time someone buys a copy of one of my books. Anyway, I enjoy writing and I’ll carry on writing my blog for as long as I continue to enjoy it. When I no longer enjoy it, I guess I’ll just have to find something else to do. What do I struggle with? Grammar and spelling mostly but luckily, Liz is pretty hot on both of those things and it is she who goes through my work and gives it a good checking over and she’ll correct all the bad tenses and spelling mistakes that appear frequently in my blogs.

A few days ago it was our anniversary. The day before we were parked in a really lovely place with picnic tables and a lake and I thought it would be a good idea to stay and move on the next day. Liz felt that she would rather have a good restaurant anniversary meal so we set off in search of a place to eat that night. Now, the thing about the Loire is that the French don’t seem to eat out much at night. There are plenty of restaurants but most only seem to open for lunch which is the main meal of the day for the French. We tried and tried to find a place but all seemed to be only open for lunch. We found one place, conveniently near a motorhome parking spot but the menu was not only very expensive but didn’t inspire either of us. It was getting later and later and eventually we decided to stop when we saw a kebab takeaway. Takeaways are few and far between in France so we bought a couple of kebabs, parked up for the night and poured us both a glass of vin rouge.

The wine was good but the kebab wasn’t but happily we had plenty of French cheese and bread to round off the meal!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.