Author Archives: Steve Higgins

The Idea, The Inspiration and The Kebab

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few weeks back I was asked to test some new editing software for a company whose software I used to use regularly. They were trying something new, in fact a feature that I had advocated a few times on one of their forums. It was a surprise to be asked to test the new feature but also rather nice. It’s always nice to be acknowledged so anyway as soon as the feature was enabled I set out to make a test video.

I thought about doing a new version of my usual content. You know the sort of thing, the videos that you usually find down at the end of my blogs extolling the virtues of Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words. Instead, I thought of doing a quick few minutes on the subject of poetry writing. It was called Ideas, Inspiration and Effort.

Nothing can start without an idea. Amateur writers like me just tend to wait for an idea to come but to be really professional you have to make the ideas come. You have to sit down and start writing. It’s only then that the ideas come. The same is true for blogs. I do get ideas. I get them driving to work. I get them while watching television. Sometimes I get no ideas at all but then I can always write about the books that I read, the old TV shows that I like and the classic black and white films that I watch on TV. Either way, blogs or poems, everything starts with the idea.

Next comes the inspiration. Again, when I’m in amateur writer mode I usually just wait for the inspiration to come. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The thing that makes it come is just to start writing. Sitting down at the keyboard with the TV on and the sound off, that’s usually when inspiration strikes. Last week if you may remember I was doing battle with my electric company because they wouldn’t give me my money back, the money that I had paid, in error, into the wrong account. I wasn’t happy about it at the time but on reflection I could see the funny side and that is hopefully what made that particular blog post rather amusing. The good thing as well is that it’s that kind of self-deprecating humour which Floating in Space is all about so if you liked that post, you should like Floating. (An in-post plug for Floating! Hey, I’m pretty pleased with that.)

The same is true for poetry, once I have an idea I start playing with words until inspiration finally comes. Then of course I need to make the effort. The effort to get down to work, typing away until the first draft is ready. Then more effort comes, the effort to edit and to develop the blog or poem until I think it’s finished. That of course is where I usually fail. I don’t have my editor on my back, I don’t have a publishing company that has paid me a million-dollar advance and is waiting for the book I promised them. The only promise I have made is to myself, a promise to one day complete another book which actually may be a long time coming. The thing is there are so many other things to do, restaurants to visit, books to read, TV shows to watch and so on.

Anyway, it’s time for another blog post and as usual lately I’m struggling. What I need is an idea. So using my own method above I thought about an idea and I came up with disappointment. Yes, what has disappointed me lately? Let me see, well there was the pizza I made the other day.

When I spend a little time on my own I tend to eat a lot of snack food. I do love sandwiches as you might have guessed if you had read this old post about sandwiches but sometimes I like to do something a little more exciting. I do like cooking with my slow cooker and I’ve made numerous bologneses, chillis and curries in this way but the other day I thought I’d try and make a pizza, a proper pizza made from scratch. I had some flour and yeast and I had Jamie’s Italian, Jamie Oliver’s Italian cook book to guide me so what could go wrong? I mixed all the ingredients and made some basic dough then I gave it a good kneading and eventually I got a good spongy dough. I left it to prove and a bit later made it into a few portions. I left one to rise once again and made a simple tomato sauce using tinned tomatoes. Later I slapped on the sauce then some cheese, some pepperoni and some onions and I was all ready to bake. Jamie recommended putting the oven on its hottest setting, gas mark 9 so I slapped the pizza in and about ten minutes later it was looking good.

The crusts were ok but the rest was a bit soggy. Even so, it was pretty reasonable. The next day I tried again and looking at some other recipes I thought it was better to cook the base first and then add the toppings and cook again. I did that, added the toppings but this time I left it in too long and the pizza emerged a little frazzled. Maybe I should just stick with chilli in future.

Here’s something else that was disappointing. Sitting down to eat I was happy to find that The Time Tunnel, the sixties Sci-fi TV show was about to start on the Horror channel. It’s about two American scientists ‘lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America’s greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time’ as the opening blurb used to go.

The Time Tunnel starts off with a Congressman coming to investigate the growing budget of the time tunnel complex and threatens to close things down unless he sees results. Scientist Tony Newman decides he must therefore travel back in time to prove that the tunnel really works and save the project. Tony ends up on the ill-fated liner Titanic. His colleague Doug follows him back to 1912 and the control room struggle to shift the two in time before the ship sinks. Unable to return the duo to the present, the technicians struggle every week to shift the duo to somewhere new just in the nick of time. One episode that I particularly remember was when the pair land in Pearl Harbour, just before the Japanese attack in 1941. Tony meets himself as a young boy and finally solves the mystery of the disappearance of his father in the attack.

The Time Tunnel was a sci fi series from the 1960’s and as a child I was crazy about it. I thought it was wonderful but it only lasted one season before producer Irwin Allen moved on to something new. I had missed the first few episodes of this latest re-run but as I settled down I realised that my favourite episode, the one about Pearl Harbour, was about to start.

Tony lived there as a child and his father was reported as missing in action so the first thing Tony and Doug decide to do is to go and visit him. Cue some rather daft dialogue and some clumsy situations which led on to more clumsy dialogue and daft situations. What a disappointment that episode was and yet for years and years I’ve looked forward to finally seeing it again. There are some things which just don’t stand the test of time.

Another thing that I found rather disappointing this week was a large donner kebab. My last few shifts at work this week went pretty well and as I drove home after the last one I thought it was time to treat myself. I ordered a large donner with salad and chilli sauce, took it home and settled down with a small beer.

The salad was as limp as the Time Tunnel dialogue, the chilli sauce didn’t have much get up and go and the donner meat had seen better days. All in all, I could have done with a trip through the time tunnel to Manchester city centre in 1986 and gone to my very favourite kebab emporium where they served donner on naan bread with fresh salad and a tasty hot chilli sauce. Yes, I had the idea, I had the inspiration, I just wish I hadn’t made the effort and got that kebab!

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The Electric Bill, The Banking App and Me

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This last week I picked up my iPad to pay my electric bill. Yes, the digital world has made it so easy to do things like that. No writing a cheque and slipping it into a pre-paid envelope and then going off into the cold to find a post box. These days you can just click on your banking app and press a button and it’s all sorted. Sometimes though it can all go so very wrong.

My electric bill arrived as usual in my email inbox. I saw it and made a mental note to pay it and then moved on to much more interesting things such as the old episodes of The Saint for instance, currently enjoying a renewed life on digital TV. Roger Moore is so much better at playing Simon Templar than James Bond. Then of course there are so many things to search for on eBay, things I didn’t know I even wanted until eBay showed them to me.

Eventually I finally got around to paying that pesky electric bill. I was tired and did it quickly, far too quickly as it turned out, just before going to sleep. Just as I pressed the button to pay my bill, I glanced quickly at the reference number that had been saved and the thought that that didn’t look like my usual electricity reference number passed fleetingly through my head before I nodded off to a restful slumber.

It just so happens that I’m pretty good at remembering stuff like that, reference numbers and telephone numbers. All I have to do to remember a telephone number is to write it down and I’ll automatically remember it. Don’t write it down and that’s it, I’ll always forget it. Anyway a few days later I had an email from the electricity company moaning that I still hadn’t paid my bill so I double checked everything, yes there was the payment, I had definitely paid it. Before sending off an email to Eon I thought I’d better just check that reference number. I did and I noticed it wasn’t the right one. What was it then? Aha, it was my old mum’s reference number from the days when I used to pay her electric bill. My iPad always remembers her reference number. I usually delete it and add my own account number but that last time I didn’t. Serves me right for paying the bill late at night when I was tired. OK, they had the money but just not in the right account. Could hardly be difficult to resolve, could it?

I dropped an email off to Eon and waited for an answer. Nothing. I called them and got stuck in a call centre queue which believe me, there is nothing I hate more apart from perhaps getting stuck in a traffic queue on the motorway when a lane is closed and there are no road workers working. So, I switched my phone on to speaker, tried to block out the horrible recorded music coming through and started pottering about on my iPad. Forty minutes later after Liz had thrown various things at me because the racket coming from my phone was driving her mad, I retreated into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Just as I was ready to settle down with a cup of tea and a corned beef sandwich someone finally answered.

That someone was a chap called Bakar. Now Bakar spoke pretty good English but even so, it wasn’t a great line and I did have a little difficulty understanding him. For a kick off I couldn’t quite get his name and I had to ask him to spell it phonetically. Bravo Alfa Kilo Alfa Romeo. Exotic names like that can be a real problem in today’s international world. At work the other day I took a call from a motorist (I work in a motorway control room) who had broken down on the motorway. His name was -and here I won’t use his real name but a very similar one that I’ve pinched from a popular comedian, Romesh Ranganathan. I couldn’t for the life of me catch his name so I asked him to spell it phonetically; Romeo Oscar Mike Echo Sierra Hotel and so on. As you can imagine that took a while and that was only his first name. In order to get the AA to come and rescue him I had to give him a major interrogation, name, address, mobile number and so on and then to pass all of that to the AA themselves, which took a bit of effort I can tell you.

Towards the end of the conversation the AA declined to come out because Mr Ranganathan’s policy had expired which to be honest, is something that happens fairly regularly. Let’s face it, as soon as you think you’re fed up paying a ridiculous amount of money for breakdown cover that you never use, you know you’re going to need it.

Anyway, that’s enough about Mr Ranganathan, let’s get back to my electric bill and Bakar. Here’s a quick recap. I’d paid my electric bill to Eon. They had the money in their bank, it was just that it was in the wrong account. From my perspective it seemed to me that there was a simple solution, even a couple of simple solutions. (1) Transfer the money from the wrong account into the correct account. (2) Refund the money to me and then I could just pay it again with the correct reference.

‘Sorry no’ said Bakar, ‘we can’t just credit your account’. Why not I asked? ‘It’s just not possible’ said Bakar without really explaining why.’ OK then refund me the money. ‘Ahh, that’s not possible either,’ said Bakar. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Well, I can’t refund you money from someone else’s account.’  ‘But that’s my mother’s defunct account.’ ‘Ahh yes but she’d have to give us authorisation to refund the money to you.’ ‘Why? It was me that paid the money in!’ ‘Ahh, but Mrs Higgins would have to authorise the payment to you.’ ‘Why? Her account is closed and she is currently living in an old people’s home!’

This conversation went on for some time and Bakar successfully deflected every idea I had for resolving the issue and come to think of it, he didn’t bring any of his own ideas into the conversation. How I didn’t smash my phone into a thousand pieces I don’t know but I would like to think that you, the impartial blog reading public are on my side, surely Eon could have sorted the whole thing out easily. However, their final piece of advice, was to contact my bank and ask them to contact Eon’s bank for the return of the money. Bakar, and the Eon help desk which he was representing went right down in my estimation but there was no choice but to contact my bank after, I might add, telling Bakar how disappointed I was in him and his organisation and penning a strongly worded email complaining bitterly about my treatment. His final comment was that if I didn’t pay my bill soon, I would be incurring a late payment charge (numerous swear words deleted here).

After a fresh cup of tea and the now slightly stale corned beef sandwich followed by some deep breaths to calm me down, it was time to dial my bank. Once again, I went through numerous menus, all advising me to put the phone down and use the bank’s internet app. I did check the app, but nothing there was of any help to my particular problem. After a relatively short wait I found myself talking to an operator who seemed eager to help but felt that a colleague in another department could provide more information so once again I was condemned to phone menu music while I waited.

After a short wait the same operator came back. Clearly that other colleague was busy so he’d have to try another one in a ‘specialist’ department. Cue more music and finally a lady came on the line, a lady who sounded very much like she was at the end of a very long tunnel. I explained the situation once again, in fact I’d explained it so much I was now word perfect. Pity I couldn’t have been as perfect when I was narrating the short introduction to one of my new videos the other day which I had to re-record many, many times. Yes, that imagined career in voice overs I was contemplating may just not be happening.

I repeated my sad story of paying my electric bill using my mother’s defunct electric account number yet another time, and then repeated it once again as the lady at the end of the long and echoing tunnel didn’t quite get it the first time. I went on hold yet again and finally was told the electric company’s bank had been contacted and they had asked for my money back which apparently might take up to four weeks. Four weeks! Four weeks in this instant internet digital world. Yes, apparently so.

The whole sad saga brought to mind the old joke about the guy who phones up his psychiatrist. He too gets a phone menu and the electronic voice at the other end says this:

If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press 1 repeatedly. If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2. If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5, and 6. If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press. If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Just stay on the line so we can trace the call.

Anyway, here’s the moral of the story, next time you pay your electric bill always check that reference number!

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The Worst Week of My Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Regular readers might have noticed that this blog is hardly topical. Most of these posts are written, or at least started weeks ago. I get an idea, scribble it down and sooner or later I finish it off. Sometimes I never finish it and a number of my blog posts have been condemned to an eternity in my drafts folder waiting for a day when I will feel inspired enough to either finish the post or hit the delete button. Anyway, I thought I’d try to do something topical for a change.

This last week three particular people have been in the news for having a bad week. let’s take a closer look.

Boris Johnson

I’ve always kind of liked Boris. Some seem to think he’s just a bumbling buffoon but at least he does have some charisma, which many politicians lack. Boris had to wait quite a while for the top job. He was the leader of the leave group during the Brexit campaigns and should have rightly become prime minister when David Cameron decided to resign. Strangely he didn’t, Theresa May became the prime minister despite being in the same remain camp as the newly departed David Cameron. Anyway, the top job clearly wasn’t for her and she was soon to give way to Boris.

Boris has tried to keep on top of the Covid 19 situation which has caused mayhem all across the globe. His government have issued lockdowns at various times but recently he has stepped back from another lockdown and just asked the populace to use common sense. The big problem for him though is more and more revelations of partying at 10 Downing St when the rest of us were staying at home and keeping away from friends and family.

He has apologised to the Queen for a drinks party at number 10 on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral and new reports suggest that staff even went with a suitcase to buy more alcohol to continue the festivities. All of that contrasts sharply with the image the Queen presented, sitting alone at her husband’s funeral wearing a black mask.

Will Boris be able to ride out calls to resign? Only time will tell. By the time you read this, we might know a little more.

Novak Djokovic

Tennis player Novak Djokovic flew to Australia to defend his Australian Open Championship Title. He apparently had a ‘vaccine exemption’ but the Australian authorities weren’t happy about it and the Serbian player was denied entry. He and his team decided to appeal and he was forced to go into quarantine while everything was sorted out. He won his appeal but the immigration minister decided to quash the appeal and reimpose the penalty.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that ‘Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic and rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected.’

Djokovic has appealed again so is in further quarantine while he awaits the latest result. The whole thing must be a pain in the neck for the tennis player and I don’t understand why the Australians let him into the country in the first place. Of course, a lot of the actions of the Ozzie government have been fuelled by the feelings of the Australian people themselves. I saw quite a few interviews on TV where members of the public were deeply unhappy about Djokovic entering the country. After all, he wants to enjoy international travel but at the same time, isn’t willing to be vaccinated. Not a great week at all for Novak and as you read this he is back in his native Serbia.

Prince Andrew.

Andrew must be the most unpopular member of the Royal Family. For years I’ve been reading articles in newspapers about his bad attitude, his rudeness and his desire to go everywhere in private jets, paid for by us, the UK taxpayer.

What has happened to him now? Well, he is to face a civil case in the USA over claims he sexually assaulted a lady called Virginia Giuffre in 2001 when she was 17. Andrew’s lawyers claim the case should be dismissed citing a 2009 deal she signed with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who apparently introduced Andrew to Giuffre but a New York judge doesn’t agree so the case is now free to come to court.

The Royal family have reacted by stripping Andrew of his HRH title and a whole list of other military titles such as Colonel of the Grenadier Guard, Colonel in Chief of the Irish Regiment, Honorary Air Commodore of RAF Lossiemouth and many more. Basically, the royals have cut him loose to protect the family and are saying, ‘Bye Andrew, you’re on your own!’ Yep, not a great week for Andrew.

Nicholas Rossi

It hasn’t been a great week for Nicholas Rossi. Mr Rossi isn’t quite as famous as the three detailed above but he has had just as bad a week as they have. He was admitted to hospital in Scotland using the nom de plume of Arthur Knight. Unfortunately, he was unmasked as Rossi and found to have an international arrest warrant waiting for him regarding an alleged rape in the USA.

Mr Rossi told US media in December 2019 that he had late-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and had only weeks to live. Various media outlets reported that he had died in February 2020 and a memorial posted online declared him a “warrior that fought on the front lines for two decades” for children’s rights and said his ashes had been scattered at sea. He was arrested by Police in Glasgow on behalf of their counterparts in Utah.

Me

I really can’t imagine what the worst week of my life might have been. The engine blowing up on my first car? My Kawasaki Z500 stolen from my back garden? The death of my father?

This week hasn’t been so bad really. I haven’t done much although I went to the quiz night the other night and also went to one of my favourite Italian restaurants, Allegria in St Annes. I had the usual email from the national lottery telling me to check my account because I had some good news coming. I’m glad I did because that £6 lottery win should come in pretty handy.

One thing I did do this week was embrace the digital world even more by adding Google Pay to my mobile phone. The first time I tried to use it I was struggling a little and nothing was happening. Luckily the lady at the till had seen this sort of thing before and advised that I was pointing the wrong end of my phone towards the pay hub at the checkout. I turned the phone round and made my first payment. Of course, big downside of this is that the old tightwad’s excuse of sorry, I forgot my wallet doesn’t pass muster anymore so clearly I’ll have to bring that up at the next Tightwads’ members’ meeting.

This is the bit where I tend to link these ramblings to a film or TV show. Big ask this week, you might be thinking. However, it just so happens that back in 2004 there was a TV series called just that, The Worst Week of My Life.

The Worst Week of My Life follows publishing executive Howard Steel in the week prior to his wedding. It’s perhaps not the best-known TV series but personally I thought it was pretty funny.

That’s it from me, hope you had a good week!

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How Little Boy and Fat Boy Changed the World

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Harry Truman took over as the US President on 8th May 1945 after Franklin D Roosevelt succumbed to a cerebral haemorrhage earlier that day. Truman was not close to the late president and one item of information passed to him must have been pretty shocking. The USA had just produced the world’s first atomic bomb.

These days we all know what nuclear weapons are, but I wonder if the truth about this deadly weapon sunk into Truman when he first heard it. At the time the US and its allies were faced with organising an invasion of Japan which had declined all offers to surrender and so Truman had to take a long hard look at the alternative.

The atom bomb had been created by the top-secret Manhattan project based in Los Alamos headed by Robert Oppenheimer. Two types of bomb had been devised, one code named Little Boy and another more complicated but also more powerful design, Fat Boy. Colonel Paul Tibbets of the US Air Force was tasked to put together a combat group able to deliver the bombs to their targets on the Japanese mainland. The 509th Composite Group was created in December 1944 and the group began training with specialist bombardiers to drop the bombs.

A committee was organised to choose the bombing targets and the result included five possible cities; Kokura (now Kitakyushu), Hiroshima, Yokohama, Niigata, and Kyoto.

Prior to the bombing of Japan, leaflets had been dropped on the population warning them of the attacks and to leave the cities. The leaflet dropping was suspended prior to the atom bombs for the same reason that the US did not attempt a demonstration bombing. They wanted to shock the population into surrendering and it was also possible that the bomb, being an entirely new device, might fail or just not explode.

Truman noted this in his diary: This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.

On the 6th August 1945 Colonel Paul Tibbets took off in an aircraft named after his mother, Enola Gay and began his mission. Ahead of him was another aircraft for weather reconnaissance and behind him was another to film the resulting explosion.

It was a bright sunny morning when Tibbets started his bomb run and then passed control to his bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee. The bomb was released at 08:15 in the morning and according to Wikipedia, Little Boy took 44.4 seconds to fall from the aircraft flying at about 31,000 feet to a detonation height of about 1,900 feet above the city  Enola Gay travelled 11.5 miles before it felt the shock waves from the blast.

The bomb detonated directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic. The radius of total destruction was about 1 mile with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles

Enola Gay stayed over the target area for two minutes and was ten miles away when the bomb detonated. Only Tibbets, Parsons, and Ferebee knew of the nature of the weapon; the others on the bomber were only told to expect a blinding flash and had been issued with black goggles. They must all have been shocked by the nature of the blast and the resulting mushroom cloud.

I remember seeing an interview with Paul Tibbets on some old documentary many years ago. He seemed at ease with what he had done. He was an Air Force officer and had followed the orders of his Commander in Chief, the President and seemed content to leave the moral questions with Mr Truman. Truman was of course famous for having a sign on his desk which read the buck stops here!

Down on the ground at Hiroshima, 70,000 people were killed by the blast and the firestorm that followed. Another 70,000 were injured and of course many people died later from either their injures or from radiation. At 7.30 that morning the air raid siren had sounded the all clear so many people were emerging from bomb shelters, although what protection those shelters would have given is debateable. Having said that, some people survived close to the blast who were in reinforced concrete basement buildings.

The Japanese still declined to surrender and only did so after a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. General Curtis LeMay ordered Paul Tibbets to return to the USA to collect another Fat Man bomb although Truman had given strict instructions that only he himself could give orders for them to be used. In any event, the earliest that another bomb could be made ready was the 18th August.

Four years later the Soviet Union exploded their first atom bomb and the USA pressed ahead with the development of the hydrogen bomb, apparently a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan. Today, in 2022 nine nations have nuclear weapons although so far the only ones used in anger have been the two used on Japan in 1945.

Has the world come close to nuclear war? Well, the one time that comes to mind was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. President Kennedy stood firm when the Soviets decided to install nuclear missiles in Cuba and initiated a naval blockade. Soviet leader Mr Khrushchev backed down but even so, Kennedy was under constant pressure from people like Curtis LeMay to invade Cuba. It has since been revealed that the Soviets in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons, which are another name for the class of weapons used on Hiroshima. So if the USA had invaded, things could have ended in tragedy.

I’m not quite sure what set me off on the subject of nuclear weapons. It’s not a cheerful subject so I think I might just lighten things up a little by going from fact to fiction.

A number of cinema films about atomic weapons come to mind.  Fail Safe is a film I haven’t seen for years until I caught it recently on TV. A computer error accidentally sends orders to a US bomber detailing them to attack Moscow. Various measures are taken to recall the bomber but all fail. The Soviets are advised and the President must deal with not only this but some of his generals who feel this is a good opportunity to attack the Soviets. Tension runs high throughout the film and Henry Fonda as the President averts a nuclear war but at a terrible price.

Doctor Strangelove is a film with a similar premise but plays as a black comedy. Peter Sellers plays multiple roles as the President, his scientific advisor Doctor Strangelove and a British air force officer.

The Fourth Protocol is a film from the novel by Frederick Forsyth. Both the book and the film build the tension nicely. It is about an attempt by the Soviets to destroy NATO by exploding an atom bomb in the UK and blaming the Americans. Michael Caine is an M15 officer at odds with his new boss when his report about a possible nuclear weapon being built in the UK are ignored. Fortunately, others higher up believe Caine and he is given the tools to track down the Soviet bomber.

I mentioned a few weeks ago about how computer technology can really date a film and another example has to be War Games. It’s another film with green text, floppy discs and dial up internet but actually it’s a pretty good film. A young lad played by Matthew Broderick routinely hacks into internet accounts in his quest for new computer games. He thinks he has found one but unfortunately, the computer at the other end of the phone isn’t playing a game and World War III could be about to start.

When I was a schoolkid, one of my favourite comics was The Incredible Hulk. Scientist Dr Bruce Banner is accidentally exposed to gamma rays during an atomic test. The resulting radiation mutates Bruce into an incredible green skinned giant who becomes known as the Hulk every time Bruce gets angry about something. The tag line for the 1970’s TV series was Bill Bixby as Bruce saying ‘Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.’ In recent years there have been a spate of films based on the comic heroes created by Marvel Comics and The Hulk was of course one of them. They all suffer in my opinion from being heavy on Computer Generated Images and light on everything else although the Hulk sequel, The Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton as Bruce Banner had its moments until it too became top heavy with boring CGI action.

Since I originally wrote this post, the story of the creation of the atomic bomb has been told in another film, Oppenheimer, the story of Robert Oppenheimer who was the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project. Beleive me, it’s worth a watch.

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The Old, the New, Covid and 2022

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My first post of 2022 was just a review of 2021 so this one is really my first proper 2022 post. I was due to be working on New Year’s Eve but that scourge of our modern times, Covid 19, stepped in and I had to call in sick.

Covid.

Both Liz and I had been suffering with bad colds and hers was getting worse with a bad headache and a loss of taste and smell. We did Covid tests and Liz was positive. My test was negative which was a surprise but then I haven’t had the headache or the loss of taste. I’m not sure when Liz was exposed to Covid, after all we haven’t been out much lately apart from some last minute shopping and a visit to quiz night at a local pub, the Lord Derby. Anyway, we were of course condemned to a minimum seven day lockdown so that meant no work on New Year’s Eve and no going out either.

We lit the fire, got the red wine on the hearth and settled down while we waited for our curry takeaway to be delivered.

The New.

Just lately I’ve been watching a whole lot of TV. Some of it new and some of it old. I mentioned a few weeks ago about watching And Just Like That, a new series of Sex and the City. Happily, it wasn’t on some subscription TV channel but on normal TV so I was able to watch it. I gave it another try the other day but I wasn’t impressed. Carrie had some hip surgery and Miranda got involved with a lesbian comedian. All pretty routine stuff for modern New Yorkers I suppose but it really wasn’t for me. Another new series was the latest four part JFK documentary by director Oliver Stone. I’ve been interested in the JFK assassination since I was a child and although I didn’t quite expect any new revelations in this new documentary series, I was surprised to find there were.

The so called magic bullet was given a severe bashing by various experts and so was the actual provenance of the bullet. The chain of evidence regarding the bullet was shown to be completely compromised as various new records released by the JFK Assassinations Records Review Board were shown to be either false or incorrect by the hard work of various investigators. The ARRB came into effect after the outcry from Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK and the documentary was fascinating but a little disjointed as instead of covering each issue in full, the films returned to the same subjects again in later episodes. Apart from that it was very convincing despite the poor review I read in the Guardian recently.

The Old.

There were the usual films shown over the Christmas period. Many films like Ghost for instance look pretty modern but it was technology that betrayed how old they were.

In Ghost banker Patrick Swayze was using one of those old computers with green text while Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the film You’ve Got Mail were still using dial up to get online and pick up their email messages. You’ve Got Mail was released in 1998 and Ghost in1990 making it 32 years old this year, would you believe it! Another film I saw that was also dated by technology was The Net with Sandra Bullock. The Net was a thriller about a computer programmer who gets involved in a conspiracy by a computer security company to mine and manipulate information. Made in 1995, dial up internet and green text were evident and there must have been many young people watching and wondering what exactly a floppy disc was.

Making Bread.

One thing that I really love and could never give up is bread. Yes, some may say it’s fattening and full of calories but it’s a food that has nurtured mankind for many centuries and anyone who tries to keep me away from a ham salad on granary is risking their life. When a bread shortage began to rear its ugly head here in Liz’s kitchen a state of panic began to mount. We were self-isolating so I couldn’t go to the shops, what could be done?

The obvious answer was to bring down my bread maker from the dusty shelf where it had lain for the past god knows how many years and to wipe it down and crank it up. I suppose I’ve had that bread maker for about twenty years. Once I got pretty interested in bread making. I had a few recipe books, I bought flour and yeast and started baking. I had a number of disasters along the way but eventually I managed to make some reasonable bread. Then, some new gadget caught my interest and the bread maker was left on the shelf. Why on earth did I stop making bread when I love it so much?

A quick search in the cupboard produced some flour and some packets of yeast and it was time to start up my bread maker once again. The thing is, making bread takes time. First the machine has to mix the ingredients then the mixture has to prove and rise. Then it gets another mix and finally the gizmo starts to bake. I waited patiently looking forward to warm fresh bread and then, many hours later when a huge rock hard inedible blob emerged I finally remembered why the bread maker had been lying on the shelf for so long.

More Old.

The Net was by no means a great film but Ghost was. I remember seeing it at the cinema back in the 1990s and it was one of those word-of-mouth films where the word was, this is a pretty good film, make sure you watch it. Patrick Swayze plays Sam Wheat, a banker who gets murdered. When his spirit is about to be pulled upward into the next world he looks back towards his girlfriend Demi Moore who is shattered and cradling his dead body and Sam realises it is not time for him to go yet. The ghostly Swayze later finds that his killer is stalking Demi. Frustrated and not knowing what to do, Sam wanders New York and finds a medium played by Whoopi Goldberg with whom he can communicate. Whoopi tells Demi about the stalker and Sam’s best friend Carl goes to find out what is happening. Sam is shocked to see that the murderer and stalker is actually acting on the orders of Carl. Maybe Ghost is a little too sentimental in parts but what the heck, I’ve always enjoyed it.

More New.

One new film (well new to me anyway) I did watch was The Time of Their Lives. It was a 2017 film starring Joan Collins and Pauline Collins. It was on in the background while I was tapping away on my laptop. I didn’t catch much of the beginning but Joan Collins is a faded movie star living in a home who decides to go to the funeral of her film director ex-lover in the hope of somehow breaking back into the film business. The funeral is in France and she somehow persuades Pauline Collins to go with her on the trip so it becomes a sort of French road trip. Over in France they meet an Italian artist played by Franco Nero, the one time spaghetti western star. Joan Collins is wonderful in the part of the former film star and I ended up putting my laptop down and giving the film my full attention. Very enjoyable it was too.

2022.

Most years I make the same New Year resolutions. They usually go something like this; finish my new book. Finish my latest screenplay. Write more poetry. Make better videos. This year I decided not to make any resolutions. I thought why not make 2022 a pressure free year? After all, I never make good on any of those resolutions anyway.

Have a great 2022 and by the way, did you make any resolutions?

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2021 And All That

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Well, that’s it for 2021. How was your year? Not very exciting I suppose, just like mine, and all because of the global pandemic. One day everything will be back to normal, although I’m not quite sure when that will be. Here’s a quick look back at 2021 with particular attention to some of last year’s blog posts. Click the links and they will open into a new page.

I started off in 2021 looking forward to a break from the cold UK weather in Lanzarote. Lanzarote has just the perfect temperature for me, a pleasant 70 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and although it can be a little cooler in the evening it’s still pretty nice. In the UK parts of the country were separated into various lockdown tiers. We in the northwest were in tier 4 which prevented foreign travel but then we realised that the restrictions were not mandatory, only advisable so it looked like we might still get away. Our flight was still showing the week before we were due to leave, then it was cancelled, then another lockdown began. Our holiday was off.

As I was stuck at home, I wrote quite a few posts about the lockdown. One was A Mostly Musical Slice of my Locked Down Life. I talked about the Beatles who incidentally are back in the news again as director Peter Jackson has taken all the unused footage from a 1970 documentary, released it as Get Back, and made it into three two hour films. I haven’t seen yet it because as usual it was all shown on some pay to view channel, actually Disney+, so until it gets released on DVD or shown on the BBC, I’ll just have to wait. Pity because it looks pretty interesting.

In the same post I mentioned that Joe Biden was sworn in as the President of the United States and Donald Trump, the outgoing President, was so upset he didn’t even attend the swearing in. Personally, I think it was a pity that Hillary Clinton didn’t run again but as an Englishman living in the UK, what do I know?

As I was part of locked down Britain, I didn’t get up to much earlier in the year so I thought I might impart some of my poetry writing wisdom to my readers in a post about The Secret of Writing Poetry. I even threw in a video of me rabbiting away to the camera and explaining my three different ways of writing poetry.

In March I was still writing about being a Locked Down Blogger but I had started to pine for my favourite sport F1 racing. The season was due to start in March and just to get myself in the mood I decided to watch some old F1 on an old VHS tape. Monaco, TV Ads and the Problem with VHS Tapes will explain what happened. While we’re on the subject of F1, Lewis Hamilton, like Donald Trump, didn’t show up for the new guy to be sworn in, well, given his World Championship trophy, but as the season ended up in a rather disappointing fashion with Max Verstappen winning because of a controversial safety car decision, I can’t really blame him. There are rumours in the media that Lewis might retire but I certainly hope not.

In April I was back writing about books again. I do love books and reading so I thought I’d set down Some Thoughts About Books and Reading.

I went for an eye test in April. For my previous test I’d been subjected to a new electronic gizmo which I didn’t like at all. This time I’d gone somewhere where they used the old fashioned method, a big set of specs into which the optometrist pops his little eyeglass variations until I had the perfect prescription lenses. That gave me an idea for a blog post. Most people take good eyesight for granted but as a lifelong spectacle wearer I can assure you I don’t. I’m used to having to change specs every time I want to read the small print on a CD in a shop or on a book or on food packaging. Now with my new varifocals I can see up close and far away without changing to another pair. Varifocals, I love them.

When I start writing a blog post, I tend to look back on my life and the things I’ve done which is how I came to write a post called A Series of What If Events I talked about how my life would have turned out if certain things hadn’t happened, like if my Dad had taken a job offer that entailed him moving away or if my Mum hadn’t broken off her engagement with another man before marrying my Dad.

In May I’d probably put together a new playlist on Spotify which prompted me to write A Brief History of the Disco Era. I’ve always liked disco music but what was the first disco record? What was the last one? How and why did the disco era end, if it really did end?

In June I was doing a lot of pottering about in the back garden which is how I came to write How Does Your Garden Grow? I’m not any sort of a gardener but Liz certainly is and so I got out my camera and took various shots of her vegetables and my lemon trees -not shop bought but grown from lemon pips, and threw it all into a blog post.

In July I was suffering with a trapped nerve in my neck which was hurting my neck and arm and that painful time prompted A Pain in the Neck as well as a later post, My Arm Hurts.

In August I had managed to get some space in a local newspaper talking about my poetry collection and that led to an interview on local radio. The recording was made available as a download so I duly downloaded it, cut out the boring bits and made it into a short video. The whole experience was one I wrote about in Diana, Meghan, Nixon and Me.

In September I was looking for inspiration not only for my blog posts but also for my videos. Sometimes I’ve made a video inspired by my blogs, sometimes it’s the other way round, I’ve made a post about making videos. From Blog Post to Video was a post about just that, how my blogs and videos sometimes overlap.

In October I hit the Big 65, yes 65 years old or to put it another way, 23,725 days old or 569,400 hours old. Wow, I didn’t realise I was so ancient!

In November I wanted to get a good moan off my chest, hence a post called A Kind of A Moany, Whingy Sort of Blog Post.

In December Liz and I were finally in Lanzarote and I was probably enjoying it all too much which is why Thoughts from A Sun Lounger part 13 was such a short one. Later as I lay on my sun lounger my thoughts drifted back to my childhood and I jotted down a few childhood memories in Make Me A Child Again, Just For Tonight. I even had a few reminiscences left over for The Post Holiday Blues and Other Ramblings.

So there it is, that was my year. Not particularly exciting but I pretty much enjoyed it anyway. To be honest, I may have been a little bored during the lockdown but mostly, I pretty much enjoyed that too. Yes, it was more time for reading, writing and blogging, all of which I hope to be doing in 2022 along with, pandemic permitting, some motorhome travels too.

Best wishes and a happy New Year.

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Christmas Day and Charles Dickens

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Happy Christmas and I hope you are having a good one wherever you are. It’s not every year that my scheduled regular post ends up going out on Christmas day so should I make the most of it and deliver a sensational blog post or should I just recognise that today people have other things on their minds than reading a blog post?

Tough call.

Still, when people have finished opening their presents and have had their fill of Christmas dinner, pudding, drinks and nibbles, perhaps there might be a small opening for readers to open up their computers or tablets and have a read of my blog. Let’s give it a shot, anyway.

I caught the end of a documentary on TV the other day about Charles Dickens and how he apparently is the man who invented the modern Christmas just by publishing a short story about Christmas called A Christmas Carol. That sounded pretty interesting to me so as I had missed most of it, I thought I’d do a little internet research.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and in 1836 he published his first book, The Pickwick Papers. The Pickwick Papers became a publishing phenomenon by introducing serial publication; the book was published in serial form and it kept the readers wanting to find out what would happen next. In the TV show I watched they had someone on from Eastenders who claimed that if Dickens lived today, he would be working in TV, responsible for the cliff hangers that today’s soaps end with.

A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 and sold 6000 copies in just six days. It was not initially a great financial success for Dickens as he had decided to publish an edition with colour pictures. No colour printing was possible at the time and so the colour pictures were hand coloured by teams of people, all of which added to the expense of publication.

Dickens_by_Watkins_1858

Dickens himself was very fond of Christmas and the description in the book of the party at Scrooge’s nephew’s house was similar to the celebrations at Dickens’ own home. The piano was played, there was dancing, Christmas trees had become popular and Christmas carols were sung. The phrase ‘Merry Christmas’ became popular because of its use in ‘A Christmas Carol’.

The tradition of having a turkey dinner for Christmas began with Henry VIII but became popular in Victorian times. Prior to that a typical Christmas dinner involved goose. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge buys a huge turkey for Bob Cratchit and his family and again that only increased the popularity of a Christmas turkey.

Another company produced an unauthorised edition of the book and Dickens sued, only for the rogue publisher to declare themselves bankrupt, leaving the author to pay for his costs despite winning his case.

Dickens was in need of money and he began a series of readings of his works which were lucrative and incredibly popular. These readings occupied most of his time in the last ten years of his life. He divorced his wife which was highly unusual for the time. He had met a young actress called Ellen Ternan who was 27 years younger than him and he remained passionate about her for the rest of his life. In 1860 he started a huge bonfire at his house, Gads Hill Place in Kent, in which he burned all his correspondence. Ellen too destroyed all her letters from Dickens so the full details of their relationship has never been known. Were they lovers? Possibly, but we can never know for sure.

On June 8th 1870, Dickens had a stroke after working on his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He died the next day without regaining consciousness. Some have speculated that he died at Ellen Ternan’s house, and she had him taken back to Gads Hill to prevent a scandal.

He was laid to rest in Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey and A Christmas Carol remains one of his best-known works and the name of his main character, Scrooge has entered into the English language as meaning a miserly person. To this day, the book has never been out of print and a first edition copy would set you back about 10 to 15 thousand pounds.

More film versions have been made of A Christmas Carol than any other of Dicken’s works but the one that is head and shoulders above the others is the Alastair Sim version made in 1951. Take a look through your TV schedule and I’m pretty sure you’ll find it showing somewhere.

Have a great Christmas.

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The Post Holiday Blues and Other Ramblings

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Returning home after a holiday is always a let down, even more so when you return to the cold and wet UK after the temperate climate of Lanzarote. One morning I woke to beautiful sunshine streaming in through the window and then went outside to sit in the sun by the pool while I waited for the kettle to boil. The next morning, I woke in a cold house with the wind battering at the window and made my way shivering into the kitchen to once again boil the kettle. In one of the James Bond books 007 calls tea ‘mud’ and claims it was the cause of the downfall of the British Empire. Nothing could be further from the truth because tea, at least for me, is one of the great wonders of British life and whether I am in the cold of a British winter or the warmth of the Canary Islands, I really cannot start my day without a cup of tea.

I had a pretty lazy holiday in Lanzarote. I spent it, like I spend most of my holidays, reading books on my sun lounger, swimming in the pool, having barbecues and enjoying drinks and meals down in the nearby marina.

I did mean, as usual, to work on my writing and as usual, I didn’t. I did manage to write my weekly blog while I was there though. In fact, despite my lacking in the work ethic department, I have managed to produce a post every Saturday for as long as I have been a blogger and this epic you now find before you is my 489th blog post.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my childhood. I had quite a few stories to add to that particular post but I always try to keep to about 2000 words or less and here’s one story that didn’t make the final draft.

I wrote about my bike in that childhood post. I loved my bike and I spent a lot of time on it exploring the Cheshire countryside as well as the country lanes that surrounded Manchester Airport where my friends and I would meet by an old WWII pillbox, slurp dandelion and burdock and watch the aircraft come and go.

Back in the 1970’s, the classic, iconic bike of the times was the chopper bike. It had a low slung frame with a seat and handlebars that rose up to the proper level. Back then I had no chance of getting a chopper bike but one thing I could do was get a chopper seat. I saved up and bought one and fitted it to my conventional bike. It looked a bit odd I suppose but I liked it, especially the tall hoop on the back of the seat.

By Raleigh-Chopper – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

One day my dad, who cycled to work every day come rain or come shine, had a problem with his bike. My uncle came round to help him fix it but nothing could be done. It was a Thursday I think and so all dad could do was ask mum to take the bike down to the cycle shop and to borrow my bike to get to work. I did think about telling him about the new seat but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. The next morning, he went out to the outhouse to get my bike and a few minutes later he was back. ‘What’s happened to your bike? Where’s the proper seat?’

The old seat was there in the outhouse but it wasn’t a quick fix. The chopper seat had two arms that came down and were screwed to the back wheel so poor old dad had to tootle off to work with the bike as it was. Mum and I watched him ride away. She turned to me and asked ‘why didn’t you tell him last night so he could have put the old seat on?’

‘I don’t know’ I said. Then again, it was my bike and I didn’t want the old seat back.

I loved that bike but one day I lost it forever. My brother and I were always swapping things; toys, models, books but mostly records. Our musical likes in those days were pretty fleeting. He’d play something that I realised I had to have and after paying his extortionate demands or swapping whatever possession of mine that he wanted, sometimes I’d find a week later that that record really wasn’t the all time classic I thought it was and so we’d either swap back or I’d wait until he wanted something of mine and then I’d insist he take back the record I’d never really wanted in the first place. Sometimes I’d swap my most treasured possession, my bike. The thing was, my brother Colin couldn’t ride a bike so it was a win win situation for me as sooner or later he’d want to get rid of the bike back to me. One day he really got one over on me.

We’d done a swap for something and he had taken my bike. I was going out for a ride but the bike wasn’t in the outhouse. Where was it? What had happened? Had it been stolen?

‘The bike?’ Colin answered blithely. He had sold it to his friend because he wanted money to buy a new LP.

My mother facilitated the removal of my hands from his throat with a firm whack to the back of my head and asked what was going on.

‘He sold my bike!’’ I yelled.

‘Your bike?’ she replied. ‘Didn’t you swap it with him? Isn’t it his bike?’

‘Yes but, yes but,’ was all I could say.

I had taken my video camera to Lanzarote with the vague idea of shooting something, a vlog or a tour of the resort, I wasn’t sure what. Perhaps I could have hired a bike and done a Lanzarote cycling video. I noticed there were electric scooters for hire but at 20 Euros for 2 hours, that wasn’t for me.

In the end I decided to take my camera and my trusty selfie stick and chat away to the camera while taking a walking tour of the marina.

On holiday I don’t watch much TV but back home on a cold December evening I tend to head straight for the TV remote. One show I wanted to watch this week was And Just Like That, a new version of Sex and The City. Now Sex and the City has always been one of my favourite shows. Season 4 was the absolute highlight of the series but the later ones were good too. The first feature film was good but the second one was poor. That’s it I thought, it’s finally finished and rightly so after all, all things must come to an end sooner or later.

The producers thought differently though and minus Samantha, as actress Kim Catrall declined to take part, Sex and the City has returned, thinly disguised as And Just Like That.

A long time ago one of my favourite TV shows was also rebooted for a TV movie special. It was called The Return of the Man From Uncle and despite having stars David McCallum and Robert Vaughn recreate their roles as super cool spies Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin, the film was dreadful. The slightly tongue in cheek attitude was gone, the music was different, the super cool way they used to cut to the next scene with a whip pan effect, gone also. The producers cut out everything that made the original good.

In And Just Like That the original cast were all there, just a little older, actually, not just older but old, seriously old. Miranda mentioned she was 55 at one point although I had already got her down as being about 65. Charlotte played by Kristin Thomas was reeling from either far too much botox or a seriously bad facelift and only Carrie herself seemed to have aged gracefully. Nothing in episode one, and I do mean nothing, was anything I could relate to despite my undying love of the previous series. One of my favourite characters died at the end of episode 1 so I had to watch episode 2. This featured a non-religious funeral ceremony in some sterile and unwelcoming New York funeral home.

Will I be watching episode 3? Maybe . .

Another TV event this last week was the finale to the F1 world championship. Lewis Hamilton the 7 times world champ was hoping to extend his record breaking run to 8 championships although bad boy Max Verstappen was giving him a good run for his money. The two were tied on points going into this last race and it was pretty clear that the winner would be taking home the 2021 champ’s trophy. The race was pretty exciting but a late race crash brought out the safety car. Max dived into the pits for new tyres but Lewis stayed out, confident that the race would not have the time to restart.

Restart it did though as the race director decided that it might be best for this race to end on a proper racing lap rather than a safety car. So, in came the safety car a lap early and Lewis and Max commenced battle, Max with new tyres, Lewis with old ones and the result naturally was Max taking the win and the World Championship.

It was a poorly mismanaged end to the season, a season that had been one of the most exciting for a very long time. Max and Lewis had fought it out on the race circuits of the world. Max has shown himself to be a talented and very fast driver but one who doesn’t seem to care for any form of driver etiquette. He lunges into the inside of a corner and gives his opponent the choice of either giving way or crashing. Lewis has had the maturity to avoid a crash mostly although the two have had their moments together.

In some ways I’m glad Max has won. It’s been a bit boring when Lewis has won everything and a new World Champion should shake the sport up a little.

Back to the present and after having my Covid booster yesterday I don’t feel particularly well. I feel slightly sick and I’ve got a mild headache. What should I do today then, Christmas shopping? Wrap presents? Slide back under the covers?

Let me see . . .

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My Holiday Book Bag 2021

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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

It’s a long time since I’ve been able to produce a Holiday Book Bag post, simply because I haven’t had a holiday which has mostly been the fault of Covid 19 so here are the books I’ve brought on holiday with me to Lanzarote.

Peter Sellers by Alexander Walker

I’ve always been interested in the comedy actor Peter Sellers. It’s probably because of a documentary I saw years ago on BBC’s Arena programme, a film about Sellers which used Sellers’ home movies and what has been good about this particular book is that it has filled in the gaps that were missed in the film.

Sellers was an only child, born into a theatrical family in 1925, he was in fact the second child of Bill and Peg Sellers. Their first child, also called Peter died in infancy and because of that, the family, in particular mother Peg, lavished a great deal of love and affection on Peter. The result was that he was not a nice child, in fact he was spoilt rotten and got his own way in everything and developed many traits he would take into adulthood with him.

Peg, Sellers’ mother, had a stage act in which she used to dress in a white outfit and pose on stage while various slides were projected over her. Father Bill was a musician and Peter claimed that he had taught George Formby to play the ukulele. Sellers was called up in the second world war and Peg used her theatrical contacts to get Sellers into the entertainment unit ENSA. She even travelled about the country to be near him until he was posted overseas. After being demobbed Sellers tried to get work as a comedian and eventually got work on a radio show by impersonating the star of that show, Kenneth Horne over the phone to the producer and saying how good that new comedian Peter Sellers was. Sellers admitted the deception but the radio producer was impressed so Sellers was asked to join the cast of the show.

From there, Sellers met Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe and together the group started the Goon Show, the famous hit radio show for which Sellers provided numerous comedy voices.

The next step for Sellers was into films and his big break was getting a part in the film The Ladykillers in 1956. His film hero Alec Guinness was the star. He starred or co-starred in numerous British comedy films before appearing with Sophia Loren in The Millionairess in 1960. The Millionairess made him an international star.

The book tells of his various film roles including his most famous one, that of Inspector Clouseau, a part which he only got after Peter Ustinov turned it down. The author also recounts Peter Sellers’ odd behaviour, his numerous purchases of cars and gadgets, his wives and how his staff had to deal with his various tantrums. His final wife, Lynne Frederick even gets a good review from the author although in other books and documentaries she has not come out looking as good.

Sellers died of a heart attack in 1980, aged only 54.

I do love books about films and film making and this one was an excellent read.

Death of a Glutton by MC Beaton

This is a novel in the Hamish Macbeth series and part of my mission to read all the Macbeth books. The last few have not been great reads. Death of a Prankster wasn’t exactly riveting but this one is much better. It’s not a classic of literature by any means, it’s just a pleasant read. It follows what I have come to think of as the Agatha Christie style of a whodunnit. You know what I mean, a group of suspects gathered together by the detective, in this case Hamish Macbeth and we know one of them is the murderer. This eighth entry in the Macbeth series is about an overweight woman, a part owner in a dating agency who alienates all the potential lovebirds with her constant eating. The co-owner of the agency wants to get rid of her. Is she capable of murder or does Hamish have his eye on someone else?

A pleasant holiday read, nothing more.

Bill Clinton: An American Journey by Nigel Hamilton

I’m a great fan of biographies and I picked this book up ages ago in one of those remainder book shops. I keep starting it and then moving on to something else so I grabbed it for this holiday book bag, determined to finish it. Bill Clinton was born Bill Blythe and took the name Clinton when his mother married Roger Clinton. It wasn’t a good choice on his mother’s part as Roger was an alcoholic and Bill had to cope with the consequences of Roger’s drinking for many years. Bill was a bright youngster. He did very well at school, he seemed to remember everything he had read, he was very intelligent and a born networker. Perhaps as a consequence of his home life he was good at sorting out feuds and disputes and when he grew tall and strong, he was able to intervene in the often violent disputes between his mother Virginia and Roger.

Bill won a scholarship to Oxford in the UK where he widened his circle of friends. Back in Arkansas he had worked on Senator Fulbright’s election team and also discovered women. Like JFK his hero, Clinton had numerous liaisons which didn’t stop when he met Hilary Rodham. She was nothing like the usual girl he became involved with. She wasn’t good looking, wore huge goggle like spectacles, had greasy hair and apparently wasn’t keen on too much deodorant. After university she went on to be part of the Senate’s Watergate Investigation staff but later joined Bill in Arkansas where he decided to run for Attorney General and later, for the Governorship. The two married and formed a wonderful political partnership that would ultimately take them to the White House.

In his election campaign President Bush thought Clinton would be easy to defeat and began to focus on the third-party candidacy of millionaire Ross Perot. Perot withdrew from the race, and then re-entered. A key moment was in the last of the debates when Bush was unable to properly answer a question from a member of the public about the personal effects of the recession. Bush was confused but Clinton answered the woman directly and had seen many issues in his home state of Arkansas concerning loss of jobs, loss of homes by people unable to pay mortgages and so on.

Another moment was when on live TV the Clintons were asked about Gennifer Flowers. Hilary jumped to her husband’s defence and asked for privacy and then told the viewers that if they didn’t like Clinton then they shouldn’t vote for him. The public did vote for Clinton and in large numbers.

Author Nigel Hamilton has produced an interesting book that is conveniently put together in bite sized and subtitled short sections. I’m not sure whether he really gets close to who Bill Clinton really is but all the information is there to make your own deductions. One of the interviewees for the book comes right out and calls Clinton an inveterate liar. He lies about many things but particularly about his personal life, his many affairs while governor and in particular his twelve year relationship with Gennifer Flowers. There are many comparisons with Clinton’s hero JFK, partly because Hamilton wrote a book about him too. I remember reading that he declined to add a second volume because he didn’t like what he had learned about Kennedy in his research. This book, subtitled An American Journey is only volume one although nowhere on the book does it state that.

The book comes to an abrupt end when Clinton wins the election. There is no description of Clinton’s joy or reaction to his victory. I suppose I’ll have to buy volume II to read about that.

An Autobiography by Agatha Christie

A while ago I was thinking that it’s about time I read something from one of the best selling authors of all time. Searching through the internet I came across Agatha Christie’s autobiography so I thought that might be a good starting point. A lot of the media stuff I do for Floating in Space portrays it as a lost world, the world of 1977 when the book is set. Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and her book truly is a portrait of a lost world. She claims she didn’t come from a rich family yet her mother and father lived in a large house. They had cooks, nannies, nurses and other servants. Her father, who she says was a very agreeable man, had a private income. His father had made investments that paid him handsomely so he was never obliged to work. He left every day for his club, returned home for lunch and then returned to his club to play whist. During the season he spent his time at the cricket club where he was president. Agatha tells various stories of her childhood in Torquay. They are all well observed tales of life in a Victorian house. Later her father dies and the family is struggling for money so they rent out the house and decamp to various places in France, including Paris. Agatha’s lifelong love of travel must stem from these early visits to the continent.

Later she leaves home and marries an airman from the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and tells of her voluntary work as a nurse in WWI. For a while she works in a pharmacy and after being introduced to various poisons gets the idea of writing a murder story. She does so and takes it to various publishers. None seem very enthusiastic about it but eventually she gets to have the work published. She is quite pleased with herself although she only makes a little money. Her first book featured Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective. She chose a Belgian as there were then many Belgian refugees in England as Belgium had been invaded by the Germans. Later she writes more books and is buoyed when a newspaper asks to serialise one of them. She realises then how poor her publishing contract is and engages a literary agent who stays with her for many years.

To conclude then, this is a very enjoyable well observed book and has made me want to add some Agatha Christie novels to my reading list.

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Make me a Child Again, Just for Tonight

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve not been at my absolute best this last week. Liz brought the last dregs of a cold over with her from the UK here to Lanzarote and gradually gave it to me. While I’ve been coughing and sneezing I’ve been lacking in a little inspiration for my blog posts and so have just written about our holiday. Two things have given me some ideas. One was a new book I’ve started, the autobiography of Agatha Christie, one of the best-selling authors ever. Her book has so far been a delightful read. She describes scenes and events from her childhood, in the days before Queen Victoria passed away, (Agatha was born in 1890) with great charm.

Another was a blog I read recently on the website Medium.com and the author quotes a poem, Rock Me To Sleep by Elizabeth Akers Allen, which in part goes like this:

Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight,

Make me a child again, just for tonight!

In my early teens we moved to a house in Cheshire which was on a new ‘overspill’ estate built by Manchester city council. It was only a two bedroomed house so my brother and I had to share a room, much to our mutual annoyance. Originally both beds were under the window, one on either side of the room with a chest of drawers in between. Later I moved my bed to the opposite end, just by the door and closing my eyes I can just see the sunlight coming through the thin curtains. My brother is not there, he has gone to school I suppose and I must either be off sick or it was one of those wonderful days when the school boiler broke down and everyone was sent home on a Thursday for an early weekend.

After a while Mum comes in with a cup of tea and announces that lying in bed all day will not be permitted. She opens the curtains and the light comes flooding in.

‘Your breakfast will be ready in ten minutes’ she says. ‘If you’re not there I’ll be giving it to the dog.’

That’s me told I think so I drink my tea and scan through whatever comic or book is down by the bedside. Later Mum shouts ‘It’s on the table!’ and I throw on some clothes and go down to the kitchen. There bacon, egg and tomatoes await me.

‘Have you had a wash?’ Mum asks.

‘Not yet,’ I answer.

‘Well make sure you have one.’

I start eating and Bob our dog walks over. He sits down on the floor beside me and I look at him, hold out my hand and say ‘Gimme your paw’ which he obediently does.

‘Don’t go feeding that dog,’ warns Mum.

After breakfast Mum makes more tea and sits down herself with some bread and jam before reminding me to have a wash. Then she shoos me away saying that this is her and Bob’s private time. She had probably been on the go all morning getting my dad ready for work, making his breakfast and his sandwiches as well as doing the same for my brother. She was always busy.

Some years later I had left home and came to visit on a Sunday. Mum was in tears because Bob had dropped dead on the previous evening. Dad was going to bury the dog where all the family animals were buried, in the garden but this house was a new build, and he found that when he dug down there was a layer of rubble there that he couldn’t get through so Mum resolved to take the dog to the vet on Monday where she knew they could dispose of the body.

She had intended to put poor old Bob in her shopping trolley but by Monday rigor mortis had set in and she couldn’t get Bob into the trolley. Happily, one of her neighbours came to the rescue and drove Mum and Bob to the vets.

Bob the Dog.

I have to add this one last story about Bob before moving on. A few years ago, Liz and I were motoring through France in our motorhome and we stopped in a pretty big town where they had a large municipal stopover for motorhomes. We found ourselves a spot in this busy place and the parking bays backed onto a grassy area with picnic tables. It was really quite a lovely spot. Liz began to sort out our food while I took plates and cutlery over to the table. As I approached, I had a sort of odd feeling that something was about to happen and there was a really friendly dog who greeted me like a long lost friend. He wasn’t jumping up or anything but he was pleased to see me. Anyway, we brought the food and wine over and sat down and the dog sat just by me.

I looked at the dog and held out my hand and said ‘Gimme your paw’ and the dog gave me a doggy smile and placed his paw in my hand. Now I know you’re not going to believe this but I’m certain that dog was my old dog, either reincarnated, or possessed of the spirit of old Bob in some way. Whether by accident or design, Bob had come back to see me. A few people passing by saw him and asked about him and what his name was and so on. I told them I didn’t know and assumed he came from one of the many vans parked nearby. All the while he was there he watched me intently with that same doggy smile on his face. Later when I took the plates and things back inside the van, Bob the dog was nowhere to be seen.

Mum had mentioned her private time but my private time back then was reading books and comics and there was little in the way of daytime TV in the late 1960’s and early 70’s although sometimes there were some pretty good school programmes. I always remember watching one about how newspapers and journalism had been used or portrayed in films. In one part they showed clips in which a comic strip artist set up various scenes and had a photographer take pictures. Later he rendered the scenes into a comic strip for a newspaper and the character, played by Jack Lemmon turned to his valet played by Terry-Thomas and started to talk about their next ‘caper’ as they called it. I wish we’d been able to watch it at our school. We had this huge TV in a cabinet. The teacher used to wheel it out and we’d watch some schools programme but we never saw one half as good as the comic strip one. It took me years to find out what the film was. It was called How to Murder Your Wife and if you ever catch it on TV, it’s well worth watching.

A bit later on I was tasked to take out the dog so we walked up to the old abandoned RAF camp that was just across from our estate. Entry was strictly forbidden but the locals had opened up gaps in the fence and it was easy to walk in. I loved that RAF camp. It covered a huge area and all the camp roads and buildings were still in place. The roads were in good condition but a lot of the buildings looked ready to collapse. There were about three or four huge towers going up about three storeys high. One had an iron ladder attached to the outside wall but it started about six feet up so to get to it you had to scale the crumbling brickwork just to get a handle on the ladder. One day I managed to do it and hauled myself up the ladder. I went right to the top and was just able to pull myself into a small space right at the very pinnacle. If I’d have fallen off or had the ladder fallen away, I’d have been killed but it was one of those daft things that kids do. There was a great view but the hard bit was slipping down from that top space onto the ladder to get down.

My brother Colin and mum at the Heysham Kart Racing Track

Sometimes on the camp a kart racing team appeared. It was just a man and his son and they prepared the kart; Dad did some engine tuning and his son took off for a few laps. I was always asking if I could have a drive but they wouldn’t let me although we chatted a lot about motor racing. They told me about a kart track in Heysham where they had raced and once, when we went on holiday to Morecambe we visited the track although sadly, there was no racing on.

I took Bob home and it was time for more tea and then I took my bike to the RAF camp for some laps round the camp roads. I had worked out a racetrack in my note book around the camp and timed myself racing round there on my bike and used to jot down my lap times including things like fastest lap on a weekday, fastest weekend lap, all time fastest lap and so on. One day the council decided to send in a tractor which deposited a load of rubble at each of the junctions so neither me nor my friendly father and son kart team could race around there anymore. Later the tower and all the buildings were reduced to rubble. Today all remains of the camp have gone and a new private housing estate occupies the site.

Later my Dad arrived home from work on his pushbike. In Agatha Christie’s autobiography she describes her own father as ‘a very agreeable man’ and even adds a quote from my favourite book David Copperfield:

‘Is your brother an agreeable man, Peggoty?’ I enquired anxiously.

‘Oh what an agreeable man he is!’ exclaimed Peggoty.

My Dad was an agreeable man just like Agatha’s and it was that comment which sparked off most of these memories. Anyway, after Dad arrived home it was usually time for tea. My Mum was a good cook but she had a limited repertoire of dishes. Curries, pizzas and pasta dishes were unheard of for her and even today when she is 92 years old, stricken with dementia and living in a home, if I can’t seem to get a reaction out of her, I’ll simply tell her curry is on the menu for tea and she will be almost jumping out of her chair ‘I’m not eating curry!’ and she won’t relax until I say I’m joking.

Back then my favourite meal must have been meat pie. Mum used to buy her meat from the butchers and she always minced the meat herself with an old metal mincer which she screwed to the table top. She cooked it slowly and always made her own pastry. She’d serve it with either mash and carrots or chips and peas, both with lashings of gravy and piles of bread and butter. It was lovely.

One of my favourite TV shows then was MASH with Alan Alda. I just loved it and still do, the way they could mix madcap humour with tragedy, and I used to record my favourite episodes. Alas, there were no VHS recorders back then and a hard driver recorder was just a twinkle in some pre-teen inventor’s eye. What I did was record the soundtrack on my cassette tape recorder. Our TV didn’t have a jack plug either so I had to use the microphone and ask people to be quiet which was an absolute impossibility for both my Dad and my brother.

Once during a recording, Mum called ‘dinner’s ready’ and we all trooped silently out to the kitchen. Afterwards Dad and my brother would try to be the first back to make some silly comment on the tape.

Bedtime was usually about 10pm. Sometimes I’d myther Mum so that I could stay up late to watch either Monty Python’s Flying Circus or something like The Invaders. I loved the opening titles to the Invaders and the way the narrator read out everything. ‘The Invaders: A Quinn Martin Production!’

David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed, deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow, he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun!

Eventually I would be sent off to bed. Back then I couldn’t sleep without reading something for a while. My brother would complain because I had the light on and I’d say to him ‘go under. Go under the covers just for five minutes!’ Eventually I put out the lights. Just outside was a street light that would light up our room with a reddish amber glow. I can see it now and I can look over and see my posters, one of Jackie Stewart in his F1 Championship winning Matra and another of the lovely Olivia Newton-John, my childhood crush.

I close my eyes for a moment and then open them again. I’m back in my room in Lanzarote, the overhead fan sending cooling air towards me. It is 7.30am. Should I get up or go back to sleep?

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