Author Archives: Steve Higgins

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!

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Favourite Directors: (Part 5) Billy Wilder

Posted on by Steve Higgins

One of my favourite stories about Billy Wilder goes like this. One day, late in his career, he arrived at a Hollywood studio to pitch a new idea to a producer. The producer turned out to be a young man who clearly didn’t know much about classic cinema. He told Billy that he wasn’t familiar with his work and could he perhaps run through a few of his films for him.
Billy looked at the man and said, “Fine, after you . . .”

I’m betting that whatever this guy had produced it couldn’t compare with Billy’s dazzling line-up of classic films.

Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha Beskidzka, a town now in Poland but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Billy was born Samuel but his mother had been to America and seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She enjoyed it so much she decided to nickname her son Billy. The family later moved to Vienna, where his father Max tried his hand at various business ventures, including being part-owner of a hotel-restaurant.

The young Wilder developed a taste for sharp observation early on. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Vienna and was very keen on jazz. His articles about bandleader Paul Whiteman led to an invitation to follow the band to Berlin and Billy decided to stay on as a freelance reporter. Berlin in the 1920s was alive with ideas, cabaret, and cinema and Wilder soaked it all in. He began to mingle with people from the German film industry and soon moved into screenwriting.

Wilder received screen credit for 13 films produced in Germany between 1929 and 1933, but his promising career in Berlin was cut short. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. That year his father died and Wilder arranged for him to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. With Hitler consolidating power and Jews being targeted, Wilder realised he had no future in Germany. After the Reichstag fire, he fled to Paris. There, he continued screenwriting and even co-directed his first film, Mauvaise Graine (1934). Shortly afterwards, he sold a script to Columbia Studios in Hollywood, and with that invitation he sailed for America.

Breaking into Hollywood

Wilder’s early days in Hollywood weren’t easy. His English was poor and he shared an apartment with fellow émigré Peter Lorre and made ends meet by hustling for work.

What Wilder did have though, was persistence and wit. He began writing screenplays with Charles Brackett, a more established writer with fluent English. The Wilder-Brackett partnership became one of the most productive in Hollywood, blending Brackett’s sophistication with Wilder’s bite. Together they worked on hits such as Ninotchka (1939), a satirical comedy famously marketed with the tagline: “Garbo Laughs!”

That success cemented Wilder’s reputation and he began to move from writing into directing. He felt screenwriters were too often mistreated by directors and the only way to protect his work was to get behind the camera himself.

Wilder the Director

Wilder’s breakthrough as a director came with Double Indemnity (1944), a dark tale of lust, greed and murder. Co-written with Raymond Chandler, the film became a defining example of film noir. Wilder used shadows, venetian blinds and Los Angeles locations to give the story a hard-edged realism. It was controversial at the time—Barbara Stanwyck plotting insurance fraud and murder was considered scandalous—but it became a critical and commercial success.

From there, the hits kept coming. Wilder had an uncanny ability to move between genres: crime thrillers, social dramas, romantic comedies and biting satires. His motto was “If you’re going to tell the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”

In The Lost Weekend (1945), Wilder tackled alcoholism with unflinching honesty. The film, starring Ray Milland, was one of the first Hollywood movies to show addiction as a serious disease rather than a comic weakness. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Then came Sunset Boulevard (1950), perhaps Wilder’s masterpiece and my personal favourite of Wilder’s films. The film begins with a dead man floating in a swimming pool, narrating his own murder—a narrative device that was bold, even shocking at the time. Gloria Swanson’s portrayal of fading silent film star Norma Desmond gave us one of cinema’s most haunting lines. Writer Joe Gillis played by William Holden is trying to get away from two guys who want to repossess his car. To evade them he drives into what he thinks is an abandoned mansion. He is surprised to find it occupied by the once famous silent film star Norma Desmond played by Gloria Swanson. He recognises her and comments “You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.” Norma replies, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The movie was both a scathing satire of Hollywood and a deeply human tragedy. It’s also interesting from a lot of angles; we see the famous Schwab’s drug store, once a Hollywood icon but now gone. Director Cecil B DeMille plays himself and when we see Joe and Norma spending an evening watching her old films, they are actually Gloria Swanson’s old films and one was directed by none other than Erich Von Stroheim who plays Norma’s butler and former husband.

Comedy with an Edge

Although Wilder made some of the darkest films in Hollywood, he was equally skilled at comedy. In fact, many of his comedies remain among the most beloved of all time. Some Like It Hot (1959) paired Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as musicians on the run, disguising themselves as women in an all-female band. Add Marilyn Monroe to the mix and you had comedy gold. The film was outrageous for its time and famously ends with Joe E. Brown’s immortal line, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Marilyn tested both Wilder and her co stars as she was notoriously late and struggled with her lines. One infamous scene required 47 takes and all Monroe had to say was ‘it’s me, Sugar’. Wilder wasn’t happy because Marilyn wanted to change scenes and dialogue which he didn’t want to do. The final result though was a classic comedy.

The film’s closing line, “Well, nobody’s perfect”, is ranked 78th on The Hollywood Reporter list of Hollywood’s 100 Favourite Movie Lines and Wilder’s tombstone pays homage to the line with the inscription, “I’m a writer, but then, nobody’s perfect”.

Two years later, Wilder directed The Apartment (1960), a film that managed to be both romantic and cynical. Jack Lemmon plays an office worker who lets his bosses use his apartment for their affairs, only to fall for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator. The film mixes laughter with melancholy, revealing Wilder’s genius for blending tones. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.

Wilder also directed Sabrina (1954), with Audrey Hepburn caught between Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, and The Seven Year Itch (1955), which gave us the iconic image of Monroe’s skirt billowing over a subway grate. He seemed to have a knack for capturing cultural moments while keeping his characters grounded and relatable.

Wilder’s Style and Legacy

What made Billy Wilder so special? Partly it was his range. Few directors could move from the bleak cynicism of Ace in the Hole (1951), a savage attack on media exploitation, to the screwball energy of Some Like It Hot. He didn’t stick to one style or genre; instead, he reshaped them.

His dialogue sparkled with wit, but underneath there was always truth. Wilder had an outsider’s eye—he never forgot that he was an immigrant looking at America with both fascination and scepticism. His characters often chase the American dream but collide with its hypocrisies and disappointments.

Wilder also had a reputation for precision. He was meticulous with scripts, often refusing improvisation. “You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning,” he once said, “but dreams don’t last long.” His films carried that same bittersweet edge.

By the end of his career, Wilder had won six Oscars and left behind a body of work that filmmakers still study. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he reportedly quipped: “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect.

The Final Word

Billy Wilder died in 2002 at the age of 95. He had outlived most of his contemporaries and watched Hollywood change beyond recognition. Yet his films remain fresh. Watch Sunset Boulevard today, or Some Like It Hot; both are hugely entertaining.

So, when that young producer asked Wilder to list his films, he was showing his ignorance of a screen legend. His legacy speaks louder than any pitch meeting. And the truth is, even if “nobody’s perfect,” Billy Wilder came pretty close.

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My Early Life: The Book, the Film and the Soundtrack Album

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I first read My Early Life by Winston Churchill many years ago. I picked up a paperback copy which tied in with the release of the film version and also along the way I got hold of the soundtrack album and later a VHS copy of the film. In this week’s blog I thought I’d take a closer look at all three.

Rooting around in a secondhand shop in St Annes recently I picked up a hardback copy of Winston Churchill’s book My Early Life. It’s a thoroughly wonderful book written in Churchill’s inimitable style. He says in the introduction he has written a book about a vanished age and indeed he has. Churchill was born in 1974 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill who was in turn the son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of an American businessman. She married Lord Randolph and became Lady Churchill.

Lady Churchill was a great influence on his life although in his very early years young Winston looked to his nanny, Mrs Everest, for motherly support. His father, Lord Randolph, was someone whom Winston loved and adored but never seemed to become close to. After the birth of Winston, Randolph began to suffer a debilitating disease which could have been syphilis. Others have speculated it was a brain tumour. Either way, Randolph died in 1894.

Looking back, I must have seen the film version before I read the book. Young Winston was directed by Richard Attenborough and is a wonderful adaptation of the book. When Winston first attends school, which of course was boarding school, his headmaster was played by Robert Hardy and he directs Winston to learn some Latin. Winston doesn’t do very well and the headmaster glares down at him and informs him that if he misbehaves, he will be punished, which to a great extent was Churchill’s overall view of school. Later he comments about exams ‘they always contrived to question me about things I didn’t know. I would much rather they asked me about things I did know.

In the book Winston records his schooldays with a great deal of charm and humour. He goes on to attend Harrow and as he intends to join the army goes to special army classes.  Winston seems to have enjoyed his army training and was keen to see action. He took leave with a friend and went to observe events in Cuba where revolutionaries were fighting their Spanish colonial rulers.

Winston was a second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars and spent a long time in India. He was a great lover of polo and he and his colleagues won an inter service championship in their first year in the country, a feat never achieved before by a recently arrived regiment.

Churchill was keen, as I said before, to see action and joined Bindon Blood’s Malakand Field Force and later wrote a book about the campaign. The book was popular and Churchill even received a letter of praise from the Prince of Wales. Because of his mother and father, Churchill was well connected in both political and aristocratic circles and later used his contacts and those of his mother to attach himself to General Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan. He was part of one of the British Army’s very last cavalry charges in the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

The charge was depicted in the film Young Winston and in his book Churchill ponders about fate and a problem with his shoulder which necessitated using his revolver rather than his sword during the charge, reflecting that if he had been using his sword he might well have been killed in the latter stages when he was surrounded by the enemy.

He ponders many times too about war in the Victorian age. How it was honourable and respectable. He mentions how officers would stop for lunch before a battle and how casualties, which were sometimes considered heavy, were nothing like the heavy casualties suffered in the later world war. If technology had taken away the honour of war in 1914, how would Churchill react to war in 2025 I wonder?

The Victorian age was an age of courtesy and respect and one of my favourite stories in the book occurs when Winston was at Sandhurst. It was the custom then, if an officer wanted leave for a few hours, to sign a book and declare himself absent. One day when visiting friends Winston passed his commanding officer Major Ball, a very strict and formal officer, on the road and realised he had forgotten to sign himself out. He cut short his visit, returned to Sandhurst hoping to add his name before the Major checked the book. Sadly, he found Major Ball’s signature at the end of the page. Would he be disciplined thought Winston? What would his punishment be? Looking further up the list Winston was surprised to find that his name had been added and countersigned by none other than Major Ball himself. Winston writes that this was a clear indication of how discipline could be maintained among officers without departing from the courteous and respectful standards of the time.

Having failed to become an MP for the Oldham constituency he went to South Africa to report on the Boer war as a correspondent. He travelled on an armoured train which was attacked by the Boers and he was captured and imprisoned in a POW camp.

One of things I particularly liked about Young Winston was the music. I bought the soundtrack album in 1985. The music for the film was in the main composed by Sir Alfred Ralston. He was brought into the film by director Attenborough as the two had worked together on a previous film, ‘Oh what a Lovely War’. The soundtrack features music by Edward Elgar, notably the Pomp and Circumstance March no 4 as well as Nimrod from the Enigma Variations.

According to the sleeve notes, the pistol used by Simon Ward who played Winston in the film was Churchill’s actual Mauser and it can be seen pretty well during a sequence when Churchill travels to south Africa to report on the Boer war as a newspaper correspondent. He travels with a unit who undertake a recce on an armoured train only to find the train attacked by the Boers on their return journey. Winston played a big part in helping remove a wrecked train from the line only for himself to not only be captured but also to lose his pistol. The pistol was returned to him in later years.

Churchill ended up in a POW camp but resolved to escape despite also claiming to the Boers that he was a correspondent and should not have been detained. With the help of a group of Lancashire miners, Winston stowed away on a goods train and made his way back to the British lines.

The incident made him famous back in the UK and when he next ran for parliament in Oldham, he was duly elected. The tone of the book becomes more serious towards the final pages but overall this is an outstanding read by one of this country’s greatest sons.

The film version was almost just as good. Simon Ward gives us an admirable picture of the young Winston with just the right hint of the great man’s later style and speaking voice.

I first saw this film at the cinema where I greatly enjoyed it and I remember it coming to television some years later. The film finishes with a poignant dream sequence which, I remember reading somewhere, was based on something Churchill either said or wrote. In the dream, a much older Winston meets his father but he is not the unwell man of his later years but restored to full health. Randolph asks Winston about great events and Churchill answers telling of the two World Wars. ‘Did Joe Chamberlain ever become Prime Minister?’ asks Randolph. ‘No’ answers Winston, ‘but one of his sons did, Neville’.

Winston mentions that he has resigned his commission in the army. Randolph looks about at the many paintings and asks Winston if this is what he does. Winston answers that painting occupies much of his time. Randolph thinks for a moment and then tells Winston to ‘do the best you can’ and we see the sleeping Churchill smile at the thought.

I’ve always liked this final sequence but when I bought my VHS copy the scene was omitted. Likewise, every time I have since seen the film on television, this scene has always been removed. I’d love to know why. Perhaps the producers thought the film too long or perhaps preferred the new ending in which Winston talks briefly in a voiceover about his marriage and living ‘happily ever after’. After a search on the internet I came across a post which claimed that Carl Foreman, who wrote and produced the film, found that US audiences occasioned so little reaction to the scene that he promptly had it cut. What reaction was he expecting to see I wonder?

Perhaps it’s time for a search on eBay. I’m sure that somewhere there must be a definitive DVD version of the film and if you ever get the chance, give the book a read, it’s one of my absolute favourites.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Comfort Food

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started off this post with the title food memories, not meaning memories of food but more the memories that are conjured up by eating food. What I’m really talking about is comfort food and the way food can comfort you by bringing back old and comfortable memories.

I’m going to start with ham sandwiches. To begin with I love bread and I love sandwiches. One of the recent highlights -if I can use that word in this context- of my brother’s recent funeral (maybe highlights is the wrong word after all) was the buffet. I really do love a good buffet. Sandwiches, obviously, pork pies, sausage rolls, salads; yes I love all that. Not long ago I was alone and missing my brother and feeling a little sorry for myself and so I made myself a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and as I was eating it a whole raft of memories seemed to sail by.

I used to come home for my school dinners and the usual sort of thing we would have for lunch were sandwiches. Sometimes cheese, sometimes corned beef but more often than not we’d have ham sandwiches. Nothing fancy, just plain old boiled ham on white bread. Later, when we had moved house and I no longer came home for dinner, my mother would make me up a lunchbox with sandwiches and sometimes her home made cakes.

Later still when I started work in city centre Manchester what did she push into my hands as I left for work? Yes, my trusty lunchbox filled with ham sandwiches.

When I was no longer living at home, I would occasionally spend my dinner breaks having a pub lunch or eating in our work’s canteen although usually I’d bring my own sandwiches. Even at my very last job, just prior to retiring, if you came across me in our rest area I’d be sat with a cup of tea and a sandwich, more often than not ham on white bread.

Probably the very first thing I could make for myself was tomato soup. Well, I didn’t actually make it. No, I opened the can, emptied it into a pan and warmed it up. To this day I love tomato soup. I sometimes even have it in restaurants. I just think soup is the perfect starter to a meal and I must confess, I’m more of a starter and main person than a main and dessert man.

Just thinking about tomato soup brings back memories of sitting in my mum’s kitchen slurping my soup and telling Bob, our dog, that no meat was involved and he was wasting his time tapping my leg with his paw as no tit bits would be forthcoming.

A slightly unrelated picture: Cheese in a French restaurant with a pichet of vin rouge

Mum had a very sunny kitchen and I can vaguely remember sitting there on the day I first started work, eating my porridge and drinking my tea and feeling slightly apprehensive. My dad set off for work on his bike and mum gave him his sandwiches and brew can before he left. Perhaps he wished me good luck as he left, perhaps he just gave a sort of nod to me and mum and then went on his way. Anyway, just as I was leaving, mum gave me my lunch of ham sandwiches and then I walked down to the bus stop and joined the other commuters on their way to work.

The dish that I first learned to actually make was boiled eggs. I like my eggs not too runny and not too hard preferably served with two slices of toast. I don’t have then very often these days but Liz does make really good boiled eggs. When I make them, they either come out hard or with the white not done enough although there was a time when I was much younger when I could do them perfectly. Two eggs and two rounds of lightly done toast make a lovely breakfast.

Boiled eggs and toast: Yummy

Another comfort food for me is a cheese and ham toastie. Cheese and ham are two of my favourite ingredients so why not add them together for a really comforting snack. Two slices of white bread, buttered on the outside. Add a slice of ham, some grated cheddar cheese and chopped onion and slap them either on a toastie maker or dry fry them in a pan. I tend to cook them on my George Foreman grill and they are so nice for a late evening snack with a glass of red wine of course.

Years ago, when I started work on the buses my friends told me that would be the end of my social life because of shifts and early starts and late finishes. As it happened nothing could have been further from the truth. Because we worked such odd hours it seemed to me that me and my colleagues were even more determined to socialise. After early shifts we were down at the busman’s club playing snooker, pool or cards. It was the same after a late shift. Our club was open till 12 so we would be able to get in for a last pint and a quick game of cards or pool. Personally, I have never been interested in cards but back in those afternoons after the end of an early shift I learned to play snooker. I was a pretty keen player for a while; I even had my own cue.

Sometimes we even went down to a local night club, Genevieve’s, where the bouncers used to let us in as long as we took off our bus badges.

After a split shift finishing round about 7 I used to either visit a pub not far from the depot or up to the club and something that they both served was a cheese and ham toastie. Eating one today reminds me of early evenings either in a Stockport pub called the Unity, now sadly closed, or our busman’s club. The only food the club served apart from crisps and nuts was a toastie. I’d usually have one while waiting for either the pool or the snooker table with a pint of Boddingtons listening to the banter of my fellow busmen.

Here’s one final food memory. As we’ve had a certain amount of hot weather lately, Liz and I have been having an increased number of barbecues. We are cooking the usual stuff of course; burgers, kebabs and steaks. We also have some vegetarian elements like padron peppers and mini sweetcorns. We also have been having home grown new potatoes. They are not actually cooked on the barbecue although we do tend to warm them up on the heat when they have cooled down. New potatoes are wonderful with just a knob of butter. At our last barby I ate them with coleslaw which brought back another bus related food memory.

In the last few years of GM Buses, when the government forced the splitting of the company into two separate parts, GM Buses North and GM Buses South, I was working in Metro Comms, our communications room. I was allocated to GM Buses North and I wasn’t very happy as our comms room was in the heart of GM south territory. Originally Atherton depot was earmarked for the North comms room and I bought a house in Newton-le-Willows, a short drive away. Then the company decided to switch comms to Oldham giving me an hour drive to work. Not only that, sometimes in the winter I would leave Newton in the rain and arrive at work in Oldham to find two foot of snow.

Still, we had a nice set up in Oldham, a nice comms room to ourselves which our bosses and supervisors rarely visited and a nice kitchen which we shared with a couple of computer guys and the HR staff. Naturally I usually had sandwiches for lunch but sometimes in the summer I’d walk up to the shopping centre and get myself a baked potato and coleslaw from a street food vendor who had a small stall with a portable oven. One day I made my way up there, ordered my spud and realised I had forgotten my wallet (a trick perfected by my colleagues in the Noble Order of Tightwads) and he said ‘never mind, give me the money tomorrow’ which was really nice of him.

There we go then, that’s my short list of comfort foods, all of which bring back good memories.

What are your comfort foods?

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The Film of the Book: James Bond 007 (Part 2)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This is part 2 of a post about the books and films in the James Bond franchise. It’s recently been announced that Steven Knight, the writer who created the TV series Peaky Blinders, has been engaged to write the next film in the James Bond spy series. Bond appeared to die in the last 007 epic No Time To Die which, certainly for me, wasn’t a particularly great film. I honestly think that the producers have got the character mixed up a little with either Ethan Hunt from the Mission Impossible series, Bruce Willis from the Die Hard franchise or perhaps Jack Bauer from 24. Bond isn’t a rogue agent. He isn’t a maverick cop or spy either. He’s a former naval intelligence officer and a serving officer of the secret intelligence service who is trained to follow orders and use his initiative in certain situations. In order to get back to the original James Bond it’s time to look at the source material, namely the books by Ian Fleming, and see how they compare to the films.

Goldfinger

Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.

The book is in three parts, based on a quote from Goldfinger who tells Bond of a saying he learned in Chicago. ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action’. In a similar situation to that in Moonraker, Bond is asked to take a close look at Goldfinger by an acquaintance from the first book Casino Royale. The man reckons that Goldfinger is cheating him at cards and asks Bond if he can see how this is being done. M tasks Bond to meet with Goldfinger who is suspected of gold smuggling. Eventually, Bond is captured by Goldfinger who correctly surmises that ‘enemy action’ has begun. Later Bond is taken to the USA where he learns of Goldfinger’s plan to rob Fort Knox.

The film version was hugely popular and to a certain extent became a sort of template for future Bond films.

For Your Eyes Only

Not one of my favourite Bond books, this was a collection of short stories and some of the titles, but not the plots, were used in some of the later Bond films.

Thunderball

This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.

Prior to Thunderball, Fleming had been working on a screenplay with two others and when the project fell through, Fleming decided to use the material in his new novel. Later, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, his two erstwhile writing partners, sued Fleming and won rights to certain elements of the story. This enabled them to years later produce the film Never Say Never Again with Sean Connery returning to the role of James Bond.

The book is well put together and as usual I found it a hugely enjoyable read. Fleming once again manages to inject the story with elements of his own life. Bond’s visit to a health clinic was inspired by Fleming’s own similar visit. In the book, Bond’s health record is revealed including details of his large intake of alcohol and cigarettes.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.

While taking a break from the search for Blofeld, Bond meets Tracy, the daughter of Marc-Ange Draco, the head of the French criminal organisation the union corse. Draco offers Bond a million pounds to marry his troubled daughter but Bond declines although he agrees to meet with her again. Later she proves instrumental in helping Bond escape from Blofeld.

In the film, George Lazenby became the new 007, sadly only lasting for one film after taking advice from his agent who felt the days of the Bond films were over. Former Avengers girl Diana Rigg portrayed Tracy. She and Bond fall for each other and are married but sadly, Blofeld takes revenge and she is murdered. Personally, I’ve always felt that this film was one of the best in the 007 film series.

You Only Live Twice

This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.

At the end of the book Blofeld is dead but Bond, who has been masquerading as a Japanese fisherman, is badly hurt and suffering from amnesia. The Japanese woman who has been pretending to be his wife decides to hide Bond in order for him to stay with her. At the end of the book, Bond reads something about Russia which triggers a memory and decides he has to go there.

The only real similarity of the film to the book was that the film was also set in Japan.

The Man with the Golden Gun

This was the last novel in the Bond series and the first Bond book I ever read. It’s a rather disappointing read as Fleming had died before completing his revision of the manuscript.

The novel opens up with Bond reappearing after going missing after his last mission. In fact he has been brainwashed by the Russians into murdering the head of the secret service. His attempt fails but Bond is deprogrammed and M decides to test Bond by sending him after a notorious hitman, Francisco Scaramanga, who has eliminated numerous British agents.

Fleming’s writing process was to create a first draft and then edit and add in more detail with a second draft. Fleming had told friends that James Bond was becoming harder to write and he wanted The Man with the Golden Gun to be his last. He also wanted to finish on a high and was concerned that the book wasn’t good enough for a grand finale. He had told his editor that he had thought about spending another year back at Goldeneye in Jamacia working on the book. Sadly, he suffered a heart attack on the morning of 12th August 1964 and died.

The film version starred Roger Moore playing his usual lacklustre and slightly camp 007 but a memorable screen villain was Ian Fleming’s cousin, Christopher Lee starring as Scaramanga. Britt Ekland joined the ranks of the Bond Girls by playing Mary Goodnight, Bond’s secretary.

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The Book of the Film or the Film of the Book: James Bond 007 (Part 1)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I originally gave this post the title of Book Bag: Ian Fleming and I intended to talk about the original James Bond books written of course by Ian Fleming. As much as I tried to keep them out, the film versions kept creeping in and so I decided on a quick change to the title, as you can see above. It’s very hard to separate the films from the books especially as I keep reading rumours about the next Bond film in the media. In fact it has just been announced that Steven Knight, the writer who created the TV series Peaky Blinders, has been engaged to write the next film in the spy franchise. Bond appeared to die in the last 007 epic No Time To Die which, certainly for me, wasn’t a particularly great film. I honestly think that the producers have got the character mixed up a little with either Ethan Hunt from the Mission Impossible series, Bruce Willis from the Die Hard franchise or perhaps Jack Bauer from 24. Bond isn’t a rogue agent. He isn’t a maverick cop or spy either. He’s a former naval intelligence officer and a serving officer of the secret intelligence service who is trained to follow orders and use his initiative in certain situations. In order to get back to the original James Bond it’s time to look at the source material, namely the books by Ian Fleming and see how they compare to the films.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.

The book is interesting in another way too. Ian Fleming sold the movie rights to Casino Royale separately from the rest of the Bond books and this enabled producer Charles K Feldman to produce a movie independently from Eon productions who own the rights to the other books. Feeling that he could not compete with the mainstream movies, Feldman decided to make Casino Royale into a comedy version. David Niven starred as Sir James Bond and ironically, Ian Fleming had mooted Niven as a possible Bond when casting began for Dr No, the first movie in the series.

Eon Productions finally acquired the rights to Casino Royale ready for the debut of Daniel Craig as James Bond. I’ve got to say I didn’t like Craig at first. He didn’t look like Bond and I honestly thought he would have been better cast as one of the Bond villain’s henchmen but I did warm to him eventually and although I didn’t much care for it at first, I really do think Casino Royale is one of the better Bond films. It was released in 2006 and follows the book pretty faithfully which many of the previous films rarely do. Craig’s final Bond film was No Time to Die which I really thought was the poorest of Craig’s five outings as 007.

Live and Let Die

This was the second Bond book to be published and the action takes place in the USA and the Caribbean, which Fleming loved and bought a house there which he named Goldeneye. Live and Let Die and in fact the whole book series were recently reissued with all the politically incorrect stuff removed which makes me wonder whether there was in fact anything left to publish after that process was complete. The book was published in 1953 and comes complete with all the prejudices and sexual and racial intolerances of the era. In one segment when Bond visits Harlem, Fleming tries to reproduces the accents and slang terms of the black people of Harlem and for me it’s not one of Fleming’s best books. In the film version, Roger Moore took over the licence to kill and the result was a very tongue in cheek version of James Bond. Sorry but Roger Moore as Bond just wasn’t for me. The film did feature a great theme song from Paul McCartney which was really a little underused in the film. Another feature of the film was a power boat chase along the Bayous of Florida which was a lot of fun but not entirely serious.

Moonraker

This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.

Bond beats Drax at his own game and then finds his next mission is to look into Drax and his Moonraker set up. Interestingly in Moonraker the obligatory Bond girl with the exciting name, in this case Gala Brand, decides not to succumb to Bond’s charms after all.  The movie version was a desperate attempt by the Bond producers to compete with Star Wars and was not my cup of tea at all.

Diamonds are Forever

Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.

The film version marked Sean Connery’s final outing as Bond, at least in the ‘official’ Bond films anyway. Connery looks bored throughout the film which seems to begin the trend of slightly less than serious films which Roger Moore continued.

From Russia with Love

According to Wikipedia From Russia With Love was inspired by the author’s trip to Istanbul in 1955 to cover an Interpol conference for the Sunday Times. The plot is very similar to the film version and involves the KGB planning to assassinate Bond and also create a scandal involving Bond and the British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.

What was interesting about this book was that Fleming had become a little bored with Bond as well as being short of ideas and so he decided to kill off 007 at the end of the book, when he falls victim to KGB agent Rosa Klebb, who stabs Bond with a hidden blade laced with poison. Fleming later developed an idea for the next book and proceeded to revive Bond for Dr No, the next in the series.

The film version closely follows the book but adds the criminal organisation SPECTRE into the mix and is, to my mind anyway, one of the best films in the franchise. Sean Connery made his second appearance as 007 and two excellent portrayals as villains were by Robert Shaw as Red Grant and Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb.

Dr No

Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.

In Dr No, Bond is recovering from the effects of poisoning in the previous book and so M, the head of the secret service, sends him on a routine mission to Jamaica where the head of the Jamaica station and his secretary have disappeared. Bond finds that they were investigating the secretive Dr No who owns a private island known as Crab Key. After further investigation Bond finds that Dr No is involved in the practice of ‘toppling’ missiles from a nearby US launch site.

Dr No was made into the very first Bond film in the film series with Sean Connery starring as 007. Fleming was rather apprehensive of Sean Connery at first, actually wanting David Niven to play the part. Later Fleming warmed to Connery, even adding a bit of Scottish ancestry into Bond’s back history in the later books.

Bernard Lee played M, the head of the secret service. He went on to appear in 11 Bond films in total and Lois Maxwell made her first of 14 appearances as M’s formidable secretary, Miss Moneypenny.

Tune in next week to read the concluding part of this post.

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3 Summer Reads

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.

Hamish Macbeth is a country policeman in the small Scottish Highland village of Lochdubh. Macbeth is a very relaxed kind of fellow. Some might even call him lazy. He shies away from promotion, even giving the credit for solving crimes to others so he can stay on in his beloved village.

A few years back the BBC made a TV series based on the books. ‘Based on’ is quite an interesting use of that particular phrase because the TV series is actually nothing like the books. The series was filmed in Plockton and Macbeth is played by Robert Carlyle. Macbeth is a laid-back relaxed character, just like in the books. He is not averse to poaching the odd salmon and he likes to apply the rule of law in his own way. He avoids promotion as all he wants is to remain in Lochdubh. That is pretty much where the resemblance to the books ends which was quite a surprise to me. Most of the characters in the series are the invention of the TV writers and not M.C. Beaton who wrote the books.

I’m not sure how happy I would be if someone made a TV show out of my book and then proceeded to change all the characters, still I did enjoy Hamish Macbeth as a TV show. It was an oddball, quirky little drama which ran for only three seasons and a few years ago Liz and I visited the village of Plockton which was very small and to be honest, didn’t actually look like the place in the TV series.

Not long ago after reading Death of a Scriptwriter last year, I put down the Hamish Macbeth books and took a little break from the murders in Lochdubh but as the summer has warmed up nicely and I’ve plenty of time to sit out in the back garden reading, I thought it was a good time to pick up the series again.

Death of an Addict.

This was a little different to the usual Hamish Macbeth novel. Macbeth and another officer, Glasgow DI Olivia Chater, masquerade as drug dealers to trap a drugs cartel operating in the highlands. I have to say that I didn’t like how the book leaves the usual village life behind and to be fair, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as the previous ones.

Death of a Dustman.

All the Macbeth series are titled ‘Death of’ someone and I noticed on the internet that there is one book that differs from the others called A Highland Christmas which seems to come in between Addict and Dustman. Anyhow, I don’t have a copy so I went straight on with Death of a Dustman. All the books in my collection end with the first chapter of the next book and Addict ended with chapter one of Dustman so perhaps the Christmas book is something a little different. Anyway, the action takes place once again in the village of Lochdubh where a new councillor decides to make the village ‘green’ by promoting recycling. As a result, the local dustman causes a lot of aggro when he declines to empty bins containing the ‘wrong’ sort of rubbish and of course he ends up getting bumped off.

Things get a little far fetched towards the end but overall, Death of a Dustman was a fairly pleasant read and another look at highland village life and its various characters.

Marathon Man

I mentioned a while ago about my brother dying and when I was sorting out his things I came across this short novel. Actually it was one of my own books and I must have lent it to Colin years ago and now it has once again come back to me. I can just imagine telling him ‘I told you that you never gave me Marathon Man back!’ to which he would probably reply ‘Well what about that Cary Grant book I lent you?’ Yes, I borrowed the Grant book ages ago when I wrote a post about Cary Grant and it’s still there, part read in my bedroom.

Marathon Man was written by the screenwriter William Goldman and later made into a film using Goldman’s own screenplay. It’s a fairly short book and according to Wikipedia it was the author’s most successful thriller novel. Escaped nazi dentist Christian Szell has been living in Paraguay since the end of WWII. He has a stash of diamonds acquired while he worked in a concentration camp which are in a New York vault looked after by his father. When his father dies in a car crash Szell has to return to New York to get the diamonds. Will it be safe though? Szell thinks that a US agent working for a secret department called the Division may be about to rob him when he picks up the diamonds.

The agent is known by the code name Scylla and Szell meets with him and uses a hidden knife to stab him. Scylla manages to survive long enough to get to his brother’s New York apartment whereupon he dies from his injuries. Szell believes that Scylla must have survived long enough to give his brother, nicknamed ‘Babe’, information about the diamonds and so his men kidnap Babe and he is tortured to reveal any information. Szell is a dentist and so he tortures Babe by drilling into his teeth. Later, Babe, a student who hopes to be a marathon runner manages to get away.

The story was made into a film starring Laurence Olivier as Szell and Dustin Hoffman as Babe. This led to an interesting confrontation of acting styles with Hoffman the ‘method’ actor and Olivier the celebrated traditional actor. On one occasion when Hoffman had to appear tired out after staying awake for three days Hoffman chose to actually stay awake for three days also. Olivier, tired of these antics famously asked Hoffman ‘Dear boy, why don’t you just act?’

(I should mention here that while researching this and checking my facts -I had originally thought that Hoffman had gone running to make himself appear breathless- I found a really interesting article in the Guardian in which the author finished with a wonderful quote about acting from George Burns who once said “sincerity is everything. Fake that and you’ve got it made!”)

The film very much follows the lines of the book except that in the film, it is Szell’s brother, not his father who looks after the diamonds and also in the book, Babe is a little more ruthless and cold blooded than Hoffman portrays him on film. In fact, Babe shoots Szell dead in the book but in the film, Szell is killed by falling on his own knife.

Both the book and the film were highly successful and Olivier’s Szell is one of the most famous screen villains, particularly with his catchphrase ‘Is it safe?’ which he continually asks Hoffman’s character before commencing to torture him. It’s a film which probably put a huge amount of people off going to the dentist for years and the book is equally as scary and also superbly written.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading. What are your summer reads?

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Saturday Nights

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My book, Floating in Space, is set in the Manchester of the late seventies. There were no smartphones, no internet and no wireless networks. In fact, ‘wireless’ was an old fashioned word for the radio. I’m tempted to say that things moved at a slower pace then but that’s not true. Things just moved at a different pace. In 2025 you hear a lot about pubs closing down but back in 1977, pubs were far from closing down; at the weekend they were the place to be! That was where my friends and I met up, drank beer, listened to music and chatted up the ladies. Saturdays were the focus of our week back then but these days I’m actually not that keen on going out on a Saturday. I much prefer a weekday night out; things are a little quieter and there are fewer drunken idiots.

Having said that, Liz and I went into St Annes last Saturday to see our friends, Ray and Dean, perform as the Boogie Brothers at the Pier Inn. The Pier Inn is only a few years old and it’s a rather small little pub. The night we went in it was a hot and muggy evening and even with the door open it was hot in there so we decided to take a break and pop into Wetherspoons which we expected to be much cooler and it was. It did strike me though that most of the clientele in both those pubs were pretty similar to my own age group. OK there were a few young people but most people out that night were in my particular age bracket. Where do young people go these days on a Saturday night?

Back in 1977 Saturday nights were the culmination of the weekend for my twenty-one year old self. I always preferred it to Friday nights because things were more relaxed, there was no rushing home from work, no rushing to get your tea down your neck so you can get changed, then leg it out for the bus. Saturday, you could take your time and leisurely work up to things. Sometimes I would go out shopping and buy myself something new to wear for that evening, a shirt, or perhaps even a new pair of trousers. Then later I would have a long relaxed soak in the bath and dress unhurriedly in my room to the tune of my favourite music. In 1977 my favourite album was Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and as I dressed I would mimic Nigel Olsson’s measured and rhythmic drumming to ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’, or ‘Candle in the Wind’.

These days I just pop into the bathroom, have a shave and a shower and throw on one of a number of short sleeved shirts that I tend to favour. Still, even back in 1977 I could sometimes get bored with the usual pubs and bars in Manchester. I remember one boozy night in which my friend Chris and I decided to go out on the train somewhere. We ended up in Nantwich if I remember correctly. We took our tent and put it up somewhere in a field or a park and proceeded to spent the night drinking in a local pub.

The next morning we woke in our tent which had partially collapsed around us. We staggered up and packed everything away and thought about making our way to the railway station. As we walked into the town various people hailed us ‘Hi Steve!’ ‘Hi Chris!’

We dropped into the local pub and the barman greeted us like old friends. ‘Great night last night wasn’t it?’ he said.  I guess it must have been.

Here are a few facts about Saturday compiled after a quick search of the internet.

Saturday is named after Saturn, the Roman God of agriculture.

Saturday is the 6th day of the week in western culture although in some places the first day of the week is considered to be Sunday, making Saturday the last day of the week.

In Hinduism, Saturday is dedicated to the planet Saturn and is considered a day for spiritual cleansing and fasting. Devotees may visit temples and perform special rituals on this day, or abstain from certain foods and activities as a form of penance.

In the UK, Saturday is the busiest shopping day of the week. Many people use this day to do their weekly grocery shopping and high streets and shopping centres are often crowded with shoppers. One of my hard and fast rules is to never go shopping on a Saturday. Tuesday works better for me, it’s much quieter.

Time for a music break. I was going to go with Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting by Elton John but to be honest, as much as I like Elton, that song really isn’t my cup of tea these days. Here’s something much more enjoyable, Saturday Night at the Movies by the Drifters.

Talking about movies, Saturday Night Fever was a film released in 1977 starring John Travolta. Travolta plays Tony, a young man who spends his weekends drinking and dancing at a local disco. I haven’t seen the film for years until I watched it recently and was surprised to be reminded that, apart from the disco dancing interludes and the music of the Bee Gees, it is actually a gritty and dark film.

Here’s what I wrote in my book Floating in Space about Saturday nights;

“There was something about Saturday nights in Manchester. Some quality of security, of expectancy, a feeling that the night and the future were going to be good. A feeling that you might just meet some gorgeous girl and that even if you didn’t, it didn’t really matter because there was always the excitement of the people, the music, the drink, and everything else that made up the evening. And then there was always the expectancy of the next night, and the next, and on and on into the future. The past building up inside you like a great data bank, reminding you, reassuring you, like a light burning in some empty room in the corner of your mind.”

The Playground as it is today

Back in the late 70s, my friends and I used to go to a bar in Manchester called the Playground. We loved it in there. Inside the Playground, flickering multi-coloured spotlights rotated across the red carpeted room which, on Fridays and Saturdays, was generally packed. It had a small dance floor sunk low like a pit where people up on the raised bar level could look down at the gyrating girls and where also, on week day lunchtimes, a topless dancer appeared at the stroke of one o’clock to translate the soul and disco music of the time into pulsating physical motion, the eyes of jaded office workers glued to her as she did so.

There was a paltry fifty pence charge to get in, the solitary bouncer was silent but not unpleasant and the DJ, who always began the night with ‘Love’s Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco, and chart music. We were all mad about Jenny, the barmaid. She was lovely. She had a kind of round, open face framed by thick blonde hair and her skin was a creamy white. She served us Worthington ‘E’ and we melted into the hubbub of people on their Saturday night out while the music of the seventies drifted through us.

Yes, we had a lot of fun nights in the Playground until one night we turned up and the place was closed. We went somewhere else that night and for some reason it remained closed for a long while. Perhaps the owners had gone bust or their lease had expired. Eventually it was refurbished and opened under another name but it was never the same again. Even so, every time I walk down Oxford Road, I always stop for a moment and remember those long gone nights in the Playground.

What shall I do this Saturday night? Get dressed up and go into town?

Actually, I think I might just order a takeaway and watch television!

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Heatwaves and Barbecues

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week in the UK we have been subject to a heatwave. Well, the media have told us it’s a heatwave although it’s not a heatwave in the sense that I understand, which is weeks and perhaps months of intense heat, drought and hosepipe bans. The media also tends to link the heatwave to things like climate change and the melting of the ice cap and lots of other stuff but to be honest, this heatwave has just been what we used to call summer. That’s right, summer, you know when things get warmer and the sun comes out and the kids get a 6 week school holiday and it stops raining. Well, stops raining for a short while.

To be fair there were one or two really hot days up here in the north west of England. In fact, it might even have been three days. Liz and I put up her small pool in the garden and we got out the barbecue. One day was really hot, so hot that in the evening we were sat in the lounge in as little as clothing as possible, in my case just a pair of shorts. We had the doors open and the fan at full blast. Now I think of it, actually the perfect conditions for a robber/murderer to pop in, tie us up, take our valuables and bump us off. Happily, that didn’t happen but it was a hot and uncomfortable night.

The next day we realised all our usual parasols and sun brollies were a bit knackered so we ordered a small gazebo. Liz’s daughter and grandson were due round for a barbecue and we wanted to keep them out of the direct sun. After about an hour of effort and a surprisingly small amount of bad language, we managed to get the gazebo together and fully installed. Our guests arrived, we all had a bit of a potter about in the pool, ate our food and all was well. I thought about taking the gazebo down but thought otherwise, after all, we were in the middle of a heatwave so keeping it up seemed like good idea.

The next day it was slightly cooler, still warm of course but much pleasanter although a bit of a wind had sprung up. Later, just when we were about to begin an unprecedented third barbecue in a row, it had actually become so windy that we were hanging grimly on to the gazebo to prevent it from taking off. The only option was to take it apart which we did. I think it’s worth noting here how strange it is that things that come in a box will never ever fit back into that same box once you take them apart and try to put them away. Actually, its not only strange but one of the great mysteries of the universe.

Just looking back over my older posts, I see that July is a pretty regular slot for barbecue themed posts. Here’s something I wrote in 2022.

A regular visitor to our barbecues is a large seabird which we have christened CBS. Nothing to do with the American TV channel but that bird is one heck of a Cheeky Bastard Seagull.

He usually arrives on our garden wall and struts around in the manner of an avian Mussolini. If he gets no response from us, he will tend to have a bit of a stretch before going into a major squawking session. Now he has made his presence felt we can expect some more strutting about until we put some bits of sausage or fat from our steak on the wall. He’ll gobble that up with the occasional foray into the sky to fend off any other birds who might be after a nibble before beginning his ritual again. When the gas goes off and he knows no more food will be forthcoming, CBS will usually have a final strut, give us a last squawk and be off into the sky.

These last few weeks however, CBS has not appeared. We’ve saved him some bits and pieces but our familiar feathered friend has not made an appearance. I’ve often wondered what has happened to him. Has he emigrated somewhere? No, surely it’s not the time of the year for birds to migrate? Has he passed away? It’s hard to tell if he was a young or an old bird. Has he been hit by a car trying to peck at some stray leftover sandwich accidentally dropped in the road?

At our last barbecue a large seabird appeared on our wall. At first, we thought it was CBS but there was no strutting or squawking and the bird did seem a little timid. He wouldn’t come close to collect his titbits on the wall. Was he a doppelganger trying to muscle in on CBS’s patch knowing the real CBS has passed away? We’ll never know.

Still on the subject of barbecues, here’s something I wrote in 2021, the year of Covid 19;

Because of Covid and now also because of my sore shoulder (did I mention the trapped nerve and my shoulder pain?) we haven’t used our motorhome much this year. We did have a run out to Yorkshire a while back and a pub stop over before that but otherwise the only trip was a run out to the garage for the MOT. Liz had bought a small portable gas barbecue ready for our travels and it was lying unused in the corner so we thought it was time to give it a trial run.

I do like barbecues but the flip side is that they are dirty and smelly and greasy. I always start off with some dry wood, pack in the charcoal and light up with some firelighters. Sometimes we’ll get a slow burner barbecue so we end up supping too much wine while we wait for things to get going. Other times we’ll get the reverse, a barbecue that catches quickly and voom, goes off in a big hot burn. That’s usually when we are expecting a slow burner and are still finishing off the salad and so when we sit down I realise I’m going to have to slap all the meat on quickly before the coals burn themselves out. The really annoying thing is when we are in the motorhome and I realise that after the barby has finished, I am somehow going to have to clean this horrible, greasy mess and get it packed away so we can move on.

So how have things gone with the gas barby? Pretty smoothly actually. None of that messing about with the coals and lighter fluid. The portable job snaps quickly together, slap in the calor gas cylinder, press the starter and hey presto, we are ready to barbecue. The other great thing about this one is that there is a water reservoir that catches all the grease and fat. Just swill that away somewhere in a corner of the garden, a quick wipe with a paper towel and we are all ready for next time. Barbecuing with gas, I love it!

Back to that unprecedented third barbecue.

In 2025 we are still using that little gas barbecue, so much easier than lighting all those coals. On the day we removed the gazebo the wind finally died down a little and we settled down for another meal. We started with some Padron peppers and some baby corn (so much nicer than full grown sweetcorn) followed by a couple of small steaks and some kofta kebabs with some French wine to wash it all down. It was almost but not quite like being on one of our French holidays.

The next day it was raining and normal British weather had resumed. The ‘heatwave’ was over.

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5 Things that Happened in July

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I published a post quite a while ago about the month of January. January of course is cold and believe me, I hate the cold so I thought I’d get a lot of cold and chilly feelings off my chest by writing about my least favourite time of the year. Today I’m going to go the opposite way and write about the month of July, generally the warmest month of the year. In fact the warmest month ever recorded was July 2023 according to a survey by scientists at NASA, the US space agency.

The Battle of the Somme July 1916

On the first of July, 1916, the Battle of the Somme began. It was an attempt by combined French and British forces to attack the German held lines by the river Somme in northern France during the First World War. The first day was the worst day in British military history with 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of which were men who were killed. The battle continued for another four months and the total casualties for both sides were over 1.5 million. The battle ended in November of 1916 with allied forces only making an advance of some 7 miles.

In March of 1917 the German forces drew back to the Hindenburg line and began to increase U Boat attacks on British shipping in an effort to starve the British into defeat. This however only spurred the entry of the Americans into the war in April 1917.

A few years ago, Liz and I visited the Somme and we saw a crater which is supposed to be the biggest crater of the First World War. It’s called the crater of Lochnagar and back in 1916 the 179th Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers had burrowed under the German lines and laid down huge explosive charges. They were detonated at 07.28 on the morning of July 1st. The British expected the Germans to have been wiped out by this and a huge artillery barrage but they were sadly mistaken.

Wilson44691, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today the crater is still there. I had expected it to have perhaps become a lake but no. It’s a deep depression in the ground surrounded by wooden walking boards, many of which have the names of deceased soldiers inscribed on them.

The Trent and Mersey Canal 1766

The canal system of Great Britain was probably the shortest lasting transport revolution ever. After only a few years the railway revolution began and suddenly, the canal system was old technology. Parliament authorised the construction of various canals in 1766, one of them being the Trent and Mersey Canal. Construction began in July of that year and it was designed by James Brindley to link the rivers Mersey, Trent, Severn and Thames. It was completed in 1777.

Canals were built for the efficient transport of goods and raw materials during the Industrial revolution although shortly afterwards the new railways became the primary method of transporting goods and of course passengers.

Today the canal system in the UK is primarily one of leisure and holiday boating and many people like me have become interested in canals through TV programmes like Canal Boat Diaries. The show is a sort of video diary by a boater called Robbie Cummings who takes his viewers on a gentle meander through the canals of the UK. I’ve always found it an enjoyable and relaxing show although when I last looked into hiring a canal boat it was super expensive. Maybe one day though.

Execution of the Romanov Family, July 1918

The Romanov family, Czar Nicholas II and his family, were shot and bayoneted to death on the night of the 16th/17th July 1917. The Soviets were worried that the family might be rescued by the anti-revolutionary forces known as the ‘Whites’.

After the revolution the royal family had been moved to various places but in 1917 ended up at ‘The House of Special Purpose’ in Yekaterinburg. Friendly guards had been replaced by non-Russians who were chosen to murder the family.

On the night of the 16th July, the family were told that they were to be relocated because of the impending arrival of pro-monarchist forces. They were asked to assemble in the basement where they were all shot. Many survived the shooting because of diamonds and other jewellery sewn into their clothes and so the murderers were forced to use bayonets to finish off those still alive. The bodies were then dumped into a mine shaft. Later it was realised that the shaft was not deep enough so the bodies were extricated and transferred to another one.

The bodies were discovered many years later by a local amateur researcher in 1979 but he kept his discovery a secret until the fall of the Soviet Union. The bodies were removed and identified using DNA. They were eventually laid to rest in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg.

Picture courtesy Wikipedia Commons

Various people have claimed to be survivors of the murders, notably Anna Anderson who claimed to be Anastasia. DNA testing later proved she was not related to the Romanov family but was actually a woman named Franziska Schanzkowska.

Others have claimed to be Tatiana, Anastasia’s sister and also Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, the only son of the Tsar. Alexei suffered from haemophilia, a condition in which the blood does not clot so it is unlikely that he survived the shooting. Interestingly though, Alexei and one of his sisters were discovered separately from the rest of the family in 2007.

The Ipatiev house where the family were murdered –the house of special purpose- was demolished in 1977 by Boris Yeltsin on the orders of the Politburo as it was attracting people who came to pay their respects to the Romanovs. Later when Yeltsin became president, he ordered a memorial church to be built on the site.

A famous film Anastasia was released in 1956 starring Ingrid Bergman as Anastasia and Yul Brynner as a man trying to use her to gain access to the Romanov millions stored in a British bank. Funnily enough, it’s a film I have not seen for years but after writing this passage I noticed it was coming up on TV so I recorded it and watched it the following evening.

The Moon Landing July 1969

The moon landing was one of the very first historical events that I actually felt a part of. In July 1969 I was 12 years old and on the morning of the 20th of July my mother had woken me up as usual for school. I came downstairs in my pyjamas for breakfast and to my utter amazement there was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon over on mum’s black and white television set. How my mother got me away from that TV set and off to school I’ll never know because at the time I read and watched everything I could about the US space program.

Believe it or not, many people today refuse to accept that Armstrong and Aldrin actually did walk on the moon that day. Many armchair ‘experts’ will call attention to photos from the lunar surface and explain that they were fakes because of various anomalies. On TikTok I recently watched a video in which a man swears his father was a security guard at a secret base where the moon landing was filmed. On YouTube there is a video where someone tries to get Armstrong to swear on the bible that he went to the moon. Neil Armstrong declined. Why? Was it because he didn’t go to the moon? Why did he retire from NASA so early? Was he ashamed about his continuing lies?

My personal verdict: Baloney. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in July 1969 in an incredible feat of exploration and bravery and as for refusing to swear on the bible about it, why should he?

The British Grand Prix

The first ever British Grand Prix was held in 1926 at Brooklands, one of the world’s first ever purpose-built racing tracks. Brooklands had an oval configuration and was famous for its banked corners. The track was also an airfield and during the two world wars Brooklands was taken over by the military for aircraft production. After 1945 the racing circuit was in poor condition and Brooklands was sold to the Vickers-Armstrong Company as a base for aircraft production. Motor sport was unable to return to Brooklands especially as after 1951, a four-lane road was built through the track area.

Giuseppe-Farina (Image from Motorsport Magazine fair use commons)

The current Formula One World Championship actually began at Silverstone in 1950 with the very first world championship Grand Prix. The first Silverstone British Grand Prix however was held two years earlier in 1948 when motor sport began again after the second world war. Luigi Villoresi won in 1948 in a Maserati but the 1950 race, round one in the new World Championship, was won by Giuseppe Farina.

This year, 2025, the British Grand Prix was held on the 6th of July and once again provided an exciting race with Lando Norris giving the fans another British winner after his team mate was given a controversial ten second penalty.

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