Author Archives: Steve Higgins

F1 Racing in 2016: A Personal Look Back.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

ferrari-96052_1280Formula One racing isn’t the sport it used to be. Well, it’s certainly different from what I used to enjoy as a schoolboy. Still, I’ve followed the sport since I was twelve or thirteen and it’s hard to break the habit of a lifetime so here’s a personal look back at the 2016 season.

One thing I’ve always supported in motor racing is the underdog. I love it when some underrated car or driver pulls out something extraordinary and beats the top men at their own game. 2016 would have been a wonderful year if Nico Hulkenberg could have produced a win, or one of the Saubers.  That long-awaited debut win from Valtery Bottas would have been – and will be when it happens- wonderful. Sadly, with the levels of technological advancement in F1 these days you don’t see new boys in under-financed teams win very often. Bottas is a great driver but he reminds me a little of Jean Alesi, another great driver who always seemed to me to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He left Tyrell when they had put together a great car. He arrived at Ferrari when they were on a downslide. He spent his career there waiting for a championship winning car but it never happened, until Schumacher arrived bringing with him Ross Braun and Rory Byrne from Benetton, his old team’s top technical men.

It seems to me that in recent years, the top cars come out top, no matter what. In times gone by in F1 the also rans were in with a chance when the rains came down. The cars with bigger and better horsepower didn’t have such an advantage in the wet and a great driver in a underpowered car could make a name for himself. Circuits like Monaco where aerodynamic wings don’t help so much favour the underpowered cars. Or at least they did in days gone by like when Stirling Moss in his underpowered Cooper won that glamorous event in 1961. These days, come what may, it’s pretty much the same cars at the front and the same cars at the back. The Mercedes of Rosberg and Hamilton are the class of the field and the blue cars of Manor Racing are bringing up the rear, just like Minardi used to do some years ago. I have to say, Pascal Wehrlein looked pretty formidable on a few occasions but not enough to challenge the top boys.

I read something a while ago, somewhere in an old racing magazine, that the top drivers will always gravitate to the top cars. It’s a rule of motor sporting life. Senna rose up to take his place at McLaren when they were the big cheese of F1 racing. So did Mansell at Williams, Schumacher at Ferrari, Clark at Lotus and so on. Alonso seems to be the exception to that rule though. Fast and talented, he was unhappy at Ferrari, broke free from his contract there and fell for assurances from Ron Dennis at McLaren that a partnership with Honda would return him and McLaren to the winners fold. Perhaps it will one day, but these last two seasons have seen Alonso looking more and more frustrated at the slow pace of development at Honda.

2017 will be a make or break year for McLaren Honda and will finally tell if they have scaled the heights they need to scale or if Mercedes will continue on the highly successful course they began charting some years ago. One casualty already from Honda’s lack of success has been Ron Dennis, removed from his rightful place as CEO of McLaren by a boardroom battle. Ron, to my mind, is one of the greats of Formula one, up there with Enzo Ferrari and Colin Chapman. His departure shows just how much the sport, and McLaren, has changed. McLaren has moved into the world of corporate business and shareholders and Ron has been bitten by the entity he was instrumental in creating.

Once again Mercedes came out top in the F1 world championship but this time it was Nico Rosberg who took the world crown, beating team-mate Hamilton by only a handful of points. Rosberg threw the gauntlet down at Lewis Hamilton’s feet towards the end of 2015 and began a highly successful break of seven wins in a row, continuing into 2016 and it was this momentum that took him, by a whisker, to the 2016 championship. A few days later he stunned the F1 world by announcing his retirement. Few things shock me in modern F1 but I have to say I wasn’t expecting that, in fact I can only think of two drivers who retired when at the absolute top of their game. One was Mika Hakkinen whose sabbatical petered out into full retirement in 2002, the other being Jackie Stewart, a master of both his career and his driving. Stewart retired at the end of 1973, not starting his 100th Grand Prix, saddened by the death of team-mate François Cevert in the US Grand Prix practice.

Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons

Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons

It’s interesting though that the vacancy in what is currently Formula one’s premier team is causing a mass of speculation. Alonso is a man who would relish that seat but would McLaren and Honda free him from his contract? Bottas too has been mooted as a possible replacement but it seems Williams have vetoed that idea, turning down a £5 million sweetener from Mercedes to facilitate the deal. Who will Hamilton’s 2017 team-mate be I wonder? As I write this it seems increasingly certain Bottas will be driving the Mercedes and therefore perhaps he will soon be enjoying his first win.

The Spanish Grand Prix of 2016 was an interesting race. Hamilton and Rosberg clashed and Verstappen, newly promoted to Red Bull at the expense of Daniil Kvyat won his maiden Grand Prix. He excelled too in the rain at the Brazilian Grand Prix looking every inch a star of the future.

Anyway, after all the hype, Rosberg has emerged as the world champion. Hamilton certainly deserved a fourth world title but equally, I think Rosberg deserved a first one.  Why did he retire? Well he is a young man with a lot of money in the bank and a young family. Perhaps it was time to devote more of himself to his wife and children. Perhaps the allure of racing motor cars had begun to lose its lustre. Who knows, but Rosberg has joined two other retirees this year – Philipe Massa and Jensen Button – although it seems Massa may be asked to stay on for another year at Williams if Bottas goes to Mercedes.

This was the first year of Channel Four’s terrestrial coverage. As a purely armchair F1 fan I enjoyed it, mostly. As I said earlier, Formula One isn’t the sport it used to be. It’s now a million dollar soap opera stage-managed by Bernie Ecclestone but even he may have had his day when new investors Liberty Media begin to flex their corporate muscles. I wonder if Bernie and his wealthy colleagues will spend some of Formula one’s millions by allowing the recently bankrupt Manor team to continue in F1?

Not on your life!

Do I care? Will I be even watching F1 next year?

Well, why change the habit of a lifetime?

If you liked this post, why not try my book Floating In Space set in Manchester, 1977? Click the links at the top of the page for more information or take a quick peek at the video below:

https://vimeo.com/167454098

 

 

 

My 10 Best Posts of 2016

Posted on by Steve Higgins

best posts 2016It’s that time of year again when we look back and take stock of what we did in the last twelve months and try to arrange everything neatly, tidy things up, add labels and pop everything onto the shelf of past memories before it gets consigned to the distant past. Bloggers are pretty much the same and I thought I might be a good idea to look back at my last twelve months of blogging.

I started 2016 by flying to Lanzarote for some winter sun and a welcome break from cold and wintry Britain. The Marina Rubicon in Lanzarote was lovely and warm, very much like a mild UK summer. The temperature was in the 70s (that’s Fahrenheit, sorry, I don’t do metric) and Liz and I spent a lovely five weeks swimming, sunbathing, reading and dining out in the restaurants and bars of the Marina. The evenings were a little cool I must admit but we dined outside every night, either at our rented villa or at a local eating place. Sometimes a fleece over the shoulders was necessary, sometimes not. I had taken with me my trusty laptop and I-Pad of course and kept myself busy blogging, promoting my book, Floating In Space and, supposedly, writing the follow-up novel. Alas, the follow-up never materialised but, what the heck, we had a great time anyway.

1.Being an avid TV viewer I had a post in the pipeline already, written in advance just in case of Wi-Fi issues on holiday. It was called M*A*S*H and the Emotional Leap Indicator. M*A*S*H is the star contender for my favourite comedy show ever and a show that is close to my writing ethic; that of combining humour with drama, and in this post I go on to analyse and talk about a comedy show that is funny as well as sad and routinely combines humour with tragedy.

2016-01-28 (2)ed2.While on holiday in Lanzarote, I did one of my usual posts, My Holiday Book Bag. I do love books and this is one of a series talking about the books I take on holiday. The idea stemmed from reading a biography of Richard Burton, who had a voracious appetite for books and always took a book bag away on holiday with him. On this occasion I’d thought I’d go one step further and make the post into a VLOG, a video blog, with me sitting in front of the camera giving out a good old rabbit about the various books I had with me. Later this spawned another blog, Making the VLOG about the whole experience of filming, narrating and so on.

IMGA03533.Whilst on the subject of books, I wrote a post about Marilyn Monroe books back in July. It was called 10 Books you should read about Marilyn Monroe. I have a large collection of books about Marilyn and in this post I introduced ten of them. Michelle Morgan, the author of Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed was kind enough to add a comment on the post.

4.During 2016 I’ve had a few health issues particularly with my back and my neck. I first hurt my neck over ten years ago and I don’t have a lot of mobility in that area but I told the story of my visits to the doctor, my diagnosis and experience of physiotherapists in Lost Horizon, Samsara and a Visit to the Doctor.

5.I regularly write posts about writing and how I work as a writer and blogger and a pretty good post about how I manage my blogging life was Bankers, Potboilers and J Edgar Hoover.

6.You may have realised as you troll through this blog that I do like my TV. Not any TV of course. I like my classic TV from the 60’s and 70’s. I like sci-fi and espionage shows and I adore old movies. I’m a great recorder too, regularly recording and watching stuff which I tend to watch in batches, sometimes watching part of a movie one day then the second part another day. Aliens, Frank Sinatra and Three Days in the life of a Couch Potato documented my TV watching habits.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

7.Bicycles, Barry White, and a Man with a Chip on his Shoulder was a nostalgic look back at my younger days when I forced my younger brother to take part in sketches and plays I had written, all recorded on cassette tape for posterity. Music came into the equation when a teenage friend and I recorded interviews with each other discussing our top twelve records. Once again, faithfully recorded on tape!

8.American politics is one of my great interests and Howard Hughes and the Watergate Tapes discussed billionaire Hughes involvement with President Nixon and the Watergate affair.

9.Thoughts from a Sun Lounger Part 4 was written on holiday in France and is part of a series revealing the various musings that have come to me while indulging in one of my favourite experiences, that of lazing in the sun on a sun lounger. This post amongst other things involves another instalment about physiotherapists!

a so called writer!10. The Holiday Diary of a So-Called Writer. This was another post written on holiday in rural France. It was about my efforts, as a writer, to focus on writing rather than reading, swimming, drinking wine and eating and might go some small way to explaining why a follow-up novel to Floating In Space has yet to appear.

Last year, 2016, I published my 200th blog post. Although I tend to focus on books, film, and TV I write about almost anything that comes to mind, always focussing on that Saturday morning deadline. Customer service, Cillit Bang, Captain Kirk and the Beatles were just a few of the diverse subjects I posted about in 2016. I also wrote about my long-term love of F1 racing in Confessions of an Armchair F1 Fan.

Hope you had a great Christmas. All the very best for 2017 and if you are an avid reader and you find yourself stuck for something to read, why not try Floating In Space? Click the links at the top of the page for more information.

my novel

Christmas TV, Quiz Shows and the Hand of Friendship

Posted on by Steve Higgins

card_232fd1b24b_oTV this Christmas wasn’t particularly great but I did watch a few things. One film I was looking forward to watching was the Lady in the Van, a mostly true story about a bag lady, in a van, who came to live outside playwright Alan Bennett’s home in London. Bennett takes pity on the lady and lets her move the van into his drive when parking restrictions force her to relocate. He combines her story with that of his relationship with his mother but the odd thing about the film is that Bennett gives himself two personas, one Alan Bennett the writer and the other Alan Bennett who is experiencing all these events. The two even confer together. This did confuse me at first but I eventually worked it out. Not a brilliant film but original.

On Boxing day I contrived to watch two films together, not by recording one and watching the other later as you might think but simply by flicking over between the two channels at an appropriate moment. Uncle Buck is one of those rubbish formulaic American films that I have to describe as not only a load of old tosh but also a rather fun film. Sometimes bad is good, if you know what I mean. Uncle Buck is about an American family who need an emergency babysitter, well, family sitter, for a few days. They find the only option is the unreliable out of work brother played by John Candy. He arrives in his old car pumping out smoke and oil. He charms the younger kids but the teenage daughter is something of a problem. I found myself a little bored part way through so it was time for a quick switch over to watch that classic John Ford western The Searchers. If you have never seen this movie, which I cannot for a moment believe, it’s about settlers in the old west who find their daughter has been taken by Indians after a raid. John Wayne and his part Indian nephew played by Jeffrey Hunter, start tracking the Indians across the west and it is only after many years that they find themselves face to face with Scar, the Indian chief, and their long-lost sister and niece Debbie, played by a young Natalie Wood.

I missed a huge chunk of Uncle Buck because I became too interested in The Searchers but I managed to tune in at the end where Uncle Buck sorts out ‘Bug’ the teenage girl’s cheating boyfriend and in doing so makes friends with the girl. Uncle Buck is a great film to watch when you’re tired and not really paying attention and I always get the feeling it was written by a sort of committee of writers. (Probably the same committee that wrote Home Alone and Three Men and a Baby and so on.) I remember once seeing a documentary about the US sitcom Friends. The show is not one of my favourite programmes but in the documentary they showed how Friends was recorded in front of a live audience. If a bit of business didn’t quite work out, the recording was stopped while a whole bunch of writers and producers had a chat about things. Then a new line or even a section of dialogue was inserted or some of the action was changed. That was then run past the live audience. If it still wasn’t quite right the laughter track was updated to fill in. Writing by committee, interesting. .

Another film I watched was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Ben Stiller as the title character. Mitty was actually a pretty good film. I missed a section in the middle when I turned over to watch a bit of Uncle Buck on plus 1 that I had missed earlier but it was a well-produced film, not hilarious but interesting. I did come away from the film though wondering whether the magazine ‘Life’ had paid to be featured in the film (a prime example of product placement) or whether the movie producers paid Life for the use of the magazine in the film.

Dr Who was relegated to the TV recorder but Liz and I watched our favourite soap Coronation Street on Christmas day. Hey, we’re northern people and Corrie is our representation in the TV world. Whilst on the subject of the north in the media I have to say one of the attractions of Coronation Street is seeing and hearing people talk the way I talk and do the things I do and live in a place I was brought up in. Certain ‘northern’ films like Educating Rita annoy me so much. It’s supposed to be set in Liverpool although the only authentic scouse accent is that of Julie Walters. Her screen husband has some kind of bland accent that’s a cross between a brummie and something else and all around are various southern and northern brogues all mixed together. I suppose the producers or director were from London and assumed that those of us up here in the ‘north’ would all understand it. Actually, that confusion of accents in the film destroys its credibility. I believe it was shot in Ireland so why not make everyone Irish? Surely a better solution to the mish-mash of accents that ruin the film. OK rant over. Back to Christmas.

I had to work on Boxing day but the drive to work was a real pleasure. I leave home at 5am to get to work in time for my shift at six and generally, the M6  is pretty busy at that time.  I find these days that the rush hour starts very early and more and more people are travelling further to their places of work. Boxing Day though was a different story, just me and a few others travelling to work.

SpitfireOn Wednesday I changed to the night shift and spent a few hours during the day with Harry and Theo, Liz’s grandsons. We went out to the park and then had a drive down to the ‘front’ in St Annes. Many holiday towns seem to look a little forlorn out of the holiday season. A prime example is Blackpool, a few miles further up the road. It looks like a tired film set waiting for the actors and cameramen to return and brighten it up again. St Annes though is a lovely, friendly town that looks good to me whatever the season. Along the front we passed the Spitfire aircraft, mounted on a tall plinth looking just like it was taking off over the sand. The other day on a TV quiz show one of the questions concerned the Spitfire which must surely have a prime place in the annals of British history. This icon of the skies was the backbone of the RAF in the dark days of 1940 and the lady on the Chase  or Tipping Point or whatever quiz it was, who had never heard of a Spitfire, was the brunt of a shower of abuse which I directed at her through the medium of my TV screen. Never heard of a Spitfire? What was she even doing on a quiz show?

Despite this being the season of goodwill it is still saddening to see images of the war in Syria on the TV news. I sometimes wonder what would happen if just one soldier would put down his rifle and hold out his hand in friendship. Would it catch on? Imagine ten soldiers, then twenty, then a hundred, then thousands following suit until an unstoppable wave of peace and fellowship begins to spread. Imagine a huge wave of harmony circulating like some oddball YouTube video going viral all around the world shaming all those who want war and strife.

One last thought about that hand of friendship. My old dad was a man who left school at fourteen with not much in the way of education. He worked on farms in the then rural area of Wythenshawe where I was brought up. He was a great reader though and whenever he started a new book he would prepare a cardboard bookmark, fashioned out of a cereal box or whatever came to hand and on it he would write down any word he came across in the book that he didn’t know. Then he would look up that word and write down the definition in his notebook. He added all sorts of things to that book. Words, phrases, lines of poetry, names of famous people and so on. One of the quotations he noted was this: A closed fist is a closed mind. An open hand is an open mind.

All I need now is a quiet day to watch Eight Days a Week, the Beatles movie directed by Ron Howard that Liz gave me for Christmas and a spare week to watch the bumper Doctor Who DVD bundle that I won on e-Bay the other day.

Happy Christmas and all the best for 2017!

Floating In Space is a novel by Steve Higgins set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page for more information.

Christmas and why Women Should do the Cleaning!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-jpg-61Men are just not cut out for cleaning. OK, it’s a fact. I’m not being sexist or anything but there it is, just a cold hard fact. It’s just not in the male make up. Women are far better qualified to do the job. Here’s an example. I remember one far off Christmas spent with my former wife in our small home in Newton Le Willows. I had some time owing me so I had taken a few days off after Christmas. It had not been a great Christmas as it was the first one since my wife’s mother had died and she had sadly put the previous year’s Christmas card from her mother in pride of place right on the top of the TV.

Anyway, everyone was getting used to going back to work and there was me, who had worked during Christmas, knackered, worn out and ready for a break. I spent one day with my brother having a nice post-Christmas drink in Manchester and the next day I was relaxing, catching up on some TV of the type hated by my wife, yes, sci fi stuff, Star Trek, black and white films and so on and then a revelation came to me. What if I took down the decorations, got rid of the tree, chucked out the rubbish? There were piles of wrapping paper and empty bottles about and so on. I could actually come out of this looking good for once. Anyway, there and then I just got stuck straight in. I took the tree down, packed away all the ornaments and decorations and put the box back in the loft. The tree was chopped up and placed in the correct bin, the green one.

All the papers, wrapping paper and empty chocolate boxes and stuff were all removed and placed in the correct bin, (Don’t want to upset those hard working bin men by putting stuff in the wrong bins do we?) Old Christmas cards dumped into the brown bins.

After that a quick hoover up and a sort out of the furniture, all put back in its proper place.

Well, I think I worked up a bit of a sweat there as I remember. Great! Time now for a well-deserved cuppa, a bacon butty and get that black and white movie I recorded the other day cranked up.

As I sat there watching Ronald Colman I could hear the sound of the bin men reversing down the avenue. Yes, my trusty van was on the drive, well out of the bin wagon’s way. (I don’t want to cast a slur on the bin wagon driver but accidents had been known to occur. And there was that incident last year when my next door neighbour had the affrontery to park a huge transit van in the road making access difficult for the bin wagon so, well they just refused to come up the drive and empty our bins.) I had placed all the bins down by the end of the drive just within easy picking up distance for the bin men. (Can’t have them walking all the way up the drive to get the bins can we?)

Just then my wife came in through the door, I stood there foolishly thinking she would be happy and waiting for the praise that was bound to come my way. I hadn’t spent my day self-indulgently doing ‘my’ stuff. I had cleaned and tidied. I had helped. Hadn’t I?

My wife took one look at the tidy lounge then looked at me and said in a sort of scary accusatory sort of way: “What have you done?”

Well, I thought it was pretty obvious what had been done but just then the reversing horn of the approaching bin wagon set off a warning bell. What was wrong? The tree was in the correct bin. The plastic stuff and empty bottles in the glass and plastic bin. The paper stuff, the Christmas cards were all in the paper bin. The Christmas cards . .

I legged it outside just in the nick of time to dive into the paper bin just as the binman was about to empty it. Sprawled across the bin I rummaged frantically through the cardboard and wrapping paper and retrieved my late mother in law’s card from certain destruction.

‘Afternoon’ I said nonchalantly to the bin men. They just looked at me with that ‘it’s that nutter from number 4’ look on their faces. Back inside my wife grabbed the card from my hand with a lethal black look and it was then that we became aware of a certain amount of what appeared to be tomato soup that had somehow attached itself to the card. Now, where that had come from I do not know, I had not even eaten tomato soup that day (although perhaps I did throw a used tin of the stuff in the rubbish.) Oh well, at least my quick thinking had rescued the card!

So, that was that, my good deed had backfired and there was I, thinking I had helped but the fact of the matter is I hadn’t helped at all. I should have just left the tidying up to her then she could have moaned at me for sitting on my behind watching TV all day and everything would have been OK and the card that was a tangible connection to her late mum at Christmas would have been safe and free from tomato soup stains.

Anyway, think on male readers. If you are considering cleaning up over Christmas, think again!

If you liked this post, why not consider buying my book? Click the links at the top of the page for more information. Thanks for looking in and have a great Christmas!

10 Signs that You are Getting Old

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This has been a funny kind of year for me because I’ve never really thought about my age, well, not until now that is. I’ve certainly never considered myself old until that one day, some months ago when I hit 60. So what then are the signs? What is it that tells you, this is it, you are finally getting old?30823347274_23da8df41d_b

1. You have insured your car with Saga.

2. You’re in Sainsbury’s and you recognise the piped music as something you bought on vinyl in 1975 which reached no 3 in the charts.

3. You are idly watching TV, playing with your left ear then find a three-inch hair growing out of it!

4. You remark jokingly to a young person that you once had more hair than Roy Wood from Wizzard and just get a blank look!

5. You remember when your family had a coal fire!

6. People call at 9 PM and ask ‘did I wake you?’

7. You check out the music singles chart and don’t recognise a single artist.

8. Things that used to be boring are now actually interesting, like crosswords.

9. In a hostage situation, you will be one of the first ones released.

10. Someone who loves you sends you a birthday card like this:

img_0389

I hope you enjoyed this post, if you did why not try my book, Floating In Space? Click the links at the top of the page for more information.

The Soundtrack to my Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The soundtrack to my life? What’s that all about? Well, quite simply it’s music. I don’t know about you but I’ve been a music fan all my life and I have always bought records of one sort or another. Vinyl singles and albums, cassette tapes, CDs and yes, even the occasional download.

picmonkey-imageMy Christmas present in 1972, my shared present I might add, which I shared with my brother, was a record player. I don’t actually remember getting any records to play on it though but a few days afterwards I bought a collection of TV and film themes by John Barry in the post Christmas sales.. Barry scored the early Bond films and wrote the theme from the Persuaders, the 70’s TV show starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. So much is that record built into my memory that whenever I hear the tune from the Persuaders, it’s not Curtis and Moore that comes to mind but that small portable record player that spent much of its life in the bedroom that my brother and I shared many years ago.

31436280925_c1d7ff01eb_oThe first single I ever bought was by my childhood heart-throb Olivia Newton-John. I actually bought two singles together, The Banks of the Ohio and What is life. A single back in 1973 cost thirty-eight pence if I remember correctly and as both those singles had dropped out of the charts I was able to get the two singles for half price, nineteen pence each. Olivia Newton-John started out as a country/folk singer but found greater fame as John Travolta’s co-star in the hit movie Grease. Sorry Olivia but Grease just didn’t do it for me.

Olivia Newton-JohnI’ve never been one for albums, I’m much more of a singles man but in the 1970s I was very fond of Elton John’s music. When I first heard his records I just assumed he was an American so I was pretty surprised to find he was English and hailed from Pinner in Middlesex. His first hit single was ‘Your Song’ from his second album, Elton John but the first album I bought was ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. Elton worked closely with lyricist Bernie Taupin to produce some memorable songs. Taupin wrote the lyrics in the fashion of poems, passed them over to Elton who worked them into a song, which is the way they work together today some five decades later. I still have all my Elton John albums but after Elton made Rock Of The Westies I lost interest in his music a little. In the CD era I picked up some of my favourites of his music on CD and I have found some of his newer work that I really like, in particular Made In England which must count to me as one of his best ever albums.

img_0142Back in my single buying days a work colleague lent me his copy of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. I didn’t really fancy it but my friend was insistent that I would love it and he was right. The idea of a whole album telling a single story including snippets of dialogue and sound effects is brilliant. I copied the album onto cassette tape and today I have two CD versions, one for in the home and one for my car.

It seems to me sometimes that back in the 70’s buying music was so easy. Hear a record on the radio, go out to the record shop and buy it; job done. Nowadays when I sometimes watch music videos channels like the Box, I hear something I like but there are no music stores to visit to buy the recording. Not only that, when and if you find one, they’ve never heard of the track that you noted down! Actually its much easier to just go online and search for the music you want and then its just a few clicks to download. However, I’m not convinced a download is what  I really want. I want something physical, something I can pick up and look at, something with sleeve notes and inserts, that’s what I used to love about vinyl albums.

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

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

So, back to the present. The other week I was watching a programme on BBC 4 about Kate Bush. It was all pretty interesting and seemed to portray a Kate Bush that was a whole world apart from babooshka babooshka and Kath-ee,  let me in at your window, the slightly scary Kate Bush that I remember from the seventies and eighties.

I did an online search and on e-Bay I found myself three fairly cheap CDs. 1: The Sensual World. (Sorry Kate, this didn’t do it for me at all.) 2: The Red Shoes. (Pretty good, nice album.)  3: Aerial. Now this was more like it. A cracking double CD. Actually more chill out than the Kate Bush of the seventies I’m used to hearing. It has not been off my in-car stereo since I bought it. It’s a fabulous album full of exciting rhythms and sounds.

aerialSo, what music do you have on the soundtrack to your life?

If you liked this post, why not try my book Floating In Space set in Manchester, 1977? Click the links at the top of the page for more information or have a peek at the video below:

Where have all the Celebrities Gone?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Some thoughts on celebrities from my sick bed.

This past couple of weeks have not been a good time for me. The onset of the winter months always seems to send me into something of a slight downer and one of the side effects of having long holidays is that you have to do a long stint at work without a break.

quotescover-jpg-41Last week I picked up a vomiting bug from Liz that came from her grandson Harry via her daughter Tania and finally to me. I only had one day off work but I felt so tired that I booked off my night shifts. I thought great, some time off to write and do those Floating In Space updates I keep talking about and relax a little. As it happens I was really tired and in hindsight I see I was sickening for a nasty flu bug which forced me to throw in a couple of sick days at work the week after.
Lying in bed sneezing and wrapped up in my dressing gown I took in some serious amounts of daytime TV and of course numerous whisky lemsips which as all men know is the only sure fire way to sort out a raging death’s door bout of man flu.

I spent a lot of time watching things like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. The show with its group of so-called celebrities (I recognised three of them) stranded in the Australian Jungle is vaguely entertaining, although more due to hosts Ant and Dec than anything else.

That’s when I realised that the twenty first century is the time of the non-celebrity celebrity. Yes, those famous but unknown people like Kim Kardasian whose pictures are to be found all over social media as they seek to extend their fifteen minutes of fame into sixteen, seventeen and even twenty minutes. To me, it is one of the mysteries of the twenty-first century. Who is Kim Kardashian? What does she do? Why is she famous?

It seems to me that these non-celebrity celebrities are the root cause of a crisis affecting U.K. TV. The fact is that there are just not enough celebrities to go round!

Many TV shows have been hit by the celebrity crisis especially I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. The new series recently aired in the U.K. with only two or three celebrities and numerous unknown persons. I have always considered myself something of a TV buff, in fact I’d even consider myself to be a major TV couch potato but then, one genre that has never interested me is the TV reality genre. The Only Way is Essex and other similar TV shows are to me, just a reason to switch off TV but the crazy thing is this, they are easy to make, cheap and some people somewhere must be watching them. Also, consider this, these reality shows are the direct breeding ground for today’s non celebrity celebs! So how can the celeb crisis be resolved?

img_0376Easy, we can just use the new non celebrity celebs and pass them off as real celebs! I don’t know if I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here passes as a reality show, I suppose it does in a way but the current series stars three celebrities I actually recognise. Carol Vorderman, the former numbers and letters lady from countdown is one. Larry Lamb is another, an actor I’ve seen in various TV shows. I don’t actually watch Eastenders but I believe he has a part in that. The third one is Martin Roberts, the guy from a daytime property show I have occasionally watched when nothing else worthwhile is on. There is also some guy from Emmerdale (don’t watch it) some comedian (never heard of him) a girl from Gogglebox (what?) a footballer (hate football) and, well some other people I don’t know. Wonder if the producers have ever tried to get people of the calibre of Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks? I did notice Hanks on a UK TV talk show the other week so surely that’s not such a remote possibility. Maybe if Hanks decided to make a sequel to the movie Castaway it would be a good publicity stunt to appear on I’m a celebrity? (Gosh, I should have been in PR!)

The Chase and Tipping Point all have produced celebrity versions of their shows and the lack of celebs has affected those programmes too. Tipping point had TV presenter Jenni Falconer (who?) and Dancing on Ice judge Jason Gardiner (?) on board. Not exactly in the Tom Cruise bracket but, hey ho. The Chase secured the services of TV presenter Matt Allwright, singer Stacey Solomon, newsreader Louise Minchin and actor Keith Allen to take on the Chaser to win money for charity. At least they also had Bradley Walsh who must count as a ‘proper’ celeb.

Another quiz show with celebrities is 8 out of 10 Cats. Their line-up is a regular one with Jimmy Carr hosting and comedians Sean Lock and Jon Richardson as team captains. A great move for the show was to combine it with Countdown, the channel 4 quiz show and so the show has become 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown! The introduction of this format along with Rachel Riley, the letters and numbers host from ‘proper’ countdown, has made for a really funny TV show but now it’s time to go one step further. Yes, you’ve guessed it. 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown Does I’m a Celebrity- Get me out of here!

Yes, I think it’s time to dust off that TV producer’s chair for me; I’ve finally solved the celebrity crisis!

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Adventures on eBay!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

ebayOn eBay a while ago I came across a listing for a razor handle for a pound. I remember thinking at the time what plonker is going to even think about buying that? Well, more about that later. Still, there are a huge amount of crazy things on eBay, things like broken items for instance. Quite a few times I’ve come across something on eBay at a fraction of its usual value. That’s where you have to stop and take a closer look. Check the small print because many times you will find something like ‘not working’ or ‘for parts only.’ That’s right, your old mobile phone packs up -flog it on eBay because somewhere, there is someone either collecting broken mobiles or using the parts to fix other broken mobiles and re selling them to make money. Of course it could just be some weirdo who collects broken phones, who knows?

Not long ago, my partner Liz, asked me to bid on a dress or a top on eBay and ever since I have been getting e-mails from eBay advising me about even more ladies dresses and tops. I also bought an iPad on eBay so now I’m inundated with emails about iPads for sale. Pay attention eBay, – I’ve already bought an iPad. I don’t need another! And please stop sending me emails about ladies dresses!

I do love old movies and eBay is the perfect place to find them. Yes, enter a film title into the search page, click on movies and DVDs and within a few moments there will be the DVD you are after. You can search by price, by time left to the end of the auction or by distance to your home but if the movie is on DVD and is out there, you will find a copy. Here are a few of my e-bay buys, some successful, some not so . .

High Noon.

I picked up a very cheap copy of this on e-bay a while ago. No cover or box, just the disc in a plastic wallet and I parted with just £1.60 for my purchase. High Noon is the story of a small town sheriff who has just got married. He is about to hand over to a new sheriff due to arrive the next day when he hears that the murderer, Frank Miller – the man he sent to prison when he cleaned up the town – is on his way back and gunning for revenge.

The sheriff played by Gary Cooper has just married the lovely Grace Kelly, but how can he leave when the killer, along with his gang, plans to get him when he arrives on the noon train? If he leaves, the gang may hijack him out in the country, so the sheriff reasons his best bet is to stay in town and fight it out on his own turf. However, for one reason or another, the help he is hoping for from the town’s residents fails to appear and Cooper must face the men alone. The movie counts down relentlessly towards noon with the memorable sound in the background of ‘Do not forsake me oh my darling’ sung by Tex Ritter.

I mentioned this to my brother the other day and he related a story my Dad had told him. My Dad saw the film during his army days in Hong Kong. The film was shown in a corrugated Nissen hut and afterwards when everyone had left the hut all that my Dad could hear was his fellow soldiers humming and whistling the theme song.

The Ghost and Mrs Muir.

By Trailer screenshot (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir trailer) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

By Trailer screenshot (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir trailer) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This is a movie that I could add to a previous blog, one about movies rarely seen on TV. I have seen it on TV though, some years ago. Mrs Muir is played by Hollywood star Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison is perfect as the formidable sea captain whose ghost scares off all occupants of the cottage his former living self once inhabited. Mrs Muir – a widow who longs to live by the sea – defies him and after a while the ghostly sea captain begins to fall for his mortal tenant. Money problems beset Mrs Muir but the captain decides to dictate his memoirs to her in the hope that when published, his tales of seafaring will make enough money for her to buy the house. This she does but also meets a suave writer played by that elegant actor, George Sanders. Mrs Muir falls for him much to the chagrin of the captain. Didn’t he – the captain – advise her to go out and meet other men and to enjoy herself, asks Mrs Muir when confronted with the captain’s jealousy? The captain retreats then, back into his ethereal world and leaves Mrs Muir with only the memory of old daydreams about sea faring captains. I won’t tell you about the end in case you want to see this lovely film but rest assured you will enjoy it. In some ways it’s a bit of a theatrical film with a lot of stage set scenes and there is an overriding sense of sadness in the film; a bittersweet feeling of lost love. Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney both give excellent portrayals.

The Signed Letter from Richard Nixon.

Yes, only £1.50, a signed letter from Richard Nixon. Couldn’t be real could it? Well, that’s what the eBay listing said, signed by Richard Nixon. I paid my money and guess what? It was a photocopy! When I complained the guy said did I really expect a signed letter from President Nixon for £1.50? Well no, but where did it say ‘Photocopy’? Somewhere in the small print obviously.

The Clothes that were Too Small.

Yes, it only goes to prove that one man’s XXL is another man’s XL. I keep saying I’ve learned my lesson but one day I will buy a leather jacket that actually fits me!

The Razor Handle.

I had one of those Wowcher emails a while ago offering me thirty razor blades ‘compatible’ with my Wilkinson’s razor at a very cheap price indeed. Blades are pretty pricey these days, so, OK, I clicked on the link, bought my voucher, then went to the razor blade site, and added my voucher code. OK so far but then I had to add a few quid for postage. Well, I wasn’t happy about that. That extra money was eating into my savings. Anyway, eventually the blades arrived at my door. Not sure what kind of service was used but it certainly wasn’t the next day courier service, more like the next month slowest possible but we get there in the end service. OK, I get the blades but then there’s another problem: They won’t fit on my razor! Now, things get confusing because there are so many razors available these days. There’s the Hydro, the Quattro, the Quattro Titanium, and a shed load of others I couldn’t even begin to name. The blades were for a Hydro which I didn’t have but guess what? Remember that razor handle I told you about earlier? The one selling on e-Bay for a pound with free postage? Remember I asked what plonker would even think of buying that?

Yes, that plonker would be me!

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The Assassination of John F Kennedy

Posted on by Steve Higgins

An appropriate reblog for the 22nd November. .

Steve Higgins's avatarLetters from an Unknown Author!

Dealey Plaza The 22nd of November 2013 was the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most shocking events of the twentieth century, the assassination of President John F Kennedy. I personally expected a deluge of TV documentaries about the assassination but in fact on UK TV there really weren’t that many. A re-showing of the Oliver Stone movie, JFK. A documentary about media response to the assassination which was really the media looking at themselves. But that was really it, there were no probing or investigative programmes, perhaps in 2013 it was far too late for that.

In 1988, twenty five years after John Kennedys death, a veritable wave of documentaries were broadcast on British television, including a rare showing on channel four of the 1966 film of Mark Lane’s ‘Rush to Judgement’. On ITV a documentary by producer Nigel Turner called ‘The Men who Killed Kennedy’ was aired, claiming fantastically that assassins from the French…

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The Worst Job in The World!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-jpg-20I wrote a post some time ago about the Hurricane Namer. It was actually about looking for my best ever job and I wondered about those whose job it is to name hurricanes. The thing is, once you start to think about the best job in the world, you automatically go to the other end of the scale and think about the worst job, the absolute worst.

My day job is a pretty good job. My employers are decent enough, working conditions are good and my fellow employees are a pretty good bunch to work with. When I’m working with new staff members I always like to boost the positive aspects of my work. I remember starting a new job years ago and all everyone could say was why did I want to work there? They complained about the conditions, about managers about pay and believe me, they really put me off the job.

Everyone has their gripes about work but it’s important to be positive. A positive mental attitude helps enormously and the worse thing about moaning about your job is that it just gets you into a negative mental aspect which is not good. I went through a phase some time ago when I was determined to get myself out of a dead end job and into something worthwhile. One of the things I did was use some confidence boosting tapes by Paul McKenna and using some of his simple ideas helped enormously.

One thing was language. Instead of saying ‘I hate this job!’ Say something like ‘I’m not happy with this job at present but it is paying my wages and soon I will be getting a much better job!’ Positive language will completely change your outlook.

If you cannot remember a name, for example, then saying something like ‘I can’t remember that fellow’s name’ is only sending a message to your subconscious not to remember the name. Its like a self fulfilling prophecy. A better idea is to say to yourself; ‘I can’t recollect that name at the moment but I’ll have a think and then I’ll remember it!’ That way you are sending yourself a different message, one with a positive outcome.

Anyway, I’m going off target here, I’m supposed to be writing about the worst job in the world and the thing that made me think about it is this. The other day I had a letter from the NHS inviting me to take part in a bowel screening which can help in detecting bowel cancer early. I read on thinking where do I have to go? Do I need an appointment at the doctors’ or at the hospital and hoping that the doctor would not be from the same school of doctoring as my physiotherapist! Anyway, it turned out that no appointment was necessary. All I have to do is produce a small specimen, place it in a plastic bag and send it off to somewhere for testing.

I remember that on my first day at work at an insurance company I was sent down to the mail room to open the mail, then I graduated to making the tea. I can just imagine the young man or woman who has endured years of training, exams, and university. Then comes their first day at the medical laboratory only to find they have been nominated as  . . the turd tester!

I think I’d prefer opening the mail!

the worst job

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