Author Archives: Steve Higgins

8 Fictional Presidents

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Donald Trump, the 47th president of the US, has been in the news quite a lot recently. He’s cutting down on the number of federal employees. He has stopped federal help for electric cars, he’s made it known he wants the USA to take over Gaza and he is also negotiating with Russia to stop the war in the Ukraine. He doesn’t seem to have involved President Zelensky in these talks despite Zelensky being the president of the Ukraine. Trump has even cast doubt on Zelensky’s right to be the president as, because of the war, Ukraine hasn’t held any elections. This is quite rich really as Putin, the leader of Russia, has not only rigged the Russian elections but has changed the law in Russia so he can continue as president and has also allegedly bumped off Alexei Navalny, his major political opponent.

It’s a story that you couldn’t write and that got me thinking about fictional presidents so I thought I’d start with a book I’ve just read here in sunny Lanzarote.

President Duncan

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson has been a good holiday read. A helter skelter fast paced read but moves along quickly and has nicely laid out short chapters to enable me to pause, jump in the pool to cool off and then resume reading.

President Duncan has a lot of problems on his hands. His wife has recently died of cancer and he is suffering from some sort of blood disease. On top of that the Speaker of the House has started hearings regarding rumours that the President spoke to a known terrorist on the phone and even helped him to escape capture.

Not only that but the President agrees to meet an unknown woman who knows a secret password known only to the President and his trusted advisors. She asks the President to meet her colleague at a football game without security and the President agrees and dismisses the Secret Service. Happily the Secret Service are hanging about closely and save the President from an assassin’s bullet but now he has to deal with a threat concerning a computer virus that will shut down every computer in the USA including those that deal with nuclear strikes.

One of the reviews on the back cover was from someone who likened the book to the film Airforce One, and to be honest, I felt the same way, even picturing the President as Harrison Ford, who played the President in that film.

The book was a great holiday read although I did wonder what part Bill Clinton played in the writing process. Did he just provide background to James Patterson or did he contribute towards the storyline too?

Anyway, the book was a great holiday read.

President James Marshall

Clearly I have to follow on with Airforce One, an action packed film starring Harrison Ford as President James Marshall. In this film the President leaves Russia in his aircraft, Airforce One after a joint US/Russian mission to capture a terrorist named General Ivan Radek. Unknown to the President, a group of Radek sympathisers have joined the aircraft posing as journalists. They take over the Airforce One but it looks as though the President has got away in an escape pod. However, the President was unwilling to leave his family behind and he has hidden himself in the cargo hold. The film then unfolds in the manner of a Die Hard film with the President bumping off the terrorists and managing to contact the White House and also to free his colleagues pretty much in the way that Bruce Willis might have done.

Not a great cinema experience but I kind of enjoyed it.

President Jordan Lyman

Seven Days in May was a political thriller released in 1964 and directed by John Frankenheimer. Kirk Douglas plays United States Marine Corps Colonel “Jiggs” Casey who works for Four Star General James Mattoon Scott, a highly-decorated officer played by Burt Lancaster. Jiggs thinks that Scott might be planning a coup to remove the President who has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, a deal which is highly unpopular with the military. Jiggs discovers that a military group known as ECOMCON has been assigned to seize radio and television networks. He manages to see the President and convince him of the threat. The President, still somewhat sceptical, organises a small group of staff to investigate.

Interestingly, President Kennedy authorised the producers to film scenes at the White House. He had read the book that the film was based on and as he had dealt with critical members of the military himself, was perhaps worried that the fictional scenario could be a real possibility.

The President was played by Frederic March who was one of the great cinema actors of the 1930s and 40s. He was the original Norman Maine in the first version of A Star is Born made in 1936 and even starred with Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina in 1935.

Presidents Palmer, Taylor and Logan

The TV series 24 first appeared in 2001 on US television. Each episode lasted for an hour and is told in real time with a digital clock on screen updating the viewer. The first series is set on the day of the US presidential primary in California. Jack Bauer, a maverick agent of the CTU Counter Terrorism Unit, is detailed to protect presidential hopeful David Palmer from an assassination attempt. Palmer was played by Dennis Haysbert as a potential black US president.

Season 2 details how Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, must prevent a nuclear bomb from exploding and assist David Palmer, now the US president, in finding the culprits. Jack is assisted by a team of agents at the CTU hi-tech control room who are adept at computer manipulation, taking over feeds from CCTV cameras, hacking into other public computers and researching various information to help Jack.

Allison Taylor is the first female president of the USA. She first appeared in the episode Redemption which was a bridging episode between series 6 and 7 as series 7 was delayed due to a writers’ strike in Hollywood. Taylor was played by actress Cherry Jones and almost seemed to be a precursor to a real life female president. As it happened, Hilary Clinton was defeated at the polls and Donald Trump became the president in 2017. (Personally, I always like President Taylor. She always reminded me a little of Captain Janeway from the TV series Star Trek Voyager.)

President Logan was played by Gregory Itzin and first appeared in season 4. He was the Vice President but was later sworn in as President when the previous President was injured in a terrorist attack. As President, Logan becomes involved in the murder of former President Palmer and is eventually forced to resign. Later, he tries to help President Taylor with a peace treaty with the Russians but again, some dodgy dealings lead him to commit suicide. Some thought the character was inspired by real life President Richard Nixon. Whether that was true or not I’m not sure but Logan was a very tricky President indeed.

I thoroughly enjoyed 24. Jack Bauer was an uncompromising agent who was convinced that the end justified the means and would shoot anyone, threaten anyone, good or bad who got in his way. The series was a very slick hi tech espionage show which combined spies, shoot outs and computer science in an exciting TV series.

Presidents Kane and Kennedy

Shall We Tell the President was a novel by Jeffrey Archer first published in 1977. In the book Edward Kennedy has become the US President and FBI agents become aware of a plot to kill the President.

I read this book many years ago but recently came across this new edition, rewritten by the author himself. In real life Ted Kennedy never made it to the White House, his challenge cut short by the ghost of what happened to Mary Jo Kopechene at Chappaquiddick. In this rewrite then, the author puts his own fictional president, President Kane in charge at the White House.

The FBI learn of a plot to murder the President. A Greek waiter, an illegal immigrant, learns of the plot whilst working as a waiter at a restaurant in Washington DC. He calls the FBI and the two agents assigned to the case report quickly to their superior. Soon, one of the agents and their boss, as well as the informant are dead leaving only one agent who by chance has survived a murder attempt. He has six days to track down the assassins.

The book kept me interested but I can’t say it was a great read and I thought some of the dialogue was a little poor, in particular the FBI agent who kept referring to his new girlfriend constantly as ‘pretty lady’ was a little cringeworthy to say the least. Sorry Mr Archer but I’d have to give this one a five out of ten.

Just off the top of my head without using Google, that’s about all the fictional presidents I can come up with for now. Which was your favourite?

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Curry, Tapas and a Read in the Sun

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Over on the front page of this site you will find a whole lot of stuff about me. It tells you that I have always wanted to be a writer, that I enjoy writing as well as Formula One racing, classic cinema and books. In one segment it mentions that I like dining out, in fact it says that dining out is one of the great experiences of life and so I thought I’d start with that, great experiences and see where that leads me.

One of the great experiences of life, as far as I’m concerned anyway is a pretty simple one. It involves lying on a sunbed and relaxing on a hot, or even just warm day. Throw in a dip in the pool and that sensation of lying in the sun while you dry off is made even more satisfying.

Of course, doing that in the UK at any time of the year is not always possible, especially in February which is why for perhaps the last ten years, if you want to get hold of me at this time of the year, you’ll find me in Lanzarote.

What can I tell you about this place? Looking over on Wikipedia I see the Canary Islands emerged from the sea bed during a volcanic eruption about 15 million years ago. There is apparently some evidence the Phoenicians were the first settlers here although the first known records of the islands come from Pliny the elder, the Roman scholar.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, nothing is recorded about the Canary Islands until 999, when the Arabs arrived at the islands. In 1336, a ship arrived from Lisbon under the guidance of Genoese navigator Lancelotto Malocello, who used the alias ‘Lanzarote da Framqua’ which is where the island’s name comes from. Today Lanzarote is part of Spain.

When we first came here round about ten years ago, we hired a car and drove round the island. We visited the volcano which was pretty much what you’d expect a volcano to look like, although the drive down a very narrow winding road in a coach towards the centre of it was a little scary. Otherwise, apart from the usual touristy stuff, there wasn’t that much to see and we quickly realised that the Marina Rubicon in Playa Blanca is by far our favourite place. Our rented villa is on the bus route and only five minutes walk from both the bus stop and the local shop so renting a car is not a particular concern.

What else do I do on Lanzarote? Well I read a lot of books.

Crossfire by Jim Marrs

I do love a JFK assassination book and this is a good one. It covers pretty much everything there is to know about the assassination from Oswald to Ruby, the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, the CIA, the FBI, the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on assassinations and everything in between. Who really did it? I’m not sure. Was Lee Oswald the killer or just a patsy? Again I’m not sure but a lot of the evidence against Oswald was compromised. The officers who found the assassin’s rifle said it was a Mauser, not a Manlicher Carcarno. Later all but one of the officers said they were mistaken. The one who said he wasn’t mistaken was later murdered.

Who were the people on the Grassy Knoll with Secret Service IDs when all the SS were in the President’s motorcade? The shells found at the scene where the fleeing Oswald supposedly shot officer Tippet  were marked by a police officer. Later, when asked to identify the shells, his marks weren’t there. I could go on and on. Maybe Oswald did it, maybe he didn’t. Perhaps he was a patsy as he claimed. Will the records which President Trump will release show what really happened? I doubt it but either way, the JFK assassination is such an fascinating mystery.

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

I absolutely loved this book. I mentioned it last week in a post about detectives but it really is a fabulous read and the film with Humphrey Bogart follows it closely, especially the dialogue.  If you have never read it or seen the film, it’s about Sam Spade, a detective who happens on a group of people all after the mysterious Maltese Falcon statuette worth untold millions and at the same time seeks to find his partner’s murderer.

The only real difference between the film and the book is that in the book, Caspar Gutman’s daughter makes a brief appearance but not in the film. In the film Gutman infers that Miss Wanderley has stolen a thousand dollar bill and Bogart as Sam Spade demands that Gutman confesses to stealing it or stands for a frisk. In the book, Spade surprisingly thinks Miss Wanderley has got the note and forces her to strip naked to show that she didn’t steal it. Only then does he challenge Mr Gutman.

I have to say I have found the works of Raymond Chandler a much better read but this particular story I loved almost as much as the film.

Another book by Hammett, The Thin Man, wasn’t as good. Detective Nick Charles is no longer a detective but many others seem to think he is and he seems to feel compelled to look into a case of murder, even though he doesn’t seem that interested. Perhaps that was why I lost interest early on and kept putting this book down in favour of others.

Going back to the thing I mentioned earlier, the one about dining being one of the great experiences of life, well, only a few minutes walk from our rented villa, just next to the shop I told you about is a really fabulous Indian restaurant. No need to get the bus to the Marina or the centre of Playa Blanca as we can just walk to the restaurant. The funny thing is, Liz and I are part of a curry club and once a month we meet at a curry house in St Annes and settle down for a curry and some chit chat. I was actually thinking of perhaps going every two months or even leaving the curry club altogether. Well, I like curry but I’d had all I really wanted to eat in that particular restaurant and, nice though it is, I perhaps fancied going to the Chinese on that day or the local Italian.

Now however, I seem to be once again hooked on curry. Our local curry house here in Lanzarote, The Indian Gourmet, is a very friendly place. We have established our favourite table. The staff know that Liz hates coriander and they have marked us down as preferring medium rather than hot as regards curry strength. The chef always comes out to see if we have enjoyed his creation and always recommends what we can try next time and so on. The curry house then has become our sort of go to place if we want to eat out and don’t fancy travelling far.

The Client by John Grisham

Time for another book and this one was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the lawyer kills himself, he tells the boys -Mark and his little brother Ricky- where the dead body of a murdered US senator has been hidden. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he would tell them about the body in the first place. Of course if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

Another of our favourite places is the Berruga Tapas bar which we have been visiting for years. Sadly, a lot of our favourite staff members have moved on in the intervening year since our last visit. The boss is still here though, Juan who always remembers us and greets us warmly and the food is still the same mix of Spanish tapas and English snack food like burger and chips and so on. It’s a rough and ready sort of place but it’s also a lot of fun. And we do like the freebie at the end of the night; a shot of vodka caramel in an ice cold glass.

So, what will we be having tonight? Tapas or curry or something new perhaps?

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Underwater Adventures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s theme is about underwater adventures. I’m come up with a few films, TV shows and books on the subject so, to start, I’ll have to cast my mind back to my childhood and remember what underwater TV series caught my imagination back then.

Stingray

Stingray was a puppet TV series created by producer Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia and it was the first of their shows to be filmed in colour. Stingray was a submarine in the service of the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and was captained by Troy Tempest and his colleague ‘Phones’ who was a master at using sonar equipment. The duo discover an undersea kingdom where King Titan holds sway over his people, the Aquaphibians. Troy and Phones rescue the mute undersea girl Marina who joins them onboard Stingray. Most of the characters had sea related names like, Marina, Commander Sam Shore and his daughter, Atlanta. Atlanta was voiced by Lois Maxwell who played the original Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Stingray was probably my favourite of Anderson’s TV shows. I particularly loved the opening sequence in which commander Shore exclaims ‘Anything can happen in the next half hour!’ As a child I used to own quite a few Stingray models. One was a plastic kit I had to put together and another was a plastic Stingray shaped water pistol.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Voyage started out as a film made in 1961. It had some big stars including Peter Lorre, Walter Pidgeon and Joan Fontaine. I actually saw the film after the TV series so I was never impressed with seeing the submarine Seaview without what was to me, its regular crew of actors. The film and the series were produced by Irwin Allen. The film version is about an amazing new submarine, the Seaview, which travels to the Arctic and finds that the sky is on fire! It turns out that a flaming meteor has set the Van Allen belt on fire and Seaview must fire a nuclear rocket into space to blow out the flames.

That has always seemed a bit silly to me but the TV series was much superior. Richard Baseheart played Admiral Nelson and David Hedison was Captain Crane. The crew met with various undersea aliens as well as sea monsters and many of the episodes had espionage and cold war themes.

In the TV series, the Seaview was equipped with a mini submarine which could also fly and was dubbed the Flying Sub. Looking over on Wikipedia, I see the flying sub only appeared in the later seasons but like Stingray, I also had a plastic model kit of it.

The show lasted for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and in many ways was a sort of undersea forerunner to Star Trek. Producer Irwin Allen went on to make three other TV sci-fi shows, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau

This was a documentary series about the undersea research done by Jacques Cousteau and he travelled the world’s oceans in his research vessel the Calypso. I remember it from the late 1960’s although over on the internet I see that the series ran from 1968 to 1976. Jacques and his team studied underwater things like sea turtles and coral reefs and I always found it very fascinating. The series was narrated by Jacques himself as I remember it but over on Wikipedia they claim that Richard Johnson narrated the BBC version. Perhaps it was a mix of the two with Jacques stepping in to talk about particular elements.

Thunderball

Thunderball was a novel by Ian Fleming and was one of the adventures of his hero, James Bond 007. The novel and the film were subject to litigation as it was based on a film script on which Fleming had collaborated with Kevin McClory. McClory wasn’t happy that Fleming had used the screenplay for the basis of his novel and the result was that after suing Fleming, McClory won certain rights to the story which is how a rival Bond film came to be made in 1983. Never Say Never Again appeared as a rival to the official Eon production Bond films.

Anyway, in Thunderball, a Vulcan bomber with two atomic bombs on board is stolen by SPECTRE and they blackmail the UK government for their safe return. Bond finds the Vulcan underwater in the Caribbean. SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo has a wonderful boat with an underwater hatch through which an army of frogmen descend on various underwater vehicles to hide the bombs. 007 and his colleagues engage in an underwater battle with Largo and eventually get the upper hand.

The Spy Who Loved Me

This film was the one that appeared in competition to Never Say Never Again. Numerous legal issues surrounded the film as producer Harry Saltzman was in financial trouble. Various issues arose with his fellow producer Cubby Broccoli but eventually the two owners of the Bond franchise managed to come to agreement and Broccoli bought out Saltzman.

Another issue with the production was that Fleming was so disappointed with his original novel he had stipulated that the film producers could use only the title and not the story. Various writers were employed to come up with a new story which eventually revolved around villain Karl Stromberg who wants to create a new civilisation under the sea and at the same time destroy all terrestrial life.

To film this, Pinewood studios created a new stage, the 007 stage in which to accommodate the interior of Stromberg’s super tanker which manages to swallow numerous submarines.

Another interesting element was Bond’s car, a Lotus Elite which was able to travel underwater. This was achieved by the special effects team using various mock ups as well as models. One version was towed out of the water using hidden ropes when Bond, played by Roger Moore, calmly opens a window and drops out an errant fish.

Ice Station Zebra

I’ve written a few posts in the past about the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and it just so happens that his favourite film was Ice Station Zebra. Hughes had a projector and watched the film, presumably on 16mm, many times in his blacked out suite in Las Vegas. The film is a cold war story based on a novel by Alastair MacLean about a satellite which crashes in the Arctic and has photographed various secret sites in the Soviet Union as well as the USA and both the Americans and the Russians want the film from the satellite. A major storm has locked in the Arctic so a submarine is sent under the ice ostensibly to rescue anyone stranded at the eponymous research station. Rock Hudson starred as the submarine captain and Patrick McGoohan as an agent whose secret mission is to retrieve the film from the satelite.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

This was a novel by the celebrated author Jules Verne, first published in serial form in a French magazine in 1869 and published in book form in 1871. The book is highly regarded as one of Verne’s greatest works and features a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, years ahead of its time. The story concerns an American expedition to capture or destroy a huge sea monster terrorising shipping. The expedition meets the monster but professor Aronnax, a French marine biologist and master harpooner Ned Land are thrown overboard only to find the monster is actually a submarine. They are taken aboard and meet the ship’s commander, Captain Nemo.

The novel was made into a film in 1954 starring James Mason as Captain Nemo.

Finally

Many years ago, I decided to try and become a certified scuba diver. I joined a club and went for lessons at Warrington baths in Cheshire. I completed the course and it was a lot of fun, pottering about underwater with oxygen tanks in the baths. The final part however involved taking your mask off underwater, filling it with air and replacing it back on your face. I tried and tried but I could not do it; every time I ended up thrashing about having swallowed half of the water in the swimming pool. I even tried it a few inches under the water in the shallow end but sadly I always managed to inhale water so unfortunately I failed and never managed to gain certification.

Years later I bought one of those little action cams with an underwater housing and managed to make a short film about me swimming, not in a beautiful underwater coral reef location as I would have liked but up and down in a French swimming pool.

I’ve probably only scratched the surface on this fascinating subject. I could have mentioned the films Titanic and Raise the Titanic or even The Abyss. What was your favourite underwater film?

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Watching (and reading) the Detectives

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Liz and I are over here in sunny Lanzarote having exchanged the cold of the UK for the warmth of Lanzarote. Of course, it is still February and things aren’t perfect over here. It’s warm but there are plenty of days when gusty winds blow across the island as well as days when the sun has been obscured by clouds. Even so there are still plenty of bars to drink at, plenty of tapas to be eaten and of course we have plenty of books to read, two of which have inspired this week’s post.

The Thin Man is a book I picked up somewhere in a second hand bookshop. It was written by Dashiell Hammett and features his famous detective, Nick Charles.

Dashiell Hammett was born in May, 1924 and became a writer of detective stories after working for the famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In his obituary in the New York Times, they described him as ‘the dean of the hard boiled school of detective fiction.’

Time magazine included his novel Red Harvest, published in 1929, on their list of the 100 best English language novels. The Thin Man was made into a film in 1934 starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as his wife Nora. I’ve only just started reading the Thin Man and it’s been pretty good so far. One interesting element of it though was finding out that in New York in the mid 1930’s it was possible to find an all-night delicatessen that would deliver coffee and sandwiches at 5 in the morning.

A further 5 sequels in the Thin Man film series were made finishing in 1947 with Songs of the Thin Man.

Another book by the same author is one that Liz got me for Christmas, The Maltese Falcon. I’ve only just scanned through it so far but it looks like being a good read. The book was made into a classic film in 1941 with Humphrey Bogart playing the part of detective Sam Spade. Mary Astor plays Ruth Wanderley who contacts the firm of Spade and Archer to help her track down her missing sister who she thinks might be held against her will by a man called Thursby.  Miles Archer, Spade’s partner decides to take on the case but is found dead by the police later that night.

Spade begins to try and find out what has happened and meets various other characters like Joel Cairo and Kasper Gutman played wonderfully by Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. One of my favourite scenes is where Spade and Gutman meet and Gutman asks ‘are you a close mouthed man?’ Spade replies that no, he likes to talk and Gutman responds famously with ‘I’m a man who likes to talk to a man who likes to talk’.

Hammet died in 1961 of lung cancer and Raymond Chandler said this of him: ‘He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.’

That brings me nicely to another of my favourite detectives, Philip Marlowe and he first appeared in the novel The Big Sleep. The book was written by Raymond Chandler and Chandler had this really fabulous talkative way of writing. You can almost imagine hearing Humphrey Bogart’s voice as you read the book. Bogart of course played Marlowe in the 1946 film version directed by Howard Hawks. Here’s a quote from the book, an example of Chandler’s descriptive style:

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stocking. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony or sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.

Not bad eh? Dilys Powell called his writing ‘a peculiar mixture of harshness, sensuality, high polish and backstreet poetry’ and it’s easy to see why. Mrs Regan was played by Lauren Bacall in the film version and up until now I had always thought this was the film where Bogart and Bacall met. Wrong! A quick check on Wikipedia and I see the couple met on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944. Bacall was 19 and Bogart was 45 and married to his third wife Mayo Methot at the time. Sparks apparently flew between the couple and Bogart divorced Mayo and married Bacall the next year, 1945. Despite the great on screen chemistry together the couple only made four films together.

The film version of The Big Sleep was a brilliant adaptation of the book and some of the differences are interesting. For instance, early in the book, detective Philip Marlowe played by Bogart meets General Sternwood’s daughter Carmen. She looks at Marlowe and remarks how tall he is. In the film, Bogart of course wasn’t that tall so the dialogue is reversed ‘You’re not very tall, are you?’ comments Carmen.

The plot of the book and film are pretty complicated, although having read the book recently I think that the book is easier to follow. During the filming the director and his stars wondered who killed the character of Owen Taylor, the Sternwood’s chauffeur. They sent a cable to Raymond Chandler asking him. Chandler told a friend later ‘Dammit, I don’t know either!’

One strange element in the film, certainly for me, is a scene where Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is watching blackmailer Geiger. Geiger has a shop that sells rare books in Hollywood and Marlowe asks for information in another bookshop opposite. There he chats to a bookseller played by Dorothy Malone who, if you are old enough, you will remember her from the Peyton Place TV series. Malone and Bogart seem to hit it off well in the film but he never returns to the bookshop and Dorothy is never seen again in the film.

Every time I watch the film, I always expect Malone to reappear but that’s one of the many dead ends the film leads us down. I think it was Hitchcock who said that every scene in a film should lead the audience somewhere and Quentin Tarantino of course said the reverse. Perhaps director Howard Hawks favoured Tarantino’s view.

Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson (image via creative commons)

Perhaps the most famous literary detective is Sherlock Holmes, created by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, first appearing in the story A Study in Scarlet. The stories are narrated by Holmes’ friend and companion, Doctor Watson. The Guinness Book of Records reports Holmes as the most portrayed character in film and television history.

My personal favourite Sherlock Holmes in the cinema was the version created by Basil Rathbone in a series of films beginning in 1939. 14 films were made with Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce playing the part of Dr Watson. The first two films were set in the Victorian era and were produced by Twentieth Century Fox. The later films were produced by Universal who set the films in, what was then, the present time period, that of the second world war.

Time now to move onto my favourite TV detective, the bumbling Lieutenant Columbo.

Columbo first appeared in the early 1970s as part of the Mystery Movie TV series. Each week followed a different detective trying to track down a murder case, sometimes it was MacMillan and Wife and other weeks McCloud, Banacek or various others. The most popular one by far though was Columbo.

Columbo was a homicide detective for the LAPD and he was played by Peter Falk, although the role was originally written for Bing Crosby. Crosby however thought a regular TV slot would interfere too much with his golf so he turned down the role, went back to the fairway and the part went to Peter Falk who made it his own.

If you ever see the original pilot, shot in 1968, you can see how Crosby might have fitted into the part, as Falk plays Columbo in a very Crosby like laid back way. The very first guest murderer was Gene Barry who was familiar to TV audiences after playing Amos Burke in Burke’s Law for many years. He also starred in a 1953 film version of War of the Worlds.

The pilot episode also introduced audiences to a particular feature of Columbo, in that we see who the murderer is and how he commits the crime first. Then we see Lieutenant Columbo gradually solve the clues and get his man, or woman. The essence then of a great episode comes in the clever way Columbo nails the murderer. Sometimes that moment is a bit of a non starter, other times it’s nothing short of brilliant. Sometimes, even if that final moment is not so great, it’s still been a great episode.

The Columbo of the early series is an absent-minded quirky fellow although in later episodes, Peter Falk who plays the detective, seems to downplay that quirky element.

Favourite episode? I’m not certain but it might be ‘Murder by the Book‘, starring my favourite murderer, Jack Cassidy. In this 1971 episode, Jack plays a writer, actually part of a writing double act, who together produce a series of novels about ‘Mrs Melville’ who is an amateur detective. The thing is, Jack’s partner wants to ditch the partnership but Jack is not happy about it. He is so unhappy he decides to, yes you guessed it, bump off his co-writer. He does it in a rather ingenious way which foxes Columbo but not for long and to cap it all, the episode is directed by none other than Steven Spielberg!

So who was your favourite fictional detective?

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Changing the Narrative

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again as we have for the past ten or so years, Liz and I have escaped the dismal cold of January in the UK and flown over to sunny and warm Lanzarote, leaving behind the dark nights, the cold and the rain.

Noel Coward did a similar thing every winter and went off to the Caribbean or anywhere he fancied really. Perhaps the cold is just not for us writers. Certainly not for me at any rate. Anyway, its nice to think I have something at least in common with a great writer like Coward.

Our day started last Sunday with my alarm going off at the utterly inconceivable time of 5:30am. Well, there was a time when I used to have to get up even earlier, happily, not any more. A quick wash and shower, a much-needed cup of tea and soon our driver was knocking at the door.

A pleasant surprise awaited us at the airport. On previous trips we have had to endure the hell of passing through security, taking out all our numerous electronic devices and putting them in plastic trays to be X rayed. This year, thanks to new technology, we didn’t have to do that. No longer was I running about, beltless, hanging on to my trousers while trying to grab my various belongings from numerous trays and pack them again in my cabin bag. This year the experience was much more civilised.

On the aeroplane I settled down and opened up my book to read. I have, as usual, plenty of reading matter with me but the book I chose to read on the flight was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel as it was a fairly slim volume and fitted easily into my shoulder bag. I chose this book as it is the basis for the film of the same name, one of my favourite films.

It came as a bit of a surprise then to find that the book was almost completely different to the film. Yes, there is a Best Marigold Hotel just like the film and it is about a bunch of retired British people who take up residence there but after that, the similarity ends.

It’s almost like watching one of those James Bond films where Ian Fleming’s original story has been evolved out of recognition. Take Moonraker for example. The book is about a German officer who has been hospitalised in WWII during the Battle of the Bulge. Some German troops had been dressed in captured allied uniforms to confuse the enemy and Drax was injured while in British uniform. When fully recovered Hugo Drax continues the deception. He builds up a great business empire but decides to take his revenge on Britain by building a rocket, the Moonraker, which he intends to drop on England. In the film Bond investigates the disappearance of a space shuttle only to find Hugo Drax wants to wipe out the earth population and replace it with a master race.

The problem with film is that it is a group project and various people have an input on the final script. Screen writer William Goldman wrote a wonderful book about his screen writing career called Adventures in the Skin Trade. He described a typical screenplay development something like this. I should point out that I’m going by memory only as my copy of his book is thousands of miles away.

Goldman writes a script and gets a director interested in the project. The director likes the idea but he thinks the ending is not right so the author produces a second draft. The director is happy and brings a big star on board. The star likes the screenplay but is not happy that his character is killed at the end. Goldman produces a third draft and the big star is happier but thinks this and that needs changing. Goldman rewrites and comes up with draft number 4. At this point the Big Star decides to sign up with another project and he is out. The director is not happy so he drops out too. Enter director number 2. He likes the screenplay but thinks a few changes are required. The writer comes up with draft number 5. Enter big star number 2. He likes the screenplay but wouldn’t it be better if his character got the girl instead of the other guy? New draft please!

Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be great if we could order a new draft of our lives. Could I rewrite the bit where I spent 17 years working for the bus company? What about the time when I wanted to be a newspaper reporter? Maybe I could have walked down to the Manchester Evening News and perhaps asked if there were any jobs going?

Another production, actually a TV series, is another example of how producers can change the characters from a book. Hamish Macbeth is actually completely different to the books on which the series was based which was a little of a surprise to me and 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. Macbeth was played by Robert Carlyle and he is the village bobby in the small fictional village of Lochdubh. Macbeth is a laid-back relaxed character. 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 his beloved village. Back in 2022 Liz bought me a whole stack of the Macbeth books and they are all an enjoyable and easy read.

Anyway, getting back to the Marigold Hotel. I was rather unhappy with the book at first. It had originally been published under the title These Foolish Things and was written by novelist Deborah Moggach, but to cash in on the success of the film, new editions were published with the film’s title. As I began to get into the book, I actually began to like it. The central theme seemed to be the story of the lady played by Maggie Smith in the film although in the book another layer of her story has been added which the film ignores. She is mugged and goes to see her well off son for help only to find he has been involved in some dodgy deal and has left to escape the police. She refuses to go back home but her doctor recommends a place in India where she can rest and recuperate. In fact, the Marigold Hotel which he has recommended is a business venture in which he is also a partner.

Various other people decide to go and stay in the hotel too. Some correspond to the characters in the film and some do not. All in all, it was actually quite an enjoyable read and kept me entertained during our flight and for my first few days stretched out on my sun lounger enjoying the warm sunshine of the Canary Islands.

Come to think of it, I’ve changed my own narrative too, exchanging the cold of the UK for the warmth of the Canaries.

Now, what can I change next?

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The Democratic Way

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As I write this latest blog post it’s the 20th January and Donald Trump is about to be sworn in as the 47th president of the USA. This was apparently the 60th such ceremony according to the first speaker although how that has been worked out, I’m not sure. Going by the huge amount of coverage on British TV, you might think that Trump had been elected president of the UK also.

When you look at it, Trump has pulled off an incredible comeback, He was defeated in the last election by Joe Biden and universally condemned for instigating a riot after claiming that his defeat by Mr Biden was a fix. He has been at the centre of various legal actions and prosecutions for numerous things including a pay off to a porn star hoping she would keep quiet about their affair. The porn star in question did not keep quiet and I’m pretty certain Mr Trump would be within his rights to ask for his money back although I doubt if he will.

The only other political comeback as impressive as Trump’s was the comeback by Richard Nixon.

Vice President Nixon as he was then was beaten by John Kennedy in the Presidential Election of 1960. He decided then to run for Governor of California but he was beaten in that contest too. He looked up at the assembled reporters and journalists and told them bitterly that that was it, ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.’ He appeared to be retiring from politics. Even so, eight years later he was back as the Republican nominee in the election of 1968 and on that occasion, he won.

Picture courtesy Wikipedia

Some years later, things weren’t going too well for Nixon. He was caught in the middle of the Watergate scandal. Watergate would ultimately be the end of his presidency but his downfall would be his own presidential recordings. He tried to hang on to his tapes but when he appointed a special prosecutor and that same prosecutor began to want more and more tapes, Nixon fired him and various others in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Did he order the bugging of the Watergate building? Of course he did! Did he try to justify it? Well, he did say famously, ‘when the President does it, then it’s not illegal.’

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been watching a BBC documentary about King Charles the 1st and Charles, like Richard Nixon, was removed from office although in a much bloodier fashion. After his defeat in the English Civil War, he was put on trial and asked to plead either guilty or not guilty. Charles declined to plead. He was the King and had a divine right to rule over his kingdom. The court decided that his refusal to plead could only be interpreted as an admittance of his crimes. He was pronounced as guilty and only a few days later was put to death. The day of his execution was on the 30th January 1649. It was a cold and chilly day and Charles asked for an extra shirt in case the assembled crowd though he might be shivering with fear. He gave a short speech in which he said he was ‘going from a corruptible to an uncorruptible crown.’ Below is the King’s final scene from the film Cromwell.

Oliver Cromwell ruled England as the Lord Protector until his death in 1658 and two years later Charles II was recalled from exile and asked to return as the King.

Anyway, back in 2017 Donald Trump was declared the victor in the election and duly became the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief of the United States for the first time on January 20th of that year and all seemed to go fairly smoothly. The chap who introduced the proceedings back then -I’m afraid I can’t remember his name- commented on the inaugural speech of President Ronald Reagan which I quote here:

“To a few of us here today this is a solemn and most momentous occasion, and yet in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”

Ronald Reagan via Wikipedia Commons

Reagan touched on the whole essence of democracy in that speech which is essentially this, that of the leader of a nation voluntarily handing over power to the new leader, the victor of the election process. In the news that same day in 2017 was a story about The Gambia’s long-term leader Yahya Jammeh who had, until then, refused to accept that Adama Barrow had defeated him in the election the previous December. He finally decided to hand over power as threats from other West African nations forced him to concede defeat. It would have been interesting if Barack Obama had said in 2017, ‘sorry, no, I’m not stepping down, I’m not ready yet!’ The last president who had to be forced from office was the man I mentioned earlier, Richard Nixon who finally accepted that the Watergate scandal had destroyed his presidency in 1973 and resigned, handing over to Vice-President Gerald Ford.

Joseph Stalin continued as leader of the Soviet Union until his death in 1953 at the age of 73. When he did not arise from his bedroom one morning at his dacha in Kuntsevo, just outside Moscow, his guards were too nervous to enquire if the feared dictator was alright. When they finally entered the room, they found he had collapsed and assumed he was suffering from a bout of heavy drinking the previous night. The guards made him comfortable on a couch and then withdrew. When he was found unable to speak the following day, only then were the doctors summoned.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party swept to power in Germany not by a revolution or by a military takeover but by the ballot box. Hitler’s Nazi party was the largest party in the Reichstag, the German parliament. Various other parties supported the Nazis all with the same thought, that Hitler was a simple man who could be controlled. They supported Hitler and convinced President Hindenburg to appoint him as chancellor. The thing is, once Hitler gained power and became chancellor, he gave himself emergency powers and began to imprison his political enemies. When Hindenburg died, Hitler combined the office of president and chancellor in one office. He outlawed other political parties and stopped elections.

Seen in that light, the events in the USA are, as Ronald Reagan said, nothing less than a miracle.

A US president can only serve two terms as the US senate, perhaps resentful of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s three terms in office, voted to limit a president to only two four-year terms. Eight years, not much time to change the world, is it? And there are only four years left for Donald Trump to make America great again, part of which seems to be the reappraisal of drug cartels as terrorist organisations, to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and to take over the Panama Canal.

What will happen then when Trump’s four years are over? Will he hand over to the next president as easily as Biden has handed over to him? Will he anoint a successor? His vice president, JD Vance perhaps? Or will he even try to stay on somehow for a third term?

Donald Trump. Picture courtesy Wikipedia

The election last year was interesting in that Joe Biden declined to run again. His decision was perhaps a little late and his chosen successor, vice president Kamala Harris, didn’t have a great deal of time to start her election campaign.

The very last time a sitting president decided not to run again was when Lyndon Johnson decided against being a candidate in 1968. Johnson wanted to create a great society for the American people but his administration was completely caught up in the Vietnam war. In one of 1968’s first primaries, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy featured well against Johnson, prompting LBJ’s arch enemy Robert Kennedy to enter the contest. Johnson withdrew and Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. The Democratic candidate eventually turned out to be LBJ’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. I don’t think Humphrey even entered any primaries so how he eventually won the nomination I really don’t know. Either way he ran but was ultimately soundly defeated by Richard Nixon.

I personally didn’t rate Trump’s inaugural speech that well, it was hardly up there with ‘ask not what America can do for you but what you can do for America.’ Interestingly, many of the TV pundits I watched seemed to think it was all pretty wonderful stuff. Can he end the war in the Ukraine in one day like he claims?

Well, I’ll give him at least a week.

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January, Don’t You Just Hate It?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I might as well start off this post by coming out and saying what I think straight off the bat; I don’t like January. I don’t like it at all because the thing is, I just hate the cold. I reckon it would be rather nice to just hibernate for the entire winter period just like many creatures do.

I’m not that keen on Christmas so maybe late November would be a good time to just settle down somewhere warm and comfy, snuggle up into my duvet and perhaps wake up round about late March. I know that March can be unpredictable in terms of the weather. It’s generally windy and cold but certainly not as cold as January. Waking up in March would give me time to get my bearings before moving into April, my favourite time of year when the days are getting longer, nature is starting to revive and warmer days are coming.

January 1970

Recently while pottering about trying to sort out the tons of ‘stuff’ I seem to have accumulated over the years I came across my schoolboy diary from 1970. As this post will be published on the 18th of January, I thought I’d take a look and see what I had written. Back in 1970 the 18th was a Sunday and all I decided to record was “Watched Captains Courageous and Randall and Hopkirk”.

Randall and Hopkirk was a TV show first broadcast in 1969 through until March 1970. It was an action and adventure drama despite the slightly tongue in cheek premise. Randall and Hopkirk are private investigators but Randall is helped by his partner Marty Hopkirk who is murdered in the first episode but comes back as a ghost to help his partner find his murderer. Marty stays on and continues to help Jeff Randall for the entire series of 26 episodes. It was later remade with comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in 2000. Personally, I prefer the original.

Captain Courageous was a film starring Spencer Tracy based on a book by Rudyard Kipling. The story follows the adventures of spoiled brat Harvey Cheyne Junior, the son of a railway tycoon. Harvey falls overboard from his father’s yacht and is saved from drowning by Portuguese fisherman Manuel Fidello played by Tracy. The boy demands to be returned home but the fishing vessel is on a three month fishing expedition and will not return early. The captain offers to sign Harvey on as a crewman until they return and under the tutorship of Manuel he begins to learn about fishing. Harvey becomes close to Manuel and is devasted when he is drowned. Returning home, he is reunited with his father as a changed person.

January 1649

This week I watched an interesting documentary about Charles the 1st. Back in January 1649 parliament was deliberating about what to do with Charles who had been defeated by the Parliamentarians. The parliament was known as the ‘rump’ parliament because any MP who was suspected of supporting the king was prevented from entering. Parliament voted to put the King on trial but the upper house, the Lords, declined to support this and then promptly gave themselves a holiday. Parliament then went ahead without the Lords.

King Charles was put to death on the 30th January, 1649.

January 1965

Another great British leader died in January 1965, Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was an army officer, an MP, an author and a Prime Minister. Nothing I can write in a short post, even one dedicated fully to his life can do justice to this great man’s many achievements but let’s have a go. Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace on November 30th 1874. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, his mother Lady Randolph was formerly Jennie Jerome from the USA, the daughter of Leonard Jerome, an American businessman.

Churchill began his military career with the 4th Hussars but later left to become a politician. He failed to be elected as MP for Oldham then went to South Africa to serve as a journalist. He was captured by the Boers and later escaped which brought him much publicity which must have helped him when he stood again as a Conservative candidate for Oldham in the 1900 general election. This time he emerged as the victor. Later Churchill became a Liberal and later still moved back to the Conservatives. The years between 1929 and 1939 became Winston’s Wilderness years when he was out of office but began to warn against the rise of the Nazis. On the 13th December he was visiting New York when he was knocked down by a car which incidentally inspired my story Timeline, the title story of my new book.

Churchill’s warnings about Nazi Germany proved correct and with the outbreak of war in 1939 he returned as a government minister and later succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister when Chamberlain was forced to resign as the Labour party declined to serve in a national government headed by him.

As well as serving as a politician, Churchill wrote many books and one, My Early Life, was made into a film, Young Winston. I’ve always loved that film but it annoys me no end when I see it on TV these days as for some reason a final scene in which Churchill falls asleep and dreams of meeting his late father, is cut out.

January 2003

Looking at my diary for 2003 I see I was suffering with a sore neck that January. I was off sick from work and my boss was not happy. While off sick I had written a screenplay and wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was living in Merseyside at the time so decided to send it to Phil Redmond, the producer of the Liverpool soap Brookside, thinking that he might like it enough to either give me some advice or even a job on the writing team. I had sent it with a self-addressed return envelope and guess what, I received it back in the post only a few days later minus any sort of feedback or a job offer.

January 1986

In January 1986 the spacecraft Challenger was ready to be launched into space. It was a unique mission in that school teacher Christa McAuliffe had been selected to broadcast lessons from space. The flight was the 25th shuttle mission and the 10th flight for Challenger itself. The mission was originally scheduled for July but the date was put further and further back until NASA finally decided on the 28th January. The temperature of -8 degrees was a record low for a shuttle launch and many engineers were unhappy. Their cause for concern was the shuttle’s O ring seal in a joint between the shuttle and the solid rocket boosters. In cold temperatures it was thought that the rubber rings might not be flexible enough to seal the joints. Sadly they were correct. Hot pressurised gas was released which burned into the external propellant tank which then exploded 73 seconds into the flight. All the astronauts were killed.

January 2025

To finish on a somewhat lighter note, today as I write this I was in Manchester. I decided I needed a few items of shopping so I walked into the nearby civic centre. It was still pretty cold despite the melting snow so I wrapped up well.  I had a woolly jumper on, my anorak and a baseball cap and gloves. Happily, it wasn’t quite as cool as I had originally thought. At the civic I popped into the cheap bookshop there but after a few minutes I realised that it was far too hot and I had to get out. Instead of walking further to Asda, I popped into the Iceland store a few hundred yards away from the book shop. After about 5 minutes I realised that in there too, the management had for some reason decided to crank the heating up to a level usually experienced in a Sahara Desert heatwave.

I grabbed the few things I wanted then headed for the till. Sweat was running down my face but there were two people at the till, both with enough shopping to last the entire winter. I opened my jacket and then heard some wonderful words, “can you come this way please?” Yes, a new till was opening up and me with my 4 or 5 items was through and soon out into the open air.

January, don’t you just hate it?

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Writing and Blog #1 of 2025

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Ok, here we go. It’s 2025 and it’s time to kick off with my first proper blog post of the New Year: I settle down in front of the fire, crank up my trusty old laptop. The blank page glares at me as usual; what to write about today?

I first started posting in 2014 and that year I managed to get 2341 views which I was pretty pleased about. If I had also managed to sell 2341 copies of any of my books, I would have been even more pleased but hey, that’s another story.

Last year in 2024 I managed to accumulate a total of 14,182 visits which is pretty fantastic although I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there that have an even larger readership. My most read post has been Manipulating the Image, a look at various aspects of photo manipulation. I’ve tried a couple of follow up posts on the same subject but that post, actually from 2022, continues to boost my readership. Why is it so popular? I really don’t know despite looking at things like subject matter, keywords, search engine optimisation and so on, I still don’t understand its popularity.

A lot of blogs on the internet seem to focus on a particular subject. Things like cycling, classic films or canal boating for instance. Those blogs always know where the next post is coming from; another cycling trip, another classic film review or canal journey. As there is no actual focus on this blog it’s sometimes hard to hone in on a new subject although generally, I stick to books, films and my little old life. Plus the occasional plug for my three books.

I have tried to occasionally write one of those ‘how to’ blog posts and impart some of my blogging knowledge to my readers and fellow bloggers but I reckon those sort of posts might be of interest only to my fellow writers. One of my previous posts was about three ways to write a poem (click here for the video version) and when it comes down to it, I think those three ways could also be used to write a blog post.

The first way was the easy way, a flash of inspiration; a great idea comes to you out of the blue and hits you square in the face and you are off and running. That is probably the best way to write a post or a poem. The second way is when something happens to inspire you. In my poetry example I wrote about a time when I returned home and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil I looked out of the window and watched the cat that belonged to the house opposite make its way across their lawn, take a good look around and then settle down under a small young tree and go to sleep in the afternoon sun.

Later subdued screams and cries were heard over the way and it turned out that the lady of the house had returned home to find her cat was sadly dead and it seemed to me that I had seen the cat resign itself to its fate, even taking a last look around before slipping away to start the next of its nine lives. Inspired by these events, shocked even, I went away and began a poem.

The third and final way of writing a poem or indeed any kind of creative work is an obvious way known to all professional writers everywhere and that is simply hard work. Unlike mere amateurs like me, the professional has no choice but to sit down and get on with things, firm in the knowledge that at a certain time their editor or publisher or Hollywood producer will be asking for that article, blog, book or screenplay.

I too have my deadline, that of 10:00am on a Saturday morning and sometimes even that is hard to work to. Sometimes I have finished a post on Friday afternoon and have passed it over to my proofreader for a quick final check, confident that all will be well for Saturday and then later find that I have forgotten to hit the schedule button or even worse, scheduled the post for the wrong day.

Coming up with a new blog post week after week just seems to get even harder and here I am on my 649th post. Six hundred and forty-nine posts! I suppose to those of you who have been writing for years, 649 may not be such a big milestone but for an amateur writer like me, it’s pretty special. The crazy thing is this, looking through my diary from a few years ago I see I was commenting on one of those online forums, praising WordPress and blogging and someone commented that if I hadn’t been blogging I might have finished my second book!

Looking back I now wonder whether that guy was actually right. 649 blog posts, times my average word count per post: That comes to over 700,000 words. I could have written another book and to be fair, that was part of the idea behind Timeline, to utilise all those old forgotten posts in a new collection of stories and blog posts. Perhaps I could have written another novel. But then again, it’s not just the words, it’s the idea behind the words, the creative thrust of a book that’s important. Get that and the book should just follow. Still, that fellow had a point. Should I give up my blog posts in favour of my book? Well, if that would guarantee me producing a book then yes, great! The thing is, it’s not a lack of words that have kept my sequel to Floating in Space in a constant state of abandonment. It’s really my own laziness.

Laziness, fear of the blank page, procrastination, they are all enemies of the writer. The only way to overcome them is just to keep on writing. If you are writing a blog post and it won’t come, switch to something else; that other post you had on the back burner or that script you had started a few years back. A great deal of my work is done like that, in small bursts of activity. A while back I had an idea for a film screenplay and worked away creating the first quarter of the work. Later I decided to turn it into a book and as I worked with the text, adding in all sorts of detail that wasn’t in the original script, the story came alive to me in a different way and I started to bring something new to the book version. Don’t hold your breath though, it’s still far from completion.

Oh well. Here’s another script story. Ages ago when I first met Liz and we began socialising in St Annes, we started frequenting Wetherspoons there. It’s a pretty friendly pub and we made friends with quite a few people. There was Big Steve who I wrote about in another post but we also met two guys, Craig and Danny (as usual, names have been changed to protect the innocent!) They were brothers in law who were married to twin sisters and they both owned and ran small hotels in St Annes. The hotels were on the same street opposite each other and the sisters were identical twins so their whole scenario seemed to scream ‘sitcom’ to me.

I used to ask them what funny things had happened to them in their work as hoteliers and being married to identical women. ‘Loads of things’ they would always say but I could never get any details. Anyway, when I had a quiet moment, I started off a pilot sitcom script using their situation, rival hoteliers married to identical sisters. It’s nothing brilliant but mildly amusing and it sat in my documents folder for a long time. Every now and again when I slipped into that blank page syndrome, I’d pull out the script and add a few more pages.

One day I noticed on one of my occasional visits to the BBC Writersroom page that a window of opportunity was coming up for a sitcom script. The BBC, rather than accepting ‘spec’ scripts all year round open a small ‘window’ of a few weeks where you can submit your work in certain areas, sometimes a film script or a play, sometimes drama, other times situation comedy. I went back to my sitcom script, pulled it quickly into some sort of shape, added an ending and bunged it off to the BBC. Then I sat down and waited, glued to my inbox, awaiting the BBC email that may or may not even arrive.

Of course, I do wonder what might happen if the BBC actually decided that my sitcom script is worth making into a pilot? Imagine if the BBC said “we’re going to make a twelve episode series!” Imagine me trying to write twelve episodes when it took me months to write one 25 minute episode! Even the great Spike Milligan had a nervous breakdown writing the numerous scripts of the radio show ‘The Goon Show’. Of course, someone at the BBC could be reading this very post. Did I say something about 12 episodes? Would I be able to write 12 episodes?

Of course! What’s 12 episodes to a top writer like me? I might even start episode 2 straight away. Well, straight away after a cup of tea. And maybe a sandwich. Better make it first thing tomorrow. Well, tomorrow afternoon might be better . .

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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2024: My Blogging Year in Review

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It seems like only yesterday that I was writing a blog post about looking back at 2023 and now, here I am looking back at 2024. I don’t intend to cover everything that happened to me in 2024 but just to mention a few things of interest and of course, a few of my own blog posts.

All the links below open up in a new page.

New Year’s day was a cold and wet one although not quite as cold as I had expected. There were amber alerts on the weather forecasts for rain and wind and although there was a slight spitting of rain here in the north west it was hardly windy. (Well that was the situation outside of my window. Only a few miles away there was serious flooding!) According to the news, New Year Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh were cancelled due to high winds despite an influx of visitors from all over the world. My own celebrations were also curtailed due to a nasty bout of a coughing bug which many other have also experienced. Our visit to the Pier Inn went out of the window as well as another proposed pub visit. Liz and I were so poorly we decided to leave each other to our respective own devices and I drove back to Manchester for a few days. There is a lot to be said for spending time alone. I wasn’t giving the bug back to Liz and she wasn’t giving it back to me. Any coughing and wheezing that kept me awake was my own and not hers and I could eat when I wanted and choose my own TV shows to watch.

image courtesy flickr.com

Not that there was a great menu of new programming to watch. It was the same old tired films and old TV shows that I have seen time and time again. It’s a Wonderful Life used to be one of my favourite films but over this year’s Christmas and New Year period, I’ve have noticed that particular film shown about 6 times on separate channels. I reckon I need to not watch it for another few years so perhaps in 2027 I can finally watch it and enjoy it again. The big Christmas James Bond film was the one they showed last year, No Time To Die, the final film starring  Daniel Craig as 007. Sorry but I didn’t like it the first time either.

The Railway Children, that charming film starring Jenny Agutter and directed by Lionel Jeffries was a lovely film shown on New Year’s Eve even though I have seen it before. Another great film was The Apartment directed by the great Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.

All in all, New Year’s Day 2025 was pretty similar to New Year’s Day 2024. As a matter fact, on checking my diary I found that I had the same breakfast on both days, egg on toast with beans. Throw in two sausages and that was the exact same breakfast I used to have in my days as a bus driver in the late 1970’s.

Back in January 2024 I published a post about sandwiches, one of my favourite things to eat. In February Liz and I had flown away from chilly Britain to holiday in Lanzarote. The weather back then was probably the best we’ve ever experienced in Lanzarote at that time of the year and hope we’ll have much of the same when we go back there in a few week’s time.

Collectable cigarette item

Being in Lanzarote meant that it was time for another Thoughts from a Sun Lounger post and I must have been having nostalgic thoughts because I wrote another post about my days as a cigarette salesman in Liverpool.

In March technology issues made me write a post called Not Responding as well as giving readers another Slice of My Life.

One of my most successful posts and one that brings a huge influx of readers onto my site is one I wrote ages ago called Manipulating the Image so in April I tried to replicate its success with a post called Manipulating More Images. It was perhaps a little more focussed on graphic design that the original but sadly, it failed to light up the internet unlike its predessor which is far and away the most read post I have ever written. WordPress stats give me a lot of insight into what my readers are reading, when they read it and where they are but using all that data to make even more successful posts sometimes is just a little beyond me.

In May Liz and I were as usual touring the Loire in France in our little motorhome. The weather wasn’t so good in England and in fact, it wasn’t much better in France. Not only that but while travelling my back became really sore and at one point I was in real agony. Not surprisingly, the next post I produced was called Wet Weather, Books and Back Pain!

In June I was writing about dreams and in July I had music on my mind which led to a rebooted post called 20 Outstanding Instrumental Tracks.

In August the UK elections took place and so I wrote a post called Elections and Questionable People. Labour were the overwhelming victors in the election although perhaps everyone knew that the Conservatives were due to be kicked out of number 10. Surprisingly, Labour’s share of the vote, despite their huge win was only 34% and the Reform Party, whose share of the votes was 14% only ended up with 1% of the seats in Parliament. Both the Reform Party and the Green Party have called for a fairer system of electing the government. Personally, I can’t see that happening anytime soon.

In September after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump, US President Joe Biden began to realise what everyone else was thinking, namely that perhaps he was getting a little too old to be the president and so he stepped down as a candidate in favour of vice president Kamala Harris. That inspired me to write a little quirky fantasy post called Becoming Joe Biden.

This year the Formula One World Championship has encompassed an incredible 24 races, far too many if you ask me. At least Max Verstappen didn’t have everything his own way and it even seemed for a time that Lando Norris might be on course to actually take the crown from him. As it happened, Lando’s team, McLaren, won the constructor’s championship but Max became the 2024 World Champion. I didn’t write much about this year’s racing but I did do a post about 7 Great F1 Designers.

In November, I finally managed to get another book together. It wasn’t the sequel to Floating in Space which I still hope to one day finish but a collection of short stories and blog posts with a little poetry thrown in. By the way, Timeline is available from Amazon as a Kindle download or as a traditional paperback.

That brings us round to December when I seemed to have my music head on as I finished the year with two posts about music albums, Slightly Less Than 10 Great Albums, actually 4 and the final 6 albums in last week’s post.

I’m actually starting to feel a little better and hopefully I might be ready to go out and drink some of that beer I’ve been missing over the last week or so.

Thanks to all my readers. Hope you all had a good Christmas and all the best for 2025.

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10 Great Albums (The Final 6)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was struggling to finish my post 10 Great Albums last week. I did manage to get as far as 4 albums along with a little background for each of my choices so this week I’m going to try and finish the job with another 6 albums. To do so I thought I’d open up my Spotify account and see what I’ve got in my favourites.

The Very Best of Sting and The Police

Looking back I think that the late 70s and early 80s were the height of my record buying life. I spent many hours each week trolling through boxes of vinyl singles in record shops. I rarely bought any single while it was still in or going up the charts, choosing to buy when the record was out of the top 30 or at least dropping down and in the half price section. The Police were one of my favourite bands and I bought many of their singles. They were formed in 1977 and the lineup stayed the same until they went their separate ways.

Sting, aka Gordon Sumner was the lead singer, bass guitarist and writer. Stewart Copeland was on drums and Andy Summers played lead guitar. Their first hits were Roxanne and Can’t Stand Losing You released in 1977 from their debut album Outlandos d’Amour. They had numerous hits, all penned by Sting until their eventual break up in 1986 although they returned for a reunion tour in 2008.

Sting went on to have a successful solo career. His first album was the jazz/rock album Dream of the Blue Turtles which included one of my favourite tracks, If You Love Someone, Set Them Free.

Dance for the New World

I’ve always been a bit of a jazz fan and perhaps that’s why I like a lot of Sting’s jazz orientated work. Back in the 90’s I was a big fan of the radio station Jazz FM. Jazz FM started up in 1990 and they played a lot of modern easy listening jazz and soul. In 2004 the station was rebranded Smooth FM and began to play a mix of classic pop. Back in their Jazz FM heyday, they played a lot of tracks from Dance for the New World, an album by modern jazz pianist Rob Mullins. I loved it straight away and bought it despite it having a hefty price tag as it was a US import.

You can find out more about Rob by clicking here.

Favourite track: Dance for the New World

Aerial by Kate Bush

I don’t know about you but in the past I’ve never had any real interest in Kate Bush. I’ve never disliked her but I’ve never felt compelled to buy any of her music, in fact, her early work has always sounded good but sort of odd if you know what I mean. Her slightly screechy ‘It’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home’ was interesting but I never bought a copy and ‘Babooshka Babooshka‘ was ok but again, I never felt compelled to buy Kate’s work.

Kate topped the UK singles chart in 1978 with Wuthering Heights when she was only 19. She has had various hits over the years including Running Up That Hill which first charted in 1985 and was a recent hit due to its use in a Netflix series, Stranger Things.

Some years ago I watched a documentary about Kate on BBC Four and I found myself liking the sounds and the melodies I heard. Straight afterwards I started searching on eBay for her records. Aerial is a double album full of lovely rhythms and melodies. It’s perhaps more akin to music that comes under the genre ‘chill out’ than her earlier frantic singles. I love the quick changes of direction, the way one track merges into another or into some soothing morning birdsong. The tracks on this album do not comply with the standard three-minute rule and they ebb and flow with Kate’s mood. Lovely stuff but be prepared to sit back and enjoy. This album is not something that can easily be put away.

Favourite track: Sunset.

Remote by Hue and Cry

Hue and Cry are a Scottish duo comprising brothers Pat and Greg Kane. Their first single Here Comes Everybody was released in 1986. It wasn’t a hit but it caught the attention of Virgin records subsidiary Circa Records and they signed up the duo. They released I Refuse on Circa, one of my favourite tracks and then went on to make Remote from which they released a couple of hit singles.

My favourite track on Remote: Looking For Linda.

Images by the Crusaders

I bought this album a very long time ago. I’m not sure where I first heard it but back in the late 80s I used to listen to a Manchester radio DJ called Mike Shaft who used to play a great deal of soul and funk and jazz/fusion. There was also that great track which was a hit in 1979 Street Life, featuring Randy Crawford.

When I was a budding amateur video maker I made a number of videos using this album as the soundtrack. Most of those videos are over on YouTube but I did have to substitute the Crusaders for some copyright free music. Pity because I do love this album. I used to have one of those programs where you can connect your record player to your PC and digitise your tapes and vinyls. Sadly, the result sounded really tinny but happily in recent years I was able to find Images on Spotify which I tend to play quite a lot.

Favourite track: Bayou Bottoms.

 Greatest Hits of James Taylor

I’ve got pretty a wide taste in music and I do like a good folk or country singer. I’m not sure when I first heard James Taylor but he was one of the first people to be signed by the Beatles new record label Apple. According to Wikipedia he is a six times Grammy award winner and was inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame in 2000.

Taylor started out as a singer in New York, part of a group called The Flying Machine but he fell into a cycle of drug taking and the band split up. He became hooked on heroin until his father came to New York, picked him up and took him home. Later he decided to have a new start by moving to London where he met Peter Asher who worked for Apple records and was instrumental in signing up James to Apple. He later became his manager.

Favourite track; Carolina on my Mind.

Spotify

As it’s close to the end of the year Spotify comes up with a whole lot of statistics that are pretty interesting. My top five most played tracks were a complete surprise to me, for instance my most played track in 2024 was Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty. In second place was Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel which of course featured Gerry Rafferty.

Third was Escape, the Pinocolada Song by Rupert Holmes. I’ve always loved that song, particularly the theme and the lyrics. It’s about a couple who are bored with each other and decide to meet someone else who likes Pinocoladas and getting caught in the rain but is not into yoga and has half a brain. Guess who they meet on a blind date? Each other of course.

At number 4 was The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News and number 5 was Top Hat sung of course by Fred Astaire.

In complete contrast, my top artist of the year was Nora Van Elken. Well, I did say I’ve got a pretty wide taste in music although you’ll probably find no new tracks or artists in my choices this year. Oh well, perhaps I should widen my taste a little for 2025. Spotify does recommend a lot of new music for me but I’m not sure I’ve actually listened to music that much lately, except in that one spot where I need advertisement free music; in my car.

What did you listen to in 2024?

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