Author Archives: Steve Higgins

Why Writers can’t do Without Dreams

Posted on by Steve Higgins
image courtesy fotolia

image courtesy fotolia

Dreams; there’s a subject. I woke up a few mornings ago in sunny Lanzarote (sorry, just had to rub that in) after a crazy dream in which I was out with a friend I hadn’t seen for years, and somehow, don’t ask me how, I had lost all my clothes. We had been out drinking and were walking home then something happened and I woke up somewhere without any clothes. I woke up then but that wasn’t the end of it.

The next night I had a sort of follow on dream. I was wandering around with no clothes, although I had come across a blanket somehow and with me was Michael Portillo (yes, the ex-MP who hosts a show on BBC about railway journeys.) Well we ended up in this hotel and I was starting to worry. Well, who wouldn’t? No clothes, no wallet, no mobile. Who could I call? Should I try and cancel my bank cards? What happened to my keys? Where am I and what has Michael Portillo got to do with it?

Michael was standing nearby and using his influence as a famous former MP. Someone brought him a phone and he started chatting into it. Clothes were brought for him and I could hear him chatting to his bank. It actually brought to mind that sequence at the beginning of one of the Bond films where Pierce Brosnan has been in a Chinese prison, escapes and finds himself in Hong Kong. He walks into this posh hotel, his hair long and unkempt, his clothes in rags and the guy at reception says “Will you be wanting your usual suite Mr Bond?”

Some people just have that manner about them don’t they? Me, I’d have been unceremonially kicked out of that hotel, assuming I’d even made it past the front door! I can just imagine the scene:
“Your usual suite Mr Higgins? Just a moment please?”
The manager beckons to a large man looking similar to Oddjob from the Bond movie Goldfinger. The next moment, Mr Higgins hurtles through the front door. As he is propelled into the street he murmurs, “that’s a ‘no’ then is it?”

I often wonder where dreams actually come from. What is it in the deep recesses of the mind that produce these spurious dramas? When I was younger I don’t really recall ever dreaming that much. As I grew older I seemed to dream more but tended to forget most of my dreams very quickly. These days I do dream quite a lot and I dream pretty sensible things too. The ending of ‘Floating In Space’ was something I dreamt one night and I typed it up and replaced the original finale which, although inspired by real events, was a little unbelievable. Also, I have an entire story which I’ve partly written into a screenplay which I dreamt one night and which played out in front of me as vividly as if I was sitting at the front row of a picture house. It is about a man who appears one night wearing a white suit and who gets involved in some strange circumstances. So strange that those around him begin to believe the man is a kind of Saviour; a sort of new Jesus figure, and his companions become disciples in the way of those who followed Jesus himself. I still have my notes from that dream and the story is on my ‘to do’ list to finish.

Dreaming a story and making it into a novel or a screenplay isn’t quite as strange as it seems. In 1898 an American writer, Morgan Robertson wrote a story about an unsinkable ship called the Titan which sailed from England to the USA, hit an iceberg and sank. The story was published fourteen years before the Titanic disaster. I remember reading the story of this writer years ago, even that the writer saw the story played out in front of him like a movie but all the research I did on the internet for this blog seems to imply that the author was a man who knew his business where ships were concerned, felt that ships were getting bigger and bigger and that a disaster like that of the Titanic was inevitable.

Wikipedia describes dreams like this: Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. It’s easy to think that perhaps the basis of dreams, the make-up of dreams comes from within but it’s possible external forces can affect dreams too. Paul McCartney once said that he didn’t write his songs but that they were out there, waiting for him to catch them; to pick them up. Perhaps dreams too are there just waiting for us to dream them.

One other kind of dream is the daydream and T E Laurence once said that those who dream in the day are dangerous men: “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

I have to confess to being a daydreamer but as for being dangerous, well, I think not. I do have a persistent daydream though, one of becoming a best-selling author.

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Five basic steps for Blog Success!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

There are a heck of a lot of blogs about blogging. How to start blogging. What to blog about and so on. The thing is though, if you don’t know what to blog about you shouldn’t be blogging. You have to have some idea what you want to talk about, some subject or interest that’s close to your heart, otherwise, what’s the point?

quotescoverb-jpg-39My blogs are pretty diverse but generally they are funny or at least mildly humorous observations on life. They usually get serious when I talk about things like the Bobby Kennedy shooting or the JFK assassination or even when I look at my writing or film heroes like James Hilton or Woody Allen.

Blogging is something that I started just to promote my book, Floating In Space, and my blogs are mostly written in the same style as the book so they give the reader a sort of taster of what they will be in for if they decide to purchase a copy but now I’m starting to feel almost like, well a professional journalist! I have my deadlines, well my deadline, my one deadline and that is to have something written ready for Saturday when I post. Throughout the week I’ll usually jot something down then edit it into something like a readable piece of work prior to Saturday, and when I say prior to Saturday that usually means Friday night!

Recently I returned from six weeks in Lanzarote and I had planned to write so much and in fact did so little. I started work on another book and another radio script as the last one was rejected by the BBC (what do they know anyway!) I didn’t make much headway in either of those areas but what I did do is a huge amount of networking and I boosted my twitter profile and quadrupled my followers and signed up to Linked In. Actually I was already on Linked In but never used it that much but there are quite a few writers’ and bloggers’ groups worth joining. I’ve also started posting my blogs on Google+ which has substantially increased my network presence. Has it led to more buyers for my book? Well, the exposure has certainly helped with my free promotion but sales are still not quite where I’d like them to be. I’m reading lots of blogs about blogging and book promotion but I’m sorry to say that the chap who promised that he could boost my sales by 1667 % in seven days did not deliver! Well, I did follow most of his advice but stopped just prior to the bit where I should hand over a substantial amount of cash for even more help!

Anyway, after over six months as a blogger here are a few handy tips!

1. The important thing I’ve learned about writing is this: be disciplined. If you plan to write on holiday then choose a time that is good for you and try not to be distracted by e-mails or the internet. In Lanzarote I’d get up early, switch on my laptop with all the best intentions and then start checking e-mails and tweeting and so on. What I should have done is set aside a time for that later, switch off the internet, write for an hour or two hours, or whatever your allotted time is, then go to the internet later.

2. Try to have something visual in your blogs to catch the eye of a potential reader, even it’s only a graphic showing the blog title. There are plenty of places online where you can sort out a graphic, places like www.picmonkey.com, www.pinstamatic.com or www.quotescover.com. You might even want to create a video. Take a look at one of mine made on the www.animoto.com site, created from still images.

3. A good headline pulls people into a newspaper and the same is true for a blog post. Think about your title as much as you think about the content. You also need to get some vital keywords in the title too, just so google can pick up your post, so if you’re writing about motorcycles, get a snappy title in there using ‘motorcycle’! 10 things you should do before starting your motorcycle engine! Try that one and if you’re stuck for a headline title or even content, try this site at portent.com, tap in a few keywords and it’ll come up with a title for you!

4. Create a blogging schedule. There’s a reason why your favourite TV show is on every Friday at seven thirty: So you’ll know when to tune in. It’s the same with a blog. Some people write every day, some people knock out a random blog every so often. My blog comes out once every week, on a Saturday so my small band of followers know when to look for a new one!

5.One final thing you might not have heard of, it’s the ‘call to action.’ So what’s that? Well it’s the thing you want your reader to do, buy your video, buy your product, or even, buy your book, so it might go something like this . . . .

If you liked this blog, why not buy my book? Click the links at the top of the page for more information.

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Why Finding your voice as a writer is so important

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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I start Floating In Space talking about the weekend as ‘one long high energy cassette’ and looking back I wonder if today’s younger generation even know what a high energy cassette is, or even an ordinary cassette for that matter? Still, the important thing is the idea, the idea that the hero of my book, Stuart, is profoundly fed up of his nine to five life and spends a lot of his time waiting for the weekend to begin so that once again he can replay the high energy cassette and enjoy life.

Like a lot of first novels, Floating In Space is semi-autobiographical and based very loosely on some of my own experiences. Many years ago I left school and started work for an insurance company and very soon the whole nine to five existence became deadly dull and I longed to be doing something more interesting. I packed in my Insurance job and spent a few months in Spain but I quickly became bored there. I do love Saturday nights out but when every night becomes a Saturday night, the whole thing loses its attraction. Back in the UK I started work as a bus conductor just as a quick way of earning money and fully intending to get a ‘proper’ job soon but I found I enjoyed my new life working different shifts and meeting new and different people as I tripped up and down the roads of Manchester.

How did I come to write Floating In Space? Well, when I was younger I used to write a lot of things, mainly action, adventure and espionage stories. The only inspiration I had was film and television and my own imagination. Sometimes your own imagination is enough but for writing to have a real impact and depth it needs to come from within and that’s where an author finds his true voice. James Bond for instance, is a great character but he didn’t spring wholly from Ian Fleming’s imagination. Fleming, like the fictional Bond, was a Commander in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War and his knowledge of secret intelligence helped him create the world of 007. When Fleming writes about Bond’s love of food and the good things in life, he is writing about himself. It was Fleming who smoked the bespoke cigarettes which he speaks of in the Bond books. It was Fleming who ate scrambled eggs for breakfast and wore ‘Sea Island’ cotton shirts and these small things he passed onto his fictional character, James Bond.

Finding your own voice is the key to finding your way as an author and one day I sat down and decided it was time to write about the world around me rather than what I was watching on television so I wrote an essay about an evening in the Busmen’s works club. It was an essay about beer and cigarettes, about playing pool and snooker and the banter of young men across the polished bar of the club and over the worn card tables. I wrote more and more about what I saw around me and gradually realised that I could spin all this material together into a novel. I wrote the book in the first person and began to develop a colloquial talkative style which I have used ever since. I never successfully put the various parts together into a complete narrative until a few years ago on a wet rainy holiday in France when I finally wove everything into the final book that you can buy today from amazon.

Go on, give it a read!

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Seven Questions about the Bobby Kennedy Assassination

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve seen and heard a lot of shocking events on television over the years. I remember hearing about the death of Princess Diana one Sunday morning while I waited for the kettle to boil for a morning cup of tea. I was watching TV when 9/11 happened and watched with horror as the second tower was hit by an aircraft. The very first tragedy I learned about from the television though was the shooting of Bobby Kennedy. I was only eleven years old then in 1968 but I knew exactly who Bobby Kennedy was and that his brother, the President, had been assassinated five years before.

Bobby Kennedy was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the 5th of June, 1968. He was celebrating his victory in the California primary the previous day. He made a speech to his campaign supporters then turned away from the rostrum. He was due to meet the press in another part of the hotel and was led away through the pantry area at the back of the hotel. As he passed through the corridors numerous people approached to shake hands with the senator and pass on their best wishes. One man stepped forward though with a gun in his hand. His name was Sirhan Sirhan. He was ahead of Bobby and he pushed forward and began firing his Iver-Johnson eight shot revolver. He was quickly grabbed and pushed down onto a nearby table. The gun stayed firmly in his grasp and he continued to fire as more people assisted in trying to subdue him. Only when all eight shots were fired was the revolver finally wrestled from his grasp. Bobby Kennedy had been injured in the head and a busboy, Juan Romero, dropped to his knees to help. He pushed rosary beads into Bobby’s hands and the injured Senator was heard to ask ’is everyone safe?’

Robert Kennedy picture courtesy wikipedia

Robert Kennedy picture courtesy wikipedia

Bobby Kennedy died the next day. It’s fairly probable that had he lived he would have succeeded Lyndon Johnson as the next President of the United States. He was a man clearly concerned about the war in Vietnam, not only the war itself but the effect it was having within the United States so one of his priorities would surely have been ending the war. J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI had been given a special dispensation by Johnson to stay at the head of the bureau despite having reached the mandatory retirement age. Would Kennedy have retired Hoover and put his own man in charge? Would he have reopened investigations into the death of his brother John, the assassinated President? Either way, these are only speculations. Bobby died the next day.

1. The autopsy showed that Bobby was hit in the back of the head at point-blank range. The fatal shot was fired in an upward direction. How could this be if Sirhan Sirhan was ahead of Kennedy and not close enough to inflict a point blank wound?

2. Scott Enyart, an amateur photographer was in the pantry and photographed the shooting. His film and photographs could answer many questions but they were confiscated by the LAPD. Later he sued the Police department for the return of his pictures but the Police claimed they had been routinely destroyed. What happened to them? Why was photographic evidence relating to the death of a major figure in the US destroyed?

3. Sirhan Sirhan had a number of notebooks. They were filled with page after page of notations like ’RFK must die.’ ‘Robert Kennedy must be assassinated.’ Why did he write these things? Were they part of hypnotic techniques that compelled Sirhan to shoot Bobby Kennedy?

4. Who was the girl in the polka dot dress seen leaving the hotel with a companion after the shooting and boasting that they had killed Kennedy?

5. Why was witness Sandra Sorrano forced to change her story about the polka dot dress girl during an aggressive interview with the FBI?

6. Sirhan Sirhan fired an Iver-Johnson eight shot revolver at Kennedy and discharged all eight bullets. In 1988 examination of an audio recording made of the assassination by reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski revealed thirteen gunshots rather the eight fired by Sirhan. Who fired the other five shots?

7. On August 21, 1968, less than two months after the assassination, 2400 photographs from the original investigation were burned, in the medical-waste incinerator at LA County General Hospital. Other records were also destroyed. Why?

When I heard about the shooting of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 I went out into the back yard of our home in the suburbs of Manchester and said a prayer for him. When he died the next day I was stunned, feeling a personal loss despite being an eleven year old English boy living a thousand miles away from the United States. In the USA itself, thousands of mourners lined the path of Kennedy’s funeral train as it wound its way towards Washington where Bobby was buried beside his slain brother, the President, in Arlington National Cemetary.

Recently Robert Kennedy Jr met with Sirhan Sirhan in a California State Prison and declared he now supports calls for a reinvestigation of the murder. Read more about this in an interesting article in the Washington Post by clicking here.

If you liked this blog, why not try my book? Click the links at the top of the page for more information!

 

 

The Trials and Tribulations of a Coach driver

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Quite a few times travelling on the motorway I’ve seen some really nice looking futuristic coaches. Back in the early eighties I had a short spell as a coach driver working for National Travel but the coaches we drove were not quite so exotic.

picture courtesy wikipedia

picture courtesy wikipedia

Today’s coaches are limited to seventy mph but back then our coaches could do eighty or even ninety miles per hour. The job for us drivers on the Manchester to London route was all about getting down to Victoria Coach Station as quickly as possible, parking up at Battersea coach park then getting down to the pub. One of the problems of running at high speeds, especially in the summer, was that engine temperatures soared and we had to slow down. One day when, once again, I was the last to arrive in London and consequently got the worst hotel room, the one that nobody wanted, one of my fellow drivers asked me if I had used the heaters.

“The heaters? What, in this heat?”

“Yes,” said my colleague. “When your temperature goes up slap the heaters on and you’ll see that temperature dial drop right down.”

Well, anything’s worth a try I thought so the next time I was on the London route I was hurtling along, way ahead of everyone and the temperature dial rose up into the red. Instead of slowing down I popped on the heaters and like magic the temperature gauge dropped down from the red into the black.

When I finally pulled up into the coach station in London I looked up into the mirror and there were my assembled passengers looking as though they had spent the trip in a steam room.

Hey, at least I got the pick of the hotel rooms though!

My fellow drivers and I were booked in at a hotel not far from Battersea coach park and in the evening we would assemble in a pub called the Drum for drinks. Some of the guys had told me about a group of ladies there who used to favour the coach drivers. They were known as ‘the heavy gang’ and for some reason I got the impression of them as being movie starlets, or fashion models. Big mistake! When I was first introduced to one of these ladies with, I might add, the whispered comment ‘she’s a right goer’ I was, well, let’s say disappointed. The epithet ‘heavy gang’ was clearly a reference to the ladies weight rather than their passionate nature as I had mistakenly believed. The Drum was not for me and from then on I rarely frequented its portals.

On one particular London trip I fell into the age old trick of thinking I had begun to actually know London. We were diverted down a different route because of road works and just as I thought we were back on the normal road I looked about and realised to my horror that I didn’t recognise any of the roads. Just then a young girl came down to the front and told me I was going the wrong way and I would have to turn back somewhere. I turned off the main road into a housing estate and just after completing a difficult three point turn (it was a 57 seater coach after all!) the same girl came back and asked if she could get off. I said sorry, no, I could only stop at authorised stops. She looked at me and pointed to the door of a house only yards away, “but that’s where I live!” She gave me that sad imploring look she must have used on many a coach driver so I opened the doors and let her off. Perhaps she wasn’t used to kindly northern coach drivers but whatever the reason she planted a huge kiss on my astonished lips, told me I was wonderful, and nipped off the coach. As I was finishing the three point turn and straightening the coach up she went into her front door and waved back with a huge smile. The rest of the passengers, subjected to this untimely diversion were not so happy.

After meeting the ‘heavy gang’ I tended to drink in the pub next door to the Drum. They had a pool table and I used to put a marker down and have a game. On this particular night a driver called Freddie came in (not his real name!) He was a really over the top friendly guy and seemed to be very concerned that I was on my own playing pool. He brought a few of the other National Travel drivers in and we all had a chat and a nice evening. Later on he asked me if I fancied going on to a club. Great stuff I thought. Here I am, a northern lad, clubbing down in London. I even imagined mydelf bumping into the girl I had dropped off earlier!

One of the other guys said to me quietly “Are you going to this club?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You fellas up for it too?”

“Well, not really, “they said. “Do you know what sort of a club it is?”

“What sort of a club? Well, I assume it’s a nightclub.”

“Yes, it is. But it’s a gay club.”

“What?” I said.

If you don’t believe it they said, ask Freddie.

Well, I asked Freddie and it was a gay club and Freddie turned out to be the resident gay driver at National Express. He was a really nice guy but I was unable to return his affections. It’s nice to be wanted of course, especially when you are the new guy but it was hard work making Freddie understand that gay clubs weren’t my scene.

The next day when I arrived back in Manchester the Boss called me over. Apparently he had been inundated with complaints about my conduct on the trip down to London.

“What?” I asked, incredulously, “me?”

“Yes,” he said. “What’s all this about you going off route and dropping your girlfriend off at her front door in London?”

That one took some explaining!

If you liked this blog, why not try my book, Floating in Space? Click the links at the top of the page to buy for more information!

 

Four Random Thoughts on a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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Lying on a sunbed under a blue sky and a hot sun must be one of the most relaxing and therapeutic things I can think of. The only sound is the rippling of the water in the heated pool and the rumbling of my own thoughts and I am thinking that as I write this it’s the last day of my holiday and in a few days time I’ll be back at work again, ploughing through a thousand e-mails, if not more.  Tomorrow someone else will be sitting here, in my villa, in my seat, drinking wine from my glass and contemplating the blue sky that I so love. I particularly like the heated pool and it has been great to swim every day and my fitness levels must have improved. A few years back I hurt my neck and it’s hard for me to twist and take a breath in the water so what was so good for me was that I was able to swim the whole length of this rather small pool in one breath. When we stayed in Portugal last year and had a big pool I was struggling to get to the other end underwater!

Two

One other thing that I enjoy when lying in the sun is listening to music on my MP3 player. As much as I have embraced technology I have been a bit of a late starter when it comes to MP3 players. It was only about two or three years ago that I changed from a car with a tape player to one with a CD player and since then I have had to start making CDs to play when I’m motoring rather than the tapes I’ve been making ever since cassette tape recorders appeared in the early seventies. Of course, once the CDs are copied to your PC it’s a pretty easy matter to then pop them onto your MP3 player. Quite recently I came across some software that has enabled me to digitise some of my old tapes and vinyl records. One of my favourite tapes was something I concocted over thirty years ago and has soundtrack music from my favourite films and TV shows along with some of my favourite dialogue too, things like Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, James Garner and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, and Michael Caine in Alfie. It’s almost surreal to lie here under the warm sun listening -not to the latest downloads but to a compilation I put together over thirty years ago!

Three

This is a lovely villa, near to the bars and restaurants and from the balcony I can see the flickering of the flags on the boats in the harbour. At our favourite bar the Café Beruggo, the staff turned out in force to say goodbye which was really nice. Of course the last days of a holiday are always sad and it’s hard to hand over the property to the next holiday maker. It was just as hard when I was much younger and the holidays of my childhood were spent in rented caravans in places like Skegness, Prestatyn, Blackpool and Rhyl. I remember one such holiday when my brother and I ran excitedly through the caravan park following instructions on the lines of ‘go to the third row, turn left and your caravan is at the end with the red roof.’ Well, we went past lots of modern looking caravans, turned left but the one at the end was an old van, looking for all the world like one of those caravans you see seemingly abandoned in some corner of a farmer’s field or on a construction site. That couldn’t be our van? Surely not! When my dad tried the key and it worked, we entered into this old and rather dingy caravan in a state of disappointment and settled down for our week’s holiday. It was so ancient that it had gas lights that were lit by a match. The van filled with that aroma of calor gas that I always liked and I remember playing cards and board games at night lit by the glow of those lamps. Those were the days when Mum booked the holiday from a classified advert in the Manchester Evening News so we never knew what to expect. That particular caravan was a disappointment but there were others that she booked that were wonderful.

Four

One final thought on caravans. Once, a few years ago, Liz and I stopped for a few days at a caravan park in France. Our van was opposite the touring section and I remember one day, sitting in my deck chair in the sun reading a book when a foreign motor home trundled over and parked up opposite. The motor home was towing a small car which was unhooked and parked. Then a huge awning was wound out from the motor home, a ground sheet dropped down, and various items of garden furniture appeared. Not long after that our new neighbour rolled out something that looked like a circular wheelie bin. As I gazed on over the rim of my paperback the top of the object opened and a huge satellite dish that surely must have been NASA surplus stock was raised and aimed at some distant TV station. The Germans had arrived.

If you enjoyed this post, why not try my novel ‘Floating In Space.’ Click the links at the top of the page to find out more.

What happens when classic TV gets remade?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

. . . Or perhaps more importantly, why does classic TV get remade? Why not just let sleeping TV classics lie? What! When there’s more money to be made! The thing about classic TV is that people know what it’s about. When they made Mission Impossible into a movie with Tom Cruise we all knew that somewhere in the movie Cruise would get to listen to a recording giving him some impossible mission with the reminder that ‘if any of your people are caught or killed, the secretary will disavow knowledge of your actions!’ The PR man’s job is half done already, done by the collective TV memory of millions of people who watched the TV series.

Recently movie producers did the impossible, re created (re-imagined to use movie-speak) Kirk, Spock, and Scotty from the original Star Trek. The first was a pretty good movie, the second, Into Darkness, I wasn’t so keen on. Someone must have liked it though because director JJ Abrams has now been recruited to inject new life into the Star Wars franchise.

Every day the more visible you are on the internet the more stuff comes into your inbox. Some of it is unwanted, TAG_Teaser_Email_05_asome of it is junk but occasionally you get something pretty interesting. I recently received this picture to the left and a week later the video link below. Looks like there is a new version of Thunderbirds in the offing.

As a school kid I was brought up on Gerry Anderson’s TV productions. I vaguely remember Four Feather Falls, a cowboy puppet show, but then came Supercar, Stingray and Thunderbirds, all part of Gerry’s vision of the future. What was great about Gerry’s TV shows was that they were aimed at kids but all had a serious adult perspective. They didn’t look down at kids, they treated children more as future adults. Supercar, Stingray and Fireball XL5 were all thirty minute shows but Thunderbirds was a full hour and many of the episodes were serious and complex.

One episode entitled the ‘cham cham’ was about a musical code written into a song and it was up to Lady Penelope, the Thunderbirds London agent, to get to the bottom of things. Another Lady Penelope episode that comes to mind was ‘Vault of Death’ in which an employee is trapped in the vault of the Bank of England and the international rescue guys try to save the man before the oxygen runs out. Of course it is Parker, Penelope’s chauffeur, manservant, and former safe cracker who manages to open the vault with a hairpin!

Scott Tracy Thunderbird 1 pilot

Scott Tracy Thunderbird 1 pilot

Sylvia Anderson, Gerry’s wife, was the voice of Lady Penelope and Sylvia always had a credit on the shows for characterisation. It was always the characters that brought the shows to life, not just the incredible Thunderbirds craft launching from under the swimming pool or other hidden places. Gerry and Sylvia went on to make live action shows like UFO and Space 1999 before they had an acrimonious split. Later Gerry tried for a comeback children’s show with Terrahawks but without Sylvia’s characterisations the show didn’t really hit the mark.

Anyway, I do wonder how the guys from this new series targeted me. I must have left something somewhere, some random cookie in cyberspace that let the marketing people know that I used to watch Thunderbirds years ago. Well, I’m not ashamed to say that I did and I also subscribed to the Gerry Anderson comic TV21 and built a plastic kit version of Thunderbird One. Hope the new series lives up to the old one, although I seriously doubt it. Anyway, if today’s kids don’t enjoy the new Thunderbirds, they can catch the classic original on DVD!

By the way, if you enjoyed this post then why not buy my book?

 

 

Tasting the Tapas in Lanzarote

Posted on by Steve Higgins

snaplanzaThis is week five for Liz and I staying here near the Marina Rubicon in Lanzarote. We’re here for six weeks in total, a nice break away from the snow and ice of the UK. The temperature here is in the early seventies and this last week it’s been a bit cool and cloudy which, I have to say, has played havoc with my swimming and sunbathing routine.

We’re away  from the centre of Playa Blanca by the Marina which is good because like a lot of Spanish resorts, the centre of Playa Blanca is a full of ‘British’ pubs and bars and restaurants offering British beer and meals like chips, egg and beans and so on as their staple fare. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not against chips, egg and beans, as a matter of fact it is one of my favourite meals but I can make it myself back at home or go to any pub or café to get it. When I travel hundreds of miles I want something different, not something I can have any day of the week back home. It’s the same with beer. Why would I want a pint of British beer or lager when I can have something different? Of course, all the major brands of beer can now be found all over the world. My local pub has San Miguel on draft! The fact is that the whole world is getting smaller and more international by the day. Not so long ago my cousin was in New York tweeting he was at a bar drinking a pint of Boddingtons, the definitive Manchester ale!

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Tasty nibbles at Café Berrugo

I do like my food and dining out can be such a wonderful experience. All you need is a great location, great staff and of course, great food. As we’re here in the canary islands it seems fair to step away from UK pub food for a while and experience proper Spanish tapas. Tapas as you may know is Spanish for small plates. Small plates of food that is, so not long after arriving Liz and I went to our ‘local’ café, a place called Café Berrugo. Now at first I wasn’t sure if this place was a real authentic Canarian eating house. Why not? Well, with items like chips, egg and sausage and hot dog and chips on the menu that was something of a giveaway but actually when we come here of an evening, most of the clientele are local Lanzarote people and if you look closely at the menu there is a nice tapas section which a lot of the Brits seem to ignore. Anyway, we knew that tapas is small dishes so we ordered this lot: Garlic mushrooms, Canarian potatoes with mojo sauce, garlic prawns, Canarian boar with peppers and onions and a portion of, well I am a Brit after all, a portion of chips. (That’s fries if you are reading this in the US.)

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Garlic mushrooms and bread.

Now the thing is, at this cheap and cheerful café the portions are pretty big so we ended up fairly stuffed after that veritable feast but we managed to scoff it all and wash it down with a nice bottle of Spanish red and the excellent staff offered us a nice free vodka caramel to finish off.

Another night we decided to go up market to the Blue Note bar and restaurant and once again we went for the tapas. I only ordered five as part of the five for twelve euros deal and decided to have two as starters and three as a main meal. Now the thing was that here at the posh end of the marina, tapas clearly does mean small plates, or perhaps tiny plates would have been a better description. The chorizo sausages were nice but as there were only three small sausages I didn’t quite get to gauge the flavour. Same with the meatballs, there were only three of them. Anyway, it was all very lovely with nice staff and a picturesque setting by the marina with a small jazz trio playing away. I recommend it highly, unless you happen to be really hungry!

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Canarian potatoes with mojo sauce and a plate of serrano ham.

So after that little bit of research it seems that tapas do not come in a standard size. If you ever visit Lanzarote and happen to be staying near the Marina Rubicon at Playa Blanca remember this; if you’re not too hungry then have your tapas in the posh restaurants by the marina but if you are feeling even a little ravenous, go down to Café Berrugo!

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Be nice to people on your way up, because you’ll meet them on your way down!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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I’m not totally sure of the origin of that quote. I personally remember it from one of David Niven’s classic books about the golden age of Hollywood but when I looked it up it is attributed to quite a few people, Walter Winchell, Jimmy Durante or even George Raft for instance so who really said it first I can’t say.

Many years ago I used to be a bus driver. In fact I started work on the buses at the very tail end of the driver and conductor years and one of my colleagues was a guy called Neil. Now Neil was a nice fella but he was also a very rum turkey indeed. Way back then there were conductors like me who were honest, well reasonably honest. There was always the passenger who paid right at the last minute as he was getting off the bus and there wouldn’t be time to snap off a ticket. Those few pence went into the drivers’ and conductors’ brew fund and when we stopped at the next canteen (back in the late seventies and early eighties there was always another canteen on the horizon) I’d get the brews in with those few pence. Of course there were conductors who made a habit of approaching customers who were just getting off the bus and they made a regular brew fund out of those last minute bus fares. Others, those more dishonest ones, and I am sad to say Neil fell into that category, went out of their way not to give out tickets or even issued blank tickets. 

One day Neil got his hands burned. He’d issued a blank ticket to a customer and who should board the bus but the fraud squad. They checked the tickets and pulled Neil up regarding the blank ticket. Neil went to a tribunal where he was accused and faced the sack but an incredible stroke of luck came his way. The fraud squad lost the evidence. They’d misplaced the offending blank ticket and Neil managed to hang onto his job with a stern warning. The fraud squad Inspector, a not very pleasant chap nicknamed Himmler, came up to Neil and told him in no uncertain terms, he had him in his sights and one day he’d get him.

Well, Neil went on to become a driver and then a one man driver and by then, as far as I know, he had left his nefarious past behind him. Still, you never could tell. Some busmen took fare fiddling to a fine art form and it wasn’t always the ones like Neil who were the perpetrators. One guy, I’ll call him Arthur, spent a pretty uneventful life working for the bus company. He never upset anyone, was always on time and was rarely off sick. He was very good with money, and apparently invested his bus driving pay packet well. Of course he was one of the first one man drivers and on a good wage. Anyway, he did really well for himself and owned a nice holiday home in Prestatyn. Good on him you might think. Then he dropped dead one day of a heart attack and a few weeks later his widow came into the depot with Arthur’s spare ticket machine. Spare ticket machine? What spare ticket machine? Nobody had a spare ticket machine! Has the penny has dropped yet? Arthur was issuing tickets and taking fares for himself! Somewhere along the way Arthur had ‘acquired’ another ticket machine. Nice scam. No wonder he had a holiday home in Prestatyn! At least the Depot Inspectors didn’t tell the wife.

Anyway, back to Neil although before going completely to Neil I have to tell you this, Just on the A6 in Levenshulme, we had a small busmen’s canteen. The thing about this canteen was that if you were on the Manchester to Hazel Grove or Stockport route you usually stopped here for your breakfast or lunch. Now if you were going towards Stockport the canteen was actually just by two double yellow lines. Just past the canteen was a turn in to the bus parking bays but if you were due for a meal break and your bus was carrying on to Stockport you had to go through the traffic lights and stop in the lay by, leave your bus and then walk back to the canteen. Now, what most people did was stop on the double yellows then shout into the canteen for the new crew. It was wrong but that’s what we did and no one made a fuss. Anyway, one day an Inspector’s job came available. Various people applied but the guy who got the job was Neil and he decided that his first order of business as an Inspector was to stop buses parking on those double yellow lines! He did so and made himself a very unpopular fellow indeed. He’d wait by the canteen door and ‘book’ any driver stopping on the yellow lines and plenty of times myself and other crews would be coming along, ready to stop and we’d see Neil waving us on so we’d carry on, through the lights and on to the layby.

Now here’s where Neil’s past caught up with him. In those days a new appointment was probationary for six months and Neil went along to an Inspectors’ meeting chaired by one of the senior Inspectors who just happened to be, yes you’ve guessed it, it was Himmler. Now Himmler took Neil to one side. Asked what he was doing in Inspector’s uniform and by the end of the week Neil was back driving his bus and someone else was in charge at Lloyd road.

Neil of course, had upset many people in his short term as an Inspector and he had forgotten the golden rule: Be nice to people on the way up because, well, you know the rest. No one ever spoke to Neil again and he cut a sad figure, shunned by his workmates and always sitting alone in the canteen. Shortly after he packed the job in.

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David Cassidy and a Haircut in 1975

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-JPG-61Take a look at the photo just below. You wouldn’t think a young lad with all that hair would one day, well, not have it. Especially if that lad had really thick luxuriant hair. Well, you just wouldn’t would you? steve 1970sThe fact of the matter is, that picture is me, my former self, a painfully shy teenage youth who would one day discover, to his utter shock and horror, that he was losing his hair! It actually happened when I was nineteen and I was working in city centre Manchester and decided I was going to have a really top notch hair cut and try a proper salon: Not the usual barber’s shop I used to go to, so one day back in . . 1975, I think it was, I went to a place called Paul Brendon’s hair design on Oxford road and asked for a haircut that was pretty popular at the time. It was the hairstyle favoured by David Cassidy who was a seventies female heart throb and although I wouldn’t have admitted it then, well, I thought he looked pretty cool. David had long hair –hey, it was 1975! – parted in the middle, so that was what I asked for. I went for the full monty; shampoo, cut and blow dry, and at the end of it I thought it looked pretty good, but as I was leaving, the barber (sorry, hair stylist) said to me, “better watch out, your hair’s getting a little thin on top!”

image courtesy wikipedia

image courtesy wikipedia

Well I paid up and left the salon and tried to get my head round that last statement. ‘My hair’s going a little thin on top’ the stylist had said. A little thin? Wonder what he meant? Of course, with such a luxuriant growth of hair (take another look at the picture) he couldn’t really mean I was losing my hair, could he? So, what on earth did he mean? After a while it came to me, he meant the individual strands of hair were thin rather than thick! I had heard talk of products like volumisers and stuff, maybe that is what I needed. Looking back it’s sad to see how I was unable to face the obvious truth; that I had begun to lose my hair. It took me a lot of years to get used to it but now, over thirty years later, well I suppose I finally have, I think!

Nowadays hair salons are a distant dream to me. Once every six weeks or so, I pop down into St Annes, and go into whichever barbers has no one waiting. (Believe me, when you have hair like mine that can be cut in ten minutes flat or less, you do not want to wait half an hour while some long haired nerd has his hair trimmed and blow dried and God knows what else done to it!) I ask for a number 2, the barber gets stuck in and then five to ten minutes later I am good to go, all neat and trimmed and with hair that does not need a drier or even a comb for that matter.

I wonder though if some miracle cure came out that would restore my hair and I mean really restore my hair, fully guaranteed, not some rip off product that doesn’t deliver, would I pay a fortune for it? Well, would I sell the car and take out a loan to get it?

Are you joking? Do you want a serious answer? Of course I would!

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