Author Archives: Steve Higgins

Blogging the Blog

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-JPG-15So just what makes us bloggers and why do we blog?

Well, if you write something, it stands to reason you will want someone to read it. It’s deep in the psyche, this need to communicate and express yourself but bloggers blog for a number of reasons. One is that we have a particular interest or passion that we just have to talk about. It might be a sporting interest or a hobby that we love. It could be a love of poetry or books.

If you spend a lot of your free time cycling for instance you might want to indulge your love of this hobby by writing about it and discussing cycling issues or sharing information and tips about cycles. I subscribe to a lot of blogs about my favourite sport, F1 racing, as well as blogs about writing and my favourite movie directors for instance.

Another reason for blogging is to promote a business. There are many photographer blogs on the web, some are from amateurs who want others to see and comment on their work, some are by professionals who are actively promoting themselves and their business.

Authors are frequent bloggers, perhaps because publishing has been turned on it’s head by the internet and the digital revolution. No longer must we writers wait for the publisher to find us, we can get our work out there straight away and build up an Internet presence which in turn benefits our self published works. Whether self publishing is a good thing I’m not so sure. I feel that personally I’ve rushed a little too quickly down the self publishing route but the experience has been good for me. I’m well aware of the state of my manuscript and it’s grammatical errors and I’m well on the way to sorting that.

I have to say also that the print version of Floating In Space will shortly have finished it’s re sizing and grammatical revisions and will be ready to hit the market soon. Blogging for me is primarily to promote my work but I do love writing and I do love writing my little blog. One good thing about blogging is that it gets the creative juices flowing. It gets you thinking, what can I write about? What can I write about next time? So far the ideas have kept on coming and I’ve got six or seven draft blogs in the pipeline although I have to say two have them have been there so long I think they may be heading for the trash file shortly.

popartpic1edQuite a few people have asked me about my novel. What’s it about? is a frequent question. Well, it’s set in the late 1970’s and it’s about a young man in South Manchester and his small group of friends. He goes from working in an insurance company to finding himself as a bus conductor in a short space of time and the background to the book tells us about life in the seventies: Music, drink, pubs and Mancunian night life.

Is it a science fiction book? No it isn’t.

Why is it called ‘Floating In Space’ then? Click the links at the top of the page for more information or, buy the book and all will be revealed!

Checking the Temperature and the British Summer

Posted on by Steve Higgins

checking the temperatureHot, boiling, sweltering, humid: Any way you look at it the UK is hot! We can’t complain about a rainy summer this year but in the UK we are just not prepared for heat. In Spain for instance it’s perfect for a hot, sunny, holiday. They have their cool outdoor pools, their outdoor bars and restaurants, and if we want to cool down more then we can go inside where traditionally built Spanish properties with their tiled interiors and whitewashed exteriors positively hug any coolness that might be about.

In the UK with our insulated walls and roofing, our houses seem to hug the warmth, it’s hotter in our homes than outside and when we leave our windows open to cool down you can guarantee some inconsiderate noisy sod will be playing his or her music far too loud, Well, that’s the British summer for you.

Something that really bugs me lately is the way the metric system has started to grip it’s clammy fingers around the UK media. When I’m watching a rather interesting documentary on the BBC I’m not interested in the least about how many metres long this or that is, or how many kilometres it is to there from here, I want to know it in feet and inches, I want to know in miles! I’m English and OK when I’m travelling in Europe I accept kilometres and KPH and do the mental adjustment but in the UK I shouldn’t have to do that. On the motorway I understand what it means when I hit the 300 yard marker to the next exit. I know what a yard is, I can visualise it. I understand that the next services are twenty miles away because I understand what a mile is and how long a mile is so don’t start putting kilometres on the motorway to confuse me!

image courtesy wikipedia

image courtesy wikipedia

And, coming back to the heat, when did all this Celsius start creeping in. The temperature today will be a maximum of twenty degrees? What is that about? If you are going to tell me the temperature tell me in the Fahrenheit that I have been  brought up with and understand then I know that seventy is hot and eighty is even hotter!

This is the time of year when the papers will say one day, it was hotter in Dartford that it was in Barcelona or hotter in Brighton than the Costa Del Sol! Interesting. Of course, they don’t say that happened on one day out of three hundred and sixty five or that the last time it happened it was 1973 but either way it’s still pretty interesting. But, and here’s something you should know, on the day the temperature  hits 37 degrees Celcius in somewhere like Blackpool the papers won’t tell you that. No, what they will say will be this ‘Temperature hits 100 degrees in Blackpool!’‘

Yes, the big one hundred, that’s Fahrenheit of course . .

Enjoyed this post? Well, if you did why not try my book, Floating In Space? Click the links at the top of the page for more information or HERE to go straight to Amazon!

 

Comics, and how they Kick Started a Writers Imagination!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

When I was a school kid one of my passions was comics. And I mean comics of all shapes and sizes. The crazy thing is that now, whenever I look round a newsagent’s or supermarket, one thing you just don’t see are comics. Maybe the younger generation are too ‘adult’ these days for comics, or maybe they just appealed to my generation. Perhaps comics are just a casualty of the electronic internet age. Who knows?

image courtesy wikipedia

image courtesy wikipedia

One of the earliest comics I remember reading is one I used to prise off my Dad despite his protests that he wasn’t interested in comics. The Hotspur. It was a great comic, although a little old-fashioned even then. Another similar comic was the Valiant. Now the Valiant had some great stories. Captain Hurricane, who was usually the front page feature: A World War II Royal marine who had a habit of flying into what might be termed today a ‘wobbler’ but in the comic they called a ‘ragin’ fury’. Kelly’s Eye was another favourite, about a man who had an ancient charm he wore around his neck called the ‘Eye of Zoltec’ that protected him from harm. Then there was ‘The Steel Claw’ about a scientist who had a false hand which when connected to an electric current rendered him invisible.

Remember the Tiger? I used to buy that for a strip called ‘Skid Solo’ about a formula one racing driver and his team.

In the late sixties and early seventies I was fascinated by Gerry Anderson’s sci fi children’s series and a comic soon appeared called TV21 which featured Anderson’s series in comic form. What I loved about TV21 was that the front page was in a kind of newspaper format with a headline and associated stories, even sometimes with a stop press that all related to comic strips within the comic. For instance: Stop press. WASP submarine Stingray reported missing in the Atlantic. When you turned to the Stingray page, there was the full story.

image courtesy flickr

image courtesy flickr

I used to buy American comics too. DC comics like Superman and Batman and the Marvel comics featuring Spiderman and The Fantastic Four. My favourites were the older DC comics and you used to be able to get an 80 page ‘Giant’ featuring something like the origin of Batman. (All super heroes had their ‘origin’ edition.) In the case of Batman I loved the older 1940’s gothic versions of Batman with his 1940’s style Batmobile. It’s great to see the latest movie versions of these fantasy comic strips but they don’t always live up to their comic predecessors.

Comics instilled in me a love of stories and lit the fuse that burned inside me and made me want to be a writer. Just to finish this blog here’s one final comic confession: Many years ago my Mum had a part time job as a cleaning lady at a big posh house in Gatley. The family which lived there included two young girls who read a girl’s comic called  Bunty. I hate to admit it but my Mum used to bring home a pile of old Buntys every month or so and I used to put them in chronological order and sit down and read them! I really did love my comics!

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David Copperfield, Steerforth, and Charles Dickens

Posted on by Steve Higgins

David Copperfield, Steerforth, and Charles Dickens.

An Airliner, An IRA Bomb, and John F Kennedy

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s a wonderful summer in the UK and school holidays have started so a lot of people will be wanting to fly away for their summer break. Wherever people are going though, they must be eager to avoid the Ukraine. I’ve not seen the news much lately and like many people I’m struggling to understand what happened. Why shoot down a commercial airliner? Was it a mistake? Did somebody think it was a military flight? Who did shoot the plane down and what will be done about it?

Things like this, needless death and destruction, are deeply upsetting. I remember years ago watching the New York Twin Towers terrorist attacks, 9/11 as it is now known, unfold before me on television and I’d forgotten really just how shocking it was until I picked up a DVD of Oliver Stone’s film World Trade Centre recently. I bought it at a car boot sale and watched it one night after a late shift and the scenes of people glued to their TV sets reminded me of myself, back in 2001, unable to move away from the TV screen.

Courtesy wikipedia

Courtesy wikipedia

One sad aspect of these atrocities, particularly the 9/11 attack in New York was that they are based on religious hatred, More than that, they are based on mistaken religious hatred because as far as I know neither the Koran nor the Bible incite murder or hatred. The Bible asks us to love our enemies, not so easy in the case of Osama Bin Ladin I admit but hopefully, in the next world the Almighty will grant his soul the compassion and understanding for others which he did not possess in this world.

A long time ago I used to have a small shop in the Corn Exchange in Manchester. It was called Armchair Motorsports and I used to sell all sorts of Motorsport memorabilia. When things weren’t doing too well I accepted an offer from a guy I knew in a similar business and sold up. He didn’t use my unit at the Corn Exchange, as it was only rented and anyway, he had his own premises. Just as well because some time later the IRA planted a bomb outside and blew the building up. The thing is, what I thought to be something of a blow was in fact a good thing. If I hadn’t sold the business I could have been going to work that day and been injured or even killed. Tragedy, world tragedy, sometimes makes you look at your own life and think just how lucky you are compared to some.

For you regular readers, you will know how I like to tie up my blogs with something faintly amusing at the end but this subject is a tough one in which to inject some humour so I thought rather than go down that route and fail dismally I’d finish with a few thoughtful and sober words from President Kennedy. Words spoken by him in a speech he gave shortly before his death and words which I think are important to this day.

Kennedy was looking for something with which to bring the Americans and the Soviet peoples together, to find some common ground, not an easy task in the cold war period. This is what he said and I think there is something here for everyone, whether you are a Muslim, a Christian, a Ukrainian Separatist or just an ordinary guy like me.

“So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Growing up with the Motor Car

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Ever look back at those old cars you used to own? I sometimes do and looking back, cars are pretty synonymous with growing up, certainly from a male point of view anyway.

9o698i3bgeI’m probably pushed to tell you the registration number of my current car but PDB 71M, the VRM (Vehicle Registration Mark) of my very first car is still firmly anchored in my old memory bank. My first car was a Bond Bug. You may not remember the name but they were sporty little three wheeler cars and I bought one because I failed my driving test twice and I could drive the Bug on my motorbike licence.

It was actually a pretty eye catching car for a three wheeler. No doors but the roof lifted up to gain access and the side windows were plastic held on by Velcro. I always remember bringing it home and showing it off to my family with a certain amount of pride and my Dad looking at it and saying “How are we all going to get into that?” Perhaps he thought I was going to take us all away for a holiday!

Still, we had some nice times, me and the Bond Bug but then one cold and snowy Christmas I decided to chance going out to a Christmas party in the car even though it was losing coolant. I topped it up with water and went off for a night of Christmas cheer. I walked home sensibly, I might add, but when I returned the next day I found that the car had frozen overnight and it ended up having to have an engine rebuild. That was a pretty expensive night out! Later when I passed my driving test I got myself a proper car.

I’m pretty happy with my current car generally, it’s a Renault Megane convertible and I kind of like being just a bit of a poser, driving round when its sunny with the roof down and looking generally pretty cool what with my leather seats and my shades but you do get those days when things go wrong.

I spent a lot of time the other day burning a few new cds to play in my car and just as I joined the motorway on the way to work I pressed the eject button on my CD player but the old cd wouldn’t eject. I could hardly pull over on the motorway so already my journey had not started well.

The other thing is that one of my electric windows, the rear off side one to be exact, has jammed. OK, at least it jammed in the up position but the car automatically drops the windows when raising or lowering the roof, so that means I can’t open my roof.  Add to that the recent lovely weather – perfect for open top driving – and as you can imagine, I’m not happy!

Anyway, I have to look on the bright side. When I pulled up at work and switched off the radio, my CD ejected! At least I was OK for music on the return journey!

Here’s my car when it was new . .

 

 

Quiz night, Frank Ifield and a very Tricky Customer

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-JPG-60Years ago a very tricky customer on my one man bus gave me seventy pence in penny coins for his bus fare. He thought this was pretty funny at first but I can be just as tricky so I gave him seventy penny tickets in return. He wasn’t amused.

I was tempted to save that gem to the end of the blog to finish with something of a bang, but what the heck, using it at the beginning enables me to link one tricky customer to another and to explain further, I’m referring to Mike, our very tricky pub quizmaster.

Mike runs the quiz night at the Lord Derby in St Annes. Liz and I are not accomplished quiz people but between us we have a fair knowledge of most things and when it comes to music we both have our ‘specialist’ areas. Mine is the 1980s and Liz is pretty good with the 1970s. Neither of us are that great with the sixties though (we’re both far too young) but it’s even harder when you have a tricky quiz master to contend with.

The quiz starts off as usual with the picture round. Twenty five pictures of famous and not so famous people and always portrayed in the picture sheet at their very worst so as to make it so much harder to guess who they are. I have to say we are pretty good at this round but there are always the problem faces and sometimes we have to barter with other teams (tell me number four and I’ll tell you number fifteen!)

On one occasion I was foxed by a picture of a football manager but I was pretty certain he was an Italian. I texted my friend Andy ‘Tell me some Italian football managers who manage a UK team!’ Andy gave me various options, none sounded right but I chose one. The guy turned out to be Jose Mourinho, a football manager from Portugal! Sometimes, no knowledge at all is better than a little! Oh well, another point lost.

The next part is the music quiz. Ten decades and two tracks for each decade. Our quiz master will usually give us a bit of a clue so he’ll throw in two numbers to help us with the years. Now on the particular occasion I want to talk about he gave us 1 and 7 so the first year would be 1961, the next 1967 then 1971 and so on. Now, and this is pretty important, Mike mentioned that as usual, the year he is after is the year of highest chart placing. Starting to get a hint of his trickiness? I thought so!.

We quickly identified the two sixties tracks, Del Shannon and the hit single ‘Runaway’ and the Kinks with ‘Waterloo Sunset.’

So, all the sixties tracks out of the way so we could concentrate on the others and in this endeavour we usually invite John and Kurt, two young guys in their twenties to our table for their up to date music knowledge. (You can see how ruthless we are!)

Frank Ifield

Frank Ifield

However, our wily quiz master had set a trap because the final track he played was another sixties release, Frank Ifield and the yodelling song! We should have been ready for it really because, as I’ve said, Mike made much of the importance of the year of highest chart placing, however, we were snookered. I personally thought Runaway had been a re-release and we changed our answers but the sad truth is that Frank Ifield’s single ‘She taught me how to Yodel’ was re-released in 1991 and was a bigger seller then than in the sixties.

Oh well, no barrel of ale on that occasion. We’ll be back next Thursday for another shot.

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

Breakfast TV and The Apollo Moon Landing.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always been a sci-fi fan but when I was a child growing up in the 1960’s I was probably more interested in science fact. The sixties was the time of the space race and the Gemini and Apollo missions were covered in great detail on TV and when I say covered I mean full features and bulletins and not just a one minute item on the news.

I don’t know if you can imagine the excitement of a twelve year old boy, getting up for school one day to find the TV on and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon when the usual TV broadcast at that time would have been the test card! How my Mother eventually managed to pack me off to school I do not know.

The moon landing was covered on UK TV by both the BBC and ITV although in our house we watched the BBC coverage exclusively. Cliff Michelmore was the main presenter but it was James Burke who explained all the technical stuff.

The launch of the Apollo missions was always a highlight for me. Although I enjoyed all the other elements too like the crew broadcasts from space, and those from Mission Control in Houston especially when a major decision had to be taken, for instance, ‘are we ok for lunar trajectory insertion?’ And the answers would come from the experts around the control room:

Capcom? Go!

Retro? Go!

Fido? Go!

Guidance? Go!

Surgeon? Go!

And so on round the room.

Now the Space Shuttle has been mothballed there are very few launches from Cape Canaveral. (Originally I had written Cape Kennedy there but as usual after writing stuff I did a quick search on the internet to check my facts and found, surprisingly, that Cape Kennedy reverted back to its original name of Cape Canaveral in 1973. I never knew that!) But another highlight of TV space coverage was in 1968 when Apollo 8 made the first manned trip to the Moon. Apollo 8’s mission was not to land but to fly to the Moon, orbit and return to Earth. The three crew members were Commander Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders.

They were numerous broadcasts from the crew, especially during their orbits of the moon and they sent back to mission control their impressions of the lunar surface, Lovell commenting that “the Moon looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a greyish beach sand.”

Every time the spacecraft passed behind the Moon radio transmissions were blacked out and the crew and ground control were relieved to hear each other’s voices once again when they came back, unscathed, from the far side of the Moon.

The crew of Apollo 8 were the first in history to see ‘earthrise,’ the Earth emerging from the lunar horizon. The crew all scrambled for their cameras but it was Anders who took the famous colour photo seen here.297755main_gpn-2001-000009_full_0

The most moving broadcast ever was when the crew read lines from the book of Genesis and Borman finished by saying “and from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”

Every time I see a documentary about the Apollo programme that includes that includes that transmission I can feel myself taken back to Christmas of 1968 and once again I become that same small boy, glued to our old black and white TV set.

I must remember to ask my Mum though, how did she manage to get me off to school on the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon?

Floating in Space is a novel by Steve Higgins set in Manchester, 1977 available from amazon.

Time Travelling and old Movies

Posted on by Steve Higgins

imga0043It may be that you are totally assimilated into the DVD age but it also may be that you are, like me, still with one foot in the VHS video age and also, like me, you may have a huge stack of VHS tapes in big boxes gathering dust and no idea what to do with them.

When I stay at my Mum’s house I’ve got an old TV and VHS player in my bedroom and I sometimes go through my box of VHS tapes and find something to watch.

Here’s one example, take the movie Charlie Bubbles for instance. That may not ring a bell to you as I taped it from channel four way back in the eighties and I’m pretty certain I’ve never seen the film broadcast again, which is a pity as it’s a great movie.

It stars Albert Finney who also makes his directing debut in the film and co-stars Billie Whitelaw, Colin Blakely, and has an unlikely appearance by Liza Minnelli. It’s written by playwright Shelagh Delaney who wrote the play ‘A taste of Honey’, which was also made into a wonderful movie.

Charlie Bubbles is a writer, played by Finney who has a sort of gloomy and despondent view of the world and he returns to Manchester to see his son. It’s great for a Mancunian like me to see Manchester as I remember it growing up. The film goes on to show the clash between Charlie’s working class background and his new life as a writer. In one of my favourite parts of the film Charlie meets a friend of his father who asks “are you still working or just doing the writing?”

Charlie replies thoughtfully that he is ‘just’ doing the writing.

Pixabay.com

Pixabay.com

Another great movie I have on VHS and not often seen on TV is ‘Seven Days In May’. Burt Lancaster plays an army officer who attempts to overthrow the US government in a coup d’état. Kirk Douglas sees that something strange is going on and alerts the President played by that fine former silent movie actor Frederic March. Interestingly, part of the movie was filmed at the Kennedy White House. Perhaps President Kennedy wanted to send a message to his Generals!

What’s quite interesting is that there seem to be movies that are shown time after time on TV, films like Die Hard for instance. (Hey, I love that film but I don’t need to see it every other week! ) Show me some movies I haven’t seen for a while! Some great films I’ve got on VHS are Saturday Night and Sunday Morning again starring Albert Finney, and A Kind Of Loving both films looking at working class life in the sixties (they used to call them kitchen sink dramas.)

Another great movie, just perfect for a wet and windy Saturday afternoon is one I found in that box at my Mum’s the other day, it’s ‘Angels with Dirty faces’ starring James Cagney.

angels-with-dirty-faces-poster2I remember watching this years ago on a Saturday afternoon. I was watching it with my Dad and strangely me and my Dad were brought up on the same movies only I saw them first on TV and he saw them originally on the cinema screen. Like all great movies my Dad was pulled into the film, totally reliving it and right at the end he said:

“Cagney’s going to cry in the gas chamber, they’re going to ask him to cry!”

Yes, my Dad blew the ending of that movie for me but something else I found on a tape was sadly ruined by a complete technology foul up.

Time Tunnel

Lee Meriwether in the Time Tunnel control room. (Picture courtesy Wikipedia)

I found an episode of the Time Tunnel, a sixties sci fi show that I’d not seen for years. It was re run back in the eighties when I was at the height of my TV recording passion. I stopped the tape, nipped downstairs to make a cuppa, got myself settled again and pressed play. I time travelled right back to my childhood watching ‘two American scientists trapped in the swirling maze of past and future ages’ as the TV voice over used to say. James Darren and Robert Colbert were the scientists and Lee Meriwether was the lady back at the control room trying to get the guys back home.

Half an hour later the screen went blank. I’d run out of tape!

Wonder if the Time Tunnel is on DVD?

If you liked this post, why not try my book, ‘Floating In Space’. Click the links at the top of the page or the icon below to go straight to Amazon.

The Sound Barrier and My in-flight Canine Friend

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always liked that lazy droning sound of light aircraft; maybe it comes from my childhood, brought up a stone’s throw from Manchester Airport which my friends and I would visit every weekend, cycling to the back of the airport down lanes and alleyways looking for obscure fields where we could get close to the aircraft. We spent many a lazy afternoon on the airport terraces, jotting down aircraft registrations and ticking them off in our flight books.

When I was younger I knew someone who had an ambition to be a pilot and was taking lessons at Blackpool Airport. He used to alleviate his tuition costs by taking friends or colleagues on his training flights if they would drive him down to Blackpool.

On the day that I joined James (the names have been changed to protect the innocent) as an eager passenger, I drove down to Blackpool Airport pretty excited. James advised that on the day he would be doing some instrument tests which involved flying the aircraft on instruments alone.

I stepped into the back of the small plane and strapped myself in. It was a hot day and the aircraft had a huge glass cockpit making it warmer still. I was at a point when I thought I would have to get out and cool off but just then the instructor turned up. He was an older chap and brought his big woolly dog along as he enjoyed, well so I was told, flying. Fido was led in to the rear seat with me and we eyed each other warily as he was strapped in.

The engine was started, we taxied out on to the runway and a few moments later we were aloft. It was exhilarating to look down on Blackpool and the tower, a place where I had spent many happy holidays as a child. After a while James had to put on a rather odd-shaped helmet which blocked out the view through the windscreen and he could only see his instruments. The small plane flew higher and higher, Blackpool Tower becoming the merest pinprick in the distance. Then the engine stopped.

image courtesy wikipedia.

image courtesy Wikipedia.

I’m not sure if you have ever seen one of those World War two films when German stuka bombers hurtled down at their targets with a banshee type wail. I only mention that because it seemed very much akin to our current situation and not only that, the pilot was lucky on this occasion that it wasn’t me issuing the wail but as we hurtled towards the ground Fido and I eyed each other with mutual fear in our eyes.

“Now come on James” said the instructor. “What have we forgotten?”

Fido pawed the back of the pilot’s seat in a vain attempt to jog his memory but our downward path continued. If you ever happen to see that rather old film ‘The Sound Barrier’ you might get some idea of our situation hurtling down towards the earth with Blackpool Tower looming ever closer in our windscreen.

“You’ve forgotten something haven’t you? The instructor might have been talking to a learner driver who had not put on his hand brake at the traffic lights.

“What if I mentioned the mixture?”

If that was a hint it was certainly in a much better class than his previous comments but either way the pilot got the message, adjusted the engine mixture and our tiny aircraft’s propeller burst into renewed life and not long later we touched down rather bumpily back in Blackpool.

“Watch out” said the instructor, “Fido gets a bit excited when we land.”

If this was a typical flight with his master then it was clear to me why Fido was excited when he landed but anyway, the dog gave me a look which said in its canine way “We made it!” and hopped out of the plane.

James completed his flying studies and left our company. He went on, I assume to a career in aviation and we never met again but I have learnt one thing.

Next time if, on the way to Spain, the engines of our jet airliner conk out I’ll be shouting to the pilot “What about the mixture!?”

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