Category Archives: anecdote

Life In The Fast Lane!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve written plenty about my previous life in its various incarnations, bus driver, cigarette man and so on. I currently work in the Highways Agency North West Regional Control Centre and if you want to know what I do there’s a TV documentary programme that’s currently airing on BBC2 called Life in the Fast Lane. Alas, you won’t be hearing my dulcet tones as I broadcast to our traffic officers, as they filmed it down Birmingham way and the North West was sadly not featured.

When incidents happen on the motorway we have a log on which we record all kinds of data about the incident and we add updates as the job progresses. ‘Vehicle recovery has arrived.’ ‘Speed restrictions cleared,’ and stuff like that. There’s a lot of mundane stuff we add too and it involves a lot of typing. One colleague suggested the other day that a thought transference/ ESP link would be quite handy and save on the fingers as they continually thrash the keyboard. The problem there though is that certain unwanted things might appear on the log, especially if the incident is on CCTV and we are watching.

“Watch what you are doing you pillock!”

“Look at that idiot in the Fiesta!”

Or, to the man who wanted to get something from his car, despite the fact that it was on fire and had turned into a minor inferno: “Don’t go back into that car!” He did and was lucky not to be burned to death.

In our control room we answer the ERTs, emergency roadside telephones used by motorists who have broken down at the roadside and sometimes we hear things like this:

“I’ve broken down and can’t remember who my breakdown recovery is with.” Ok, so what do you expect me to do about it? Guess which recovery organisation you have joined? Call a number of recovery agencies randomly and hope one of them knows you? No, what I can do is have you vehicle towed off the motorway and charge you £200. £200! Yes, it is an expensive business breaking down on the motorway. Here’s another one:

“I’ve run out of petrol. Can one of your patrols bring me some fuel?”

No, but we can tow your car away and charge you £200! That response, as you can imagine does not always go down well but as I have said, breaking down on the motorway is a serious and expensive thing. Do not go on the motorway without checking you have enough fuel as it’s not only expensive but dangerous.

Running the motorway is a serious business and there aren’t many comic moments that I can tell you about but here’s one that comes to mind.

Some years ago we had a new recruit that I’ll call Eric, (once again, the names have been changed to protect the innocent!) Eric sadly was not doing too well in his training and it was later found that he was dyslexic so sadly he was unable to continue his career with us. Anyway, on one of his last days one of our managers decided to give him a go as the radio dispatcher, passing out incidents to our patrols over the airwaves. Well Eric did OK until a patrol came across a pedestrian. We reported this to the police and they asked for the person’s name and date of birth. Well, the pedestrian had one of those cross gender names, something like ‘Lesley Smith,’ that could be either male or female. The police asked us for the sex of the person, were they male or female? So Eric asked this question over the air, the patrol however were in one of those radio blackspots were there is poor reception and couldn’t seem to understand.

“Please repeat your last message,” they kept asking.

Eric was getting a little flustered by now and repeated, “Is the person male or female?”

“Please repeat,” asked the patrol.”What details do you need?”

“I want the sex. I need the sex!” called Eric.

I haven’t laughed as much since . .

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Dynamic People and the Movie Business.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I always used to the think the TV and movie business was full of creative people. It isn’t. Sure, there are creative people, people who write and direct and act but for the main part, the industry is full of dynamic people, people who get things done, people who make things happen.

I am many things, some good, some bad, but not by any stretch of the imagination can I be called dynamic.

A long time ago, fresh from my encounter with channel four (read about my Taxi project here) I was determined to break into film and TV. I had a friend called Nathan (once again, names may have been changed to protect the innocent) who was interested in video and we made some video movies together on a pretty amateur level. We lost contact for a while but we both saw an advert in the ‘Manchester Evening News’ advertising Manchester’s new film office. Neither of us knew what the film office was so we both went down to see what it was, to see if we could maybe get a job there or make some contacts or even if we could get someone to listen to us for a few minutes. It turned out the film office was just that, an office for film makers who wanted to film on the streets of Manchester and the office would facilitate that. Anyway, because of that we met up again and Nathan and I started to chat about our ambitions. Nathan had found a comedy script written by an old friend and wanted to make it into a comedy TV show. It was about a Yorkshire yokel and the silly things that happened to him so we put together a ‘treatment’ as they say in the business and took it to channel 4.

“Great,” they said, “we like it!”

“Great,” we answered, “can we have the money to make a pilot?”

“No,” they said, but if we made one they’d look at it. Well that was it I thought but Nathan went away and came back to me a few days later. He had placed adverts in the press looking for actors and needed me to help him with the first rehearsal!

image courtesy wikipedia

image courtesy wikipedia

I have to say I was surprised and a little and shocked but I looked at Nathan, dynamic Nathan, with new found awe and respect. Numerous people turned up at Nathan’s place and Nathan gave out parts and we had our first read through. Afterwards Nathan cooked a meal; basic stuff, beans, toast and so on, but he cooked a meal for the assembled company. Most of them were students so perhaps John thought that was a good way to keep them coming back! The one problem was that our star actor, and here my memory has failed me a little, I can’t remember if the star actor was a friend of Nathan’s or the writer or Nathan’s mate’s friend or whatever but the star actor lived in Huddersfield. He played the leading part but he was too busy to come over to Greater Manchester and mix with his fellow TV actors and crew. In fact he felt we should all go over to Huddersfield!

Anyway, rehearsals continued without our lead and we chose an actor from our new troupe to stand in for the lead. The lead’s mother was played by a lady from Stockport amateur rep and she seemed to feel that perhaps we were more amateur than her and resigned. Her place was taken by a young black girl who did a great Yorkshire accent and generally played the part pretty well.

A week later she astounded us by playing the part in a Caribbean accent.

“What are you doing?” I asked, and she explained that her mother was a Caribbean immigrant and therefore a black woman of that age in Yorkshire must have been an immigrant also. Her logic was clear and she was playing a good part, bringing her own background and experience to the role so we said, “great. Carry on.”

A few weeks later the guy playing the yokel’s father left and our Caribbean girl suggested a replacement. It was another black actor so we gave him a shot and he worked well with the ‘mother’, also playing things from a Caribbean perspective. Now about this time I was concentrating on the video side and I was busy trying to get Panasonic to lend me a broadcast standard video camera so we could shoot our pilot. When I returned to our ‘set’ a few weeks later we had lost control of the shoot. Our Yorkshire yokel project had become a sort of Afro-Caribbean meets Yorkshire project and on top of that, John, and it is probably an understatement to describe him here as a fellow who liked the ladies,  Nathan had lost no time in using his new ‘producer’ status to attract more young ladies. Various females appeared ‘on set’ and he took pictures of them or videoed them reading from the script. They were clearly thankful to their producer for giving them this chance!

One day we were shooting out in Didsbury when a girl I had never seen before called out “CUT! Set up for retake!”

“Who are you?” I asked only for Nathan to shoot over and calm me down.

“Can’t we give her just a bit of a chance at being director?” he asked. Nathan, like many a producer before and since had lost his soul to the power of the movie business.

Anyway, I thought the time had come to return the project to its humble beginnings. It wasn’t a show about Caribbean immigrants. It had morphed into something I didn’t know anything at all about but Nathan felt things had evolved naturally and it was important to follow that course to the end. Sadly, Nathan and I went our separate ways. I went back to bus driving for a short while then I later became a cigarette salesman and today, apart from being an amateur writer and blogger I work for the Highways Agency.

And Nathan? Did I mention what Nathan does? No?

He’s a film producer.

Anyway, not to worry, has he got a blog as good as this one? Doubt it but if you enjoyed this post you might want to read my book. Click the icon below!

 

Spiders, Spider-man, and why I’ll always admire James Bond

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-JPG-85Recently, one of my friends put this on her Facebook status; ‘why are spiders so big?’ Indeed, why are they so big and why did the Almighty allow them to get so big? My friend had encountered a large spider in her home and was prevailing on her husband to remove it. Various comments followed on Facebook, some telling her to grow up and some hoping that the offending creature be put to death immediately if not sooner. In fact my friend’s husband commented later that the offending spider was really a plastic toy one, not that I believe him because the simple truth is that I, a grown man, really hate spiders.

I’ve always rather liked Spiderman though; in fact Spiderman is my very favourite super hero, partly because he’s so different from other super heroes. He’s young, nerdy, full of teenage angst (whatever that is) and as well as being a superhero he has to deal with a lot of stuff teenage people deal with, spots, acne, girls and so on. Peter Parker, as you may know, was bitten by a radioactive spider which gave him his incredible powers. If I was Peter Parker though, a radioactive spider would have got nowhere near me because (1) I would have splattered it immediately it came within range or else (2) my screams would have made it scuttle off pretty quickly!

James Bond has always been one of my favourite fictional characters. I read all the books as a teenager and once spent a hot afternoon in Manchester in an Oxford Road cinema watching a double bill of Goldfinger and From Russia with love. Bond has been in some pretty tight spots too, you may remember him strapped to a table and being threatened with a laser beam, then there was the time in Live and let Die when they left him on a little island surrounded by alligators. Remember when he was in a shark filled pool in You Only Live Twice? All pretty scary stuff but the scariest ever was in Doctor No when he wakes up, switches on the light and finds a massive saucer sized spider crawling over him. Luckily, as a double O agent he is licensed to kill and clearly this includes spiders as not long afterwards the spider met it’s just end.

2048px-Cobweb-spider-frontal-mzeThe other day at work, I was having my morning ablutions in the comfortable surroundings of our disabled toilet, when a spider the size of a house, a mutant gargantuan spider limbo danced under the door and headed straight towards me. Now you may not know this but like Gandhi, I subscribe to the ancient tenets of Ahimsa, the culture of non-violence and also in recent years I have gravitated towards the Buddhist faith. Buddhism is a religion that is at peace with all mankind, a religion of respect and understanding. It also embraces the belief in Karma, the universal force which ensures that you will be paid back in equal measures for your kindness and also for your wicked deeds. Now, the thing is this, I may have to go out and find some old ladies to help across the road or donate a large portion of my earnings to charity because, well, perhaps you’ve guessed already:

As that spider came hurtling at me I didn’t think for a moment of Gandhi, Buddhism or Ahimsa. I just did what any right minded individual would have done: I put out my foot and squashed that spider!

If you enjoyed this post why not try my book, Floating In Space. Click the links at the top of the page for more information!

Writers Block and Promotional Videos

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Every writer gets there eventually; the point where a blank piece of paper stares back at you and you can’t think of anything to put on it. I’ve always tried to write, even when nothing will come to mind, and it’s then I open my diary and write about me and things that I can chronicle and maybe even turn into a poem or a blog. I guess that’s why so many of my blogs are about my personal past, I’ll be writing about myself and something comes to me, a little light goes on and I start thinking, ‘hey, this could be a good blog!’

Diaries are a good way to keep you writing, because something is always happening in your life, even something ever so minor. ‘Watched that Old Bond film last night, Goldfinger. Had a glass of whisky and scoffed half a large fruit and nut bar.’ Not a great diary entry but so what, you are writing again and as more and more words start to come, you are writing and creating more and more. You’ve beaten the blank page and produced something. Not only that, diaries are great to look back on. I tend to open one and look back and see what I did on this day on a past year. 14th September, 1996? Wonder what happened then? Wonder what I was doing? Who was I spending my time with?

Just lately I’ve been waiting for the latest proof version of my book with my latest revisions and the curse of the blank page has hit me. So, I decided to step back from writing and make a few videos about Manchester and maybe link them up with a half hearted idea about talking to camera about events that my book was based on. All the locations in the book, well the pubs anyway, are real life locations, real pubs and in my video I take a look back at some of those places.

The video started well but it took a while for me and my brother to get the hang of what we were doing. He was filming and I was talking. We shot some footage then retired to the pub to check it out. One of the pubs we went to was the Salisbury, a pub I used to frequent years ago and a pub that looks today, pretty much just how it used to look years ago. Even inside the pub; it had clearly had a refurb, but it had been done thoughtfully and the pub with its polished wooden bar and flagged stone floors looked pretty similar to how it used to look. The only thing was that back in the late seventies and early eighties when I used to drink there, my friends and I used to sit in a room at the far end of the pub which nowadays looks as though it’s a private function room, so I couldn’t just sit back in my old seat and remember the times gone by.

Anyway, we reviewed our video, made a few suggestions and shot some more takes. Much better ones. Then we decided to wander down to some other locations. We shot some more video then retired to the pub for another review. We were on our way to the Briton’s Protection when we called into the Rains pub which has a really nice beer garden backing onto the canal. After a few pints I had some ideas in my head for some more filming so my brother cranked up the camera. ‘It’s not working,’ he said so I told him to press the record button again then went off into what I thought was a pretty interesting monologue. Later we realised that the camera was recording when my brother thought it wasn’t so when he pressed the record button the second time it went into pause mode. A great monologue lost for prosperity! Anyway, at least we had a great afternoon out. As for the video, well, think we’ll have to schedule a re-shoot!

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If Only . .

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Just looking through my old videos the other day and I came across a documentary about James Dean called ‘James Dean’s last day’. It’s an interesting film and a sad one too as it counts down Dean’s last day, his leaving Hollywood and his departure for a racing event at Salinas. If you don’t know much about Dean then you won’t know he was an amateur racing driver and was killed in a car crash in his new Porsche.There are so many ifs and as I watch the film I keep thinking if only Dean had left the Porsche on the trailer instead of driving it to the race track. If only the speeding ticket he was given had made him slow down. If only a man called Donald Turnupseed had seen Dean and not turned across him. Such a shame, such a tragedy. Dean, I’m sure, would have gone on to make so many great films and one day he would have directed some too.

Racing driver Ayrton Senna is a man would have gone on to greater things too, more world championships and more race wins. I even read something by Ron Dennis the other day in which the McLaren boss said that Senna had political ambitions too. Could he have run for the Brazilian Presidency? We’ll never know because Senna was killed at San Marino in 1994 and we are left only with the on car video pictures of him as his car slipped from under him and hurtled towards the crash barrier. The on car pictures fail before the final moments of impact when a suspension arm was flung back and pierced his helmet, causing his death.

A video that did show someone’s final moments was one I saw the other day. I was lying outside in the sun and I could hear a video playing on Liz’s I-pad. It was a woman talking about her son’s motorbike crash and hoping the video would help other road users, particularly car drivers who need to look out for bikes. I was reading a book at the time and the video distracted me, then I heard the sound of the bike, the rushing of the wind and then the impact.

“What was that?” I asked, “Was the crash filmed?”

Indeed it was. The rider was wearing a helmet camera and his fatal crash had been recorded. Later I took a look for myself. The rider was a relatively young man, only thirty eight years old and the video starts off as he waves goodbye to his friends at an air base and immediately he leaves the car park he is gunning his bike very, very, fast. As his mother talks sadly about her lost son, holding back the tears we cut again to her son, riding extremely fast and passing cars quickly on a single carriageway road. He pulls out and slips quickly past a car. As he pulls back in front of the car he reaches a junction, another car pulls across to turn right in front of him and he has only time to shout ‘No’ and he hits the car and tumbles onto the verge. The impact is shocking, so shocking I awoke last night still thinking off it. The rider had been doing 97 mph and had no chance whatsoever of surviving or avoiding the crash. Why was he going so fast? If only he had tucked in behind the car at the junction he would have avoided the crash altogether.

These are questions without answers. Riding a bike very fast is exhilarating and exciting but a rider needs to be so very aware of what he is doing, what is happening ahead and he must react so much quicker than a car driver as he is so much more vulnerable. Listening to the video, as I first did when it played on Liz’s I-pad, it seemed to me that the clip was aimed at motorists who do not look properly, who do not check properly for other vehicles before turning. After actually watching the video it is clear that the speed of the rider, 97mph on a sixty mph road, was the main factor in the accident and it meant that the rider had no time almost to react other than to hit his brakes. Still, if the car driver had taken a second look up the road, a second glance, he might have seen the bike and stopped. If only.

I’ve had a few scary moments on my motorbikes but I don’t think I ever hit 97 mph, even on the motorway but then I’m not sure the 125 and 250cc bikes I had could go that fast. At work they used to call me the fair weather rider because if it was raining I would always get the bus to work. When I bought  my first car I hung up my helmet for good apart from a brief fling with a Kawasaki 500 when I had split up with my girlfriend.

The car driver was prosecuted and had his licence suspended for 18 months and was also sentenced to 130 hours of community work. The Bike rider lost his entire life, his whole future that was ahead of him, gone, just like that of James Dean and Ayrton Senna. He wasn’t a famous man and wouldn’t have, I suppose, made any great movies or won any motor races but he would have married, perhaps had children and gone on to live a happy, contented life. All lost in a single moment.

Swimming, The French Riviera, and the Magic Bus.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Years ago when I was a teenager, my friend Chris asked me if I fancied a holiday in France with him at his Grandfather’s villa in Hyeres, not far from St Tropez. Now on the surface that seemed to be a pretty incredible invitation. I wish I had a friend today who could make me an offer like that. Like a lot of things in life though, there was a catch, and in fact there turned out to be more than one. Chris’ Grandfather was retired and living in the UK and we were taking him with us to visit his property in France. Anyway, we booked a trip on something called the Magic Bus; a coach service frequented by students and back packers attracted to the cheap fares. It was quite a contrast when we arrived in London and boarded our bus at the coach station; fifty or so teenage travellers and one rather frail old man.

cannes-190461blog_1280Two things stand out from that journey. One was waking up in the middle of the night, curled up in my seat and watching the two young French drivers effect a driver change while the bus was still travelling at roughly seventy miles an hour in lane one of the autoroute. One driver leant out of the cab, still hanging on to the steering wheel, while the other slipped nimbly past him into the seat. He took the wheel and then reached down to adjust the seat with his other hand. Once he was comfy and settled in, he put his foot down and carried on. The other driver was already asleep in his little bunk.

The other thing was early in the morning we awoke to find ‘Pappy’ as Chris called him, scrabbling about on the floor. He didn’t seem to understand my poor schoolboy French so I had to nudge Chris awake and ask what was going on. After a swift French exchange Chris said he was looking for the false teeth he had dropped in the night. One of the back packers nearby found them and Pappy leapt up, grabbed the gnashers and popped them into place!

Poor old Pappy was not happy when we arrived at his French villa. The villa had come to him after the death of his second wife and there were conditions attached meaning it would pass to her family in full when Pappy died. During his absence, the French relatives must have been getting impatient about their inheritance and they had somehow managed to sell off some parts of his land and rented out the downstairs of the villa to a motor mechanic. Pappy was not happy.

The villa was the second catch. Lovely as it was with its extensive grounds, it appeared to me to have been untouched for many years. There was no running water at all in the house. If we needed water it had to be pumped up from a well in the garden. There were no indoor toilets; one had to use the traditional ancient French toilet outside. Pappy, being unable to reach these facilities in a rush, had a bucket in his bedroom which Chris and his brother Tony also made use of. As I could not approach the bucket without retching I declined to either use or empty it. However, after one evening of excessive drinking they caught me using it and I was forced to empty it the next day. I could only do so by wearing my diving mask and snorkel and as I pottered along to the French toilet the two of them, watching from afar collapsed into laughter which soon passed to me and it was much later, after repeated attempts, when I managed to complete my task.

That snorkel and mask turned out to be pretty helpful in an other way too. As a school pupil at Sharston Comprehensive school, every Wednesday I think it was, we marched the short distance to Sharston baths for our swimming lesson. I use the word ‘lesson’ reluctantly as I really don’t remember getting much tuition at all, As usual I joined the small band of non swimmers in the shallow end of the pool. The teacher tossed us a few polystyrene floats then joined the others at the deep end. That was generally the last we saw of him till the end of the lesson. All the time at that school I can only think of one person who ever made the move from the non swimmers to the swimmers and that was because his dad taught him to swim in the summer holidays. All well and good you may think but what has that to do with a trip to France? Well, simply this, on that holiday in Hyeres, with the help of my two friends and a borrowed dive mask, I finally gained my confidence in the water and learned to swim in the gentle blue waters of the Mediterranean by a quiet beach called ‘Le Cat.’

When the time came to leave, Pappy refused to go. He was Italian by birth but had lived all his life in France and wanted to stay here in a place where they spoke a language he understood. He was very old though and unable to look after himself and after some persuasion, he came with us and returned to the UK. Sadly, he died some time later.

Years afterwards Chris returned to Hyeres to take a look at the old place. He told me that the villa was still there but the land had all been sold and numerous properties now closely surrounded it. The relatives had finally got their inheritance.

If you liked this post, why not try my novel? Floating in Space is set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.

 

Competitions and Getting Even With Your Brother.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always been one for competitions and in my younger days I was always clipping a coupon from a newspaper or magazine and trying to win something or other. I once won a Thunderbirds water pistol from the 1970’s comic TV21, which my brother then broke, thus commencing a lifetime of sibling squabbles and differences.

competitions and getting even with your brother

image courtesy MorgueFile.

I noticed in my inbox today an email from the Daily Express inviting me to compete for a brand new Fiat. Now a Fiat isn’t my favourite car or even on my want list but hey, I’m not going to turn down a free one!

When I clicked on the link a box appeared telling me I so far had nil entries but to in order to build up entries I had to ‘like’ various options. The first link offered me a new iPhone. Fair enough I thought, I can like that easily, but as I progressed further, sucked in, in the way some web sites suck you in, I saw that they wanted my name, address, mobile phone number, email address, gender, marital status, inside leg measurement and so on. Competitions just aren’t what they used to be are they? I used to enter a whole lot of motor racing competitions because not only do I know my motor racing onions but I also used to have a big stack of racing annuals and reference books in order to look up the answers.

Answer this simple question to win a trip to next year’s Monaco Grand Prix! Who won the Monaco grand Prix in 1955? Easy peasy, run upstairs, get out my F1 statistics book and look it up-  yes it was Maurice Trintignant driving a Ferrari! How long did that take? Well, running upstairs, -say, one minute. Finding the right book -five minutes. Skimming through to the appropriate page -one minute. Running back down stairs -one minute, total time elapsed; eight minutes! Then complete the caption, there was always a caption, I always use shell petrol because . . .and then it’s off to the post box and sit and wait for my tickets, which incidentally went, most unfairly, to some other lucky person who usually resided in Kent, or Luton, or somewhere else down south!

The fact is that to answer the question above (which, until I looked it up, I actually thought was Juan Manuel Fangio) I did what everybody else does these days, I clicked onto google and I had the answer in 0.38 seconds.( Incidentally, Fangio took pole position but retired from the race.) Yes, competitions these days are more like a lottery. Sometimes they don’t even ask a question they just ask for your e-mail address, then condemn you to an inbox full of spam for the next ten years, all in return for the remote possibility of winning a new car or an iPad or some other delectable delight that you have set your heart on but is just too expensive.

Anyway, going back to the Fiat competition, I ‘liked’ the iPhone link, filled out my life story and so got five entries into the Fiat competition. I hope I won’t get too many nuisance calls about the iPhone. Well, come to think of it, I doubt if I will actually get any as I entered my brother’s mobile phone number into the box! Well, serves him right if he thinks I’ve forgotten about that water pistol!

If you liked this post, why not check out my book? Click on the links at the top of the page for more information.

When Bad Driving is just a symptom of Something Bigger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The TV news brings the news right into our homes and I’ve been close to the news, via the TV, many times. I was watching TV when the 9/11 attacks happened and remember switching on one Sunday to find that Princess Diana was dead. Shocking events indeed but other news, personal news can be hard to take and sometimes shocking things are inside us and we need to let them out.

One day many years ago, when I was a bus conductor I worked with one of the worst drivers ever. We had numerous arguments about his fast driving and even worse, his fast stops. A bus conductor needs a smooth driver and one he has confidence in because he needs his hands free to deal with cash and change and to issue tickets. Keith, not his real name, was a dreadful driver and sometimes used to stop the bus in an emergency by using the dead man’s handbrake, so called because it locked the wheels of the bus. We nearly came to blows after I had been sent sprawling across the top deck once too often and Keith’s excuse was that he had to slam the brakes on to avoid an accident. Of course, if he hadn’t been going so fast he wouldn’t have needed to slam on!

Eventually I went to our chief Inspector and told him frankly that Keith was dangerous and I wouldn’t be working with him again so they sent an Inspector from the training school to check him out. The inspector was in full uniform so you might think that Keith would have modified his driving style but no, he drove at his usual mad speed, lurching to a stop and seemingly enjoying throwing passengers and conductors alike all over the place. I always felt I needed those clamps that rock climbers have so I could clamp myself to a rail while I issued fares.

Later on, on what turned out to be our last shift together, we stopped up at Woodford where we had a twenty five minute lay over. I sat down and poured out some tea from my flask and started reading my book. Every time I got into the book Keith would say something so I’d have to stop, sigh, mark my place and say something in return. Eventually I could see he wanted to talk and wasn’t interested that I wanted to read so I put my book away.

He turned to me and told me about his wife who was pregnant. Then he said, “The thing is, I’m not the father. I’ll bring the child up as my own but I’m not the father!”

“Right,” I said. Inside I was thinking; what is he saying here? Have he and his wife had IVF treatment or something?

Keith cut me short and said, “She’s had an affair. It’s not my child. It’s my Dad’s.”

“Your Dad’s?”

“Yes, she’s had an affair with my Dad. It’s all over now. We sorted it all out. I’ll look after her. It’s all over. She’ll be ok with me now.”

Keith reached into his pocket and pulled out a newspaper and began to read. He had let it out, the secret that had been eating into him, perhaps even the secret of his bad driving. Perhaps he had been taking his anger out on the people and streets of Manchester with his mad driving. I can’t tell you how shocked I was to hear his story. I wish I could have been more helpful. I wish I could have been supportive but perhaps I was. After all, it was me he chose to tell and I did listen but I did wonder about his dad. What sort of a man was he? How could he treat his son like that?

My own Dad was a super guy. He died at a hospice not far from Manchester Airport in the early hours of the  morning many years ago but my Mum waited until six am to tell me, because she knew I got up for work at that time. He had been poorly for a while and the phone call wasn’t unexpected. Despite that it was still a shock. When I was much younger and dressed in denims and had long hair and was obsessed by pop music, just like many people of my generation, my Dad and I were worlds apart, but we managed to bridge that gap, eventually. Whether Keith and his Dad could do the same and bridge the gulf that had opened up between them, I don’t know.

The Inspector from the driving school took Keith off the road and sent him back into the driving school. The school failed his driving and he became a conductor on the all night buses. I never saw him again but I hope things worked out for him.

Floating in Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.

 

Sychronicity, Care Bears, and My Very last day ‘On the Buses.’

Posted on by Steve Higgins

When I first moved from Manchester to Newton-Le-Willows I had been assured that the head office for our newly restructured bus company, GM Buses North, would be in Atherton, a mere ten to fifteen minutes from Newton.

The government had begun deregulation in passenger transport in 1986 but the final act in the saga came in the early 1990s when they forced GM Buses to split into two separate companies because as a whole, GM had an unfair monopoly over bus services in Manchester. The irony is that today, companies like Stagecoach and Arriva are ten times bigger than GM buses ever was.

005ediyAnyway, just after I moved to Newton-Le-Willows, GM Buses North decided their new head office would not be as previously agreed in Atherton, but in Oldham. I wasn’t amused and after some time commuting from Newton to Oldham I jumped ship for a job in Warrington. I had decided to go back to being a bus driver for a short while just so I could get settled in my new location without a lot of commuting.

My new bus company was called Warrington Goldlines and they were running buses every few minutes in Warrington in direct competition to Warrington Borough Transport. They were following a trend set by Stagecoach of aggressive competition, flooding an area with buses to overwhelm and eventually take over their competitors. These techniques didn’t quite work in Warrington. Perhaps the locals were loyal to the Warrington Transport that had served them for years, perhaps they saw through the hype, perhaps they thought wait a minute; these new buses don’t run at night or Sundays so why should we support them?

Indeed, Warrington Goldlines ran bus services from six am to six pm Monday to Saturday which is what appealed to me when I went for the job. Anyway, I learned the routes then settled down in my new role. Goldlines had a special offer ‘dayrider’ ticket which cost 99p and lasted all day so a lot of daytime travellers and workers came aboard our buses. Unfortunately we also gained a lot of passengers who felt that even 99p was too much to pay. Frequently people boarded my bus waving any old bus ticket and expecting a free ride. Well, not on my watch as they say. I soon cracked down on a whole bunch of wasters, cheaters and fare dodgers and after a month I had banned a whole bunch of people from my bus. Not that they were bothered much as there was another one in ten minutes so if they couldn’t get on my bus they would wait for the next.

One day a regular scruffy couple boarded my bus saying “we’ve got dayriders!” and when I asked to see the actual ticket they had to make a thorough search of their pockets and bags which took some time. The ticket they eventually found was at least a week out of date so I declined to take them aboard. Now, in Warrington we had a bunch of passenger helpers known as the ‘care bears’ and my rejected passengers complained to the care bears about me but no, they weren’t coming aboard without a ticket. However, our one inspector decided that at this stage of our battle with Warrington Transport, public relations were more important than the small matter of not having a ticket or paying any bus fare so he decided this couple could travel for free. I wasn’t amused and when they left the bus at their stop and turned to say, “Thanks driver!” I was tempted to say something other than “have a nice day!”

Youths larking about and swearing was another problem especially on the number 123 service which went to Houghton Green and I banned about six youths from travelling on my bus. However, as it was a ten minute service when I turned back to Warrington I would see the lads on the bus behind me giving me the ‘V’ sign from the back seat. Still, karma, as I have mentioned in a previous blog, plays a great role in the life of a bus driver. All things are connected and if you are patient and at one with the universe, like me, synchronicity will turn the hand of fate into your favour.

One day the powers that be at both Warrington Borough Transport and Warrington Goldlines decided to sit down and work out their issues. Clearly WBT had not been driven into the ground as expected and the time had come for a discussion. The result was that Warrington was divided up by the two companies, WBT had their patch and Goldlines had theirs. Gone were the buses every ten minutes. Gone was the six pm finish and soon regular Sundays off would be just a memory. Time, I thought, for a new job!

On my very last day I was on the 123 service. The foul-mouthed youths were once again declined the opportunity to wreak verbal havoc on my bus and I left on my journey. Now, this was after six pm and there were no buses every ten minutes and of course no WBT buses as this route was now part of our exclusive patch of Warrington. After six pm buses dropped to every hour and when I returned to the bus station those same lads were still waiting. One of them knocked on my door. How could they get home now? What were they to do? Well, it was my last day so I took pity on them and picked them up. As we approached their stop I waited for the abuse that was sure to come. The muttered curses. The V sign as I drove off. Instead, when the doors opened the leader of the group came forward.

“Sorry for swearing at you in the past,” he said.

“Yes,” mumbled the others as they left.

No swearing, no abuse, just a simple apology. That was my last day as a bus driver. My last day ever in fact as I have no intention of ever doing that job again but those lads really made my day, in fact I even felt kind of mean for excluding them from my bus in the past. Then again, if that was what made them examine their behaviour then perhaps it was a good thing.

Either way, thanks to them I still have a good feeling about my last day on the buses.

If you enjoyed this post then why not try my book Floating in Space, set in Manchester, 1977? Click the links at the top of the page or the icon below to go straight to amazon.

The Outlaw, Howard Hughes, and the pursuit of Money

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once upon a time Howard Hughes was the richest man in the world. In today’s society being the richest man requires some serious wealth and Howard Hughes ticked all the financial boxes you can think of. He inherited his father’s tool company when he was very young. Too young in fact to take control but he found a law that said if he could prove he was capable of running the company then he could take control. He proved he could and did just that, took control. His father had designed a tool bit that was essential to America’s oil industry but instead of selling the drill bit he patented it and then rented it out. Howard Hughes though had other ambitions that did not involve oil or drilling but the profits from the Hughes Tool Company were vital for his ambitions in aviation and the movies.

Hughes combined those two interests in making the WW1 movie ‘Hell’s Angels’ about fighter pilots and for the shoot he assembled the largest private air force in the world. Towards the end of the shooting, sound pictures made their appearance so what did Howard do? He re shot the entire film with sound equipment!

The_Outlaw-poster-trimAnother movie Hughes made that is famous, or perhaps infamous, was the 1943 Movie ‘Outlaw’ starring Jane Russell. Hughes appeared to be obsessed with Jane’s breasts, even to the extent of designing a new bra for her and re shooting a famous close up of her time after time. Hughes clearly had some psychological issues; he was a compulsive, obsessive man. He usually had the same meal when he went out with one of the many starlets he courted. Jane Greer recounted in a TV interview how Hughes would eat things in the same order, the peas first, then the potatoes and finally the meat. Once when they dined Hughes came back to the table and Jane noticed his shirt was wet. Hughes had spilt something onto his shirt so he washed the shirt in the men’s room, rinsed and squeezed it out, then put it back on.

As his mental health deteriorated, Hughes retreated into a world of blacked out penthouse suites and midnight telephone calls to his army of assistants, some of whom were private investigators keeping close tabs on anyone Hughes had an interest in, particularly starlets he had signed to personal contracts and his girlfriends like Katherine Hepburn or Jean Peters whom he later married.

The incredible thing is, despite his illness he and his company produced aircraft for the US government, including the now famous ‘Spruce Goose,’ many of which he test flew himself. However, in July, 1946, Hughes crashed while testing his XF11 reconnaissance plane. The aircraft crashed in Beverly Hills and Hughes was seriously injured. He survived but remained addicted to morphine for the rest of his life. His company also produced the Glomar Explorer, an undersea recovery craft for the CIA and it was part of a plan to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear sub in an effort to learn the USSR’s nuclear secrets

If you want to know more about Howard Hughes my favourite movie about him is not the Aviator, the Scorcese/ Di Caprio movie, good though it is, but an old TV mini-series based on a book by Noah Dietrich, ‘Howard, The Amazing Mr Hughes.’  Tommy Lee Jones gives a great performance as Hughes in the film.

Noah Dietrich was once Hughes’ chief executive and financial advisor. He resigned after becoming more and more unhappy with Hughes’ bizarre behaviour. In later years Bob Maheau, a former FBI man employed by Howard, experienced much the same thing; numerous obsessive memos, midnight phone calls and so on..

Hughes died in 1976, cocooned from the world by morphine and the close attention of his Mormon aides. Despite his wealth Hughes was emaciated and underfed, addicted to drugs which his aides rationed in order for them to manipulate him. Surely, final proof that money is not everything.

Still, better not forget this weekend’s lottery ticket, just in case!

Floating in Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information!