Category Archives: anecdote

A Slice of My (Christmas) Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few weeks ago during November, I thought that it might be a jolly good idea to start my Christmas shopping so I’d be pretty much ahead of the game when it came to Christmas itself. I’ve had that idea before, on a number of occasions. The strange thing is I’ve never actually done anything about it. Oh well, there’s always next year.

About a week before Christmas, I bought a load of stuff from Ebay and various other places and finally, with a few days to spare, I felt ready for Christmas. On the Monday prior to Christmas we went to our favourite restaurant, Ego. Ego has a special Monday offer with a reduced price for two courses and £10 off a bottle of wine. What I’ve always liked about Ego is that even though the food isn’t actually outstanding, the staff are. They don’t make excuses if you complain, they just sort out whatever the problem is with your food or your wine or whatever it is. Just lately the food there has been a little tame but on that particular Monday our meal was really rather lovely and as a fully paid up member of the Society of Northern Tightwads, the £20 off our two bottles of wine went down a treat.

Tuesday was our day for Cheapy Chippy Tuesday which is a special Tuesday deal at our local chip shop and as a cup of tea goes so well with fish and chips it was also a chance to have a totally alcohol-free day.

Tuesday is usually the day for the quiz down at the Pier Inn but for whatever reason they were having their Christmas version on Wednesday so the next day we went down for a couple of pints and to join in. We didn’t win which was a shame but it was fun anyway, what with some music and a raffle. Our friends Ray and Helen were there and they mentioned that on the following day, Thursday, Ray and his fellow musician Dean would be performing a number of glam rock era songs in their musical alter ego as the Boogie Brothers. That led to a discussion about the efficacy of playing songs by the now disgraced king of glam rock Gary Glitter.

Glitter is another music icon now airbrushed from history. You won’t find him performing on old episodes of Top of the Pops. On a recent TV show about the glam rock era Glitter only got passing mention but none of his music was played. Back in the 1970’s he was a big star but his downfall came when he took a computer to be repaired and it was found to have numerous pornographic images of young girls. Still, is it possible to separate the man from his music? Can we enjoy Gary’s old songs and still condemn him for his pervy activity? Ray was thinking the same thing. If he did a Glitter song in his act, how well would it go down? I told him that we would be there the next day to listen to his music even though we would have to leave early for our regular Thursday quiz night.

That particular night I was wearing a gold signet ring that Liz had bought me some time ago. I’ve always rather loved that ring. I had lost it a while ago but after a little thought and a mental reconstruction of the last time I had worn it, I realised where I had left it. Anyway, reunited with my ring I wore it out to the quiz at the Pier Inn that night. When I came home to get changed, I opened my drawer to pop in the ring but dropped it. I heard a metallic ping so I guessed it had bounced off a fan that was down by the side of the bed which we had used quite a lot during the summer. I lifted up the fan but I couldn’t find the ring. The next day I shifted the fan and a load of books and other stuff that was down there but the ring still eluded me. Later I asked Liz to take a look but she couldn’t find it either. I looked again but it wasn’t there. Where could it have gone? What the heck had happened? I wasn’t happy.

I can’t say that the TV channels have given us much new to watch this Christmas. We watched The Sound of Music over Christmas, one of Liz’s favourite films. I’m not much of a fan of musicals but I do love The Sound of Music. The performances are fabulous as are the songs. I remember once seeing Julie Andrews on a talk show complaining about the goody two shoes image the film had given her. Maybe the film did do that although I’m not so sure but it’s a film that has given a lot of joy to a lot of people and I hope she felt proud about being a part of it.

A different sort of music was performed in The Glenn Miller Story, a film that was shown again on Boxing Day. I really loved that movie when I first saw it on TV back in the 1960’s. Sadly, as much as I loved it then, when I see it these days it is a little disappointing. James Stewart was far too old to play Glenn Miller.

June Alyson played Glenn’s wife and she elevated the use of the word ‘annoying’ to a new level with her constant beginning or ending of a phrase with ‘Honestly!’ I imagine the scriptwriter was fairly pleased with himself, coming up with a cute bit of business like that. Wrong! If I had been Glenn Miller and June Alyson my wife, I would have been sorely tempted to employ some appropriately placed Gaffer tape to remedy that situation.

Another moment in the film comes when Glenn comes home from work and his wife takes him upstairs and says, ‘look what just arrived,’ and guess what had arrived! Two children who seemed to have appeared in time honoured fashion via the unseen stork. Of course, they may have been adopted, I really don’t know because it wasn’t really explained very well but it was a little bit like one of those moments in old episodes of Blue Peter, the children’s TV show, where Valerie Singleton or John Noakes would say, ‘and here’s one I made earlier!’

I must have mentioned in previous posts about how I used to have a cassette tape recorder and how many times I used to drag my poor brother into performing the skits and plays I used to write.

One time we did a skit on the Glenn Miller story and there was me in my best American accent drawling, James Stewart style, ‘that sound, that certain sound, I need to find that certain sound and I’m gonna keep on looking till I find it.’ Throw in my brother blowing a raspberry down a cardboard tube and cue me as James Stewart: ‘That sound, that certain sound: That’s it! I’ve found it!’

One last Glenn Miller memory: Back in the 1970’s I went to see the actual Glenn Miller Orchestra. They were touring the UK and they appeared at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester headed not of course by Glenn Miller but bandleader Buddy De Franco. I didn’t manage to drag any of my friends along so I took my mum with me.

My mum died this year aged 93. It was sad to see her go but at the same time good to see her released from pain and confusion.

The one new thing I watched on TV this Christmas was the new Doctor Who. I’ve watched Doctor Who off and on since I was a child from the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell up to the present. The Doctor, in case you didn’t know, is an alien from the planet Gallifrey whose body ‘regenerates’ every so often which is pretty convenient for when a new actor begins to play the part. In 2017 the Doctor regenerated into a woman for some reason and now the latest Doctor has regenerated into a black man. There were a lot of good points in this Christmas edition of Doctor Who. The production values were excellent, the photography was good. There was a new assistant introduced who seemed pretty interesting with a fascinating and mysterious backstory. On the flip side, the main story about goblins who steal a new baby so they can feed it to a monster resembling Jabba the Hut from Star Wars was a bit weak. I liked the new Doctor’s leather jacket though.

Thursday was a bit of a disaster for us. Our bus into St Annes never appeared so we had to get a taxi. That made us late for tapas at the 54 restaurant and we had to miss out the Boogie Brothers at the Pier Inn so we could get to the Lord Derby in time for the quiz. Hope the glam rock night went ok!

Anyway, fast forward to Christmas morning. It had actually only just gone midnight on Christmas Eve when Liz handed me a small present. It was very small and I guessed it was something like a walnut whip or something small to eat but when I tore off the wrapping paper and opened it, I was surprised to find my lost ring. Yes, Liz had found it after all and had wrapped it up to give me a cheeky surprise on Christmas morning.

Hope you all had a good Christmas and best wishes for 2024.

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My Week with Man Flu

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s been a tough week for me, stricken with man flu, hanging at death’s door. I managed to get through but only just.

Friday was another cold and wet day here in the north west of England. We had planned to dine out at a nearby Italian restaurant and then walk over to the Pier Inn for a few beers and listen to the music. I wasn’t feeling at my best even though Liz and I knew our friend Ray would be performing and we do like his music. There was a 30% off deal at Allegria, the Italian restaurant in question but the catch was this: to get the 30% off, diners have to book a table 24 hours in advance. We hadn’t booked and that meant paying the full price. There was only one thing for it, I had to call for help. I quickly dialled the Northern Association of Tightwads and I was soon through to an advisor.

I outlined the situation and he answered immediately. There were two possible options, I could stay at home or I could try to bluff it out.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Bluff it out! Tell them you called up yesterday and booked the table. Make out they have lost your booking and insist they honour it.”

Knowing the guys in Allegria I knew they were a little touchy about their offers. It was always important to check the small print because if you didn’t meet the criteria, they wouldn’t give you the offer. Anyway, I wasn’t feeling too good and thinking about it, I suspected even then that I was suffering with the lethargic symptoms of pre-man-flu. What the heck, we had some leftover cottage pie in the fridge so after a quick look outside and taking in the cold and windy evening we gave it all a miss and stayed in.

I didn’t sleep well that night and the next morning I had a sore throat and headache and then the sneezing began. My worst fears were confirmed: I had man flu.

A quick look around the bathroom and I found a couple of old cough mixture bottles which was handy and in the kitchen I still had some Lemsips left. That might just keep me going I thought. It wasn’t going to be a good day. I dragged myself outside and filled up the coal scuttle. Then I raked out the ashes, got some wood together and finally got the fire going. A lot of people think it’s great to have a real fire and it is nice I must admit but it takes some time and effort to get it going, which is not ideal when you’re suffering with one of the most deadly illnesses known to man.

Soon the flames were roaring in the hearth and that felt good but the effort had worn me out. For a moment I thought about calling the emergency services but of course, these days our NHS emergency services are really stretched. Of course, I know they would help and be sympathetic but one of the problems the ambulance services have to put up with are these idiots suffering with inane things like the common cold or a headache who call for an ambulance. OK, I know I’m hardly in that category but I thought I’d try and brave things out, for a little while anyway.

The next day I was worse but I was able to light the fire again and watch the qually for the Mexican Grand Prix. It was a good qually but sadly my current favourite driver Alex Albon didn’t do too well despite a good showing in the practice sessions. It was great to see the two Ferraris both on the front row though. I managed to drag myself through the day, staying close to the fire and dosing myself with Lemsips and whisky. A few times I felt really poorly, constantly sneezing and coughing and the cold sweats and shivering were dreadful. That morning I reached out to call for the ambulance a few times but ultimately I just said to myself, come on Steve, we can get through this.

By Sunday I was feeling slightly better. I wasn’t getting much sleep but the sweating had eased off. The headaches were down to bearable and the only real problem was the constant sneezing and coughing. That seemed to ease off later and Liz reminded me that we had booked to go to a church charity night. I wasn’t sure whether I could make that but the thing was, we had already paid for two £5 entry tickets. There was only one option, I had to call the emergency hotline for the Northern Order of Tightwads again and I got through quickly.

“Hello, Northern Tightwads, Yul B Allright speaking, how can I help?”

I quickly outlined the situation to Yul and his immediate response was “Looks like an open and shut case to me Steve. Are the tickets refundable?”

“Sadly no,” I answered.

There was a long intake of breath on the line. “That’s your problem straight away Steve. If you don’t go to this function, you’re out of pocket by £10. I know you’re not well and I take my hat off to you even considering going out when you’ve got man flu, I know how tough that can be but it seems to me that shelling out £10 and getting nothing in return is just plain wrong. I’ll bet you’re not happy about that yourself.”

“Well, I didn’t actually pay for the tickets myself.”

“What?”

“Yes, my girlfriend paid for them so I myself won’t actually lose out but I don’t want to see her lose out either.”

“Wow, that’s a tough situation Steve. Firstly, let me congratulate you, making sure advance payments are paid by others is one of the great tenets of Tightwadism as you know. Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I need some further advice. I’m gonna make a few phone calls and get right back to you.”

“Thanks Yul.”

I put the phone down feeling already that a great weight had been lifted.

I made myself a Lemsip, put some more coal on the fire, wrapped myself in a blanket and waited for the call. I wasn’t well and on top of that, Liz had already told me what I could do if I didn’t turn up that night and it wasn’t pleasant. I did think of telling her that what she suggested doing with the coal scuttle was a medical impossibility but I decided to keep that to myself. Not long afterwards the phone rang.

“Steve Higgins,” I answered.

“Yul B Allright here. Steve, I’ve spoken to some colleagues and what we think is that health situation permitting, you should get down to that charity do.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yep. I know you didn’t buy the tickets but what we have to think about is our ideology here at Northern Tightwads. We could just say OK, you didn’t buy the tickets and of course your girlfriend, Liz, isn’t even a member but this a wider issue. Culture and ethos are important here and even if the loss won’t be sustained by a member of our group, paying for something and not getting the benefit of that payment is not acceptable. We think the only course of action for a true tightwad is to go down to that function and enjoy what you’ve paid for.”

“Well, there is a hotpot supper included in the ticket price.”

“That just confirms it Steve, you’ve got to get down there and make sure you get that hotpot and if humanly possible, make sure you get an extra portion!”

I was moved for a minute.

“Yul, you’re right. I just don’t know what to say. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your advice. No way we can leave that hotpot uneaten. Thanks Yul.”

“Anytime Steve. All of us at Northern Tightwads are right behind you and just remember.”

“Remember what Yul?”

“Anytime a round of drinks need buying, just make sure you need to visit the gents.”

“Thanks Yul, I’ll remember.”

We had a good night at the charity night, we even won a fiver and a bottle of gin in the raffle. I even started to feel better but that night things took a turn for the worse. I awoke at five in the morning with a major coughing and sneezing fit. I wrapped myself up in my dressing gown and staggered to the lounge. The fire had gone out but it was still warm in the room. I settled down with another Lemsip and watched the Grand Prix. Local star Perez got himself shunted off at the first corner much to the dismay of the crowd. The Ferraris tried to hang on to the tail of new three times world champion Max Verstappen but sadly failed and Max won again.

I watched a shed load of TV until about 9am when I went back to bed for some more much needed sleep.

When I awoke later my sore throat had eased a little, my temperature was down and the coughing and sneezing had begun to subside. I checked my pulse.

Yes I thought, I might just get through this.

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A Few Random Thoughts about Time

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Time is a pretty odd thing when you think about it. You can’t see it or touch it but it’s there just the same. As far as I understand, time is uniform, it bumbles along at exactly the same speed, year after year. There are always 24 hours in any given day and 365 days in every year, except of course for leap years. I mentioned last week about encountering each new birthday with a sense of apprehension. After all, each birthday brings me closer to my inevitable end, my dying day but it seems to me that as we get older, time seems to speed up and the months and years pass by faster and faster.

Perhaps that’s a consequence of nearing the latter stages of my journey through life. Recently when we were travelling through France motoring along through the endless country lanes of the Loire valley, it seems as if I only became aware of the speed when I reached a new village or hamlet and had to slow down. Perhaps that’s the way it is with time too, that you only notice the passing of time with some new event, something that brings time into perspective.

One of my friends has a daughter born on my birthday and the other day the child’s grandmother mentioned to me that she would be soon off to school. School already I thought? After all, I still think of that child as a baby, which clearly she no longer is. (Quick check and the little girl in question was born in 2019!)

In the boot of my car are two big yellow anoraks with reflective stripes. I put them there in case I ever break down on the motorway although they were given to me when I first joined the Highways Agency. They were compulsory clothing for being out and about seeing the motorway network first hand with our traffic officers, our area contractors and the police. I remember being out with the motorway police for a day and looking down at the speedometer as we made our way to an RTC and seeing it registering 120mph. That was an interesting day but it was actually back in 2005, 18 years ago. Can those yellow jackets really be 18 years old?

Music is another thing that always registers the passing of time. In the pub quiz that we visit every Thursday there is always a music section. The quizmaster plays 10 tracks and asks for three answers for each; the title, the artist and the year. We are helped in the year aspect as the DJ plays two tracks from each of ten decades and gives us the year endings. Now back in the 1980’s I was at the height of my love of vinyl singles. I bought singles every week, usually when they dropped out of the charts and were sold off at half price and not only that, later in the 80’s I bought my first video recorder and spent a lot of time recording my favourite music on video. What this means is that I should be spot on with the 80’s music but a lot of the time I sadly am not. Last week at the quiz, one of the tracks was Red Light Spells Danger, a hit by Billy Ocean which I was convinced was 1987. Actually it was older and was released in 1977. Fortunately Liz’s recollection was better than mine.

I have always been one for skimming through records and CDs, especially when the word ‘sale’ can be seen. Some years ago, a prime location for buying cheap CDs was Woolworths which sadly went bankrupt in 2015. In Woolworths many years ago I picked up a compilation CD. It had some really nice tracks and a few I’d never heard of but I chose it particularly because of one track, ‘Horse with no Name’ by America. I’ve always loved that song and I don’t have a copy of it so I bought the CD. Later when I had got home and played the album I was surprised to find another track that I hadn’t spotted earlier, it was Desiderata, a poem by Max Ehrman made into a pop song, of sorts, by an American guy called Les Crane.

Now not only is that poem one of my favourites but so is the musical version. It was played a lot at school by our headmaster in the morning services and as soon as I heard it again it brought memories of those long ago schooldays flooding back to me: The registrations, the morning assembly, the prayers. Back in the late sixties a lot of those morning assemblies were about Vietnam and how our headmaster, Mr Trickett wove his morning address from Vietnam to the Desiderata, I do not know but that musical version was something I loved and finding it again on a CD was like getting part of my youth back.

 

Quite a few years back Liz and I visited many of the war cemeteries in Northern France and like many others were moved by the many monuments to those who lost their lives in two world wars. I made a video about the many war memorials we came across and in the video commentary I spoke about the passing of time.

I have a theory about time and it’s this, it’s that time flows differently in different places. OK; sounds a bit mad doesn’t it? Let me explain further.

On many occasions when trundling through rural France I’ve come across many bunkers, fortresses and other sites. In northern France Liz and I stopped at a war grave cemetery that was picture perfect in its own way. The lawns were incredibly neat, and the hedgerows immaculately trimmed. Sadness pervaded the site like a scent coming over from the adjacent fields. Throughout there is a feeling of peace, of slowness and a feeling that time has stopped here or perhaps just slowed. That’s not strange when you think that time must have speeded up during the action of the first and second world wars, so it seems only fair that nature must compensate, that time must slow later to make up for the fast and frantic earlier time.

You can imagine the pace of things even a hundred years ago: The early morning bombardment, the whistles blowing as officers called their troops to go over the top. The advance parties who made ahead to cut the barbed wire, the troops walking apprehensively forward until they walked into the deadly machine gun fire that cut most of them down. Many found their final resting places in these cemeteries, places that are now quiet and peaceful with a silent beauty, timeless and moving with the beat of nature as a backdrop; the humming of the insects, distant cows mooing, and the birds flying past.

All the places we visited have had their moments in the spotlight of world history. They all lived through times of accelerated pace when time flowed swiftly. Perhaps it’s their time now for a quieter pace while time flows slowly.

Back to me then and my 67 birthdays. Time as I mentioned seems to speed up with age but there is still time to mention one more thing.

Time for a cup of tea!

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My Birthday Week

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Some time ago, and I can’t remember when it was, I went from looking forward to my birthdays to not being interested in them at all. In fact, I even think I’ve gone a little the other way. I don’t hate my birthdays but they worry me as with each one I just get older and older.

I’ve had 67 birthdays now which is quite a considerable number and one thing is certain, I won’t get another 67. This year I took my birthday off Facebook, I’m not sure why, perhaps I just don’t want people to know I’m so ancient. Perhaps inwardly I’m ashamed of being old but either way, Liz posted birthday wishes on Facebook so removing my birthday was a pretty pointless exercise. Anyway, together, Liz and I had a pretty lovely week.

To kick things off, on the Monday prior to the big day we visited one of our favourite restaurants. It’s called Ego and it’s actually part of a big chain of Ego restaurants and on a Monday they have a special offer which consists of any starter and main course at a reduced fixed price and also £10 off a bottle of wine.

The food isn’t outstanding at Ego but the one thing that makes it stand out is that if something is wrong, the staff will fix it. There will be no questions, no excuses, they will just get you another meal or just fix whatever it is that was wrong.

In a lot of restaurants staff seem to want to give excuses or reasons for the problem but never seem to want to do anything about it. A while ago we were in another restaurant, actually one of my favourites and we complained that the mussels were a bit gritty. The manager came over and explained that it wasn’t the fault of the restaurant but the fishmongers. Really? Another time we complained that some of the leaves in a salad were a bit dead. Again, it wasn’t their fault as the salad comes pre-washed. Yes, but didn’t the chef look at the plate? Wasn’t it checked before it came to the table? A quick check and the offending leaf could have been removed and then there would be no problem. That particular restaurant has since gone down a little in my estimation.

Anyway, if those things had happened at Ego, the manager would be round to our table to apologise, the food would have been instantly replaced and now I come to think of it, the last time we complained, the manager not only sorted the issue but also gave us both a free glass of wine which is why we keep coming back there. The food is important at a restaurant but so is the service.

Anyway, that was Monday. On Tuesday, the day of my actual birthday, we went to the restaurant which served the gritty mussels and I had a really nice meal. The waiters had been tipped off beforehand that it was my birthday and after our meal came and sang happy birthday and two of our friends who were also in the restaurant came over and joined in too.

Later, we went over to the Pier Inn for their Tuesday night quiz. These days you hear a lot about pubs closing down. Even the Rovers Return, the pub in the long running soap Coronation Street is currently boarded up and closed so it’s nice to see new pubs opening. The Pier Inn used to be a shop many moons ago and now it has reopened as a small pub serving some very nice real ales.

(Picture courtesy Wikipedia creative commons)

The quiz at the Pier Inn is one of those that is mostly based on current affairs rather than general knowledge so as we hadn’t watched the news that much it was certain we weren’t going to do well, however, we were joined by a friend who actually was pretty well up on current affairs and combined with a few crucial answers we added when it came to music and Hollywood, we ended up as the winners!

I believe that the decisive question was actually one that I answered. Which four things were removed from the top of Mount Lee in Las Angeles, California in 1949?

 Yes, that was a tough one for many of the quizzers but being a fan of classic Hollywood I guessed that the four things were letters, actually LAND. Yes, the famous Hollywood sign was originally ‘HOLLYWOODLAND’ and was erected to advertise a new housing estate in Hollywood in 1923. In 1949 when the sign became rather dilapidated, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce offered to repair the sign but removed the ‘land’ segment so the sign would advertise the area itself and not just a housing estate. It was refurbished again in the 1970s and still stands today.

I thought I’d take a break from my birthday week and talk for a minute about Sex and the City. On a previous post I gave the latest series of And Just Like That a bit of a slagging off but I thought, is it that bad or is it that SATC was not actually as good as I remember? In order to resolve this issue, I opened up my DVD box set collection and plumped for my favourite season, season 4. With the DVD player cranked up I slipped in the first disc and there it was, SATC how it used to be; fabulous stories, great characters like Maria, Samantha’s lesbian lover, Charlotte’s husband Trey and his mother Bunny, Aidan, Steve, Mr Big, the OCD jazz guy and many others and Charlotte doesn’t look like some plastic botoxed oddball version of herself like she does today. I loved it and yes, And Just Like That really is as bad as I had thought.

Picture courtesy Olivers

Wednesday was a day of rest and a chance to ease up on my food and alcohol intake but on Thursday, our regular quiz night, we ate out once again. This time we went to Olivers, a friendly little place only a 5 minute drive from Liz’s house. Olivers is a small place with only a few tables serving pizza and pasta. They don’t serve alcohol but you can bring your own beer or wine which keeps the prices down which of course is vital to a tightwad like me. The pizzas are nice at Olivers but the dish I really like is a sharing board consisting of some pretty simple elements. Meatballs in tomato sauce, slices of some fabulous bread the chef makes himself, a pretty amazing garlic mayonnaise, olives, salami and potatas bravas which Liz doesn’t like so we swap that for a side salad. It’s simple but I love it plus the pizza we share for a starter is really nice.

After that it was off to our regular quiz. We excelled as usual in the picture round, we did reasonably well in the general knowledge but the music round was our downfall where we attributed the wrong songs to the wrong years. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

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Writing and What Happened in 1977

Posted on by Steve Higgins

1977 was a different world. There was no internet and there were no mobile phones. The only phones were landlines and they were big and heavy with great rotary dials with which you had to laboriously dial a number. As more people wanted telephones they needed more numbers and so numbers got longer and longer. 061, the dialling code for Manchester became 0161 and the code for London which was 01 became two new codes 071 and 081

I should tell you that I’m actually quite interested in telephones, especially those big heavy ones with a dial. I used to collect them and in fact I have quite a few; my two favourites are an old Bakelite phone from the 1940s and a Trimphone from the 1970s. The Trimphone was a new style telephone created by BT. It was a wedge-shaped light phone and the handset fitted neatly across the dial. Although it’s a phone I’ve always associated with the 1970’s, it was actually first introduced in 1965 and had a warbling ring tone instead of the traditional bell. The original versions had a green dial which lit up in the dark although this was discontinued due to concerns about radiation as the phosphorous which gave off the green glow was energised by a small tube of tritium gas which was mildly radioactive. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought anything could be ‘mildly’ radioactive but happily my two trimphones do not glow in the dark.

Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:

Once in 1977 I had a bit of a crush on a girl named Anne. I was a bus driver and my conductor had gone out with Anne a few times before moving on to someone else. I asked my friend Des for her number and I called her up one evening. I didn’t have a phone so I had to use a call box. I dialled the number and the phone rang for quite a while and finally someone answered.

‘Can I speak to Anne’ I asked.

‘Anne?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Anne. Tell her it’s Steve.’

‘Steve?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Steve.’

‘Just a minute.’

I could hear someone in the background asking who is it? And someone saying it’s for Anne and I had the feeling then that Des was playing a trick on me but hopefully the girl, whoever she was, had gone to fetch Anne.

A vintage bakelite telephone bought in France

I waited for quite a while and soon the pips went on the phone and I had to put more money in. I was still hanging on when the pips went again and in went my last coin. After what seemed like ages Anne came to the phone. I told her I didn’t have any money left so I quickly asked her out, she agreed and we set a place to meet, just before the phone finally cut off. When I finally went out with Anne, she told me that the phone wasn’t hers, it was her auntie’s phone and her auntie lived around the corner so Anne’s cousin had to nip round to Anne’s house, tell her there was a phone call and bring her back to the phone!

I remember telling Des about it and he laughed his head off. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was her Auntie’s phone, you twit?’ I said.  Des just laughed even more.

Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book Floating in Space. Floating was set in the year 1977 and as I mentioned earlier there was no internet, there were no mobile phones and wireless was an old-fashioned name for the radio. What else happened in 1977?

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the USA and he had won the election the previous year, taking office on January 20th, 1977. He was a peanut farmer who defeated President Gerald Ford who had served as President after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. As I write this, Carter is currently the oldest living former President.

In the UK the Prime Minister was Jim Callaghan. According to Wikipedia, he was the only Prime Minister to have held all the four main offices of state; Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and of course, Prime Minister.

A previous Prime Minister, Anthony Eden died in 1977.

Today’s blog is my 578th post over here on WordPress. It’s my 578th time of reaching out and showing readers a little of my work and hoping it might stimulate a few of you to click the links above and perhaps buy a copy of one of my books.

Creativity is important to everyone and my creative outlet is here in these weekly pages. For others it might be painting or photography. It might be working on a car or motorbike or even a little woodwork or home improvement. Creativity can take many forms, even making a post on Facebook can be creative. If you are on holiday and take a picture of a sunset and make it into a post, that is creativity. You can even take it further, crop the picture, add a filter to the image. Add a quote, Oscar Wilde is always good for one and so is Noel Coward or the big daddy of the written word; Shakespeare. The more you add the more creative you are. You can even write more on the post, another sentence, another paragraph, even another page. Soon you are on the way to a chapter, then more chapters and in time you will find that you have written a book. You’ve become a writer which, let’s face it, is a big achievement but then you need to write more, you need more pages, more chapters and more ideas.

Some people might write more than 578 posts, others may fall by the wayside after a mere eight, after all we all have things to do, jobs, work, life. All of that gets in the way.

Perhaps it’s time to get back to 1977:

On the 16th August 1977 at 6am, it was time for Elvis Presley to get some sleep. Night and day were reversed in Elvis’ world. He spent most of the night awake doing all the things he wanted to do. If he wanted to see a film at the cinema, he paid the cinema to run a film for him and his friends at night. He ate and played games at night, like the racketball he played with his step brothers and friends before going to bed that morning.

His fiancée, Ginger Alden was with him and Elvis who had trouble sleeping, took his usual assortment of sleeping pills before turning in. Sometime around 9am, Elvis awoke and told Ginger he was going to the bathroom. His bathroom was huge and he had made it into a truly personal and private place. In the bathroom was a circular shower. One wall was mirrored and fringed with those lightbulbs that one sees on the dressing table of a stage or film star and Elvis’ toilet things were clustered around the basin. The room was carpeted in purple and as well as a circular shower there was a couch and a TV set.

Elvis may have been sat on a chair reading The Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson or he may have been using the toilet however, sometime during the morning he keeled over and fell face down to the floor wearing only a pair of blue cotton pyjamas. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll had died.

A few months before Elvis died, my friend Chris and I decided to pack in our jobs and travel to Spain and look for work there. His sister had already made the trip and assured Chris that there was a big British contingent and plenty of jobs available in bars and restaurants. Accommodation was readily available too. Chris and I hitchhiked to London where we caught the boat train to Paris. We wandered about in Paris trying to get a ride further south but after waiting for days trying to get a lift, we caught the train down to Spain.

We had a big reunion in a place called Lloret de Mar with Chris’ sister. Two Scots guys fixed us up with a pension, a small place to live and we met them later in the bar and bought them drinks as a thank you. After a while I became a little fed up of buying them drinks, yes, they’d helped us get a place to stay but that didn’t mean I was committed to providing them with free beer for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure they appreciated being told that and afterwards even though Chris got on with them pretty well, I didn’t. The incident contributed towards a certain unpopularity on my part in the local community but at least it kept the cadgers from mythering me. Still, other newcomers to Lloret were pretty popular, they had money in their pockets and the local Brits didn’t.

Quite a few notable people died in 1977. Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Wernher von Braun, Roberto Rossellini, Marc Bolan and of course, Elvis Presley.

I stayed in Lloret for two weeks and it was fun. Every night was like a Saturday night but after two weeks I realised I didn’t just want Saturday nights. Sometimes I wanted a normal Tuesday night watching TV. Sometimes I wanted a Sunday night and my mother’s Sunday dinner and sometimes I wanted a rainy Thursday afternoon. After a few weeks in the sun I left Chris in Lloret, hitchhiked north through France and finally back to Manchester.

We didn’t have a telephone at home so I couldn’t call to say I was on my way back. I always remember knocking on the door of our house. Mum opened the door and said ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be gone for six months. ‘It didn’t work out Mum,’ I told her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. I threw your old bed out!’

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Funerals and a Star of England

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Before I went away on holiday at the beginning of May, I went to see my mother. She had lived in a care home since 2020 and suffering with dementia, she would alternate between periods of deep depression and confusion. The first words she would usually say to me are ‘where am I?’ or ‘when am I going home?’ The home she remembered though is her childhood home, one that she left behind many years ago.

On visiting just before I left for France, the staff took me aside and told me that Mum had only a month to live. She looked bright and cheerful, if a little thin but certainly not someone with only a month to live. Over two years ago they had told me the same thing. Then on another occasion they told me she only had six months left. Both forecasts were inaccurate. This one however, proved to be correct.

When Elvis Presley died someone approached John Lennon with the news and waited for his reaction. He reportedly said, ‘Elvis died ten years ago’. Lennon despite his peace and love image always struck me as a hard faced sort of man who cared little for the sensitivities of others. Those words of his came to me when I heard the news that Mum had indeed died. Her name was Mary and the real woman, the real soul or spirit that made Mary what she was, had either long gone or been obscured by dementia.

Still, even though I felt as though I had lost Mum a long time ago, I still grieved at her passing and of course there was a funeral to arrange. I don’t really know much about funerals and what they involve so I began to cast my mind back to other funerals I had attended.

When my Gran died the funeral service was held in Marple. I’m not sure why as it was nowhere near where my Gran lived or was buried. The journey from there to Southern Cemetery in Manchester was for me, a masterpiece of motor car management, juggling with high water temperature and having to dive into a garage to top up my car with water and then hurry along to catch up the funeral cortège.

At the graveside I noticed my Dad making signs to the two grave diggers and after the coffin had slipped into the ground and the final words of the vicar had faded, my Dad, a former grave-digger in years gone by, had a happy and joyful reunion with two of his old co-workers, much to the dismay of Mum who stood with me and cried her heart out. (Not your finest moment, Dad.) At least he thought better of introducing her to his friends which I thought he was going to do at one point.

My Uncle Raymond was my favourite uncle and my Dad’s best friend. When he died his funeral cortège took a detour past the British Legion, one of his numerous watering holes, and the staff and customers came outside to pay tribute as his coffin passed slowly by.

The funeral was sad and tearful and the wake was pretty similar. A lot of sad people, a lot of tears and my Dad, who had lost his best friend was devastated.

I was driving that day and was asked to run some long forgotten relative home. I did so and returned a short while later. Only twenty minutes or so had passed but when I returned, I returned to a happy, noisy, enjoyable party, full of laughter and fun. I don’t know what had happened in the twenty minutes I had been gone but I came back to exactly the sort of party that my Uncle Ray would have loved.

Over in France I called the funeral home. They assured me Mum’s body would be looked after and soon someone would give me a call about further arrangements. The next day someone did indeed call and we set a date. I called or messaged all the relations that I could and then waited for the next step. The next step never happened so I called the funeral home again. No rush they said, finish your holiday and then come and see us and we’ll set a date for the funeral. Set a date? But we’ve already done that, haven’t we? It turned out that the date I’d set was a date to speak to the funeral home’s financial advisor! Perhaps I was more stressed than I thought.

I was full of nerves as we approached the day of the funeral but I went back to some of my old Paul McKenna confidence building routines that I used to use before job interviews. I woke on the day of the funeral feeling calm and confident. Everything went as planned and it was good to see my cousins and other family members who I hadn’t seen for many years.

My mother was born on Black Thursday, the day of the Wall Street crash, October 24th, 1929. She was born in Cheltenham, I’m not quite sure why, perhaps my Grandad was there looking for work. The family lived for a while at 36 Bath Street in Hulme, a suburb of Manchester. They moved to the new council housing estate of Wythenshawe in the 1930s. It must have been a wonderful place then, surrounded by farms and country lanes. Mum was the eldest in her family, followed soon by, in no particular order, Ada, Beryl, George and Frank.

The war came in 1939 and being the eldest, Mum helped with the cooking and shopping and used to tell me stories of queuing at shops and ration cards and swapping ration coupons for the things you didn’t want for the things that you did. She told me she could tell the German planes from the British ones by the sound of their engines and when the blitz came, the family used to troop out to the bomb shelter, all except my grandad who under no circumstances Mum said, would he ever step in there.

When Mum left school, she worked in a series of local factories and then later worked in Manchester city centre. She used to meet my grandad in Piccadilly; he would be going home after a night shift at Evans Bellhouse in Newton Heath and she would be on her way to work.

In 1948 tragedy struck when her sister Ada was killed in a cycling accident. Mum was deeply affected and told me about it many times.

Happier times came when she married my dad in 1954 and although they had their ups and downs, they stayed together until he died in 2000.

Mum was the centre of our small family. She organised everything we did. She arranged all our family holidays to places like Rhyl and Prestatyn, Blackpool and Morecambe and all the seaside destinations of northern England. They were always caravan holidays and as we had no car we always travelled by coach. We took the dog with us and no matter what preparations were made Bob, our dog, was always sick on the coach. Myself, my brother and my dad all looked the other way and pretended the dog was nothing to do with us while Mum, always prepared as usual, cleaned up the mess.

She also arranged all the decorating in our house taking charge of the wallpaper and preparing all the surfaces for painting. Dad would appear in his overalls, do the painting and then Mum would clean everything up.

She was devasted when he died in 2000 but like always, she just carried on.

I used to ask her if she wanted any shopping and she would always say, when she couldn’t go shopping herself anymore, then she was finished.

Once, when I was living in Merseyside, she bought a new lawn mower from Argos and asked me to pick it up. I kept putting it off but eventually drove back to Manchester and down to Argos. I had the code she had given me but the staff told me it had been picked up. I insisted it couldn’t have been but they were equally insistent that it had.  I drove round to Mum’s and it turned out she had got tired of waiting for me and had picked it up herself. She had gone to Asda, got herself a trolley, pushed it to Argos, the staff put the mower in and then she pushed it home, returning the shopping trolley the next day.

When she began to suffer with dementia my brother and I looked after her with the help of carers and believe me, it was very difficult indeed. She would forget she had eaten and demanded more food. She complained that her clothes were not her clothes and after an illness which I personally thought might have been covid she moved into a care home.

Sometimes I’d visit her and she could hardly put two words together. Other times she’d be bright and happy and talkative but even so, her death was more of a freeing of her spirit than anything else.

A lot of the words above came from the eulogy I read at her funeral. I’d decided to finish with these words from Henry 5th by William Shakespeare: Small time but in that small most greatly lived this Star of England.

You might those words were perhaps a little inappropriate, after all, Mum wasn’t a king or a queen. She was a simple lady who loved her husband and children and did her best for her family. She was proud to be a housewife and a homemaker but I truly believe she was, in her own way, a Star of England.

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Thoughts in My Car

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Every couple of weeks or so I hop into my car and set off on the journey back to Manchester. I usually have some provisions packed although a lot of the time I will pop into the shops and pick some things up, a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk. I’m a man of simple tastes.

The car starts up fine and I’m off down the drive and heading towards the M55 motorway.

Once I’m moving I crank up the stereo and settle back to drive and listen to my favourite music. I hate adverts. TV adverts are bad enough but radio ads are the ones I really hate so no commercial radio, just CDs. My stereo takes five CDs which is great as sometimes I might get bored with the current CD and I like to click forward to the next one.

Coming along Queensway towards the M55 and there are roadworks ahead. There’s not a great queue but the only other route involves a huge excursion to bypass the area so I reckon I’ll just stick it out.

My much missed Renault convertible

My car is a Skoda Octavia Scout 4 wheel drive. It’s not anything I’ve gone out of my way to buy it just happened to be available when I wanted to change cars so I went for it. The only car I’ve ever really gone out of my way to buy was probably my last car which was a Renault Megane convertible. I don’t suppose I took the roof down that much now I come to think of it but a convertible was something I’d always wanted. I really did love driving on a warm summer’s day with the top down. My previous car was a Rover and it had a somewhat old fashioned radio and tape player. Not that I minded having a tape player. Ever since my teenage days I’ve enjoyed copying my vinyl 45s to tape and making what they call these days a mixtape, although back in the mid seventies that wasn’t a phrase I’d ever heard of.

Anyway, I loved tapes and I enjoyed compiling them. If the tape broke: no matter, they were only cheap, throw it away and record another. Bored with a tape? Again, no matter, just record something else over whatever was already on there.

Tape cassette

Finally through the roadworks on down towards the M55 motorway.

When I moved up to the Renault my collection of tapes was consigned to the storeroom and I brought a box of CDs into the car. I wasn’t totally happy but then I realised I could continue in my mixtape recording by just creating collections of my favourite music on CD. I began to copy CDs onto my laptop so I could burn my favourite tracks to new CD collections. I even had a program in which I could digitise some of my very best mixtapes which had clips from TV and film shows and burn them to a new CD.

Finally I turn on to the M55 motorway. I see I’m perhaps a little short on fuel but I’ve got easily enough to get me to Manchester and back. It’s always worth checking your fuel as when I was a motorway traffic officer, running out of gas could be a big problem. So many stranded motorists used to call up and mention they had run out of fuel as if we were going to pop down with a tank of petrol. No, we would be towing their car away and charging them £250 for the privilege, assuming the police didn’t get involved and give them a ticket. Imagine if they had run out of fuel in the fast lane or on a motorway with no hard shoulder; that could be dangerous and even fatal. Always check your fuel before going onto the motorway.

After a while I thought about actually having my original CDs in the car rather than copying and editing them. After all, if you come to a dud track it’s easy to just flip to the next one. So I brought a couple of boxes of CDs into the car, one in the passenger footwell and another in the boot. Every so often I’d rotate them.

Not so long ago I was stuck in a traffic jam. I was a little bored with my current five CD selection and wondering if I should reach over and select some new music from the zip folder of CDs in the glove compartment or even reach down to the box of newer CDs on the floor. We started to move up slowly but just then my eye happened to catch something on the front of the stereo. There was a small slot I hadn’t seen before and was that worn mark the symbol of a SD slot, you know, a slot for a memory card? We started moving and I made a mental note to look into that later.

By now I’d reached the junction with the M6. I took the slip road for the M6 south but I knew that soon I’d have to make another decision. Should I go M61 south and then M60 ring road or stay M6 south and then M56? Decisions. The M61 is not one of my favourite motorways. It always seems to be busy and then there’s the confusing link to the M60 anti clockwise where you have to move over to the right but traffic from the A666 that wants to go M60 clockwise tries to go left. It’s an accident hot spot and I can almost hear myself in former days when I was the radio dispatcher: Romeo Lima three four. Can you make to an RTC southbound M61 just by the junction with the M60 clockwise?

‘State five, Hotel Alpha’ would be the hoped for response, state five is code for enroute to the incident. Hotel Alpha was my call sign. Anyway I decide to stay on the M6 south. It’s a bit of a risk as I know there are roadworks and a 50mph zone but I still reckon it will be better than the M61.

Police and Highways dealing with an incident. This was on the M25

I checked the stereo and guess what? Yes it was a slot for an SD card. Now it just so happens that all the music I have copied and digitised I had already placed on a micro SD card for my MP3 player. I copied all that to a standard size SD card, popped it into my stereo and now I can listen to my entire music collection without changing CDs, without rotating boxes of CDs, without having the footwell of the passenger seat full of CDs. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. OK, I’d have to copy all the newer CDs in my collection that I hadn’t already transferred to the SD card but even so, I still have a huge collection of music on that card, all of which I like and all advertisement free.

I’d hit the roadworks on the M6 and dropped to 50mph as per the speed restrictions. A lot of people look down on my Skoda but Skoda is actually part of Volkswagen and the engine is basically a Volkswagen engine so really the car is actually a pretty impressive vehicle. I’ve got a cruise control so I set the speed to 52 MPH and glide gently along in the slightly faster moving outside lane. I’m gradually working my way through my SD card and along comes some music I haven’t heard for a while, the soundtrack from the film Aliens.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley from Alien

Aliens was the James Cameron sequel to the Ridley Scott sci-fi horror film Alien. Alien is a sci-fi classic and I’m never sure which is the better film Alien or Aliens. The other sequels in the Alien series were poor and even the prequels weren’t that good, even though Ridley Scott himself directed them. The first was Prometheus which he followed with Alien Covenant. I tried to watch Prometheus but just got bored with it. Alien Covenant was much the same.

Alien had a top-notch cast including Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm, John Hurt and others. The actors in Covenant were good but I just didn’t have any interest in them. The plot seemed pretty similar to Alien; a spacecraft receives a distress call and goes to investigate. This involves a long hike through the countryside although why they couldn’t have landed closer, I don’t know. Instead of the eggs and the face hugging parasite from Alien some alien spores are encountered by one crew member. He is taken back to the spacecraft and to the medical bay. One crew member gets locked in with the deteriorating man and guess what, an alien bursts out of his body and attacks the other one although just about then I switched off. Why is Alien so good and Alien Covenant so bad? It’s hard to say. Was it just the charisma free actors in the latter or the slow pace? Alien ticked along fairly slowly too but the director always kept the viewer interested in what was going to happen, plus the actors in Alien were so good.

A dubious area of the M6 is around Warrington where the M62 joins us and things always seem to get busy. There are queue caution signs up but these are automatic signals which are activated by a system called MIDAS. Motorway Incident Detection and Signalling. Slow traffic has been detected but then it is always busy in this area. Things speed up and we are soon over the Thelwall Viaduct and onto the M56.

I click onto the next CD on the SD card and it’s a singer called Rumer. Rumer is a British singer-songwriter with a really lovely voice. I reckon it’s just as good as Karen Carpenter and both have the same smooth and warm tone. The album that’s playing is one that has a fabulous version of a Carpenters classic, I Long to be Close to You.

Listening to the wonderful voice of Rumer, I pass the airport, another incident hot spot, without any problems and soon I’m pulling up at my mother’s house. I’ve got my laptop with me and I’ll have a few days to write a new blog post.

Not sure what to write about though.

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Technology and a Sort of Personal History

Posted on by Steve Higgins

So that’s Christmas and New Year over with, let’s get cracking with 2023. I might as well say, I’m always glad to see the back of Christmas and New Year. Not only that, I’m glad to see the back of December 21st too as the 21st is the shortest day of the year and now, each day gets longer as we gradually move towards the spring and warmer weather.

One other reason to see the back of 2022 was that during a cold snap just before Christmas, our pipes froze and we had three separate burst pipes in the loft. The first two weren’t so bad as we spotted them straight away and our plumber came over quickly and sorted them. The third one was worse. The pipes burst over the spare room which we didn’t notice straight away. It was only as Liz was passing on the way to the bathroom that we became aware of water pouring down into the room. Hats off once again to our plumber who came over straight away and sorted the leak. Sorting the wet carpets might take a little longer though. All that is just another reason to hate the cold.

This year, much later this year I should say, I will be 67 and I start to find myself looking inward, looking at where I have come from as well as wondering about the future.

The future, I have come to feel is about technology. Technology is ever changing and touches even a common individual like me. Once I recorded my television programmes on VHS tapes and now, they can be saved directly to my hard drive at the push of a button. Regular instalments of a show can be recorded automatically and missed shows can be watched on catch up TV. You can even begin to watch a TV show before the recording has finished. I spend a lot of time converting my favourite documentaries onto DVD although by the time I’ve finished, DVD will probably have given way to some newer technology.

The Beano. Picture courtesy Dundee.com

Years ago, I used to read a comic strip called General Jumbo. The general was actually a small boy who had various crime fighting adventures with a unique set of radio-controlled toys or models. I always remembered him controlling the models using something like an iPad although when I researched the General, who appeared in a famous UK comic called The Beano, I see he controlled them with a device that fitted over his wrist. Maybe it was some other comic strip hero that used the iPad like device but either way today’s iPad is one of my favourite devices. I’ve had an iPad for a number of years. I used to edit my blog posts on the iPad and produce and schedule most of my tweets and other social media posts but recently I have not been able to.

My iPad is fully up to date but alas, many apps will not work anymore. Many need an update of 14.5 and my pad, despite being fully updated only updates to 12.5. This is a most disappointing aspect of the iPad but it represents I suppose the ever-changing face of technology. It also represents something of a mean streak in the people at Apple, for they are not content for us to buy their very expensive gadgetry, they want us to buy the same item again, suitably updated and up-priced, several years later.

Fair enough, technology must move on but why at the expense of old technology? Anyway, one most wonderful and unexpected Christmas present I received this year, courtesy I might add of Liz, was a new iPad. Now I can reinstall the apps that I could no longer use on my old iPad. My banking app works again and I can sort out my social media posts with ease.

At Christmas I always get myself a present. It’s usually something like a DVD or a book but this year I bought myself a DNA test. It came with three months free on the ancestry.co.uk web site and it was pretty fascinating looking back at the paper fingerprints left behind by my ancestors in marriage documents, census forms and birth certificates. Having said that, researching your family history isn’t easy, especially when your grandfather for instance had the name George Higgins, a pretty unremarkable name in turn of the century Great Britain.

A lot of what I have found on the ancestry web site is nothing new and seems to merely confirm things I have found out by other means. I have my father’s birth certificate which gave some information and my grandfather’s marriage and death certificates which gave me more. My grandfather as I have mentioned was George Higgins. He died in 1954 before I was born. Ancestry linked me to the family tree of a distant relative who seems to claim that George was born in Ireland. Now that contradicts something my father told me many years ago. He told me that his grandfather or great grandfather came from Ireland. The man was a catholic and in order to marry a protestant, he was forced to come to England. That being the case I find it hard to understand how George came to be born in Ireland. Did his forebears return to Ireland or has Ancestry found a different George Higgins? On George’s army documents, he reports both his mother and father as being English, not Irish.

My Grandfather, George Higgins fought in the First World War with the Royal Horse Artillery so my father told me. This is him in this splendid picture with his horse, Prince. My Dad had the picture with him in his wallet when he was in the forces and as time went on it got a little torn and tatty and somewhere, I suppose it must have been in Hong Kong where he was stationed for a while, he found a little photographic shop that specialised in rescuing old pictures. The background of the picture was originally a forest but the rescue work removed them in order to make the picture good.

Over on Ancestry I found that George served with the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1912 to 1921. In 1921 he enlisted in the 52nd East Lancs Corps which was a Territorial Army Unit of Field Artillary.

Both sides of my family, my father’s people and my mother’s, came from the back-to-back terraced houses of Salford. They moved to Wythenshawe in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s. Wythenshawe was known as the ‘garden estate’ because instead of small terraced houses, here were bigger and better houses with front and back gardens. The estate was built on land purchased by Manchester City Council from the Tatton family. It was originally rustic countryside full of farms. My Dad worked on quite a few of them and my Mum tells me stories of getting milk from Potts dairy farm which stood apparently just across from my old junior school. You’d never know because no trace of it remains today, just a row of council houses.

I had hoped to find more about the past but navigating the records that hold the keys to the things that have gone before is not quite as easy as I had thought.

My great grandfather is mentioned on George’s marriage certificate. He was Patrick Henry Higgins and was no longer alive in 1920 when George married my grandmother. What makes the search difficult is that there are a great many Patrick Henry Higgins’s about. One day, during an epic troll of various census records, I found an Annie Higgins in the census of 1901. She was the head of quite a large household. Her husband was no longer around but one of her sons was called George. Was she the widow of Patrick Henry? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps that elusive DNA report might help when it finally arrives. One day I hope to find out.

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A Few Christmas Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I always find it hard to write a Christmas blog post. I’m not sure why but then Christmas isn’t really my favourite time of the year. Anyway, here are a few of my Christmas memories, some of them culled from previous Christmas posts.

I used to like Christmas way back when I was about 12 years old. There were three presents I wanted as a child for Christmas and I didn’t ever get any of them, well not for Christmas anyway. One was a Secret Sam Briefcase which was a toy briefcase based on something James Bond might have had back in the 1960’s. The other was a toy rifle called a Johnny Seven which was very much like the big blockbuster rifle that Ripley wields towards the end of the film Aliens and the final thing was an Action Man. It was apparently too expensive my mother told me.

Secret Sam case. Picture from Pinterest

After Christmas I still had dreams of getting an Action Man and I eventually did. I bought or swapped one from my old schoolfriend Peter. It had a broken foot but I stuck it back together and had many happy hours of fun with it. I built this huge flying car I called a Jet Raft but sadly the co-pilot’s seat went unoccupied for quite a long time. The next Christmas, Action Man must have come down in price substantially as my brother received one as part of his Christmas box.

Many times I borrowed his Action Man to occupy the co-pilot seat in the Jet Raft. If we fell out during our games as we frequently did, he would depart and take his Action Man with him. Later I bought his Action Man off him outright at what was probably, knowing him, a hugely inflated price.

Back then when you bought an Action Man outfit, each outfit came with a number of stars. If you saved up 21 you could get a free Action Man. I only ever bought a couple of outfits as I mostly made my own. My favourite was an Apollo astronaut outfit I made out of cardboard and some white fabric. However, I did cadge the stars off various schoolfriends and eventually saved up the 21. Yes, it was a great day when the Jet Raft was finally fully manned with pilot, co-pilot and navigator!

This is a picture of my old childhood home. It didn’t look like that when we lived there, there was no drive for a start and there was no metal fence, we used to have privet hedges but of course don’t forget the first rule of karma; nothing stays the same.

Christmases back then were cosy affairs. My brother and me lying on the mat in front of the coal fire and Bob, the family dog, trying to push past us for prime position. He used to get as close to the fire as he possibly could. When his nose dried up my mother would shout at him and drag him away as a dog with a dried-up nose is, as we all know, such a terrible thing. Well, mum thought so anyway.

We used to watch a lot of old black and white films back then, in fact many of the films I saw were films that my dad had seen in his younger days at the cinema. Once we watched Angels with Dirty Faces and I could see from my dad’s face that the film must have brought back good memories for him. I won’t tell you the end of the film because it has quite a clever twist but for whatever reason, just as we approached the final reel, dad felt so moved by re-experiencing the film that he had to tell me the ending! Thanks a bunch dad!

Yes, I’ve experienced many Christmases, some good and some bad. Many years ago I lived with my girlfriend, I’ll call her J. (J for Judas.) On Christmas morning J went out early to take her two children to Christmas day mass. While she was away, I charged up my video camera and when they returned, I shot various things, opening presents and having Christmas dinner and so on. It makes me sad to see that video now although I haven’t seen it for years. When the children came back from mass, they were anxious to open their presents but we were still waiting for their mum. Where is she, I asked? Oh, she had to make a phone call they said. Phone call? Why use the call box round the corner when we had a phone. Two phones in fact, one in the hall and one upstairs. When J eventually came home, she told me she had been chatting to a neighbour. A little alarm bell went off in my head at the time but I dismissed it.

Later it turned out that she had used the call box to phone her new boyfriend, the one she eventually left me for.

Another Christmas I remember was when I had bought my first car. I was still at home and we had moved out from Manchester just over the border into Cheshire. It was freezing cold and my radiator was leaking so I topped it up with water from the tap. I drove back into Manchester, went to a party which I ended up walking home from. When I went back the next day, the radiator had frozen and ruined the engine. That was an expensive Christmas and an expensive lesson to learn about motor cars.

My first car, a three wheeled Bond Bug

Here’s one last Christmas memory. One far off Christmas spent with another ex-girlfriend in our small home in Merseyside. I’ll call the girl in question X. I had some time owing me so I had taken a few days off after Christmas. It had not been a great Christmas as it was the first one since X’s mother had died and she had sadly put the previous year’s Christmas card from her mother in pride of place right on the top of the TV.

Anyway, everyone was getting used to going back to work and there was me, who had worked during Christmas, knackered, worn out and ready for a break. I spent one day with my brother having a nice post-Christmas drink in Manchester and the next day I was relaxing, catching up on some TV of the type hated by X, yes, sci fi stuff, Star Trek, black and white films and so on and then a revelation came to me.

What if I took down the decorations, got rid of the tree, and chucked out the rubbish? There were piles of wrapping paper and empty bottles about and so on. I could actually come out of this looking good for once. Anyway, there and then I just got stuck straight in. I took the tree down, packed away all the ornaments and decorations and put the box back in the loft. The tree was chopped up and placed in the correct bin, the green one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not long after, X and I parted company.

Those were a few of my Christmas memories. Hope you have a great Christmas and New Year.

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It’s C-C-Cold

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This has got to be my least favourite time of the year. I hate the cold. Yes, actually hate it. It’s not a case of disliking it or preferring it to be warm or not being happy about it. Yes, I hate the cold.

I suppose, looking on the bright side, at least I can say I’m not living in Norway or Greenland or even Iceland but then again, it’s only a matter of 849 miles from the UK to Iceland. No wonder I’m cold. It would be nice if I could hibernate like a hedgehog. Have a good feed and then curl up in some nice, cosy spot and wake up in the Spring. I can just imagine waking up having slept through the winter. I’d have a long hot shower and then have breakfast out in the garden, perhaps cook some bacon and eggs and then just sit back and check my emails and see what has been happening while I’ve been away.

Anyway, back to reality and I’ll just pop the fan heater on for a few minutes while I go and load up the coal scuttle so I can light the fire.

We are off to Lanzarote in January and just thinking about it brings on a quick daydream: I’m over in Lanzarote and the temperature is a nice 70F. The pool is perhaps a little chilly but I jump in and after a few lengths I get out, slump into my deckchair and relax while the sun dries my body. I’ve got a book not far away for when I’m ready to read and I’m looking forward to some fresh salad and a barbecue later. Of course, we might even be walking down to the marina and our favourite tapas bar and partaking of a glass or two of red wine.

Back to reality again and excuse me while I pop out and chop some more wood for the fire. I put the kettle on and switch on the TV. I’m in the mood for an old black and white classic British film and what does BBC2 have to offer?  Scott of the Antarctic!

Captain Scott planned to make an expedition to the north pole but then changed his mind and went for the south pole. At pretty much the same time Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, decided he also wanted to make the trip so a kind of race began. Who would get to the pole first? Amundsen decided to travel in classic fashion with teams of dogs pulling sledges. Scott decided he would use new mechanical devices, vehicles with caterpillar tracks, all of which broke down in the cold. Scott also used ponies but they were not acclimatised to the cold and fared poorly. Amundsen’s dogs turned out to be the best choice.

Why either of them would want to go to the pole is completely beyond me. All that they found there was a shed load of snow and ice which most people could have predicted anyway.

As we all know, Scott got beaten to the pole by Amundsen. The gallant British explorers then had to face the task of getting back to civilisation, however the weather worsened and the men froze to death in their tent.

Scott of The Antarctic is a sad film although John Mills plays a good part as usual and James Robertson Justice plays a serious role for a change, that of Captain Oates who disappears into the snow after telling his friends that he ‘might be some time.’ Oates perished like his friends but his courageous actions have never been forgotten.

While I’m on the subject of Antarctica, here’s an interesting story. In 1513 an Ottoman Admiral and cartographer called Piri Reis compiled a map of the world. According to Wikipedia the map, not all of which has survived, depicts the western coasts of Europe and north Africa and Brazil with reasonable accuracy. The Canary Islands are also shown as well as Antarctica. Eric Von Daniken mentions the map in his book Chariots of the Gods and claims that extra-terrestrials may have supplied the information for earlier maps on which the Piri Reis’ map was based. Why you might ask? Well, the northern coast of Antarctica was perfectly detailed in the map but how could Reis know this when the coastline of the area is buried under snow and ice?

Anyway, enough of the Antarctic. Time for a quick scan through my emails. What’s this one:

I have to say, I’ve always rather fancied skiing. It looks pretty exciting and I can imagine it might even be a lot of fun. The big problem is that it involves paying money to travel somewhere that is cold and I have to say, straight out, that going to places that are not only cold but colder than where I live is not only wrong, it really must be either illegal or immoral or probably both. Quick on the spot reappraisal: Skiing? I don’t think so!

Right, kettle on and another steaming hot cup of tea coming up. I needed something to warm me up. I had the fire lit and as I settled down with my hot tea I was actually beginning to feel, not completely warm but a bit of a thaw at least. I flipped through the TV channels like the dedicated couch potato I am and what did I find?

Ice Station Zebra.

Ice Station Zebra was not only one of my favourite films but it was also a favourite of billionaire Howard Hughes. He would watch it regularly in his rooms high above Las Vegas and many times when it had finished, he would ask his aides to rewind the film on his projector and show it again.

Rock Hudson stars as the skipper of a submarine sent on a rescue mission to the north pole. Also on board the ship are a mysterious spy duo played by Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan. When the film was shot, McGoohan was in the middle of filming the TV series The Prisoner and while he was away from the set of the TV show an episode had to be shot without him so the writers dreamed up an installment in which his character Number 6 finds himself in the body of someone else, that of actor Nigel Stock. All of this was engineered for Patrick to star in the film without affecting the production of the TV series.

Ice Station Zebra was based on the novel by Alastair MacLean and it’s a film I’ve always enjoyed despite the cold location.

I piled more coal on the fire but I was still not feeling particularly warm. In fact I was quickly developing various symptoms that were all too familiar: runny nose, feeling cold, slight sore throat, high temperature, clearly a major cold, possibly even serious influenza was on the way. Might as well get out and enjoy myself I thought before being consigned to coughing, spluttering and sneezing, sipping hot lemon and whisky and not wanting to emerge from under the covers. Liz and I decided to visit our local Indian restaurant and join a few of our friends dining there. Obviously, it was going to be cold so I wrapped up well. Shirt, woolly jumper and thick new fleecy coat.

We settled down in the restaurant where I was pleasantly surprised to find the heating was going full blast. Off went the jumper, off went the coat. Poppadoms, onion bhaji and chicken bhuna with pilau rice? Yes, don’t mind if I do.

After some spicy food I finally warmed up. Well, for a little while anyway.

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