Category Archives: The story of my life!

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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Diary of An Oddball Kind of Day

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I had another completely different kind of blog post planned for today but something happened that I just had to write about. Life and the things that get in your way when you’re not expecting them. I’ll start with the day before. I drove down to Manchester to my mother’s house. I like to write there and make some bits and pieces of video. It’s nice to be alone just for a while, to eat when I want to eat, eat what I want and to just generally sit back and open my laptop and create stuff. Sometimes nothing happens and I spend quite a lot of time watching DVDs and mowing the lawn. Actually, I was planning on one of those last lawn mowing efforts before the winter but alas, it had rained during the night and the lawn was soaked.

Arriving at mum’s I made a brew and started making some food. I sat down and waited for things to be ready and made a second brew. I’ve got a great mug at mum’s house. It’s big, bigger than a normal mug but not a giant one. It’s not too big and not too small, just perfect in fact. I ate my dinner, drank my tea and watched a little TV.

As it happens, not much was happening on terrestrial TV so I broke out the DVD box set that Liz had got me for my birthday. It was McMillan and Wife, one of my favourite old TV shows which surprisingly has not been repeated on British TV. Back-to-back episodes of Columbo are shown every Sunday and as much as I love Columbo you’d think broadcasters would like to mix things up and perhaps show the other elements of what used to be Mystery Movie: McCloud, Banacek or even McMillan and Wife.

McMillan and Wife starred Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James as the McMillans, a husband-and-wife detective team. Hudson plays the Police Commissioner of San Francisco and he and his wife go about solving various mysteries. It’s not quite as good as Columbo which for me has to be one of the greatest ever detective shows on TV. The series ran for 6 seasons but Susan left after season 5. She later gave up full time acting to concentrate on her family. Rock Hudson as we all probably know was a closet gay who died of AIDS in 1990.  Susan Saint James once said he was ‘the sexiest man alive!’

Anyway, let’s fast forward to the next day. I got up, washed and dressed and came down for breakfast. Soon I had sausages and bacon sizzling on my George Foreman grill and an egg all ready. The kettle boiled, the teapot was ready but where was the cup? You know the one, my favourite cup, the one not too big or too small. It wasn’t in the lounge and it wasn’t in the kitchen. It wasn’t on the drainer or in the sink with the dirty pots. In short, it had vanished. There was no other choice but to use another cup. I went for a slightly smaller one but, being a different size, I ended up with too much milk and not enough tea.

I had a feeling then that this was an omen, that this day wasn’t going to be good. Oh well!

Breakfast scoffed, I went out and walked into the civic centre to do some business. On the street just a few minutes walk from the centre I spotted a man approaching. He was about 30, tall and clearly under the influence of something, drink or drugs I wasn’t sure what. He was wearing flip flops and a pair of denim shorts which was a bit of a surprise as it was pretty cold. The top he was wearing looked a little like a sort of plastic mac only a very small one, a good three sizes too small for this guy. The buttons were all fastened but were straining a little. His belly was showing, not a particularly big belly but clearly there was nothing on under the mac. I made to walk to the other side of the road and this guy did the same. I nonchalantly turned back to my original side but the guy looked a bit confused by this and he decided to change direction also. Maybe he wanted to ask me something, I don’t know but to be fair, I just wasn’t in the mood to chat to a drunken idiot, especially as this was only about 10:30 in the morning.

A white van came down the street then going far too fast and the guy lurched back to my side but, anticipating this I ducked behind the van to the other side. As we passed on opposite sides of the street he gave a friendly wave and I waved back. He nearly fell over then but managed to keep control and despite nearly walking into a tree carried on.

My business that day was with my mother’s banks. There were two both side by side. My mother, for whatever reason, had split her money between the two banks and I had a court order enabling me to take control of her funds.

Bank number 1 was closed despite showing on their web site as being open until 5pm. That was annoying but I went into bank number 2. I spoke to a staff member and explained everything. Did I have a copy of the court order? Yes I did as well as a copy of my deputy certificate. Now this is where things get tricky. We live, as you know, in an electronic email internet age and my documents were saved on my phone, ready to be sent electronically to whoever needed to see them.

That’s no good explained the lady. We need to see a hard copy. Well, I can email them to you I said. No good she answered, I haven’t got an email address! Don’t give me that I thought. Everyone has an email address, especially people who work at big institutions like banks. No said the lady, you’ll have to phone our special hotline. She jotted down the number and sent me away.

OK, look on the good side. I’ve had a bit of exercise and taken in some fresh air so I went home and started again.

I called the number given to me by bank number 2. The conversation was a little difficult but they gave me a link to their website and I was eventually able to upload my documents. I still haven’t heard from them a week later but at least I’ve got somewhere….I think.

Bank number 1 was a little trickier. It turns out mum’s branch was in the process of closing down so I was advised to contact another branch. No problem I thought, there’s a branch near Liz in St Annes. Wrong! Turns out that branch has closed down too. There is a branch in Blackpool. I gave them a call, explained the situation. They too want to see a hard copy. Can’t I just upload the documents? No, they want to see the actual document. OK. I made an appointment to see them. I went to my solicitor and she had made me 6 copies of the court order. I passed them to bank number 1. OK? No, we want the original, not a copy. We want to make our own copy!

I knew it was going to be a bad day.

Back home I put the kettle on. Another search for my cup and still no sign. This is it. I knew it would end like this, losing my marbles. I made another cup of tea in another mug. Once again it was too strong and I had put too much milk in. Oh well, I’ll have to get used to my new mug I suppose.

What’s for tea? I’d not made a chilli for a while so I chopped the onions and garlic and fried gently. In went the mince along with cumin and chilli paste. Later, in went the tomatoes and stock. I transferred everything to my slow cooker and left it to gently bubble away. After a while I became concerned as no chilli aromas seemed to be forthcoming. A quick check and I noticed that I hadn’t plugged the slow cooker in!

My trusty old tea mug.

I’m trying to think of similar days. There was the time Liz and I went to a hotel in Folkestone. We were getting dressed for dinner and I realised the black shoes that I’d brought were both left shoes. Yes, that evening I don’t think I cut quite the figure I wanted to cut with my smart jacket, trousers and trainers. Then there was that other time, the one where I went for a night out wearing a white suit and came back with beer and kebab stains all over me. Oh well, these things happen.

The next morning, I had breakfast and then a few ideas came to me and I started tapping away furiously on my laptop. After a while I reached out for my tea. I had hardly drunk any and it had gone cold. I was going to throw it away but then thought I could easily warm it up in the microwave. I opened the microwave and what was there? My favourite cup and some old cold tea!

Today was going to be a good day!

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Memory, Memories and Memorabilia

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I got to thinking about memory the other day, after all memories are important. Our whole past experience is made up of memories so in effect, everything that has passed, everything that has gone before, exists only in memory.

My mother who suffers with dementia will be 93 later this year. Sometimes when I visit her she is talkative and chatty, other times not. A sad moment a few months ago was when her only words were please help me, intoned over and over like a ritual or a prayer. I left her feeling extremely saddened and upset that day but when I visited a few weeks later she was the complete reverse, bright, happy, talkative and chatty. She couldn’t remember her address, except for her childhood address, the one she left behind many years ago but still, she was bright and asked about her home and her garden and what about the rent? Was I keeping up to date with the rent?

The Auntie I never met.

I brought her a photo I had found of her sister Ada. Ada was a keen cyclist who was sadly killed in 1948 in a traffic accident on her bike. I showed her the picture and she knew Ada immediately telling me about her many achievements in cycling and also winning a place at the Manchester Central Grammar School for Girls.

The photo, as I had hoped, stimulated her memory and we talked for a while about the past and her long-lost sister.

Sometimes I wonder about my own memory. I forget names quite frequently and sometimes when Liz and I go to the pub quiz and try to identify celebrities in the picture round I end up saying things to Liz like ‘It’s the woman who was Mrs Peel in the Avengers on TV’ (one point for Diana Rigg.) Or ‘It’s the woman from the film Titanic’ (another point for Kate Winslet.) Or even ‘the guy who used to be on the breakfast show on Channel 4 with that woman who’s on Celebrity Gogglebox’. (Outstanding if you got Johnny Vaughn!)

The other day I was sorting out some of my old CDs. There wasn’t much on the TV so I popped one in the player. It was by Elton John called simply ‘Elton John’ and contains the hit single ‘Your Song’ and various other tracks. As Elton tinkled the ivories and began to sing, I realised I knew all the words despite not having listened to that album for many years. I’ve also got it on vinyl and when I was in my early twenties and discovered Elton, I played and played his records until my parents yelled up the stairs telling me to pack it in.

Memory is important too in today’s electronic devices. I mentioned in a previous post about how a shoot for one of my videos was curtailed because the camera’s memory card was full. I usually have a spare but on that particular day I hadn’t popped one into my camera bag. Result disaster! Well, almost disaster as I still had my spare camera. When I came to edit that particular video which was about Manchester Airport I also had a lot of unused video from previous visits as well as some video from the VHS days shot in the late 1980s so I was able to change direction a little bit and also to look at how the area has changed in recent years.

Going back further to the 1960s and 70s, my schoolfriends and I used to visit the airport regularly and go on to the viewing terraces to watch the aircraft land and take off. My old schoolfriend Steve used to be a real aircraft expert and when we made a video about the airport in 1986, he would comment on my photos saying things like ‘that was a 747 just arrived from Heathrow’ or ‘that was a Lufthansa 757 off to Munich’.

My mother too was pretty knowledgeable about aircraft, well, World War II aircraft anyway. Manchester was bombed in the war and mum’s suburban home of Wythenshawe was frequently hit as it was just up the road from the airport, a particular target of the Nazi bombers. The famous WWII pilot Guy Gibson did some of his training at Manchester airport, then called Ringway and mentions it in his autobiography, Enemy Coast Ahead. My mother says she could tell if the aircraft were British or German by the sound of their engines. The German bombers had a deep droning sound apparently.

A lot of my photographs are routinely backed up on Google Photos but recently they advised me about the new limits of their online backup service. From June 1st 2021, instead of free back up, that now only extends to 15 GB, after that we will have to purchase a plan with Google to continue our image storage. All my laptop images are backed up at Flickr.com but again, that isn’t a free service, I pay a yearly fee. Of course, I could just cancel but then how could I access my images? Well, it just so happens that all my images and videos are backed up on my three hard drives but Google is so much easier to use. If I want a picture for a blog post I tend to just search my Google photos rather than search around the house for my drives and then plug them in. When I went to back up my 2021 photos and videos the other day, I realised I didn’t have enough memory on my current drive so now I’ll have to get another one.

Loss of memory is a regular theme in the film world. The Bourne Identity and its sequels were about an intelligence agent who wakes and does not know who he is. Matt Damon plays the lead character who is picked up by a fishing boat near to death suffering from bullet wounds and total amnesia. The Bourne films are a series I’ve always wanted to watch but I never seen them. (Note to self- set the TV recorder next time The Bourne Identity appears on the TV guide.)

Hitchcock made an amnesia themed film in Spellbound starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. A doctor, played by Gregory Peck, arrives at a mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director but Ingrid Bergman discovers Peck is an imposter. Peck’s character fears he may have killed the former director but cannot recall anything. Not my favourite Hitchcock film but it’s an interesting one with dream sequences designed by surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

Finally, here’s my favourite amnesiac film, Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. It’s a film not often seen on TV and now and again I’ll get out my old VHS copy if I want to watch it. Based on the book by one of my favourite authors, James Hilton, the film concerns a shell-shocked war veteran, played by Colman, recovering in a sanatorium during the latter days of WWI. The man cannot remember his past but makes a new life with Greer Garson. After they are married the man now known as Smithy, journeys to Liverpool to see a newspaper editor about a story he has written. In the city Smithy is hit by a cab and knocked unconscious. When he awakes all memory of Smithy has vanished but his true identity returns.

He returns home to his lost family but what was he doing in Liverpool. Where has he been in the years since his wounding in the trenches of the Great War?

At times a little sentimental, I’ve always loved this film. Colman is wonderful as the man who rejuvenates his family’s business, becomes a respected MP but cannot find happiness until he knows what happened to him in those few lost years.

Here’s a last thought on the subject of memory. When you are at the pub quiz and are struggling to recall the name of the guy who played Jason King in TV’s ‘Department S’, never say to yourself ‘I can’t remember’. According to Paul McKenna, the guy who produced all those books and tapes about confidence boosting which I used to use when preparing for job interviews, you are sending a message to your subconscious saying ‘don’t remember’. What you should say to yourself is ‘I’m not sure at the moment but the answer WILL come to me soon.’ That way, you’re sending a positive message to your subconscious telling it to get working on that long-forgotten name.

Now, who did play Jason King? Peter Wyngarde! Told you it would work!

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Retirement, Caravans and Some Holiday Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Just lately I’ve been getting an awful lot of congratulations. Some in person and others by text or email. You might be thinking what has Steve done? Won a prize, had a book published? A video getting honours in a film festival? No, none of that. I’ve retired. By rights I should be happy, after all I wasn’t so happy in my job and I’m glad I don’t have to go back in again. Of course, if my retirement had happened ten years ago perhaps, then I’d have a reason to be upset. I was a deputy manager working with a lot of colleagues who I also counted as friends and leaving was the last thing on my mind. These days, a lot of those friends have left and moved on to other things and my deputy manager status was lost when I had to reapply for my own job. So now that I am leaving, I should be feeling happy but I actually feel a little bit sad. Perhaps if I had an exciting new job to look forward to, I’d be feeling more positive but the thing with retiring, it means no new job, no new beginning, just an end.

My plan, and believe it or not because generally I don’t plan anything, my plan was to be off to Europe with Liz in our little motorhome but with her hip replacement operation coming sooner than expected and Liz still recovering, we are still here. At least I don’t have to go into work though.

When we finally get to go away there will be no checking of our route and worrying about getting back in time. Getting back in time for what? For work? A few years ago we thought about taking the ferry to Santander in Spain and working our way gradually back home through Spain and France. Covid put paid to that at the time but now that journey is once again a possibility. We could even just travel south in France until we find somewhere warm and relaxing. Breakfast in a French aire. A check of the map and then a few hours driving to a new location, preferably by a plan d’eau, a swimming lake. Time perhaps for a swim, a little relaxation in the sun before cranking up the barbecue. Yes, bring it on.

We did think long and hard before buying a motorhome. Getting a caravan was another possibility. Many years ago I used to have a static caravan. It was on a site in Lancashire, not far from Lytham St Annes and it was a nice relaxing place. There were no amenities such as a bar or restaurant but there were many good walks along the estuary and it was a short drive or bus ride into Lytham where there were, and still are, many lovely restaurants and bars.

Probably the thing I used to really like about it was how much it reminded me of the many family holidays we used to have as a child. We always stayed in a caravan in places not too far away like Blackpool, Morecambe, Rhyll, Prestatyn or sometimes we’d go further afield to the east coast of England. My mother always arranged those trips. We didn’t have a car so we would travel on a coach. There was mum, dad, me and my brother and Bob, our old dog. Bob was always a bit of an attraction to the other kids on the bus and we were always proud to tell them that Bob was ours. Frequently on those trips, Bob, who was not a good traveller would throw up. Then we disowned the dog and pretended he was nothing to do with us. Mum, who came armed for every eventuality always had some cloths ready to clean up the mess although once I remember her going forward to the driver who stopped and produced a mop and bucket from somewhere which she took from him and expertly mopped up.

Today I can still remember the smell of the calor gas stove. The thrill of renting a bicycle that was much better than my old tatty bike back home and racing round the camp. Sleeping in bunk beds and fish and chips for tea from the camp chippy.

My last caravan was really pretty well laid out. It had a central lounge, kitchen and dining area. At one end was the guest bedroom and small toilet, at the other end was the master bedroom with a connecting door to the pretty spacious bathroom and toilet. There was a nice garden and a shed where we kept our lawn mower and outside table and chairs. When I eventually sold the van there was a clause in the contract which said I could only sell back to the camping site unless I removed it and the price was much less than I thought it was worth. The only alternative was to take the van away. To do that would involve hiring someone to move it and then, move it where? I would have had to have found another site and pay the usual costs, transport of the van, new site fees, site tax and so on. After some haggling I gave in and sold the van to the site owner. Funnily enough, only today I read a blog about caravanning calling caravan site owners the New Robber Barons of the 21st century!

In England, motorhome owners have no choice except to stop at private camping sites, all of whom charge fees, some fair, some not so fair. One thing we have started doing is stopping for the night at pubs that allow campervans to park in their grounds free as long as you use the pub facilities, buy beer and food which I have always been happy to do.

In France, there are many free parking sites for motorhomes. Most are municipally owned with small charges for emptying your toilet and filling up with drinking water and I must tell you this story about one particular parking site and Bob the dog which I know I’ve told in an earlier post but it seems to fit in so well here.  A few years ago, Liz and I were motoring through France in our motorhome and we stopped in a pretty big town where they had a large municipal stopover for motorhomes.

We found ourselves a spot in this busy place and the parking bays backed onto a grassy area with picnic tables. It was really quite a lovely spot. Liz began to sort out our food while I took plates and cutlery over to the table. As I approached, I had a sort of odd feeling that something was about to happen and there was a really friendly dog who greeted me like a long lost friend. He wasn’t jumping up or anything but he was pleased to see me. Anyway, we brought the food and wine over and sat down and the dog sat just by me.

I looked at the dog and held out my hand and said ‘Gimme your paw’ just like I used to say to Bob our old family dog. Now I’m not sure what I expected to happen but the dog gave me a doggy smile and placed his paw in my hand, just like old Bob used to do. It was rather satisfying to have the dog there by my side while we ate. Occasionally I slipped him some food just like I used to do with old Bob. Later when I took the plates and things back inside the van, the dog was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished into the warm evening and I wondered whether it really had been Bob, reincarnated and come back to check on his old master.

Just writing about these things has got me all geared up ready for our future trip. Driving is a pain in the neck these days in places like busy Manchester. On the much quieter roads of the Loire for instance, driving is still a pleasure. I look forward to chugging along watching for the road signs and the names of the French towns. I like the quiet stopping places and the peaceful aires where we can stay for the night. I like too the sleepy French villages and the small markets where we buy local bread and cheeses. Of course, who can forget those wonderful restaurants and eating in the open air. The small starters of cold meats and crudités. The appetising mains, le plat de jour and the cheese course. The glass of rosé to start with and the pichet of vin rouge.

Hopefully, I’ll be seeing all those again soon.

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