Back here in Manchester it was nice to have a few days to myself after Christmas and New Year. One thing I tend to eat a lot of when I’m alone is sandwiches. Yes, I’ve always loved the humble sandwich. As a child I took sandwiches to school, either ham, cheese or corned beef, almost always on white bread. Occasionally I’d have a salmon or salmon paste sandwich but generally salmon or any kind of fish just isn’t my cup of tea.
In a quiet moment during the Christmas holidays, I was skimming through Pinterest and came across a pin for a hot pastrami sandwich. I can’t say I’ve ever had pastrami either on a sandwich or not but the thought of one brings to mind American films where the characters go into a New York delicatessen to eat.
In the film When Harry Met Sally the two main characters, played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, visit a real deli for the film’s most famous scene. It’s the one where Sally shows Harry how easy it is to fake an orgasm by demonstrating it there and then in the deli. According to Wikipedia, the location was actually Katz’s Delicatessen at 205 East Houston Street in Manhattan. Also, just while I’m in the mood for dishing out useless information, the lady in the film who says to the waiter, ‘I’ll have what she’s having‘ when Meg Ryan, who played Sally, had finishing orgasming was actually director Rob Reiner’s mother and the line was suggested by Billy Crystal who played Harry.
Woody Allen’s characters spend a lot of time in New York Delis. In Broadway Danny Rose the film opens up in another actual deli, this time the Carnegie Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue across from the Carnegie Hall, where a bunch of comedians discuss a well known theatrical manager called Danny Rose who has had a sandwich named after him in that very place.
As a great fan of the sandwich, I reckon it would be pretty cool to have a sandwich named after me and in a previous post I put forward for consideration a sandwich of my own creation.
The Ham, Cheese and Coleslaw Higgins Special.
I prefer this with a fresh white bap but it’s equally as good with a brown bun; split and butter it, slap on some thinly sliced honey roast ham, then some grated cheddar and to finish off add a generous portion of coleslaw. Settle down, tune the TV onto your favourite channel, pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy. Give it a try, it’s lovely.
After writing the above I decided to pop to the shops and pick up some pastrami and cheese so I could have a go at making that hot pastrami sandwich I mentioned earlier. On the way out I picked up one of those free supermarket magazines. On the back page there was a question-and-answer article with a celebrity. The celeb in question was Fearne Cotton who I have to say, I’ve never heard of but anyway, here were her questions and I thought I’d have a go at answering them myself
Tell us about your new book.
Well, I don’t have a new book, just an old one, Floating in Space which you buy from Amazon. It’s about a young lad back in 1977 who gets fed up of his boring office job. Why not buy yourself a copy and help me out with that big electric bill I just received?
Best advice on keeping a positive outlook.
Well, I’d have to refer you all to my spiritual mentor Marcus Aurelius. He said that you and I have power over our minds but not external events, so any pain you might feel about any situation is not caused by the situation itself, but by your own thoughts which are under your control. Wow, bet you weren’t expecting philosophical stuff in this post, were you?
And your first novel is coming out in June 2024.
Actually, no it isn’t but if I manage to pull my finger out, I might have a short story collection ready round about then.
Who is left on your celebrity wish list for the Happy Place?
It turns out the Happy Place is a podcast which Fearne runs so if I was having a celeb on my podcast who would I ask? Lewis Hamilton perhaps. I’ve never seen a decent interview with him. Then again, I wouldn’t mind having Oliver Stone on for some serious chit chat about cinema and the JFK assassination.
You’ve got a busy schedule. How do you unwind?
Busy schedule? I don’t think so. I don’t even know what a busy schedule is.
As a vegan, what are your tips for anyone wanting to try a plant based diet?
A plant based diet? Listen, plants are for pots on the windowsill or out in the garden. I have grown chilli peppers before now which are great in a dish like chilli or curry. I’ve even grown small lemon trees from a pip but I’m still waiting for that first lemon. A plant based diet? I don’t think so.
What is your go to dish for those evenings when you’re stuck on what to cook?
Well, chilli and rice is one of my favourite dishes. I tend to start it in the morning in a big pan and then throw it all into the slow cooker. For something quick I usually have a jar of pesto in the fridge so I’ll just cook some pasta, throw in the pesto and then serve with parmesan. Of course, there is always the pastrami sandwich.
What are you most looking forward to in 2024?
Let me see, there’s our trip to Lanzarote in a few weeks. I look forward to the summer when we’ll once again be taking our motorhome over to France but most of all I’ll be looking forward to some warm weather. I really do hate the cold.
New Technology
I think I’ve written before about my brother and how when we were younger, we were always swapping things. My brother, whose name is Colin although I always call him Jimmy (I’m not sure why) still swaps things today, mostly with his friends. He recently came into possession of a television set which he didn’t actually want. It was quite a big TV set, much bigger than mine and so I offered to swap a portable TV set which I knew he had always wanted for this new, bigger TV set. He wanted the smaller portable because it had a built in VHS player and he wanted to play some of his old VHS tapes. Anyway, we did the swap and I plugged in the TV set which seemed to be working well and all seemed ok. Later I decided to set it up properly and to link it to my trusty old DVD recorder.
It’s a long time since I bought that DVD recorder and technology has moved on quite considerably since then. Back then the universal connecting element between TV sets and DVD players and set top boxes and so on was the SCART plug. These days it seems to be something else, the HDMI plug. Anyway, I shifted furniture about as I realised the new bigger TV wouldn’t fit on the old TV stand so I shifted more stuff about and put the TV on an old computer desk but I still struggled to fit the DVD recorder into the same area. Then I realised the new TV didn’t have a SCART socket. It did have an AV socket though but even though I had an AV lead I just couldn’t get the two devices to connect together.
A few years ago, I was in Currys or some other kind of TV technology hardware store and when I told the shop assistant that I wanted a new TV with a DVD player, He told me to forget about that as a DVD player was ‘old technology’. Of course, I could see his point, why buy a DVD when you can download a film or any TV show to your hard drive without a shelf full of discs? Even so, I had to tell the guy to go away because the thing is I actually like old technology, I like DVDs, I like their special features, I like the director’s commentaries and the ‘making of’ documentaries.
That night I ended up flipping through the TV channels because there was nothing much worth watching and to watch one of my DVDs I would have had to put everything back together with my old TV just the way it was before.
Oh well, that’s enough TV for today. Might as well give that hot pastrami sandwich a try.
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.
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.
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.
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
Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:
Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
