Category Archives: author

Not Responding

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m still coming down to earth after five weeks in sunny and warm Lanzarote. OK, we’ve had a few warm days but mostly the weather has been wet and windy and cold.

I retired in 2022 so I don’t have to get off to work every day and, unlike many bloggers and amateur writers, I don’t have to struggle for writing time. Even so, my motivation to get up and write next week’s blog post has been a little deflated by the bad weather. Still, in a few days we will be in April my favourite time of the year. The days are getting longer and warmer and soon Liz and I will be off to France in our small motorhome.

Back in December I decided to save a little money by declaring the van off road and getting a rebate on the road tax but now it’s time to get the MOT sorted and get the van ready for the road again.

I had the van running the other day and it started up ok but there was one little cloud on the horizon, the left rear tyre was flat. It was parked up against the wall so I had to struggle over with my pump and soon the tyre began to inflate but then I realised there was a definite hissing sound and air was escaping. OK, new tyre required for this year plus whatever the MOT throws up.

I mentioned last week how I was glad to finally get a new video ready for my YouTube channel but my big problem with video is that I just can’t leave them alone. The video was all finished and uploaded to YouTube but then, as usual, I decided to tweak it a little. A further issue was that after editing a video on my laptop I usually upload the clips to Animoto and mix another version on the Animoto online editing site but my subscription had run out so I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do. So, it was time to put video editing aside for a while and try and write a blog for this week.

Not much has happened to me lately so what could I write about? My visit to the cinema? No, I mentioned that last week. Some more reflections on Lanzarote? No, I reckon we’ve had enough of that too. Restaurant visits? As usual I’ve had a few of those, after all, dining out is one of life’s great pleasures but then again, that’s another subject I’ve written about.

Putting blog posts on hold for a moment I decided to dig out an old poem I’ve always rather liked, give it a little makeover and make a new poetry video. I made it from scratch on my laptop, just with me reading the poem to camera. What I’ve always found when I record a ‘piece to camera’, as the professionals call it, is that my first attempt, take 1, will always be the best. Later by take 5 I find that I’ve completely lost the plot and I’m mixing all my words up, especially the bits at the end which are so easy I don’t even bother to write down. Things like, Thanks for watching, if you’d like to read more of my poetry look out for this new anthology, A Warrior of Words, available from Amazon.

That came out on take 5 as Thanks for watching my new anthology. If you’d like to er . . Take 6: Thanks for watching Amazon, go to Amazon to read er . . Take 7: Thanks for reading more of er Amazon . . It reminded me of the time when Marilyn Monroe had to do a scene on Some Like it Hot in which all she had to say was, ‘it’s me, sugar.’ The scene took 47 takes to complete!

Time for a break but later I did manage to put together a reasonable sort of video.

Later it was back to trying to knock out this week’s post. Sometimes when I’ve been really stuck, I’ll take an old post and either rewrite it or add to it. After trolling through lots of old blogs I thought the best thing to do was to just open up a blank page and start writing. I did that, wrote a couple of lines and realised that even though I was typing, nothing was happening. After a while a message came up on my screen saying Word is not responding. You don’t say, I thought.

Technology issues can be really frustrating and I’m sometimes rather tempted to resolve them by smashing my laptop to smithereens but I thought, no! The best thing to do, seeing as I had no idea what to write, was to go back and work on another video project. OK. I had a project which was fully edited once again on Animoto. As my subscription had expired, I couldn’t add a narration so it was time to download the result and narrate the voiceover on my laptop.

Download complete, I noticed that when I recorded the voiceover, the recording seemed to be jumping and missing out various words and then another message appeared: Video Editor is not responding! Aaagh! I clicked over to Google and searched for information about optimising sound recordings. I found that I had set my recordings to DVD quality and maybe my laptop just couldn’t cope with that. OK, time to reset to CD quality and finally that was another problem sorted. (I’m happy to report I resisted the temptation to just smash my laptop to smithereens again.)

I noticed then that when I had my narration on my computer screen and scrolled down as I read, the microphone was picking up the clicks on the scroll button. I couldn’t print off the narration as I had no ink in the printer so what I did was upload the narration to my OneDrive and open it up on my iPad and read it from there. On my iPad I was asked to log in to OneDrive. I did but they wanted further confirmation. They wanted a passcode entered which they sent to my mobile. Off I went in search of the mobile. I entered the passcode but I was too late. It had expired! I did it again but this time the password was wrong!

(Steve don’t do it. Don’t smash the iPad to smithereens!)

I was getting more than a little exasperated but I recorded the first section of the voiceover, paused, scrolled the text and recorded some more. Brilliant I thought but then that message popped up again: Video editor is not responding. OK, keep calm I thought, don’t smash the laptop to pieces. What could I do? Perhaps I’d used up too much memory so I took a load of video files and moved them to my portable hard drive. A quick reboot and a check of my C drive: delete my temporary files and finally things seemed to be working properly.

OK, final narration added, time for a few quick changes here and there and that was it. I like to leave the finished video for a few days then take another look and then any minor errors are much easier to see.

In the old days of editing video, the editor began at the beginning and just carried on adding the next clip and then the next and so on. Today, working in digital video, the approach is slightly different. A scene can be easily compiled into a rough cut but then the editor can go back and change clips earlier in the video, trimming a bit here or re-ordering things there. Another great thing about modern video editing is that you can save your project, so if at a later date you want to change something, you don’t have to start all over again. You just open up your saved project, change whatever you want and create a video file for the new version.

I’ve often thought about how wonderful it would be to be a professional video editor but then I always imagine myself at work and the boss comes in and says ’can you have that ready by this afternoon?’. I doubt if I would last long at that company when I handed in the finished product two weeks later.

One of my favourite video editing stories is about Charlie Chaplin. Over a hundred years ago in 1920, Chaplin had just completed his first major film as a director; The Kid. He was in the middle of a messy divorce from his first wife Mildred Harris and thinking she was about to seize the unreleased film, Chaplin smuggled the negative to Salt Lake City where he completed the edit in his hotel room. Despite this, The Kid was released to rave reviews and became the second highest grossing film of 1921.

I doubt whether Return to Stockport Bus Station will get a similar response but I do love messing about with video or as Liz tends to call it; twatting about on my laptop!

A little later I checked my emails and there was one tempting me to renew my Animoto subscription with a half price offer. As a fully paid up member of Northern Tightwads it just not in my psyche to ignore such an offer so I signed up for half price and went about making a new version of my latest video. That would be version 3 and by the way, everything worked fine and I didn’t smash my laptop into a thousand pieces.

OK, time to write that blog post. I opened up word and stared back at the few lines I had written but nothing in the way of inspiration seemed to be occurring. I was getting a new message but in my head rather than on my screen:

Brain not responding.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

 

 

The King is Dead: Long Live the King

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As you might have guessed from the title, this week’s theme is Kings. Not quite sure where I’m going to go with that but I thought I’d kick things off with a few words about the guy we’ve known until recently as Prince Charles. Now of course he is King Charles III so before I get to him, I’ll just backtrack and start with the original King Charles.

King Charles

The first King Charles was of course, Charles I. Charles fell out with Parliament over his idea of the divine right of Kings. He was determined to govern without the assent of Parliament and this led to civil war. Charles was defeated and ultimately executed in 1649. One of my favourite historical films was Cromwell in which Alec Guinness gives a wonderful performance as Charles.

Cromwell ruled the country as Lord Protector until his death in 1658. His son took over for a while but was not as successful as his father. Parliament then voted to restore the monarchy and in 1660 Charles II returned to Britain from exile in Europe. Charles, like his father, had his own disputes with Parliament and he too ended up dissolving parliament in 1681, ruling without them until his death in 1685. His last words were apparently to do with his mistress, Nell Gwyn. ‘Do not let poor Nell starve’, he is supposed to have said.

I’m not a great fan of the royals but I’ve always respected Queen Elizabeth. Her quiet dignity and bearing were an inspiration to many. Since her death in 2023 her son Charles has ascended to the throne and I’m happy to see that so far things seem to have continued just as they did before. There was a time when I thought the best way forward for this country was with a president but could a president unite the country in the way that the Queen and her son Charles have done? The Queen has shown herself to be above nationalism, party politics and religion in a way that a president could never do and I hope the new king will continue that tradition.

The Lion King

The Lion King is an animated Disney musical. It was produced in 1994 and was apparently inspired by the Shakespeare play Hamlet. The film features the voices of various well known actors including Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons and even Rowan Atkinson. The story concerns Simba, a lion cub, who is meant to succeed his father as King of the Pride Lands but he is tricked into thinking he is responsible for his father’s death by his uncle who is known as Scar. Scar assumes the leadership when Simba flees into exile.

The film started life as an animated drama but later evolved into a musical and features original songs by Elton John with lyrics by Tim Rice.

The King of Rock and Roll

On the 16th of August 1980, a young woman called Ginger Alden was disturbed when her boyfriend got up from bed to go to the bathroom. It was around 9am but the two had not gone to bed until 6am that morning. Ginger fell back to sleep but when she awoke, sometime after 2pm, her boyfriend was not there. She went to look for him and found him on the floor of the bathroom, dead. His name was Elvis Presley.

Elvis was the man who had transformed popular music and inspired a generation of musicians that came after him. It could be argued that he single handedly created the youth generation because before he came along there was no youth culture, you were either a child or an adult, there was nothing in-between.

Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8th, 1935. The family moved to Memphis when he was 13 and the young Elvis went to school there graduating in June, 1953.

Elvis was a great music fan interested in rockabilly and rhythm and blues as well as southern gospel music. In 1953 and later in 1954, Elvis paid to have a disc made in the recording studios of Sun Records. The owner, Sam Phillips, was on the lookout for a performer who could bring a wider audience to the black music on which he focussed. He invited Presley to work with two musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore and upright bass player Bill Black. One great result of a session the new group had together was a recording of a song called That’s All Right. The record took off after it aired on local radio stations and along with live performances the small group began to take off locally.

In 1955 JD Fontana joined the group as their drummer and also Colonel Tom Parker took over as Presley’s manager, negotiating a recording contract with RCA. Elvis released Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 and it became a number 1 hit.

Presley created the rock n roll explosion but by the late 60s and early 70s he was no longer a driving force in music. Groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had moved the medium forward and Elvis, addicted to prescription drugs, was a bloated shadow of his former self. He died in the bathroom of his home in 1980.

Musical Interlude

When You Are a King.

 

The King of Hollywood.

Clark Gable was born on the 1st of February 1901 in a small town in Ohio. His mother died when he was only 10 months old and he lived with his uncle and aunt on their Pennsylvanian farm until his father remarried in 1903. He got on well with his stepmother who adored him but he left school aged 16 to work in the Firestone tyre company. He left home for good at the age of 21 after a row with his father who ridiculed his desire to become an actor.

His first wife, Josephine Dillon was 14 years older than him but she encouraged him to make the rounds of the film studios. With his second wife Ria, he moved to New York for work in the theatre and after some success was given a screen test by Irving Thalberg at MGM. Thalberg hated the test but even so, Gable was given a part in a western, The Painted Desert. As a result, Gable was given a second screen test which led to a contract at MGM.

His early films were of little note but a great success was Red Dust filmed in 1932 in which he starred with Jean Harlow. Gable played a plantation manager involved with Jean Harlow as a wisecracking prostitute and the film’s success made Gable MGM’s most important leading man.

In 1939 MGM loaned Gable to producer David O Selznick to play the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with The Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s story of the American Civil War. If ever there was a man born to play a part, Gable was born to play Rhett Butler, the dashing southern gentleman who falls for Scarlett O’Hara played, after a much publicised search, by Vivien Leigh.

Gable had a number of marriages, actually five in total, but the one that perhaps meant the most to him was his marriage to Carole Lombard. The two were a great match and married during the filming of Gone With the Wind. They bought a ranch in Encino, California and settled down to a happy life. When the USA entered the war, Lombard offered their services to the Government and the President felt that Gable could best serve the war effort by making patriotic war movies. Lombard went on a tour selling war bonds. On the last leg of her journey, returning to California by air, the aircraft crashed and all aboard were killed. Gable was devastated and not long afterwards volunteered for active service.

David Niven mentions the visits he had in England from Gable in his book Bring on the Empty Horses. His wife once found Clark in the garden of their small cottage, his head in his hands, crying for his dead wife.

Gable survived the war and in 1955 found love again with Kay Williams, marrying for the last time. His last picture was playing the part of a modern day cowboy in The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. Every day he came on set on time and knowing all his lines but usually was kept waiting while Monroe and Clift, both with troubles of their own, were either late or failed to appear.

He died of a heart attack not long after the film was completed. His pregnant wife gave birth to a son after his death.

Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr was an American Baptist minister and was one of the leaders of the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. He led marches and non violent protests for the right to vote, for desegregation and other civil rights. In 1963 he led a march to Washington where he gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.

The head of the FBI considered King a communist sympathiser and a dangerous radical. They spied on his private life and bugged his phones. King won the Nobel peace prize in 1964.

In 1968 he was planning more protests in Washington when he was assassinated.

Sources: Elvis, We Love You Tender by Dee Presley. Clark Gable: In His Own Words compiled by Neil Grant and Wikipedia.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

 

2023 and all That

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This is the time of year when I look back at my posts from the previous twelve months and try and work out what was good, what was bad, what was popular and what was a bit of a dud. Looking over at my WordPress stats page I see that this year was an amazing year for me. I had pretty much double the visitors I had last year so my two books, Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words had more exposure than ever before. That sounds good but I can’t say I noticed any corresponding spike in sales which is a pity because that means my chances of ever owning a Ferrari are getting slimmer every week.

On my two main social media channels, WordPress and YouTube, I can click on my stats pages and be presented by all sorts of facts and figures which some bloggers can use to make their channels more and more appealing to their followers. That’s pretty much what I’d like to do but even though I have all that information at my finger tips I’m not sure what to do with it.

Over on YouTube I made a video just after the last lockdown which was basically me wandering about Manchester and blabbing away into my video camera perched on a selfie stick. For some reason It proved quite popular and pulled in a lot of viewers so you might be tempted to think why not do more of those sorts of videos? Well, the thing is, blabbing away to my camera is not really my sort of thing. I like to make a video, choose the best shots, add some stills and then write a voice over, record it and try and match up the visuals to the narration. Should I change everything then to get more viewers? The correct answer is probably yes but as blabbing into the camera is something I’m not really happy with I just tend to stick with my usual way of working.

I should mention here that all the following links to my previous posts should open in a new page.

Over here on WordPress the post that had brought in all my extra readers is a post called Manipulating the Image. It started off about an Instagram glamour model called Olivia Casta who it seems isn’t quite as young as she seems. I spotted an internet article claiming that she was an older model who uses a ‘face app’ to make herself look like a teenager. This led to me looking at various photographic manipulations I’ve heard about including the famous picture of JFK assassin Lee Oswald which, he claimed, was a fake image.

Olivia Casta

I must get 50 or 60 hits on that post every day but I’m not sure why it’s so popular. Perhaps it’s just a really outstanding post (I like to think so anyway) or maybe it’s because it’s linked to a popular young internet model who pops up frequently on Google searches. I could perhaps make more posts about internet glamour models but would that bring serious readers to my blog? Would it bring potential book buyers to me? Probably not. So, stats can be interesting but do they help bloggers and writers like me or do they just tend to confuse us?

Of course, integrity as a writer is important. Do I really care about getting more readers and more likes and better and better stats? Shouldn’t I care more about doing justice to myself as a writer and being true to myself?

Actually, I kind of like getting more readers and more likes. Anyway, time to have a deeper look back to 2023.

Back in January I had got interested in my past family and treated myself to a discounted membership of one of those ancestry sites and I wrote a couple of posts about what was then a new interest for me. I soon found tracing ancestors wasn’t as easy as I had thought. I was also getting ready to jet off to Lanzarote and escape the freezing UK weather and I posted a few Sun Lounger posts about life in Lanzarote.

In February I bought the Richard Burton Diaries. In the first few pages the usual question came up. Why did Burton write them? For eventual publication? Perhaps. Perhaps just like me, he wanted to make a record of what was happening to him. Perhaps again, like me, he just liked writing, he did have ambitions to be a writer. Journaling is good, it enables you to look back, to remember things, to re experience them and it will, hopefully, get one writing when one has few ideas. After a few diary entries I like to think I will be ready, hopefully, to produce some creative writing. That’s my plan anyway. Richard Burton used to take a ‘book bag’ away with him whenever he travelled which has inspired my own Book Bag blog posts.

In Lanzarote I was thinking about Manchester and wrote about Taking The Man out of Manchester. I also rebooted an old post about creating a video in 1992 about Manchester Taxi drivers.

Looking uo at the Beetham Tower

In March, still thinking about my ancestors, I did a post about my DNA and another post looking at interesting transformations.

In April I published a post about connecting classic films and another about the thoughts that came to me while driving my car. I’ve always thought that my best story ideas come while driving.

In May I was still looking back. I opened up my schoolboy scrapbook and took a look at the things I used to paste in there and also another one about my youth in Writing and Young Higgins. May was a sad time for me though as my mother died aged 93.

In July I had been looking through some of the books in my collection and wrote about my interest in Marilyn Monroe. In August I wrote some more about Marilyn this time after searching through some of my old VHS documentary films.

Round about this time I had a complete personal disaster when I somehow managed to delete my diary for the year. It’s a diary written in a word document and I must have somehow selected everything, instead of a small passage I had wanted to rewrite and deleted it all. I was on a new page so I hadn’t realised everything was gone. Just a short new sentence remained although I did have a backup copy but that only ran to March. Everything I had written about my mother’s death and funeral was gone. I managed to reconstruct some entries made up of what I remembered about that period but even so, I was really unhappy.

In September I wrote about the year 1977 which of course is the year Floating in Space is set and I was reading a collection of Noel Coward’s autobiographies.

October is my birthday month although I’ve always wished I could have been born in the summer. October always signals to me the beginning of the end of the year. What is there to look forward to except dark nights, bonfire night, Halloween and the cold? I’ve produced quite a few repeated themes in my posts and one of them, A Slice of My Life, was published in this month.

In November I was hit by one of the deadliest diseases known to man yes, the dreaded man-flu. I managed to knock out a few blog posts though including a homage to some of my favourite TV shows produced by Gerry Anderson.

In December I wrote about the Godfather; the film and the book and one of my favourite film actors, Cary Grant, inspired by the new TV series about Cary, Archie.

That then was my year in the blogging world. This post is my 596th post and all being well in a short while I’ll be publishing post number 600. Getting back to my stats, this year was a bumper year for me in terms of visitors to my pages. as I mentioned earlier, visits to my site were almost double of those in 2022 but have readers been interested enough to buy Floating in Space or my poetry anthology, A Warrior of Words? Actually, no they haven’t. Perhaps then I should just pack it all, give up blogging and writing. Of course, if I did that, how else would I occupy myself? The thing is, I actually like writing and not only that, I’ve just had an idea for another blog post.

Tune in next week for more book and film posts as well as more observations and anecdotes.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas to All My Readers!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Yes, It’s that time again. As I write this there are only a couple of days left before the big event, Christmas day.

Thanks to all my readers for their support over the past year. I hope you all have a lovely and enjoyable Christmas. I’ve not written much for this week but I have added a little something which you can download and read at your leisure when you’ve had enough mince pies and Christmas TV.

Click the link below to download a pdf file containing two short stories which I hope you will find entertaining. I’ll be back next week with my final post of 2023.

Merry Christmas!

2 short stories

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Captain My Captain

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This will be my 592nd post and as you can imagine I sometimes struggle for new ideas. Scrolling through the internet the other day I chanced on something about Robin Williams and the post mentioned the film Dead Poets Society. It isn’t one of my favourite films but if you’ve ever seen it you might remember the poem O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman which features a lot in the film. It got me thinking about Captains so I thought I might kick of this post with a few words about my favourite captain, James T Kirk.

Captain James T Kirk

The first series of Star Trek starred William Shatner as Captain James T Kirk. Forget Captain pointy head Picard, Kirk is a proper Captain and after a good twenty minutes of any episode he will usually have blasted a number of aliens with his phaser (a sort of ray gun) and done some pretty serious kissing of any beautiful girl, alien, android or otherwise, within a 100 yard area. Mr Spock was played by Leonard Nimoy. He is the ship’s science officer and as a Vulcan rarely displays emotion, logic being his primary motivation. Doctor McCoy played by DeForest Kelley is a doctor of the old school and he and Spock frequently get into verbal confrontations. Together they are the chief officers of the starship Enterprise on its five year mission to go where no man has gone before.

william_shatner

As a schoolboy I wrote to Desilu studios where I believed Star Trek was made, based on credits shown at the end of the show. After a while I received a set of glossy pictures of the show’s stars. They were all signed by the various actors, Shatner, Nimoy and so on but the signatures, I have long suspected, were made by a machine.

The original Star Trek, like many TV programmes of the sixties was shot on film and today it looks pretty sharp compared to shows from the 80’s that were shot straight to video. It was given a digital makeover a few years back with digital effects and new CGI spacecraft and is looking pretty good these days. Which was my favourite episode? Well I’d have to say it was the one that fans voted the best Star Trek episode ever; City on the Edge of Forever. The crew of the Enterprise arrive at a distant planet searching for the source of some time displacement. The source is a time portal, left among the ruins of an ancient civilisation which although abandoned, still emits waves of time displacement. In the meantime, Doctor McCoy is suffering from paranoia brought on by an accidental overdose of the wonder drug cordrazine which any Star Trek fan will tell you can cure any known Galactic ailment. McCoy in his crazed state bumbles through the time portal, back to 1930’s America (handy for that old 1930’s set on the Paramount back lot) and changes history. Kirk and Spock are forced to also go back in time, stop McCoy from changing history and restore things to the way they were. Joan Collins plays a charity worker at the core of events; does she have to die in order to restore normality?

What happened to Kirk? Well in the movie Generations, the character of Captain Kirk was sadly killed off. Generations which started off pretty well, combining the usual sci-fi elements of Star Trek with an intriguing mystery; who is the mysterious Soran and what is he up to? As it happened what he was up to wasn’t really that interesting, but the film marked the cinema handover from the original Star Trek cast to the new one. Pity really because as I mentioned above, I never really took to the Next Generation. However in the last two Star Trek films, the producers returned to the original characters, Kirk Spock, McCoy and Scott and with new actors playing the old characters, the story of Captain Kirk continues. As I write this William Shatner, who played the original Kirk is still active even though he is in his 90s. Wonder if they could get him to play Kirk one last time?

Captain Scott

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.

You can watch the story of Captain Scott and his tragic expedition in the film Scott of The Antarctic. It is a sad film although John Mills as Scott 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.

Captain James Cook

Captain Cook was born in 1728 and died in 1779. He was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, who left behind a legacy of geographical and scientific knowledge.

He achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. His mapping of the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand changed the face of world geography. Before his famous three voyages to the Pacific and Australia, he also had made detailed maps of Newfoundland.

Cook was attacked and eventually killed by the natives in the Hawaiian Islands, during his attempt to kidnap the Hawaiian chief to reclaim the cutter stolen from one of his ships.

Captain Scarlet

Captain Scarlet was a TV puppet series made by producer Gerry Anderson in 1967. It was the first of Gerry’s puppet series to use puppets with realistic body proportions which although they looked more realistic were difficult for the puppeteers to manipulate. The idea for the series was that earth was under attack from the mysterious ‘Mysterons’, a race from the planet Mars that had been disturbed by the Zero X Mars exploration missions. The Mysterons have the power of ‘retrometabolism’, a way of reconstituting matter after an object or person has been destroyed. Captain Black has been recreated in this way and is under the control of the Mysterons. A similar thing happens to Scarlet but somehow he has broken free from Mysteron control. Scarlet is a member of Spectrum, an organisation set up to defend earth. All the agents have colour code names, hence captain Scarlet, voiced by Francis Matthews and Captain Blue, voiced by Ed Bishop.

A computer animated reboot was broadcast in 2005.

Captain Nemo

Nemo was a character in the Jules Verne novel 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea. The novel was first published in 1870 and reappears in another of Vernes books, Mysterious Island written five years later. In the first book a French scientist has joined an expedition to find a sea monster. They ship is attacked by the monster and the biologist is surprised to find the monster is an advanced submarine. He and other members of the ships company are taken prisoner where they meet the mysterious captain Nemo. Not much is ever revealed about Nemo except that he seems bent on revenge after his homeland, wherever that was, was conquered by a powerful imperialist nation.

There have been numerous film versions but my personal favourite Nemo was played by actor James Mason.

Captain America

Captain America was a comic book hero first created in the 1940s. Steve Rogers is a frail man who volunteers to use a new serum which will rapidly boost his physical powers. He combats the nazi menace with his sidekick Bucky Barnes but an accident leaves him in a state of suspended animation until he is revived in the modern era and becomes the leader of the super-hero group The Avengers. I can’t say I was ever a great fan of the captain even in my younger comic reading days. Youngsters these days may know Captain America from the current wave of super hero films. Captain America: The First Avenger was released in 2011 starring Chris Evans as the eponymous hero.

Captain and Tennille

Captain and Tennille were a husband and wife recording duo who had most of their success in the 1970s. Daryl Dragon was known as the captain because of his habit of wearing a captain’s hat when he was the keyboard player for the Beach Boys. He and his wife Toni Tennille had a number of hits throughout the 1970s although the one I particularly remember was ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, a number one hit in the USA.

Captain Von Trapp

Never heard of captain Von Trapp? Well clearly you haven’t seen the Sound of Music. The story of the Von Trapp family of singers is actually a true story and Maria Von Trapp wrote a memoir about her experiences which was published in 1949. The book was made into a German film in 1956 and was so successful that a sequel was produced. Naturally Hollywood became interested but before that producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday secured the rights to make the story into a stage musical. They employed Rodgers and Hammerstein to write new songs as the German film had no original songs and just used Austrian folk songs. The musical was a huge hit and later became the famous hit film. Julie Andrews starred as Maria, the trainee nun who becomes a nanny to the Von Trapp children. Their father, Captain Von Trapp played by Christopher Plummer eventually falls for Maria and the family manage to escape from Austria just as the Nazis take hold of the country.

I’m not a great fan of musicals but I do love The Sound of Music.

Captain My Captain

O Captain My captain is a poem by Walt Whitman about the death of Abraham Lincoln. As I mentioned earlier it is perhaps most famous for being used in the film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams as an unconventional teacher.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

A Slice of My Life Part 7

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always good to come back home and yet, at the same time, it’s always sad to leave your holiday destination. As you arrive back in rainy and cold UK, you can be sure that someone else is sitting on your sun lounger, sipping wine from your glass and contemplating a dip in your pool. Oh well, there’s always next year to look forward to.

We’ve spent three and a half weeks tootling through France in our motorhome. The weather was wonderful and not exactly what I was expecting in France in September. Usually, in the first weeks of September in the Loire, and I do speak from considerable experience of the area, there will be a big thunderstorm and the next day the temperature will be substantially cooler. This year we had the usual thunderstorm except that the next day it was just as hot and muggy as it had been the day before.

We sailed from Dieppe back to Newhaven and it isn’t a trip we’ve done before but we had a great cabin and despite a poor forecast, the English channel was pretty calm.

In the UK the traffic on the M25 was an absolute nightmare and what made it worse was that for the previous three weeks in France, driving had been an absolute joy. Yes, there was the occasional traffic jam, a bouchon as the French call it, but nothing like the endless queues on the M25. Rather than complete the trip to the North West in one drive, Liz found us a small village which boasted a cosy pub with lovely food and real ales and was happy for motorhomers to park overnight in their car park.

The next day we carried on north and found that the M6 boasted as many traffic jams, if not more than the m25. Anyway, after various diversions we finally found our way home and after swapping my t-shirt for a fleece we started thumbing through three and half weeks of mail and it’s probably round about then when we started thinking about the people, who were using our sun loungers and our pool, who I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

A few days after returning home I had to start preparations for a visit to the hospital. Prior to going away on holiday I had been for a routine test for bowel cancer and the result was that further investigations were required. I had thought that perhaps an x-ray was required or something like that but it turned out that the further investigations involved a colonoscopy. I’ve got to say that I didn’t like the sound of that at all. As you may know, it involves slipping a camera up the rear end to have a good look round inside your bowels.

The whole thing put a bit of a dampener on our first weekend at home. On the Sunday I had to stop eating at 3pm and then at 7pm drink a not very appetising potion designed to empty my bowels. It took a while to get working and one of the side effects was a rather intense belly ache. Not long after I thought I’d better visit the toilet.

The next dose of the potion was due at 6am so I set my alarm and when it went off Liz had already been up and got the dreaded mixture ready for me to drink. Thanks Liz!

After taking the mixture there was nothing to do but wait for it to do its work. The Japanese Grand Prix highlights were due on TV so I moseyed over to the lounge hoping to crank the race up. The race wasn’t broadcast until 10am so scanning through my recorded items I saw that the final episode of And Just Like That season 2 was ready and waiting to be watched. A cup of tea and a slice of toast would have gone down great guns but sadly, that wasn’t allowed.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m still watching And Just Like That. My favourite character, Mr Big has gone and although it’s has been good to see the return of Aidan, things just aren’t the same somehow. The dynamic of Sex and The City has been lost partly because Samantha is not in the series and the new characters are ones I don’t really have any interest in. Not only that, there seem to be very few male characters in this new series when back in the old Sex and the City days there seemed to be a lot of interesting men engaging with the central quartet of girls.

This episode was in the news before it had even been broadcast as it had a special appearance from Samantha who made a quick phone call to Carrie. Apparently Kim Cattrall who plays the part declined to take part in the series as she felt she was done and dusted with the character as well as not being paid enough money. Anyway, some executive asked her to make a cameo appearance which she did and for a moment it felt as if the series was finally back on track. The moment didn’t last long though.

Later in the episode, Charlotte’s gay friend Anthony is in a relationship with a new boyfriend who wants anal sex but it turns out that Anthony doesn’t do anal sex. Now, I know this is a delicate subject but I thought all gay people had sex that way so that just shows how much I know about homosexual life. Anyway, Anthony submitted to the ordeal and going by the look on his face he wasn’t enjoying it at all. In fact, I’d guess he felt just like me with a camera going up my bottom.

The nurses and staff were all very nice and friendly and made a great effort to treat me with a lot of dignity despite this very undignified process. Even so, that camera bloody well hurt, certainly at first. The worst thing was that as it went up my bowel it pushed a load of air into my stomach giving me really painful wind. The nurses encouraged me to break wind but I struggled to do so, although eventually I was able to shift position which in turn helped to release some wind. After that it wasn’t so bad although I had to turn over so I struggled to watch the camera pictures. Yes, welcome to 21st century healthcare where you can actually see the inside of your bowel on a TV screen.

The ordeal was soon over and apart from finding a small hemorrhoid which caused all the concern in the first place, everything was ok but believe me, that was not a pleasant experience.

Generally I like to finish these kind of posts with a link to the cinema world but I found it hard to think of anything appropriate. However, the other night I sat down to watch one of my favourite feel good films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Maybe you have to be a certain age to enjoy a film about retired people choosing to spend their last years in India but I’ve always enjoyed it. One thing I noticed on this latest viewing was something I hadn’t picked up on before. Towards the end of the film there are numerous repetitions of a phrase that I’ve always attributed to John Lennon and which I’ve used many times on my Twitter feed.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

ULEZ, the Lottery and More Thoughts From a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It always happens to me when I’m away. I know I’ve written about this before but the National Lottery has been annoying me. Here I am away from home and I get an email saying check your account, you’ve won a prize. Great! I wonder what is it? The million-pound jackpot or £3.42 on the Thunderball? I’m guessing it’s the £3.42. Either way, the National Lottery site cannot be accessed from abroad so I’ll just have to wait until I’m back in the UK before I find out if I’m a millionaire -or not.

What would I do though if I won a huge amount, millions of pounds? Well, it would be brilliant of course but me with my council house mentality, what could I do with say three million pounds? Well, the first thing would be to give away a third to charity. Yes, sounds good, doesn’t it? Really commendable but the thing is, I’ve already promised the Almighty that if he stopped for a minute and gave me a multi-million pound win, I’d give a third to charity.

I’ve promised so I could hardly say no and keep all the dosh could I? He would probably bump me off in a car crash or something. The big problem there is that I’ve also promised a third to the other side, you know, Lucifer, The Devil, Satan. I’ve promised him a certain amount of wickedness if he, the devil, will give me the jackpot. It’s shocking I know but I won’t be doing anything really nasty, just something moderately wicked like blocking up a post box on the last posting day before Christmas, just a little something that could be accepted as being wicked. Know what I mean?

Still, once I had the money, what would I do with it? Its ok for these rich people who are used to money. They will invest it and even if they invest it and go bankrupt, they will be still riding around in Rolls Royces and staying at top hotels whereas little old me would be in the nick for insider trading before you can say Gordon Gekko!

So, imagine I’ve got three million burning a hole in my pocket. Well, my old HP laptop is a little behind the times and slows down quite a lot when I try to edit my YouTube videos so a new PC or laptop must be on the cards. A new house? Of course, in fact the lovely villa that we rent here in Parçay Les Pins is a wonderful place. Perhaps I’d offer Rebecca the owner a few quid to take it off her hands. A little updating would be good. The lounge needs a makeover as do the bedrooms and the bathroom. Yes, I could see myself settling here quite happily. Then of course I’d need a nice car. My current vehicle, a Skoda is looking a bit long in the tooth, I quite fancy one of those cars with a lot of leg room. A few years ago the government was encouraging us to buy diesel cars, now those of us who still own them are being penalised by idiots like the Mayors of London and Manchester, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.

Both want new low emissions in their towns and Khan has already gone ahead and expanded ULEZ, the Ultra Low Emission Zone from the centre of London to the Greater London area. Now, if you want to use a diesel car in those areas you will have to pay £12.50 per day. Yes, £12,50 per day to drive in the low emission zone, even though your vehicle has an MOT and has passed the ministry of transport emissions test. I’m all for cleaner air but what Khan is trying to do is get the working man who mostly drives a second hand car or van to contribute towards the London Mayor’s almost bankrupt set up. How fines will change the air quality though I’m not sure but what about the companies who designed and produced our polluting vehicles in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better if the government decided to say to the manufacturers, reduce the emissions on your vehicles by 2025 and then allow those vehicles time to gradually drop down into the second hand market? After all, we can’t all afford brand new electric vehicles.

Andy Burnham wanted to do a similar thing in Manchester but the outraged response of the residents of Manchester forced him to back down. Now he will tell you he didn’t want a low emission zone. Actually he did, certainly when he was MP for Leigh. Now as Mayor he says ‘I was forced into this by the Government.’ No, not really, the Government didn’t ask for a charging zone, just a small city centre low emissions zone, it was Andy Burnham who extended the zone to the whole of Greater Manchester, no one else. Sorry but Andy Burnham is a liar.

Funny how you can get onto a rant without meaning to. Time to calm down and read a book.

Faithful by Marianne Faithful.

I picked this book up after reading a blog post that made it seem like the most wonderful book ever written about the 1960s. I knew very little about Marianne Faithful except that once upon a time she was involved with Mick Jagger and I was surprised to find that Marianne was actually a singer. She had a hit in 1964 with a song called As Tears Go By which I thought I’d never heard of but when I played it, I realised I had. I’d always thought this was by the Seekers but of course it wasn’t. Good job that song hasn’t been played on our weekly quiz night as I would have got it wrong.

Marianne seems to have made friends with someone who was a record producer and in the crazy world of the 60s a couple of tracks were recorded, a single was put out and made the charts. Later, caught up in the swinging London scene she met Mick Jagger and began seeing him regularly. This being the rock and roll scene, booze, drugs and sex make a lot of appearances. Marianne was initially attracted to Keith Richards but after the two hit the hay together Keith remarked casually while getting dressed that he thought Mick really fancied her so despite her rather liking Keith she began seeing Mick.

Mick comes over in her book as quite a nice guy really. He seems to have been happy to enjoy booze, drugs and sex just like your average rock and roller but he seems to have always been able to step away from anything, like drugs or booze in particular, and stop it taking over his life.

Marianne did let drugs take her life over later on but at the beginning things seemed pretty amateur. For instance in the famous police drugs raid on the Rolling Stones, circa 1967 I think, Marianne had bought some travel sickness pills quite legally in either Italy or Spain but because they contained speed, they were illegal in the UK, not that anyone knew that of course.

Marianne stayed with Mick for quite a while but her life seemed to be going out of control as she seems to have been stoned for most of the 60s. Eventually she became a major drug user and at one point ended up living in a squat but still seems to have found the time and money to score drugs.

Actually, this book is very like a book I read not long ago about John Cooper Clarke in that when people are drug addicts, all they can think of is getting more drugs. Even though Marianne gets in quite a state, she never thinks that the reason might actually be her drug taking and neither does she ever even entertain actually not taking drugs.

Somehow, even when Marianne is living in a squat someone thinks she might be able to put an album together and make some money which she does. She ends up in New York and eventually manages to get into a detox place from which she finally emerges, in later life, clean and drug free.

Her life has been  -and here I have to use a phrase that I hate but here is actually relevant- a sort of roller coaster ride and the book is written in a sort of stream of consciousness way in which she describes her LSD trips with quite mesmerising clarity.

At the end of the book, she is happy that her albums have done well and people regard her now as a serious artist and not just Mick Jagger’s druggie girlfriend which, sorry Marianne, was my conception of her before reading this book.

One final thing. I clicked onto Spotify and listened to a few of her music tracks and I have to say, even though Marianne seems to be nowadays up there with the gods of rock and roll, I didn’t find anything that resonated with me. Sorry, Marianne.

Here in France we have been really lucky with the weather, it has been lovely, sunny and warm. I’ve been to France at this time of the year many times and usually the summer ends with a big thunderstorm. One day it’s hot, the thunderstorm comes and the next day it’s considerably cooler and the summer has gone. This year we had the usual storm but afterwards it was still muggy and hot. As I write this on the 13th of September, we’ve sat outside for our usual evening meal but as we came to the cheese course I felt cold. After a while I was so cold, I had to nip inside and dig out my fleece.

Yes, the summer is finally over.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Writing Heroes and Making that YouTube Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

What makes someone want to be a writer? Is it a need to emulate our own writing heroes or something else. I mentioned in a post last week that it’s important to be creative and we can be creative in a huge number of ways, not just in traditional artistic pursuits but also in everyday things, decorating our homes for instance, posting on social media, putting together a CD music mix or many other things.

I’ve always been a writer. As a child I used to scribble stories in notebooks and I even wrote short TV and film screenplays. I used to cast the characters from the film and TV actors of the time and I even remember one in particular. I was fascinated by the espionage fiction of the time, things like The Man From Uncle and James Bond 007 and I wrote about my own secret agent, Agent 80.

I cast Steve McQueen in the role as Agent 80 and put together a dossier on his secret agent character choosing which car he would drive and what sort of a place he lived in, cutting out pictures from magazines to make up the fictional file. Back then I was really interested in espionage and sci-fi and all my writings were pretty much about things like that. Later, as an adult, I started to write about things that happened to me; working in an office and working for the bus company and the pubs and bars I used to frequent. One of my favourite essays that I produced back then was something I wrote while waiting in a pub and I scribbled down notes about two people sat opposite and their smoking ritual involving getting out the packets, taking the cigarettes, flicking the lighter and then lighting up and the way they smoked, the way their hands moved and so on.

These days a lot of people in bars place their mobile phones carefully on pub tables looking over occasionally for messages. Back when I was a young man smokers placed their drinks carefully by their cigarettes and lighters, their table becoming a sort of personal shrine saying this is my space.

Two people who became writing heroes to me were Dylan Thomas and James Hilton. I won’t go on about them too much as I’ve written about both before (click the highlighted links for previous posts) but here are some basic thoughts;

Dylan Thomas

Dylan was a hard drinking, pub going writer and it was perhaps that image which first appealed to me. The other thing which really interested me was the incredible power of his writing but add that to his spirited readings from his work and his radio broadcasts and well, I was totally hooked.

James Hilton

Hilton is the author of one of my favourite books, Lost Horizon and he is also a fellow northerner like myself. Hilton was born in Leigh in Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester and he made a journey I would love to have taken. He went from Leigh to Hollywood, California and he wrote a number of books and screenplays that were made into classic films. He wrote Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Goodbye Mr Chips starring fellow Englishman, also a northerner, Robert Donat who hailed from Didsbury in Manchester.

Charles Dickens

Dickens is of course a great and famous classic writer. I’ve got to say that some of his books I’ve found a little hard to read. I’ve tried and tried to read Pickwick Papers but I just couldn’t get through it. Not long ago I picked up Bleak House and once again I couldn’t really get started on the book. I have read A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and my absolute favourite, David Copperfield.

My favourite character, apart from Copperfield himself is Steerforth, a friend of David Copperfield but one who ultimately betrays him. The best part in the book probably, for me at any rate, is the storm when David returns to Yarmouth. Dickens builds the storm slowly and each word and phrase adds a new layer to the sense of danger and foreboding and when Copperfield is finally reunited with his old friend Steerforth at the height of the storm’s ferocity, death comes between them and Steerforth is sadly drowned.

My well thumbed copy of David Copperfield

Dickens reveals this in a very unique way, he does not tell the reader Steerforth is dead. He leaves the reader to realise this themselves and, in the process, makes the reader almost at one with the narrative. Throughout the book, Dickens mentions in passing about Steerforth’s habit of sleeping with his head on his arm. It’s referred to many times in the narrative almost as a matter of non interest, something unimportant that the reader doesn’t really need to know, but when David Copperfield spies someone aboard a stricken ship trapped in the fierce storm who evokes some faint remembrance for him, a tiny warning bell is set off.

Finally, when the body of a drowned man is brought ashore and lies mutely on the sand, his head upon his arm, we know just from that simple bit of information, without the author telling us anything more, that Steerforth is dead. The prompts and clues that Dickens has hinted at have paid off for the reader in the most satisfying of ways.

Noel Coward

Coward has really been a surprising writing hero to me. I’ve been aware of him for years through film and television and his slightly eccentric persona has always been a little amusing to me. I remember once seeing an interview with him on the stage at the BFI, (British Film Institute) Richard Attenborough was interviewing him and seemed to me to be treating him as some sort of God that had been beamed down from the heavens. Coward was puffing away on a cigarette and lapping up all the praise.

A favourite film of mine is Blithe Spirit. The film starred Rex Harrison as a journalist who wants some background for a novel and he invites a medium, Madame Arcarti to officiate at a séance at his house. Unfortunately for Rex, Madame Arcarti evokes the spirit of his dead wife who at first is only visible to him. The film and of course the stage play that came before is a wonderful witty comedy. I liked it so much I wondered if the play or the screenplay was in print. I was happy to find that it was and I bought a paperback copy which also contained two other wonderful plays, Hay Fever and Private Lives. Again, these other plays were outstandingly witty and humorous and off I went in search of more works by Coward. As I write this, I’m currently reading a collection of his autobiographies.

Coward liked to arise early in the morning and then write until lunchtime, after which he would then enjoy his lunch and relax for the afternoon. Not a bad set up really and one I could do with taking up myself. Of course, I’m not so keen on lunch as Noel, I’m more of a late breakfast kind of guy, brunch I think they call it in places like the USA. Also, I don’t get up that early. I have done in the past, in fact I once did a regular 6am shift which meant getting up very early indeed.

Anyway, after writing about these four great authors it’s got me in a creative mood. I’ve done quite a bit of writing lately but I’ve realised that I’ve been neglecting the video producing aspect of my creative side. It’s clearly high time I produced something new for my YouTube page. After all, video is important for plugging my media profile as well as the two books I have for sale on Amazon.

I got out my video camera and thought what could I do. Yes, a piece to camera. I’ve been reading up lately about Marilyn Monroe which is why the late Hollywood star has featured in quite a few recent posts. I decided I could talk about my Monroe book collection and articulate a recent post I did concerning an internet debate about Marilyn’s death. I worked out what I was going to say in my head and then shot the whole thing in one take as a sort of rehearsal. I took off my scruffy polo shirt, changed it for a nice shirt and did the whole thing again. Not bad I thought.

Next I went about editing the video. The light wasn’t good so I upped the exposure and added some contrast. I cropped a few of the shots and closed in to a tighter shot covering me and the books I mentioned in my collection. I added the titles and credits and then settled back to review the entire thing. It was a good few hours work and I was ready to upload to YouTube when I spotted something.

During the video I mentioned a BBC documentary a few times. The documentary was called Say Goodbye to The President but for some inexplicable reason I realised that in the video I had somehow managed to refer to it as Shall We Tell the President, which happens to be the title of a novel by Jeffrey Archer, which as far as I know, has nothing whatsoever to do with Marilyn Monroe.

I wonder if any of the writers mentioned above ever had problems like this?

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

 

 

 

 

 

Re-reading Old Books and Re-watching Old Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always been a great reader and even though I look forward to reading something new, I like to re-read my favourite books just like I re-watch my favourite films. The other day I happened to pick up a book that is one of my favourite ever reads, Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

James Hilton is one of my personal writing heroes and yet his name may be unfamiliar to many of you reading this blog. He was a journalist and an author and made the trip from his home in Leigh, Lancashire, (now Greater Manchester) in the UK to the Hollywood hills in the United States to become a screen writer. He is probably more well known for his book ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ which was made into a film with Robert Donat (actually another northerner from Didsbury in Manchester) but my favourite of his books and quite possibly my all-time favourite book is ‘Lost Horizon’.

Lost Horizon is a book I found in a second-hand shop many years ago. A battered 1940s paperback I paid twenty-five pence for and yet that small investment has paid me back many times over for sheer reading pleasure as Lost Horizon is a book I re-read every year or so and I often pull it down from my bookshelf when a current read fails to entertain me.

Lost Horizon is a completely original idea and is about British consul Robert Conway in the dark days before World War II. Conway is helping his fellow British citizens escape from civil war in China and he and his small party escape in the last plane only to be kidnapped and taken to a distant Tibetan monastery. Conway meets the High Lama and after a time it is revealed that the Tibetans want to preserve the best of world culture and art and make it safe from the coming war.

Hilton is one of those few people who have invented a word or coined a phrase that has become part of the English language. In this case it was the name of the Tibetan monastery, Shangri-la which has since become a byword for a peaceful paradise, a distant haven. Camp David, the US President’s retreat was originally called Shangri-la until renamed by Eisenhower for his son, David.

Hilton’s journey from Leigh to Hollywood must have been a magical one and one I envy, especially as his time in Hollywood was a golden age for movie making. Lost Horizon was made into a movie by Hollywood director Frank Capra and starred Ronald Colman as the urbane British diplomat of the novel. It’s a movie that was restored some time ago and is a great DVD if you happen to see it. Colman also starred in another movie authored by Hilton, Random Harvest, which I mentioned last week in my post about VHS recordings.

Hilton settled in Hollywood and wrote a number of screenplays for classic Hollywood movies such as ‘Mrs Miniver ‘. Sadly he died from cancer in 1954.

 

All of Me an autobiography by Barbara Windsor

I’ve got a few new books to read but I thought I’d save them for my next holiday. I had an idea recently for a blog about the Carry On films so I picked up this book for a bit of research even though I read it a few years ago.

Barbara Windsor is probably best known as the blonde from the Carry On films. It’s a niche that stuck with her despite her appearances in later years in the TV soap Eastenders. Maybe she liked that, maybe not but either way, she was rather good at what she did. In this book, she tells her life story and it’s very frank and pretty entertaining.

‘Bar’ as her friends called her, doesn’t hold back and basically tells it like it is. She talks about her climb to fame and the husbands she has had along the way. First was Ronnie Knight, an East End gangster and friend of the Kray twins. Ronnie and Bar seemed pretty good together for a while but neither of them were interested in each other’s careers. Barbara would be off filming and Ronnie it seemed wasn’t bothered at all about that. He would be off to sort his nightclub out and Bar would be happy at home having to get up early for a film or rehearsing for one of her many stage roles. On one occasion in the early morning, the police burst in and carted Ronnie off to the nick for armed robbery. Barbara stuck by her man then but soon after, she’d had enough.

After Ronnie got the push, he was involved with a blonde down at his club; Bar moved on to a younger guy and when that didn’t work out, she moved onto an even younger guy. That younger guy, Scott, was still with her a few years ago when Barbara was sadly stricken with dementia and went into residential care.

One surprising aspect of the book is that although I’d always thought of Barbara as a film and TV star, in fact a great deal of her career involved the stage and she appeared in many stage productions including her own one woman show.

This book, written in 2000 is a great little read and well worth picking up if you see it in the book shop. It’s written in a friendly talkative chit chat style, almost as if Bar has dictated it to someone and that’s something I particularly like about the book. The last quarter of the book though feels a little as if it has been tagged onto the end of another book. It mainly concerns her relationship with final husband Scott and is perhaps a little gushing and overly romantic and Woman’s Weekly style but I reckon Bar deserved a little romance in the twilight of her days.

Barbara died in December, 2020 but the Carry On films just literally carry on. Most weeks you can find one showing on one of the many TV channels now available. In her book, Barbara has a bit of a moan that despite the longevity of the films, the stars never made a pennly from all the numerous TV repeats of the films. Still, how many people thought the films would be still popular years after their first release? The first film was Carry on Sergeant made in 1958 and the last one, Carry on Columbus was released in 1992. Altogether there were 31 films, four Christmas specials, various stage versions and numerous TV shows. All the main stars, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor and many others are long gone. The only major star of the films still alive in 2023 is Jim Dale, now aged 87.

My personal favourites in the franchise were these:

Carry on Cleo was a spoof on the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor film Cleopatra and utilized a great deal of the sets and costumes used in the original. Look closely and you can see Sid James wearing one of Richard Burton’s outfits. There are some great lines in the film especially the one spoken by Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar, Infamy, infamy; they’ve all got it in for me! I love it.

Carry On Screaming. Sid James was unable to appear so his role was taken by Harry H Corbett, the star of TV’s Steptoe and Son. The sultry voiced Fenella Fielding played a character called Valeria in a spoof on horror films. Kenneth Williams plays a Dracula like character and Corbett was Sergeant Bung, a detective investigating various disapearances.

Carry on Up the Khyber. Kenneth Williams starred as an Indian leader, the Khasi of Kalibar and Sid James is the British Governor, Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond with Joan Sims as his wife. In my favourite sequence Williams and James have this exchange;

Yes, I think its time for a cup of tea, a cheese sandwich and a watch of whatever Carry On film is currently showing!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

 

 

Funerals, Marilyn and what to do with those VHS Tapes

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I went to another funeral this week. It was someone I knew only very slightly and in fact Liz knew the deceased much more than me. His name was John and he was a pretty nice guy. The funeral service though seemed to me to be a little bit flat, a little lacking in soul. There was no priest or reverend at the service, just the celebrant. She read out a history of John’s life and family, someone came up to read a sad poem and his Grandson played a tune on his guitar.

The big problem though was the heat. Despite hearing for most of the year that a heatwave was coming this summer, most of the time we in the UK have suffered weeks of bad weather. The day of the funeral though turned out to be the hottest for a long time. Sweat poured down my face in the crematorium and when the service was over I had to make a quick exit as I had a doctor’s appointment to get to. It was wonderful to sit down in the air-conditioned surgery and cool down.

Afterwards we drove back to the wake but the venue that had been chosen was a hotel just by the seafront and the sun had brought out the crowds and parking was impossible, well, almost impossible. Luckily a small school next door was good enough to open its gates to the mourners otherwise I could never have parked at all.

At the wake I knew no one except the widow but everyone I did speak to said the same thing, wasn’t it a lovely service? Actually, I didn’t think it was although I would never have said that. Was it because there was no priest or vicar? Did the tributes fall flat because no one there had any faith in anything except the finality of death?

Funerals are odd things; in a way they are not for the dead but for the living, those left behind after a loved one has died and I have to say, not only did I enjoy my mother’s funeral, although enjoy is not perhaps the right word, but it helped me more than anything to say goodbye to her.

Something else that made me think about death this week was reading a blog on Medium.com from an American writer. He had read that in the state where he lives, and I can’t remember which one it was in the USA, he had read that the average life expectancy for a male was 77 years. He was 57 and so he reckoned that on average, he had about 20 years left. 20 years sounds a lot but when it comes down to it, it really isn’t that much at all and if the same thing is true for me, a male living in the north west of England, then I’ve only got about 11 years left.

This week as I write this, is the 61st anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I wrote about Marilyn a while ago talking about my collection of books about Marilyn and the clippings in my scrapbook. Over on Twitter and Instagram, pictures and clips of Marilyn are still pretty plentiful despite her dying back in 1962. One post I saw on Instagram paid tribute to her memory but at the same time the author decided to take a poke at those who believe Marilyn was murdered by the Kennedy family.

I have to say I don’t believe that, not for a minute, but at the same time I don’t believe Marilyn committed suicide either. I mentioned that on the Instagram post and the author told me there were no credible witnesses regarding her involvement with the Kennedys. Not so I replied, there was Marilyn’s housekeeper and handyman, there was Marilyn’s neighbour, there was Marilyn’s friend Jeanne Camen and of course there was Marilyn’s psychiatrist Ralph Greenson who when pressed about Marilyn’s death answered ‘ask Bobby Kennedy.’

Other people jumped into the argument too, some supported me and some didn’t. Jeanne Carmen was a liar said one, so was Bob Slatzer who has not only claimed Marilyn had been murdered but also that he was actually married to Marilyn for a short time. The studio forced the couple to annul the wedding or so he says. The problem there is that there are no records of the supposed wedding and the dates Slatzer gave were dates when Marilyn was known to be somewhere else.

Walt Schaefer, the head of the Schaefer ambulance company that sent an ambulance to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Marilyn’s home, says Marilyn was alive when the ambulance arrived but she died on the way to hospital. How did her body then get back to her home where it was supposedly discovered by housekeeper Eunise Murray later that night?

Here’s another thing: in 1985 a former employee of the ambulance company came forward to say that he was part of the ambulance crew that night. James Hall says Marilyn was found in the guest cottage but CPR was applied and she began to revive, her colour going from blue to normal. A doctor then appeared; he gave Marilyn an injection into the heart which missed and cracked a rib but she then died.

Hall has passed numerous lie detector tests but like many of the stories of Marilyn’s last hours, his story has never been corroborated and no broken rib was reported by the coroner, Thomas Noguchi.

Did Bobby Kennedy visit Marilyn on her last day alive? Yes, as I said earlier there were eyewitnesses to his visit. Did he murder Marilyn? Of course not but whatever happened, Marilyn did not survive that night.

You might be thinking that perhaps I’m getting a little obsessed with the death of a film star who died 61 years ago and actually, you might have a point. The more I read about Monroe and her death the more I want to know the truth but it seems to me that Monroe fans are split on the subject of her death. There are those who think Marilyn took an overdose and there are those who think something sinister involving the Kennedys happened. It’s a little bit like the JFK assassination; some think Oswald did it, some think that something happened involving the CIA, the Mafia, J Edgar Hoover, Cuban exiles or a combination of all those.

There’s a great scene in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall where Woody tries to explain just how all those differing theories and ideas can get on top of you and perhaps it’s time to put my Marilyn murder books away for a while and read something else and watch some different documentaries.

These last few days I’ve spent trying to sort out my huge collection of VHS video tapes. Any films that are likely to be shown again on TV or that I can now buy on DVD I tend to just throw away. Some that are proper commercial recordings I’ve taken to the charity shop but I’ve still got a shed load of tapes of F1 events, TV shows and documentaries. What I’ve tried to do with those is to copy them to DVD as I just happen to have a VHS/DVD recorder combo. One of the videos I found was the 1985 documentary Say Goodbye to the President which was of course about Marilyn Monroe, her involvement with the Kennedys and her last days. It’s a bit sad but films get reshown time and time again but TV documentaries rarely get a second showing.

A few weeks ago I was writing a post about stars who have appeared in Columbo and I knew I had a video of Jane Greer talking about her experiences with Howard Hughes. Could I find it after searching through my cupboards and boxes of VHS tapes? No, of course not. This week when I thought I would carry on with my mission to copy a few more interesting VHS documentaries to DVD, I opened a box and there was the video I’d been looking for. It was a tape marked ‘The RKO Story, the Howard Hughes Era.’ It was an episode from a 1980’s BBC documentary series about RKO Studios which were for a short period owned by Howard Hughes. Jane Greer was finally free of her contract to Hughes and had been signed to RKO and then Hughes bought the studio. I’m not sure if he bought it just to get control of Jane Greer but of course that is what happened.

Hughes told Jane how he knew she wasn’t happy; she told him she was. He wanted to buy her a house; she told him she already had a house and by the way, also a husband and child living there. Hughes was undeterred. He wouldn’t put her in any pictures unless she left her husband which she wasn’t ready to do so he kept paying her wages according to her contract and she just went home, cashed her pay cheque and got on with her life. Her film career of course stalled fatally.

A number of others told a similar story, Janet Leigh was one, another was Jane Russell. Jane had encountered a lot of racy publicity due to the film The Outlaw but as she pointed out, the sexy publicity pictures and film posters were really not representative of how she actually appeared in the film.

The film censors of the day wouldn’t allow the film to be released and Hughes used the ensuing battle with the censors to promote the film. He famously designed a bra for Jane to wear in the film which was intended to look as if Jane didn’t have a bra on at all. Jane Russell refused to wear it, padded her own bra with tissues and Hughes was apparently none the wiser. The film was finally released years after it was made, did very well and was even re-released when Hughes took over RKO.

As I said earlier, any film I have on VHS is not really worth saving as most are easy to find on DVD or on TV but I do have a few that I have rarely seen on the small screen in recent years. One of my absolute favourites is Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. I love that film. It’s a bit soppy and sentimental and always brings a tear to my eye at the end. It was written by one of my favourite authors too, James Hilton, who came from Leigh in Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester. I haven’t seen it on TV since I recorded it on VHS back in the 1980’s. Is it worth copying to DVD? Of course it is, in fact I think it’s time to make a brew, get out the biscuits and the tissues and settle down for a watch.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.