There is a lot to be said for being alone. Not all the time of course, we all need someone most of the time and I know from experience, how sad being alone can be. When my father passed away in 2000, my mother seemed to slip into a little shell. She went shopping every day even though there was always food in her fridge or cupboard. She went to the shops to see other people, to speak with bakers and grocers and other shopkeepers before returning to her empty house. When I got divorced and came back to live with her, I like to think that me being there gave her a sense of purpose once again.
Occasional time on your own though can be good. It gives you time to think and do things that perhaps annoy your usual close partner. Playing music for instance or watching TV shows that your partner does not like. When you are alone you can eat early or eat late. You can get up early or you can get up late. You can even sit in the garden and read without any need to go back inside until you are good and ready. You can indulge in foods that are bad for you and no one will know. That cream cake that you should not have eaten is a secret between you and your inner self but you and you alone will know had good it tasted. Same goes for that Spam sandwich.
Sometimes I might get up early just for a change because together, Liz and I never get up early. Other times I might just lie in bed and read. I’m currently reading Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. Goldman wrote the screenplays for films like A Bridge Too Far, Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men.
He gives advice on screenwriting and tells a number of film making/writing anecdotes. One I found particularly interesting was how directors want rewrites incorporating their ideas for the film. Then a big star comes aboard but doesn’t like it that his character dies at the end. New rewrite and the character is not killed. Then the star leaves the project and another star arrives. Cue new rewrite, this time the star wants to die but the director leaves and the new director wants to bring his own writer on board.
During All the President’s Men, Goldman interviewed the two newspaper men, Woodward and Bernstein, who pursued the Watergate story. After a year of research and interviews particularly with Woodward, Bernstein who was then married to Nora Ephron, put his own screenplay forward written by himself and Nora. Goldman wasn’t amused. Later he says that only one scene of the Bernstein/Ephron screenplay was used in the film but it wasn’t a scene Goldman was happy with. All along he had tried not to ‘Hollywoodise’ the story and keep scrupulously to the facts. The scene that came from the Bernstein script was one where Bernstein tricks a witness into talking. That says Goldman, was pure fiction.
Woodward and Bernstein (Picture via creative commons)
Time to drag myself up and into the kitchen. Breakfast for one is usually bacon and/or sausages cooked on my George Foreman grill. Poached egg and toast and a cup of tea.
After breakfast it’s time to write. Most of the time my laptop is full of part written stories and blog posts and my usual way of working is to write my stories in my head and then when I seem unable to go any further or sometimes when my head is just too full of stuff I’ll write the story down. I’ve got a lot of stories that start off well and then seem to lose their way.
Blog posts are a different matter. I’ve always felt that my deadline of 10.00am on a Saturday morning gives me an impetus to write. I can’t just write in my head or leave unfinished a half written blog post (although to be honest, I actually do). I must write, I must create something ready for Saturday morning, even if it involves dusting off an old blog post and re writing or re-hashing it to create something new.
The best time to write is when it’s raining. That way, particularly in the summer, I don’t feel bad about being inside writing when I should -if the weather is lovely- be outside. I remember once back in 1968 I spent a very enjoyable afternoon on a very hot and sunny day, at the cinema watching 2001 A Space Odyssey. When my mother found out where I had been she told me off for not being outside and enjoying the sunshine.
I don’t eat lunch but round about four I generally feel the need for a cup of tea and a ham sandwich. I do love sandwiches. Another thing about being alone is that I like to cook. I make pretty much the same old things, spaghetti bolognese, chilli, pizza. Most of the time I make a pizza by buying one of those cheap cheese and tomato pizzas and adding more cheese and more toppings but I do like to make a fresh pizza including making the dough. A lot of my pizzas came out a little soggy until I found the perfect solution. When using home made dough it’s a good idea to first bake the dough for a short while then take it out, add the tomato sauce, cheese and toppings and then slap it back in a very hot oven.
As I am writing this, exactly one year ago on the 30th April 2025, I made a pizza with home made dough and that was probably the first time I had made a perfect, well, almost perfect pizza. It had, if I remember correctly, cheese, onion, pepperoni and mozzarella chunks. I served it with salad for myself and my brother although he declined the salad. We had a nice evening. We chatted and watched one his favourite Bond films, Octopussy with Roger Moore as 007. I’m a big Bond fan but I’ve never liked Roger Moore as James Bond. Eventually my brother’s taxi arrived and he left.
Another thing I tend to do when I’m alone is to edit video and record my voiceovers. I’ve got a really good microphone and of course to record you do not need any background noise. When I was a school kid living on the council housing estate of Wythenshawe I was always pretty enamoured of Gatley. Gatley is a small village just next door to Wythenshawe. It’s a lovely village with nice pubs and shops and private houses and it’s a place I always thought would be rather lovely to live in. These days I couldn’t afford to live anywhere near unless I was lucky enough to win the lottery.
What I like about Gatley is that although it has changed it actually still looks pretty similar to the way it used to be, so one day I walked round the village with my video camera and then hooked up my mic and told my YouTube viewers my personal history of the village; the pubs I used to drink in, the cinema where I saw a lot of films (including 2001 A Space Odyssey mentioned above) the café I used to eat in, the chip shop I used to visit and the pub where my dad was the gardener and mum used to make the lunchtime sandwiches.
Another great things about being alone is being able to watch whatever I want on the television and not only that, to watch it the way I want to watch it. Sometimes I watch two or more programmes at once by flipping over during the advertisements or whenever I lose interest in one or other of the shows. Sometimes I’ll watch a DVD or even just watch the first half and then the second half the next night. Sometimes I stay up late and sometimes I’ll go to bed early and read a book. That’s the great thing about time on your own, you can do whatever you want.
After about three days on my own I find myself missing Liz and I pack up and drive up the M6 back to her place. The first thing I ask her is ‘have you missed me?’
She’ll look at me and say ‘missed you? I didn’t even notice you’d gone!’
All the links to previous posts above open in a new window.
It’s always nice to see my regular post published on a Saturday at 10am but almost as soon as it goes out into the world of the internet the first thing I think about is what shall I do next?
Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.
700 is quite a milestone, certainly for me anyway. I started writing my blog posts back in 2014 and I’m quite pleased to have got to this point. 700 hundred blog posts. Anyway, after all that and a quick recount later I see that this is actually blog 701. Last week was my 700th post and I didn’t realise. It’s a bit like missing my birthday or waking up on the 2nd of January and realising you’ve missed New Year’s Day.
have written about all kinds of things although I mainly stick to books, classic films, Formula One and me and my little life. Some of those posts I have worked quite hard on and I’ve written and rewritten them and researched and sometimes rewritten again. At other times I have found myself on a Friday staring at my laptop wondering what on earth can I write about and then, right at the last moment, I have either thought of something or remembered a post that was made up of various short elements and decided to take one of those elements and develop it into a new post.
I always jot down notes for blogs, especially those where I try to connect various classic films together so for instance I’ll start with a director or an actor, let’s say Noël Coward for example and then try to go through various films and link together different actors or personalities and eventually end up back with another Noël Coward production. The links on the right are a bit thin but Coward worked with director David Lean, Lean worked with Jack Hawkins on The Bridge on the River Kwai. When Hawkins contracted throat cancer later in life and was unable to speak, his voice was dubbed by Charles Gray. Gray played Blofeld in the Bond film Diamonds are Forever. Diamonds was written by Ian Fleming who was a friend and neighbour of Coward in Jamaica. 
In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, 
I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, 
By far the most interesting part was his account of the filming of In Which We Serve, a very patriotic film showing the activities of a ship in the Royal Navy that was eventually sunk and the lives of those who served in her. In his very first autobiography, the names of the many actors and actresses he worked with meant very little to me but now I can recognise a few names, John Mills and Richard Attenborough for instance and David Lean who co-directed the film with Noël although in actual fact, Lean directed most of the film when Coward became bored with the long-winded filming process.
The book is a huge volume and the editor has woven Noël’s letters with some interesting text about what was happening to Noël in between his letter writing. In 1941 Noël was invited to stay at the Welsh resort of Portmeirion where, many years later, the famous TV show The Prisoner starring Patrick MacGoohan would be filmed. His friend, Joyce Carey was hoping to write a play away from the bombs that were dropping on London. Her play never materialised but Noël wrote Blithe Spirit during the five days that he was there.
We came over on the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen after spending the night in a small pub called the Jolly Boatman somewhere in the south of England, actually Kidlington, I think. We have visited this pub once before back in May and it was nice to find that the staff remembered us even after just one visit. The trip over on the ferry was good. We paid a little extra for a top of the range cabin and it was well worth it. We had a little balcony, a tv, kettle and various cold drinks in the fridge. After a bit of a sleep and a shower, we awoke refreshed and ready to find a place to stop for the night in France.
To be honest, I do use ai, not to write posts but to make the quirky memes and graphics that I use to promote my blogs. This is one over to the right. I had never even thought about using ai to actually write a post. Even so, I thought as I was a bit low on ideas it might be interesting to ask ai what I should write about. It came up with a plan for a post asking me to answer various questions about my work. Anyway, here are a few of them.
I see that I started this blog page back in 2014 and my first post went out on the 23rd of May. It wasn’t anything exciting, in fact it was pretty much a sort of advertisement for my book 
Over on the front page of this site you will find a whole lot of stuff about me. It tells you that I have always wanted to be a writer, that I enjoy writing as well as Formula One racing, classic cinema and books. In one segment it mentions that I like dining out, in fact it says that dining out is one of the great experiences of life and so I thought I’d start with that, great experiences and see where that leads me.
Crossfire by Jim Marrs
I absolutely loved this book. I mentioned it last week in a post about 
The Client by John Grisham
Letters from an Unknown Author! 