Category Archives: The Life of a Writer

Graphic Design and More Manipulating the Image

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m pretty keen on social media, not for social media itself (although it is nice to see what my friends are up to) but as a platform to plug my work, my blog posts and my books and videos. In this post I’m going to look at the impact of graphics and images and the sites I use to create them. All the links open up in a new page.

OK, let’s get started. The first thing to remember about blogs is that a big wall of text tends to put off readers so it’s a good idea to break up the text with a few pictures. What kind of pictures though? Well in the blog posts themselves I’ll use either my own photos or use an online stock photo site like Unsplash.  I’ll also try and render the blog title into a graphic which I’ll also use on Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) to promote the post. The easiest way to do that is to use a site like Quotescover where I can just type in the post title and either my name or the name of my website.

The graphic to the right was made on Quotescover.

A site I used to use was Picmonkey which a few years ago was completely free. These days it’s only available to paid users except for the app version which you can use on your phone or, like me, on my iPad. A lot of the features are unavailable to free users though and I use Picmonkey primarily to add text to a photo relevant to my post.

I’ve always liked this picture which I used on a post about my favourite music, The Soundtrack to My Life.

Another site for making graphics or pins for Pinterest is this one, Quozio. Again it’s simple and free to use, just type in a title and your name and choose a template. If you are making a quotation graphic for social media, just add the quotation and whoever said it instead. This one was a simple graphic with a clock.

When Picmonkey declined to let me make free images I had to look elsewhere to make my graphics. One site I began to use was Canva.com. I initially thought Canva was a little complicated but once I got used to it I began to make some good graphics.

Canva has a number of templates which can be personalised and a regular one I use is one for a YouTube thumbnail. What is that you might ask? Well it’s the image you see when you scroll through YouTube looking for an interesting video. A bad thumbnail can turn a viewer off watching the video and good one can pull in a new watcher.

Here are a couple of my YouTube thumbnails. My poetry videos all have a similar thumbnail, just for continuity. Click the image below to watch the video on YouTube.

This one is pretty self explanatory and takes you to my welcome video on YouTube.

Another site I’ve started to use is Adobe Express. It’s similar to Canva and again has various templates that the user can adapt and modify. A graphic I made on Adobe was from a template which I personalised. The picture of me came from Nightcafe, an AI imaging site. How does that work? Well, it creates images from a prompt, so you just describe the image you want to see in words and artificial intelligence does the rest.

How did I get a picture of myself? This is a little trickier. First the user has to upload pictures of the person you want to make an AI model of, in this case me, then you add a prompt to describe the picture you want. On Nightcafe and many other AI sites too, you can upload a picture and develop it. On Freepik you can hit the reimagine button and a different version of your picture will appear.

Sometimes I will make a picture or graphic and send it to another site to see if I can come up with a different or better version.

To make a graphic that I use on X, I added the picture of me to a graphic I had used before and removed the background. Using the animation feature I got the picture to jump into the frame and then jump out again after the text had slid in.

On my laptap I took the animation and added some sound using sound effects downloaded from Zapsplat, a site that provides music and effects for video. Here’s the resulting video.

A lot of the images I’ve created on AI are ones used to plug my blog post over on sites like Facebook and X, graphics that all say something like, ‘New Blog Post Out Now!’

This is one for a post about the Apollo 11 moon landing.

This is for a post about the western genre.

I use three main AI sites, Nightcafe, Freepik and Microsoft Designer. All three sites operate a sort of credit system whereby the user gets so many tokens to create images but after you have used your tokens, that’s it, unless you want to subscribe and pay for more. On Nightcafe, the user gets 5 tokens per day with extra tokens for various things; voting on other users creations, voting on competitions and so on. On Freepik, I’m not quite sure how things work. I’ll sign in and see I have 20 free credits, that’s one credit per picture. Even if I’ve used up my credits I can turn to the ‘reimagine’ page and produce alternative images where I usually have about 5 credits. The next time I visit, sometimes I’ll have another 20 credits, sometimes not, even so, I’ve produced some good images there.

On Microsoft Designer, you can create an image and then use it in a blog graphic or social media post where you can add text and all sorts of stuff.

To create an image you need a prompt. Here’s one I used for an image of a street poster:

A vibrant and eye-catching roadside advertising banner, announcing the release of a “new blog post “ on “www.stevehigginslive.com” The banner features a bold, modern font, with a creative design of a laptop opening up to reveal a digital world. The background is a busy city street, reflecting the urban environment where the blog post was written.

See if you can recognise the result of that prompt further down but one thing to remember is that AI images don’t always turn out the way you want them, especially when using text within the image. Here are a couple that look good but the text didn’t quite work out right.Both of the images above were supposed to say ‘New blog post out now!’ Oh well.

On Nightcafe there is now the option to make an image into a short 4 second video. Here’s one of my favourite promo pictures rendered into a gif, an animated image. The web address was added later on Picmonkey. The image prompt went like this:

Floating in a raging sea during a storm with rain hammering down, we see a bottle on its side with a message inside. The message is visible and says “New blog post out now!” Professional photography, shot on dslr 64 megapixels sharp focus 8k resolution

To finish off, here are a few of my latest graphics, all of which are out there on X in yet another attempt to liven up my posts and to bring in more readers.

OK, what AI image can I create now for my next social media post? What about an art gallery, perhaps seen from above? Light streams in dramatically from windows off to the side. It’s a wide angle shot, looking down. Art lovers are admiring a new poster advertising my blog. It should turn out something like this . .

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A Slice of my TV Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week I thought I’d continue with my theme of real people in TV and film and throw in a few personal thoughts too. It’s been a quiet week. The weather in November in the UK has been the usual dull and dismal November weather and October wasn’t that great either.  Despite October being my birthday month it isn’t a month that I’m really keen on. There’s Hallowe’en for instance when perfect strangers knock on your door and ask for treats, then comes bonfire night when it’s the usual nightmare of fireworks going off at all times of the evening and night.

While I’m having a moan I might as well mention my back which has been sore for quite a while. To be fair I’m not in any kind of agony but it’s sore all the same. A few months back the doctor sent me for an x ray. Apparently, it didn’t turn out so good so then they sent me for another one. The other x ray didn’t turn out so good either but by then my back pain had eased off so I wasn’t that worried but then I got a call from the doctor asking me a whole raft of questions and suggesting a third x ray was needed.

This sounded a little odd to me, especially when I went into the doctor’s surgery to pick up the card that you need to take down to the walk in centre where they take the x ray. I must have misunderstood they told me, you don’t need another x ray. To be honest I don’t think I misunderstood at all and I tend to think that they need to get a grip at this surgery.

Until I Kill You

Anyway, let’s move on. I mentioned above about a post I published a few weeks back about real people portrayed in films and this last week I’ve watched quite a bit of TV on this theme. One particular programme was Until I Kill You. It was a true life drama in four parts and it was pretty scary. It was about a woman, Delia Balmer, who gets involved with a man called John Sweeney who turns out to be a serial killer. The couple move in together but Sweeney is a bit controlling so Delia asks him to leave. He responds by attacking her, tying her to the bed and repeatedly raping her. She is lucky in that she has a friend who is looking out for her. The friend telephones when Delia doesn’t turn up for work and doesn’t believe the story Sweeney gives and tells him so, threatening to call the police.

Later when Delia has been released, she goes to the police, reports the assault but the judge decides to parole Sweeney so he returns and tries to kill her although the next door neighbour intervenes and calls the police and ambulance. Despite stab wounds Delia survives but it is only years later when Sweeney is connected to other murders that he is finally imprisoned.

The police and the justice system don’t come out of this looking good but at least Delia was finally able to put things behind her and carry on with her life. You can stream the four part series over on ITVX.

Back to the Personal Stuff

A few days later the doctor’s surgery called and asked me to see the doctor that same day. The doctor discussed the x rays and said he had to send me for an urgent CT scan. When I asked why, he used a lot of big medical words and it was only after we were ushered out, Liz, who has some medical knowledge, told me he was saying that I might have cancer.

The first thing I thought of was I hoped that this wasn’t going to ruin our long stay in Lanzarote we have planned for next February. I started thinking about having chemotherapy and being stuck in hospital when I should be relaxing in the sun and I began to think maybe it’s time to get my things in order and write a will or something. My dad lived until he was 72 so I was kind of hoping I might have a few years left.

Sully: Miracle on the Hudson

When I was on holiday in France not so long ago, I picked up a DVD in a vide grenier, a car boot sale. The great thing about DVDs is that even if you buy a French one, as long as there is an English language option you can watch it in English. The DVD I picked up was called Sully and it falls quite easily into the theme of real people portrayed in films.

If the name Sully doesn’t quite ring a bell at least you might remember an incident that happened in New York in 2009 when a passenger airliner had to land on the Hudson River. The aircraft, piloted by Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, had just left LaGuardia airport when it was hit by a flock of birds which disabled both engines and forced the crew to ditch in the Hudson. That was pretty dramatic but you could be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t much material to make a film out of. Even so, the film, directed by Clint Eastwood was pretty exciting and concerns not only the landing in the river but the following inquest in which the civil aviation authority tries to make out that Sully could have made it back to the airport.

Various simulations seemed to show that an emergency landing at the airport was possible but at the hearing, Sully questions that the simulations were done without the human factor. The simulation pilots knew the engines would fail and were ready to turn immediately back to the airfield. Sully and his co-pilot did not. They followed procedure to restart the engines which failed and only then did they realise the only option was landing in the river.

Sully cooly asks how many attempts did the simulator pilots have before getting the landing right. The answer was 17. Sully of course only had 1 attempt.

Tom Hanks plays Sully and plays, as usual, a good part and if you happen to notice Sully on your TV listings, it’s well worth watching.

Back to the Personal Stuff

One day I received a text message asking me to come to have a CT scan at Victoria Hospital in Blackpool. I had to click on a link to confirm I was attending and that was pretty much it, until a few days later I got a confirmation letter and I realised the scan was at a drop in centre and not at the hospital. Anyway, I went along for the scan which was a very quick fire experience. I went into the scan area and lay down on a bed. I was expecting to have to strip off and get into a hospital gown but no, I lay down fully clothed, handed over my specs and wallet and the machine arch ran over me a few times and that was it.

Lord Lucan

I reckon I need another true life film or TV show to finish this post off. This week I watched a TV documentary about Lord Lucan which was pretty interesting. I tuned in thinking it was a drama but it was actually a documentary. It was an interesting documentary but a very slow and long winded one. It was in three parts and followed a Hampshire builder, Neil Berriman, who had been adopted as a baby and finds that his birth mother was the nanny murdered by Lord Lucan.

Back in November 1974 the body of Sandra Rivett was discovered in a Belgravia basement and the chief suspect was Lord Lucan, who promptly disappeared. Neil teams up with an investigative journalist and together they track Lucan down to Australia where they reckon a man using the name ‘John Crawford’, is actually Lucan. It all looked pretty likely that Crawford might actually be their man but then other evidence emerged that seemed to invalidate that claim. It was pretty interesting but to be honest, this very slow moving documentary could have easily been cut down to two or maybe even one episode. If you are interested you can stream Lucan on the BBC iPlayer.

And Finally

After about a week I noticed a report on my MY GP phone app about my scan which said ‘abnormal results, contact patient.’ No one had contacted me so I called up the surgery and asked to speak to the doctor. After about 20 mins the doctor called me back. Happily there was no need to worry, the scan had showed no trace of cancer and the ‘abnormal’ report referred to my back and the need for further treatment at the muscular skeletal unit.

I have to admit to a warm feeling of relief when I put the phone down. I wasn’t about to die after all and I could look forward to a month in Lanzarote. The only thing is, watching Sully has put me off air travel. Wonder if we could sail to Lanzarote instead?

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Timeline and the Life of a Writer

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As much as I love writing it’s not always that easy. You might think, well all Steve does is settle down and tap away on his laptop and hey presto, there’s a new blog post. The problem is that when I settle down in front of my laptop, the ideas don’t always come. Not only that, there is always the temptation to scroll through Facebook or to search for more things that I didn’t even know I wanted on eBay.

A lot of the time I think of something to write when I’m either in bed having just woken up or driving my car. What I do then is tend to write the blog or story in my head and hope to reproduce it when I’ve settled down in front of my laptop.

Looking at my little WordPress site I thought perhaps it’s about time I produced another book. I’ve had a sequel to Floating in Space in my head for a long time and I have started it. The big problem is that although I’ve started it, it doesn’t seem to have the same length as the original, it’s more of a longer short story which is no good at all. Too long for a short story and not long enough for a book.

When I became rather disenchanted with the idea of a sequel I did have a number of other stories in my head so I started writing those down and producing some short stories. Most of those I publish over on Medium.com but there are a few I’ve published over here on WordPress. In fact a few are available to download just by clicking on the download tab above.

Now I seem to have quite a few of those stories, so I thought about putting them together in a book, after all compiling a book is much easier than writing one, isn’t it? Actually, when it comes down to it, it isn’t that easy after all. I collected some of my stories together with some of my poems and then added in a selection of my blog posts. Then I had to format and index everything and finally after months of changing things round I felt I had finally got it right. The next step was to get it published.

I looked at quite a few options for self publishing but I ended up going back to what I think is the easiest one, Amazon. I uploaded my manuscript, checked and changed it a few times and finally ordered my proof copy. A quick look through that and I soon identified various problems so it was back to the manuscript, correct that and upload it again.

Over on Canva.com I created my cover then realised a sort of margin had appeared from somewhere so I had to edit that and then upload it again. Almost as soon as I thought everything was ok, some other issue would occur, A correction might have moved a new chapter to the next page so the contents page had to be revised. The text looked too bunched up so I spaced it out a little which meant another revision to the contents. Yes, I thought compiling a book rather than writing a new one would be so easy but in the end it wasn’t. A lot of that was due to me thinking I had mastered the intricacies of Microsoft word when actually, I hadn’t.

Then of course I thought that when I published I would automatically get a Kindle and a paperback version together; oh no, that would be just too easy. The Kindle version required its own manuscript too.

I thought about the title for ages and finally chose Timeline because it sounded like a good title for an anthology and also as it’s the title of one of my favourite short stories featured in the book. The only problem is that there seem to be a whole raft of books called Timeline available on Amazon including a particularly popular one by Michael Crichton. (Don’t bother with that one, try the one written by me!)

Take a look at my download page where you can download two of the stories from Timeline absolutely free.

Anyway, I’m happy to say that Timeline is now available as a Kindle download or as a traditional paperback from Amazon. I hope you will enjoy it.

Click here to go straight to Amazon.

 

More Sun Lounger Thoughts (Part 11)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again, Liz and I are travelling across France in our little motorhome, looking for restaurants to eat at and lakes to swim in. The weather hasn’t been great but at least it hasn’t been cold, although a little less cloud and a little more sun would have been nice.

We don’t tend to do a great deal on holiday apart from swimming, eating and reading and despite the overall lack of sunshine I’ve still managed to do a little sun lounging. Here are one or two thoughts that came to me as I relaxed.

French Supermarkets.

What on earth happens in France at supermarket checkouts? In the UK they seem to move along at a fair pace but in France, when the shopping has been scanned there is a sort of lull while the customers seem to take forever to pay. Many seem to pay by cheque which is surprising as I can’t even remember the last time I wrote a cheque but here in France, the customer pulls out his cheque book, spends forever writing it out and eventually they move on. For us British, it’s a quick tap of the card and the payment goes through and that’s it.

Kebabs.

One day when we were travelling along we ended up at a kebab takeaway which are very few and far between in France. We were probably heading for one of our favourite restaurants which of course, this being France, was closed. Restaurants here seem to close for staff holidays which means the entire establishment is shut unlike similar places in the UK which stagger their staff holidays. Strange!

Anyway, back to the kebab shop. We ordered our kebabs and frites and then the manager invited us to sit down on the couch and turned on the tv. Wait a minute, this was a fast food emporium,wasn’t it? Sorry, I forgot the French don’t do fast food. Slow food yes but not fast food. We watched most of the French news bulletin while the kebab man presumably peeled some spuds, dropped them in the frying pan and then sorted out the kebab meat. I asked if he had any chilli sauce but that seemed to confuse him. Sauce piquant I ventured? Ah, he did have some samurai sauce which seemed to sound pretty hot. It wasn’t but it was pretty nice.

Space Travel 2024.

While I curled up one night and surfed the internet I happened to read about the new Boeing Starliner, the latest in a series of new spacecraft which have been produced to replace the space shuttle. The Starliner reached the orbiting international space station but there were a few issues with the thrusters and so the spacecraft was returned to Earth without its crew. They were on a mission lasting eight days but will now be stuck up in space until February.

Returning without the two crew members was a safety precaution and although the craft landed without any issues a few of the thrusters did fail so it was better to be safe than sorry. The crew will return on another spacecraft, the Space X ship but what I found really odd was that the crew’s Starliner space suits are not compatible with the Space X spacecraft.

The two spacecraft are of course made by different companies but even so I thought that this particular issue was addressed during the Apollo program. If you have ever seen the movie Apollo 13 you will know that a small explosion on the service module meant that the crew had to move into the lunar excursion vehicle in order to conserve power and oxygen in the command module.

The lunar module and the command module were made by different manufacturers and many of the systems were not compatible and engineers on the ground had to work out how to make the two craft function together by rigging up temporary connections. Those procedures were then radioed up to Apollo 13 for the three man crew to set up. One item that had to be put together was something to clear the carbon dioxide out of the air. You would think that after all that, NASA would make sure that there were universal fittings between spacecraft, especially in the vital area of space suits.

Reading.

Life at the Top by John Braine.

This is a follow up to Room at the Top, one of the original kitchen sink dramas about a council house boy determined to make it to the top. In the first book, Joe Lampton seems to have made good. He has married the daughter of one of the area’s top businessmen, Councillor Brown. To do so he had no choice but to dump his lover, a married woman much older than himself, who then got drunk and was killed in a car accident.

Ten years later Joe is not that happy. He works for his father-in-law who has bought the couple a new house, all in Joe’s wife’s name of course. They have two children but Joe is bored and fed up.

He becomes a councillor just to satisfy the father-in-law but is shocked to find that his wife has been having an affair with the husband of his wife’s friend. That spurs him on to have his own affair and as you can imagine, it all ends in tears.

This novel, unlike its predecessor, reads a little like a soap opera and I found myself having little interest in whether Joe stays with his wife or leaves her or any of the goings on either at the council or in Joe’s home.

Verdict: 5/10

Anyway, that’s enough random thoughts for now, time for a swim!

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Another Blog Writing Day

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always good to pick up my iPad and see that my scheduled post has been successfully posted but the next task is to start thinking about a new one for next week. What can I write about? Has anything interesting happened to me? Have I read a great book or watched something good on TV? No? Well, that’s me up the creek without a paddle then.

Just lately I’ve haven’t been much of an early riser. I wake up late on a Saturday morning, visit the bathroom and then make some tea and take it back to the bedroom for Liz and myself.

Next I’ll open a new page on my laptop and just start writing about anything that comes into my head. After about ten minutes and I see the page is still blank I think that perhaps the best course is just to do what I usually do this time in a morning which is to check my emails. 500 deletions later I’m back to that blank page again. Perhaps I could write about my emails? Nah, I’ve done that already.

My next move will be to drink my tea and perhaps see what Liz has tuned the TV into. This being Saturday it will usually be Saturday Kitchen. Perhaps I could write a foodie post? Nah, done that a few times already. After drinking my tea and surfing through my social media I reckon I’m ready for some breakfast, to eat rather than to write about.

Time for a wash and a shave and then I get dressed and see what is on offer for breakfast. It’s a little late so we decide to go for a bacon and egg butty. Excellent. While we eat that we crank up an episode of the TV words and numbers game Countdown to get our brains working. Countdown? Could I write about that? Well, I could give it a few lines anyway.

Countdown was the first show to be broadcast on what was then UK’s new terrestrial TV channel 4 back in 1982. It is a fairly simple format with two contestants who have to make words out of 9 random letters, the winner being the one with the longest word. They also have to choose 6 numbers and then use those to make a number chosen randomly.

Back in 1982, the show was presented by Richard Whiteley with Carol Vorderman supervising the letters and numbers stuff. Richard Whiteley continued to host the show until his death in 2005. After that various people have presented the show including Des Lynam and Anne Robinson but the current host is Colin Murray. Carol Vorderman left in 2008 and her role was taken over by Rachel Riley. Also on the current show is Suzie Dent in charge of dictionary corner along with a celebrity guest. The show is currently the longest running game show on UK TV.

Personally, I am no good at Countdown whatsoever which puts me off trying to become a contestant. Liz is pretty good but sadly has no desire to be on the show. However, if she cannot get the random number, we usually have the TV on pause until she does. I then tend to say things like ‘you’re disqualified’ which can sometimes elicit a verbal reaction and so then I usually leave the room to make more tea.

Tea, now there’s a thing. Could I write about tea? Come to think of it, I have mentioned tea a few times but it’s hardly a subject for a blog post. Here are a few comments on the subject that kicked off a past holiday post;

Even on holiday in wonderful warm Lanzarote I’m a man who needs a cup of tea, and by tea, I mean hot tea. Just think of all the workers in far off India who have worked to grow and cultivate tea leaves and package it and send it off to people like me. I wouldn’t dream of insulting those people by drinking a cup of lukewarm or even cold tea. Liz however doesn’t mind cold tea but after chatting further I found our earlier experiences have shaped our attitude to tea. She, whilst at school, worked in a café and usually found that she was so busy that she had little time to drink her cuppa and generally picked it up when it was cold.

Once, many years ago, I had a cigarette vending round. I visited pubs in Merseyside, serviced their ciggy machines, filled them with cigarettes and took away the cash. A lot of the time I was in a hurry to get going to the next site. Even so, I would never turn down a cuppa and so many times I would have to drink a steaming hot cup of tea quickly so I could move on. The faster I worked, the earlier I finished and I very soon developed the knack of drinking hot tea,

Maybe I could build that up into an entire tea related blog post but would that interest any of my readers? I’m not so sure. Come to think of it, they mention tea in one of my favourite episodes of Columbo. Columbo is hot on the trail of Robert Culp who murders a man in the lobby of a cinema and he entices him there by putting subliminal cuts into a film which make him go in search of a cool drink. Anyway, while Columbo is chatting to the projectionist he mentions he is thirsty and the projectionist offered Columbo some tea, some iced tea!

Iced tea? Jesus, what planet is this guy on? Who drinks iced tea? That is a crime against tea. Dear me. Anyway, it’s time for a break. It’s a sunny day so Liz and I pop outside and settle down on the patio with our tea. (Our hot tea.) We’re creatures of habit so we always tend to kick off a session on the patio with a sudoku puzzle. Sudokus are little number games invented by those wily Japanese and once again, it keeps our brains active while we drink our tea. Most of the time Liz will beat me but the thing is, even while I’m trying to solve that sudoku I’ll be trying to think of something to write so that’s my excuse for Liz winning. If I really worked at those little number games, really worked at them, well, then it might be a different story.

After a quick sudoku session I pick up my book for a relaxing read in the sun. I’ve currently got a few books on the go. One is about the flight of Rudolph Hess and his mystery flight to the UK in 1940 and the other is about the JFK assassination. If I were ever to appear on TV’s Mastermind I would probably choose the JFK assassination as my specialist subject:

What is the grassy knoll?

It is an area of Deally Plaza in Dallas where it has been theorised that a frontal shot was fired at the president.

Who is Lee Harvey Oswald?

He is the alleged assassin of JFK.

Who was Alek Hidell?

That was an alias used by Oswald.

What is the magic bullet?

It was a bullet fired from the Texas School Depository that supposedly hit the president and then exited his body and then hit John Connally.

Who was John Connally?

He was the governor of Texas riding ahead of JFK in the presidential limousine.

Who shot Lee Oswald?

Jack Ruby.

I can imagine doing pretty well there but then going to pieces in the general knowledge round. Having said that there is a general knowledge round in the weekly quiz we attend at the Lord Derby pub in St Annes and we tend to do reasonably well.

If the weather stays warm we might stay outside for a barbecue and these days rather than getting the coals ready, lighting them three or four times before they finally get going and getting my favourite shorts covered in coal dust and grease, we nowadays use our little portable gas barbecue. Perhaps I could write a barbecue post? Well, I could probably write a barbecue section of perhaps another foodie post but an entire barbecue post? Probably not.

While I’m on the subject of barbecuing I think it’s important to share these two universal facts regarding a traditional coal barbecue;

One. Always watch your barbecue because if you don’t it will burn itself out before you’ve had a chance to set the table and serve the salad.

Two. Never watch a barbecue because if you do it will just take ages and ages to get going and just when it finally reaches optimum cooking temperature well, it’ll probably be time for bed, which is why we now use our trusty gas barby.

Liz and I tend to start off with a big salad including a large portion of Liz’s home made coleslaw and then munch our way through a selection of sausages, kebabs, burgers and steaks all washed down with some imported red wine which we select from French supermarkets on our annual travels.

I do love a barbecue from the first satisfying hiss as the steak hits the hot metal of the barbecue to the final mouthful of burger and the last glass of red wine. As the sun goes down it’s time to clear up and go back inside for some evening TV. Should I do a little work on that blog post?

Nah, there’s always tomorrow.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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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.

 

 

Film Connections (Part 5)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s time for another post in which I try to put together a few golden age cinema stories connected by a thin, sometimes very thin, connecting link. Today I’m going to start with Olivia de Havilland.

Olivia de Havilland was one of the great film stars of Hollywood’s golden age. Amazingly she died only fairly recently in 2004 having lived to be 104 years old. She appeared in eight classic films with fellow star Errol Flynn, including The Adventures of Robin Hood in which she played Maid Marian to Flynn’s Robin Hood. Flynn claimed in later years to have been in love with Olivia but nothing ever happened between the couple, or so they both said.

In my favourite Hollywood book Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven paints an excellent portrait of Flynn. You always knew where you were with Errol, wrote Niven -he always let you down.

Flynn hailed from Tasmania, an island state of Australia. In Australia he became involved in a film production called In the Wake of the Bounty, a documentary film about the mutiny on the Bounty that featured reconstructions with Flynn as Fletcher Christian. After this he made his way to the UK where he became an actor and spent many years in repertory in Northampton. He was fired from Northampton rep but was spotted by producer Irving Asher and given a part in a film made at Teddington Studios in 1934. The film was Murder in Monte Carlo which has since been lost but apparently Asher, who worked for Warner Brothers, sent word to Hollywood recommending Flynn for a contract. After a successful screen test Flynn was given the starring role in the swashbuckling adventure, Captain Blood, after Robert Donat turned down the role. The film was a great success and made stars of Flynn and co-star Olivia de Havilland.

Olivia began living in Paris in the 1950s but continued acting not only in films but also on television and on the stage. She received numerous awards and she and her sister are the only siblings ever to both receive Academy Awards.

Olivia’s sister was Joan Fontaine and the two had a famous feud or falling out which seemed to consume most of their lives. Olivia seems to have ‘blanked’ Joan when Joan won an Oscar for her role in ‘Suspicion’ in 1942. They seemed to become friendly for a while until they differed about looking after their elderly mother.

My favourite of Joan’s films and perhaps her most well known was Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Joan played the part of a shy young girl who falls for Maxim de Winter, played by Laurence Olivier.

Rebecca was filmed in 1940 and was Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film. In Monte Carlo a shy young girl played by Fontaine encounters English gentleman Maxim de Winter and thinks he is about to jump off a cliff. Later the two fall for each other and marry but the new Mrs de Winter -her actual name is never revealed- seems to feel Maxim’s love for Rebecca, his late wife, is overshadowing her life. It’s a great film and one of Hitchcock’s best. Olivier apparently wanted his wife, Vivien Leigh, to play the part which Hitchcock ultimately gave to Joan.

Vivien Leigh was the surprise choice to play Scarlett O’Hara in the film version of Gone with the Wind. The film was a major film adaptation of the book by Margaret Mitchell which had been a huge success and producer David O Selznick bought the film rights. Production was delayed for a long while as Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable for the part of the roguish Rhett Butler. Another delay was a distribution deal with MGM which couldn’t be finalised until Selznick’s then current deal with United Artists had expired. Selznick used the delay to promote a huge search for an actress to play the part of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoilt daughter of a plantation owner in the deep south of America. He eventually chose Vivien who was in the USA visiting her husband who of course was filming Rebecca.

Clark Gable was known as the ‘King of Hollywood’ and in 1935 he made a film with Loretta Young called The Call of the Wild. During the production, Young became pregnant with Gable’s child. Their daughter Judy Lewis was born on November 6th 1935. Loretta hid her pregnancy and gave birth in secret and then later arranged to ‘adopt’ the child. Judy never knew the circumstances of her birth although it was an open secret to many in Hollywood. When she finally learned of the rumours, she confronted her mother who admitted she and Gable were her biological parents.,

In 1939 Gable married Carole Lombard. She was a great star particularly in the screwball comedies of the day and Gable adored her. They met while making the film No Man of her Own in 1932 but nothing romantic happened until they met again at a Hollywood party in 1936. Gable was separated from his then wife Ria Langham but still married. Eventually she agreed to a divorce and Gable was free to marry Lombard.

When World War II began, Carole travelled to Indiana to a war bond rally where she raised over 2 million dollars for the American war effort. She and her colleagues were due to return to Los Angeles by train but decided to take a faster option and fly. The flight crew of the aircraft were thought to have been in difficulty crossing the mountains surrounding Las Vegas as safety beacons had been turned off in case Japanese bombers tried to enter the area. The aircraft crashed into the mountains and all on board were killed. Gable was devastated. Afterwards he joined the US Air Force and saw action over Germany as a gunner.

In 1960 Gable began work on his final film, The Misfits. The screenplay had been written for Marilyn Monroe by her husband, playwright Arthur Miller. She was not happy playing a character called Roslyn who she felt was based too much on herself. She and Miller were at the end of their marriage and their deteriorating relationship caused tensions on the set. Miller was stressed as he was doing multiple rewrites. Monroe was frequently late or didn’t turn up for work or didn’t know her lines while Gable, the complete professional was on time and word perfect every day. Director John Huston had to hold all the differing elements together but the film was finally completed. It was the final film for both Monroe and Gable. He died some weeks after filming completed aged only 59 and despite having two other marriages after Lombard, was laid to rest beside her.

Another star of The Misfits was Montgomery Clift. He was also a ‘method’ actor and along with Marlon Brando and James Dean was one of the three great method actors of the 50s and 60s. I have always thought that his first film was The Search, a film made in bombed out post WWII Berlin in which Clift played a US army soldier who helps a refugee boy find his mother. Clift gave such a natural performance that director Fred Zinnemann was asked where did he find a soldier that could act so well?

Clift’s actual first film was one of my personal favourites, Red River with John Wayne, a western about an epic cattle drive across the US. The Search, despite being filmed later was actually released first.

Clift became great friends with Elizabeth Taylor and the two made many films together. In 1956 while filming Raintree County, Clift was involved in a terrible car crash in which he suffered severe injuries to his face, particularly the left side. Taylor comforted Clift in the wreck of his car while they waited for the emergency services. Clift returned to complete Raintree County after taking two months off to recuperate from plastic surgery.

Montgomery Clift was a homosexual in a time when such things were covered up by Hollywood and his sexuality was not mentioned in public until Elizabeth Taylor spoke about it in a speech in 2000.

After the success of The Search, Paramount offered Clift a major contract which he accepted and the first film he made for the company was The Heiress directed by William Wyler.

Bringing us full circle, Clift’s co-star in The Heiress was Olivia de Havilland.

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Naming That Hurricane

Posted on by Steve Higgins

These days I’m retired but back in my working days I sometimes dreamt about having a really interesting job. You know, something special, something really interesting, something out of the ordinary, something like a Hurricane Namer. Let’s face it, someone out there has to do it; someone has to name those pesky hurricanes. Whenever I was having a bad day at work I used to think that one day I’d search just that little bit harder, go that extra mile and maybe, just maybe I’d land a job like that.

Today in the 21st century, searching for a job is a completely different thing to what it used to be. No more searching through the situations vacant columns in a newspaper. Job hunting nowadays is pretty much internet browsing. OK, you’ll still see jobs advertised in newspapers but the internet is where the job action is. Technology has even reached a point where you can have an online interview. Once I had a video interview with the BBC. I’m glad to say I passed the interview but as so many people applied there wasn’t a job available for me. Pity as I really did fancy working for the BBC!

I had another interview not long ago which was for a weekend job manning the helpline for a bank. I started off by entering a lot of information about myself and answering some questions and then I came to a section about selling. Selling? I wasn’t going for a sales job so when the question came up asking if I was confident about selling financial products I answered ‘no’. Big mistake because the interview terminated there and then. I later learned that part of the helpline job including trying to interest the customer in the bank’s financial services.

I remember once back in the 90s when I was unemployed for a short while I was sent to join the ‘job club’. There was one compelling reason to go, attend or we’ll stop your unemployment benefit! OK, fair enough I said, I’m on my way. The very first day at the job club in Levenshulme, Manchester, the club was that packed we couldn’t all get in. It was just a case of give your name, register and get going.

The next week there were slightly fewer people and by week four our numbers had reduced to just a small group. We checked the job cards in the unemployment office, checked the newspaper job advertisements and worked on our CV’s. The staff gave advice on interviews, letter writing and so on, and in between we supped plenty of tea, ate a considerable amount of biscuits and generally had quite a friendly, sociable morning. Why people didn’t want to attend I really didn’t know. I kind of liked it. When I actually got a job, I used to find myself thinking, ‘wonder what the guys are doing down at the job club?’

Many years before that I embarked on a career with GM Buses, the main bus operator in Manchester. It was always intended to be something to pay the rent while I found a proper job but somehow, I never found that proper job I was always looking for. After a few years I started to realise that, so I started trying for promotion. One day I put in for an inspector’s job. It was more money, it was a supervisory role and best of all it was based in the depot so I didn’t have to deal with the great unwashed public. There were two vacancies, one in the Ardwick depot, about ten minutes from the city centre and another in Rochdale which was on the other side of Manchester. I wasn’t interested in the Rochdale one as it was much too far away and I didn’t have any transport at the time. Ardwick though was pretty easy to get to, a quick bus into Manchester from Didsbury where I lived and then there were lots of buses heading south from the city centre through Ardwick.

The interview seemed to be going pretty well. There were three interviewers all coming at me with various questions and, because I had just read a book about how to have a great job interview, I had a shed load of answers as well as a host of questions to throw back at them. Anyway, after a while they asked me to step out of the room. When I was called back they asked me what would I do if they offered me the Rochdale job. Rochdale? That’s miles away I thought, so I said no thanks. No thanks? It felt like a good decision at the time, well, for about five minutes anyway.

These days I’m retired but even so, I haven’t cancelled my job alerts and the crazy thing is I’ve actually had quite a few job offers lately. I get a lot of messages from the sites where I have uploaded my CV and two lately were from companies who liked my CV and asked if I wanted to be interviewed for two managerial jobs. Thanks but they were a few years too late. One job I did apply for was to be the Belfast correspondent for ITV news. I sent off my CV and linked in some of my ‘talking to camera’ videos. I didn’t for a minute expect to get the job but I did get quite a nice email back thanking me for my application and interest in ITV News.

Anyway, back to the Hurricane Naming job. I suppose it was a bit of a silly dream really, not unlike the accountant on Monty Python who wanted to be a lion tamer . . .

Hurricane naming must be one of those home working jobs I imagine, perhaps one where you have to be on call, after all a hurricane could erupt out of the weather front at any time, night or day. Maybe there’s a control room or central office where you are based but I’d guess that every few weeks or so you’d have to work from home and perhaps be on call at the weekend.

I can just imagine the scene, it’s the middle of the night, I’m tucked up in bed at home and my work’s ‘Hurricane Naming’ mobile rings . .

STEVE: Hello, Hurricane Naming Officer.

CALLER: (AMERICAN ACCENT.) Hey, this is the Pacific weather station and we’ve spotted a new hurricane forming over the south west. We need a name straight away.

STEVE: OK, give me a minute here, bear with me.

CALLER: OK but look, we need that name.

STEVE: OK I’m on it. (If my work’s ‘hurricane’ laptop is anything like my own laptop it does take a heck of a long time to boot up!) Let me see, which letter are we up to? Oh yes, J. So it’s going to be . . Joan. Yes, Hurricane Joan.

CALLER: Joan? Hurricane Joan? Look, this hurricane looks like be a real ‘kick ass’ hurricane and I’m not sure Joan is up to it as regards a name.

STEVE: Well sorry you don’t care for it but as of 02:35 hours I’m officially naming this hurricane; Hurricane Joan.

CALLER. Holy smoke. Joan? You gotta be kidding?

STEVE: No. Joan it is.

CALLER: The thing is, my old Mom was kinda looking forward to having a hurricane named after her. She’s 86 this year and not in the best of health. In fact, (fights back the tears) I wonder if she’s going to make 87.

STEVE. Well, what’s her name?

CALLER: Betsy. Hurricane Betsy would be just great, a real gutsy hurricane name!

STEVE. Yes but we’re up to the J’s. We did the B’s a while back, last year actually.

CALLER. Well what about Juliet, my wife’s name is Juliet.

STEVE: Juliet? But what about your old Mum?

CALLER Well, this way we kind of keep it in the family and well, when it comes down to it, that’s my frikkin’ hurricane. I found it and I can’t believe some goddamn limey is going to choose a name like Joan!

STEVE: Well what sort of a name is Juliet? Joan has got an old world feeling about it and here in Hurricane Naming we like to keep old traditions going.

CALLER: Juliet is the name of the woman married to the guy who found the hurricane!

STEVE: Well it just so happens that I am the duty Hurricane Namer and as I said earlier, I’m naming that hurricane Joan!

CALLER: You Limey b-

LINE GOES DEAD. STEVE SIGHS AND MUMBLES TO HIMSELF: It’s all in a day’s work for a hurricane namer!

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Working with YouTube

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week I’ve been having a long look at my YouTube page. I have quite a lot of videos over there and a few relate to this actual WordPress site which you are currently looking at. Some are promotional videos like the one you will find right at the bottom of this post which try to persuade the viewer of the merits of either Floating in Space or my poetry book, A Warrior of Words.

Back in the 1990s I felt it was about time that I did something about becoming a film director so I went on a video production course at a now defunct place in Manchester called the WFA. The Workers’ Film Association was situated in Hulme near the city centre and had what was at the time quite a hi-tech video editing set up. Sadly, a few years later, the digital revolution came and all the training I had done with video tapes and super VHS cameras was rendered not worthless but seriously behind the times.

The video I made back then was about the taxi drivers of Manchester and it was one of the first videos I was able to digitise and upload to YouTube. Manchester Taxi 1992 is my 5th most popular video with over 4,200 views. The four more popular videos are all, with one exception, old VHS videos that have also been digitised. The one exception is a promo video for Floating. It has six thousand views which I have to put down to using it in a Google advertising campaign some time ago.

My big issue with YouTube is that despite having a small handful of videos with pretty substantial views -my top video has over 180,000 views- I don’t make a penny in royalties because in order to make money on YouTube, you must have over a thousand followers. I have at the moment about 402 YouTube followers and it’s been difficult to even break that 400 figure. For a long time I had 398 followers but every time I found a new follower, I would lose one. I would get to 399 and be on the verge of cracking the 400 barrier, only to drop back again to 398 or even 397. Just lately I seem to be remaining steady at 402.

Why am I losing followers? Well even though I manage to produce a new blog post every Saturday, I don’t produce a new video every week. In fact I don’t even produce a new video every month. Why not you might ask? Well, for a kick off, videos are pretty hard to make. They have to be filmed and then edited. They need a lot of time and effort and I seem to spend all my time and effort writing my weekly blog post. Sometimes in the past when I’ve struggled to make a video I’ve tried to take an old blog post and make it into a video. I’ve done quite a few versions of my book bag posts as videos but some work out well and others don’t. I remember making one and feeling quite pleased with myself but then reviewed the video and found myself talking about my Book Blag and also about Bleak House by David Copperfield!

A lot of my regular videos are video versions of my poems and I began to wonder whether those people who come to my site to watch my old VHS videos of motor racing at Oulton Park or Manchester Airport in the 1980s are perhaps a little put off to encounter my poetry videos.

Not that my poetry is in any way offensive, in fact I personally think it is rather good or at least I like to think it has a certain charm. Then of course as they are my videos and I made them, I’m bound to say that. The thing is, those people who come to my page to listen to poetry might not necessarily like my other videos and those that like the other things might be thinking ‘what’s all this poetry stuff doing here?’

That is basically why I thought it might be a good idea to create a separate YouTube page dedicated to my poetry videos. After a quick bit of research, I found that I could create another page quite easily so with a few taps on my keyboard there it was! The next thing was to migrate my poetry videos over to the new page and this is where the problems began. I thought I might be able to do it with just a few more keyboard clicks but migrating videos sadly isn’t possible which is rather annoying. The only answer is to delete the videos from my main YouTube page and then upload them again to the new page.

The big problem with this is that firstly, doing all that takes a lot of time and secondly, it means that I’ll lose all the viewing figures from those original videos. Now a lot of my video poems don’t have great viewing figures or ‘likes’ but surprisingly quite a few of them have really good stats and it’s a bit of a shame to see them all go back to zero on the new page.

The other thing is finding the original videos. I don’t delete them and I still have them on my hard drive but in many cases I tend to edit them again and add perhaps different music, some subtle sound effects and sometimes even a new voiceover. I haven’t named the video files particularly well so it isn’t always easy to find which is the newest or even the best version. Not only that but as my trusty old laptop gets clogged up with loads of videos and has started running really slowly I’ve shifted them over to portable hard drives to free up space so they are not as accessible as before.

Message to YouTube if they happen to see this post. Give users the options to easily move videos to different channels. Things could be so much easier!

Anyway, I’ve started things off, added an introductory video and over the next few months I should eventually have all my poetry videos moved over to the new page. Of course perhaps I should announce the new set up to my small band of followers. How could I do that? Well, I’ve noticed that YouTube has made it possible for channels to create a post, much like Facebook and Twitter. So, I could make a post announcing the new channel and the changes I’ve made. I did a quick search on Google asking ‘how do I create a post on YouTube?’ The answer came straight away and looked pretty straight forward. Could I manage to create a post though? Of course not.

Perhaps that’s something that can’t be done on an iPad so I switched over to my laptop and guess what? I actually managed to finally create my first YouTube post. Happy days!

My usual YouTube page can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@SteveHigginsWriterBloggerPoet

My new poetry page can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@PoetrybySteveHiggins

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6 Takes on Dreams

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was looking back at some of my old blog posts the other day, hoping for a little inspiration. I usually find that my older blog posts are much shorter than the current ones and sometimes I can rewrite them or extend them and actually make them into a new post. Around the same time I noticed a blog post on the BBC web site about dreams in TV and film. That sent me searching for an old blog post about dreams and so here it is, suitably rewritten and extended.

My Dream

The other day I woke up far too early. It was 6 am when I stretched out and fumbled for my phone to check the time. It was a Friday and I didn’t have a completed blog post for my usual Saturday morning deadline, the deadline that for the past few years has kept me honest as a writer. I padded off wearily to the bathroom, had a glass of water and availed myself of the facilities and went back to bed. I don’t dream that much although a few years ago my dreaming seemed to increase, so much so that I started a dream journal, a notebook just by the bedside so that when I awoke I could jot down the details of my dream. Later when I came to review the notes, I tended to find a whole lot of gibberish that not only made no sense but didn’t in any way nudge my memory and bring back those quickly forgotten dreams.

A long time ago I awoke after a crazy dream in which I was out with a friend I hadn’t seen for years, and somehow, don’t ask me how, I had lost all my clothes. We had been out drinking and were walking home then something happened and suddenly I was somewhere without any clothes. I woke up then but that wasn’t the end of it.

The next night I had a sort of follow on dream. I was wandering around with no clothes, although I had come across a blanket somehow, and with me was Michael Portillo (yes, the ex-MP who hosts a show on BBC about railway journeys). Well we ended up in this hotel and I was starting to worry. Well, who wouldn’t? No clothes, no wallet, no mobile. Who could I call? Should I try and cancel my bank cards? What happened to my keys? Where am I and what has Michael Portillo got to do with it?

Michael was standing nearby and using his influence as a famous former MP. Someone brought him a phone and he started chatting into it. Clothes were brought for him and I could hear him speaking to his bank. It actually brought to mind that sequence at the beginning of one of the Bond films where Pierce Brosnan has been in a Chinese prison, escapes and finds himself in Hong Kong. He walks into this posh hotel, his hair long and unkempt, his clothes in rags and the guy at reception says “Will you be wanting your usual suite Mr Bond?”.

Some people just have that manner about them don’t they? Me, I’d have been unceremonially kicked out of that hotel, assuming I’d even made it past the front door! I can just imagine the scene:
“Your usual suite Mr Higgins? Just a moment please?”
The manager beckons to a large man looking similar to Oddjob from the Bond movie Goldfinger. The next moment Mr Higgins hurtles through the front door. As he is propelled into the street he murmurs, “that’s a ‘no’ then is it?”

TV

I mentioned earlier about the BBC post about dreams. I noticed it advertised at the bottom of a page I was looking at and I didn’t actually read it until later. A lot of the films mentioned in the post were ones I had never heard of but in the TV category was one probably everyone knows about. The return of Bobby in Dallas.

In case you have never watched an episode of Dallas here’s a quick resumé: It was about a rich family living in Dallas. The family’s money came from oil and the head of the family was Jock Ewing. The other main characters were his wife Miss Ellie, his sons JR and Bobby and their wives Sue Ellen and Pam. Larry Hagman created the famous character of JR, Patrick Duffy was Bobby, Linda Grey played JR’s wife Sue Ellen and Victoria Principal was Bobby’s wife Pam. There are more characters but those were the main ones. After season 8 Patrick Duffy decided it was time to leave and pursue other acting roles and so his character was killed off. The ratings dropped during season 9 and so Patrick was enticed back to the series, the only problem was how could he come back? His character died surrounded by friends and family so what could the writers do? Well, the answer they came up with was this: It was all a dream!

When you come to really look at it, what else could the writers do? Patrick could return as Bobby’s long lost twin brother. Or perhaps he didn’t die after all. That one would be tricky as he did die as I mentioned above, surrounded by friends and family so they could hardly try to make out he didn’t die. Maybe a double, a fake Bobby really died but that idea is a bit silly, after all Dallas wasn’t a spy or a sci fi show. So what happened was this, at the end of season 9 with Bobby dead and his wife Pam involved with another man, Pam walks into the bathroom and finds Bobby in the shower. The season ends there which was quite a finish and we had to wait for the next season to find out that Pam was having a dream and Bobby hadn’t really died after all. Some fans hated it but when it comes down to it, what else could they do?

The Novel

Dreaming a story and making it into a novel or a screenplay isn’t quite as strange as it seems. In 1898 an American writer, Morgan Robertson, wrote a story about an unsinkable ship called the Titan which sailed from England to the USA, hit an iceberg and sank. The story was published fourteen years before the Titanic disaster. I remember reading the story of this writer years ago, even that the writer saw the story played out in front of him like a movie but all the research I did on the internet for this blog seems to imply that the author was a man who knew his business where ships were concerned, felt that ships were getting bigger and bigger and that a disaster like that of the Titanic was inevitable.

The Quote

The Hit Single (John Lennon; Number 9 Dream)

The Film

It took me a while to think of films based on dreams but then an obvious one finally came to mind; The Wizard of Oz. The film is about a young girl, Dorothy, who lives in a small town in Kansas. She decides to run away from home when her dog is about to be taken away from her. A friendly vaudeville entertainer encourages her to return home but when she tries to she is swept up in a tornado which deposits her in the land of Oz.

Once, back in the 70’s or 80’s, The Wizard of Oz had a cinema re-release and I took my mother to see it. She was a big fan of Judy Garland. When the film came on mum let out a sort of disappointed shrug and I asked her what was wrong. She told me that when she had seen the film originally it had been in colour. ‘Perhaps they couldn’t find a colour print or perhaps it wasn’t in colour after all,’ I told her. ‘I was sure it was in colour,’ she replied.

Later, when Dorothy wakes up in the land of Oz, the film goes from black and white to colour. I looked over at mum and she smiled back. ‘I was right after all,’ she said.

The change from colour to black and white also denotes that Dorothy had entered not only Oz but the world of dreams. Later in the film when she returns to Kansas, it is only then that she realises that her adventure in Oz had been a dream and that the cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and even the Wizard, were based on characters from the farm where she lived.

The Wizard of Oz was a classic film made in 1939 and was an adaptation of the book by Frank L Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Judy Garland was forever linked to the film and in particular to one of the classic songs she sings in the film; ‘Over the Rainbow’.

To finish I think I’ll pinch a few lines from my original post.

Not so long ago I remember travelling on a luxurious aeroplane, not the cramped budget airline I usually fly on but something very special. I was in first class in a very comfy seat with lots of legroom. The hostess was handing me a drink, not in a plastic cup but a very elegant crystal glass. As I reached forward to take the drink, I slipped and went head over heels towards the floor.

I lifted my hand up to check my fall but I was back in bed at home and everything had been a dream. I looked over and Liz was scrolling down her mobile phone. ‘Bloody hell!’ she said, ‘that snoring was going right through me. Where’s my cup of tea?’

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Wet Weather Writing

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Liz and I have always been pretty lucky with the weather on our holidays. This year in Lanzarote we experienced the best winter sun we have ever had. In late January and February, we had five weeks of sun with hardly a bad day. Well, we did have the odd bad day but they mostly consisted of a few hours of cloud and once, a short rain shower. This year in France we weren’t so lucky.

I can remember a lot of wet weather holidays as a child. Days in caravans reading books and comics while the rain poured down. Fish and chips in seaside cafes keeping warm and dry. A few years ago Liz and I had a very wet holiday in France. We spent a lot of time indoors in our small rented cottage. I used the time to sort out the manuscript for my book Floating in Space. The manuscript has a very disjointed history. I began the book in the 1980s, writing in longhand in a notebook. Later, I updated the story as I typed it up on my typewriter.

Later still I got hold of an old word processor. It was called a Displaywriter if I remember correctly and had floppy disks the size of old 45 rpm vinyl singles. Then came the computer revolution and once again I copied the text onto my new device. I backed up my work onto standard sized floppy discs but then came disaster, a big PC crash. My PC was under guarantee so it was shipped back to the manufacturer and came back a few weeks later all nicely repaired, updated but without all my saved files.

The big problem was the back up files, I just couldn’t find them, so once again I started from scratch and put the novel together from my typed version and my longhand originals. When I’d got to the three quarter point of the novel I found my back up disc but then I had two versions, both slightly different. That’s the thing when a writer starts rewriting, you get new ideas, you take the characters into new situations, you tell the story in a different way. So anyway, I did the only logical thing I could at that time, I threw my hands up in despair and walked away.

Later, much later, Liz and I had the wet weather holiday in France mentioned above and that was when I decided to sort the whole thing out. I went through the two versions, deleted a whole lot of stuff, rewrote the ending and managed to knit all the different sections together. I was pretty pleased with myself at the time. I’m a fundamentally lazy person so when I manage to get off my lazy behind and actually do some good work, I always feel pleased about it.

This year in France the first week was pretty good, weather wise. I particularly wanted to visit a place in France called Lochnagar. It’s the crater from the biggest explosion in WWI. In 1916 in the First World War there were two opposing forces facing each other. The German invaders on one side and the defending Allies on the other. They fought each other with guns and artillery but they also fought in another more unexpected way. Both armies were tunnelling under the front and the British dug their way under the German lines, packed a huge amount of explosives in an underground cavern, lit the blue touch paper and boom! That was the biggest explosion of the war and it left behind a pretty big crater.

Today the resulting crater is still there. Back in 1916  the 179th Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers tunnelled under the German lines. Explosive charges were laid and detonated at 07.28am on the morning of July 1st 1916. The explosion marked the beginning of the battle of the Somme, the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. The British suffered 54,470 casualties on that first day including 19,240 fatalities. In return they gained just three square miles of territory. The offensive lasted till the 18th November and the total casualty list for the Allies topped 620,000.

The crater is a stark reminder of the First World War. Today visitors like me come to look and to remember. There are many memorials and even the wooden walkway around the crater contains elements that have been paid for by donations and the names of long gone soldiers are inscribed on its wooden planks. I had thought that perhaps the crater might have filled with water and become a lake but today, despite its covering of grass, it still looks an odd and unnatural part of the landscape.

Wilson44691, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The previous day we visited the nearby museum of the Somme battle. It was quite expensive to enter and there was a separate charge to go through and see the Somme memorial. I kept to the museum and wandered around looking at the rusty old shell casings and machine guns and helmets and thought of the young men who lost their lives in that terrible conflict. In another room I watched the old black and white films of the war which played in various languages and in a final room the last exhibit was a replica aircraft. It was a Nieuport originally piloted by Georges Guynemer during the battle of the Somme.

If I’d have been given a choice, I reckon I’d rather have been in that flimsy aircraft than down in the trenches.

After a week exploring the north of France we slipped further south to take up residence in our rented villa. As much as I love our motorhome I much prefer the luxury of a big house with a swimming pool. The weather wasn’t great but even so, the pool was heated and we did manage a few swims despite only having hot sunshine to dry us off on a few rare occasions.

The other big drawback to this holiday was the intense pain from my back. I reckon I must have suffered a slipped disc or a trapped nerve. The pain lasted about two weeks and luckily, Liz always travels with a good supply of painkillers, just in case, so never again will I be asking ‘Do we really need all these?’

You might be thinking that because of all the bad weather I did something similar to what I mentioned earlier about sorting out my book. Did I sort out another book? Did I finish the sequel? Actually, no but I did do quite a bit of work on putting together my short story collection which one day might see the light of day on Amazon. The other thing we tended to do when the weather was bad was eat. Eat in restaurants. Yes among my many loves such as writing, reading books and watching classic films there is also my love of a good restaurant.

I love everything about a restaurant. I love taking my seat and looking through the menu and that first taste of a lovely glass of wine. There is a lovely restaurant near to our villa, Le Restaurant de la Gare. You are shown to your table and given a basket of bread and a bottle of red comes over along with some water and a bottle of cider. Once settled you can then serve yourself from the buffet where you will find various cold meats and pates and numerous salad items.

One thing I could probably do without though is the waitress who has a voice which wouldn’t be out of place on a British army sergeant major. It’s a voice that you can hear miles away and even when she is inches from your head, rattling off the restaurant’s main courses, she still doesn’t tone down the volume. ‘Poisson, porc au moutarde ou steak?’ she bellows. I had the pork which turned out to be braised pork and was rather nice.

Frites ou riz? ‘Frites’, I tell her thinking that if I was married to her I would be deaf within a week.

It’s usually sad to have to return home but this year what with back pain and bad weather I was actually rather glad to be coming home. We had the most wonderful cabin on the ferry back. A really comfortable bed and a door which opened onto the rear deck where I could watch and take photographs as we left the port. It was interesting to see the pilot’s small boat running alongside us as we left Cherbourg. I had always thought that the idea was for the ferry to follow the pilot out but in these hi tech days the pilot was probably just on the radio telling the captain to keep starboard or keep port or whatever.

When we returned home, I turned on the TV to watch the celebrations and ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D Day on television.

Now we are back home I see the sun has finally come out in France.

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