Category Archives: The Life of a Writer

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.

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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?

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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!

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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.

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Repurposing Content and Re-Editing the Edit

Posted on by Steve Higgins

No work of art is ever finished, only abandoned. I read that years ago, so long ago I can’t even remember who said it, but even though my blog posts and videos can hardly be described as works of art, I still can’t leave them alone.

While sorting out my box room this week I came across yet another box of old VHS video tapes. One was marked WFA original footage.

Back in 1992 I went on a video production course at the WFA, (Workers Film Association) in Manchester and during the course I made a film about taxi drivers in Manchester. I didn’t make it myself, I was part of a team of three and we didn’t have specific roles. Although the taxi idea was mine, I wasn’t the director, we all were, so you can imagine that the final film was one where compromises were made. All three of us I can imagine, if left to our own devices as director or editor, would have all have created a different video.

The original footage ran for over two hours and was shot on super VHS. My video player actually supports super VHS and I was able to digitise the tape and copy it to my laptop. A lot of the footage was not used because of course we were all pretty new to what we were doing. There were plenty of wobbly shots, plenty of blurred ones and even some with bad sound. There is one almost entire interview without sound until the end where someone, I hope it wasn’t me, remembers to either switch on the microphone or plug it in.

I did hope to be able to add a link to this blog post for my new edit, however, an editor needs time to acquaint himself with the footage and get an idea of the finished project in his head. As I am that editor and as I like to edit in a careful organic kind of way (some might say slow) that re-edit, alas, isn’t quite ready yet so I’ll add the link to the old version below.

One of my best videos is one about the graves and cemeteries of World War I and II in northern France. It’s a sad video but the visuals are good and I put together what I thought was a pretty good narration based on some blog posts I’d written previously.

One big mistake was when I edited the video, I started with a shot I’d taken at the beginning of our trip to France. It was shot of a really huge motorhome with a trailer and then I panned over to our much smaller model, thinking at the time I’d add some jokey comment on the lines of what a fabulous motorhome -but this is ours over here!

Anyway, I added the comment and put everything together then uploaded it to YouTube. It seemed to do pretty well getting a lot of views but when I added it to a Facebook page for YouTubers and video producers, expecting a certain amount of praise, one reviewer mentioned that the jokey stuff didn’t really go with the overall tone. Looking back at the video I realised he was completely correct however by then the video had pulled in a few thousand views and I was reluctant to substitute the re-edited version as then I’d lose all those views!

Oh well, there is a much better and substantially re-edited version on Vimeo, alas without so many views.

One video that I have gone back to time and time again is a video about my home town of Manchester. Although I haven’t been into Manchester much lately, in the old pre-Covid days I used to always make time to visit the city. As a matter of fact, I’ve always enjoyed spending time in Manchester. Many years ago, I’d go into town and work my way through various second hand book shops in the older part of the city and then spend far too much time in the old HMV store on Market Street. The store there was huge with sections for CDs and music and another area for DVDs. There was probably a gaming section which is something I’ve never been really interested in but usually by the end of the afternoon I’d have a stack of books, CDs and DVDs to take home and enjoy. I mustn’t forget the other delights of Manchester too, the huge array of pubs, bars and eating places which I always tend to visit.

The narration for that video was adapted from my book Floating in Space and various blog posts I’ve written about the city over the years. In the video I’ve tried to compare the Manchester of 1977, which is when and where the story told in my book takes place, to the Manchester of today. Every now and then I go back to the city, shoot more video and add or exchange a video clip for a better one. In fact, there are probably three versions of the same video over on YouTube. Recently I made a brand-new version but I thought it might be better to perhaps leave my YouTube page as it is. Well, for now anyway.

You might wonder then why is it that TV and motion pictures never get re-edited? Actually in some cases, they have. In 2006 CBS announced that the entire original series of Star Tek was to be digitised and enhanced with new CGI effects. Even the theme music was re-recorded in digital stereo. Star Wars was re-mastered in 1997 using new digital effects and once again in 2019 and a lot of the latest Doctor Who DVD releases feature enhanced special effects.

There are plenty of films that are untouched of course. I’ve always hated the cumbersome model shots and effects in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Pity Hitchcock isn’t around to go back and add some better ones.

My blog posts are another creative adventure that are open to a bit of re-editing. Most of my posts come to a successful conclusion but there are plenty of occasions when I realise I could have taken the post a little bit further, especially my early posts from 2014. Back then my posts were substantially shorter. In 2014 a post on my blog was on average 639 words long according to my WordPress stats page. Today, in 2023, my average post length is 1,627 words. Some of my favourite posts I have occasionally used again with the addition of new text and new images and even sometimes a link to an appropriate video. Sometimes, I’ve combined similar posts to create an entirely new one. I actually thought that I was doing something pretty revolutionary in the blogging world but in fact a quick search on the internet will reveal plenty of ‘how to’ posts on ‘repurposing’ content. There is nothing new under the sun.

For quite a while I’ve been trying to flog one of my film scripts over on Inktip, which is an American website where writers can offer their work to a variety of producers who are looking for screenplays. I’ve had a few nibbles and a number of producers have looked at my script. None however have gone as far as actually buying my work and offering to produce it which is a great pity because seeing my work as the basis of a feature film would be a big thrill for me. Anyway, when the renewal came up for my pro membership fee, my inner tightwad denied access to my credit card and my membership was terminated.

What could I do now with my screenplays? Well, one way of using that material has been to make them into something else, in fact I’ve repurposed them into short stories. I don’t tend to publish fiction over here on WordPress although quite a few times when I’ve been wondering what to write about for next week’s post, I have considered it. However, I’ve saved my fiction for my page over on Medium. Click here to take a look.

That’s pretty much it for this look at repurposed content. Just writing this post has made me realise I’ve not done much on my podcast for a while. Perhaps I could make this post into a podcast and then I could use the audio as the narration to a video version. Then I could write a blog post about how I did all that! Wow, that’s proper repurposing.

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More Bits of a Blog (or a Blog of Bits)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

If I was a professional writer working for a magazine or a newspaper, I reckon that this week I’d be getting a bit of a telling off from the boss as I’ve not really been pulling my finger out. I’ve been feeling a little deflated lately. Maybe it’s an after effect of going to my mother’s funeral or perhaps it’s just a general feeling of disappointment. Every writer wants his work to take off and become a best seller but neither my novel, Floating in Space or this blog, look like hitting the top of the book or blogging charts. Yes, every week brings a new follower and that is good, after all every writer wants an audience, every writer wants readers but a writer needs to produce new content to put before them and just lately I’ve not been delivering the goods. The aim of this blog, as always, is to not only let people know about my books but also to give the reader something interesting enough to make him or her think hey, wonder if Floating is worth buying? (Of course it is, get yourself a copy now!)

A lot of blogs die a natural death because the blogger gets bored but in the past my deadline, my one and only deadline of 10am on a Saturday morning has actually inspired me to write more. Anyway, this week’s post is a bit of a mish mash of draft posts that I’ve started but been unable to finish. Let’s start off with a look at the weather.

Its H H Hot

Image credit: Daily Express

A few months back I wrote a blog post called It’s C C Cold so as we in the north west UK are experiencing such fabulous weather, it is only fair to write about that.

Over here in the UK we’re not really ready for nice weather. It comes along every now and again, totally unexpectedly and we are all unprepared.

In France, from where I have just returned a few weeks ago, the weather was the same but over there the French have cool houses, protected from the heat by shuttered windows and thick walls. It’s a similar thing in Spain where their whitewashed outside walls reflect away the heat of the sun. Over in the UK our houses are built to keep the heat in and sometimes it’s hotter inside than outside.

Still, I’m certainly not moaning about the good weather. I like the heat and I hate the cold and I’m happy to make sure there are a few cans of Pepsi Max chilling in the fridge. Out have come my shorts and t-shirts and sandals and for the most part Liz and I have been outside in the sun reading and relaxing. Out there in the sun when I put down my book for a moment I’ll start thinking about things to write and it’s there that the ideas for my stories, poems and blogs will come. Yes, retirement has its plus side.

Of course I live in the north west of England, not an area particularly renowned for great weather and after a couple of weeks of really rather nice hot weather, down came the rains. Funny how it always seems to happen when we are all ready for the barbecue. What we perhaps need is one of those big awnings which we could pop out whenever the rain threatens to ruin a good barbecue.

Cinema

In the post I mentioned above, It’s C C Cold, I referenced a few appropriate films, things like Ice Station Zebra which is one of mine and Howard Hughes’ favourite films. As this post is more about heat rather than cold what films could I bring up? Some Like it Hot? Yes, great film but not really appropriate. Lawrence of Arabia? Yes, great film but I’ve written about that one before. Let’s go with the Towering Inferno. Towering Inferno was a film blockbuster produced by Irwin Allen, who also produced numerous 1960s TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the Time Tunnel. Another film hit for the producer was The Poseidon Adventure, a disaster film in which a cruise liner is overturned by a huge wave and the occupants, still alive on the inverted ship, struggle to survive.

In the Towering Inferno, Allen brought together an impressive cast headed by Paul Newman and Steve McQueen with numerous other stars and famous faces making appearances. It’s a pretty simple plot; a new skyscraper has just been opened named the glass tower but various electrical issues cause fires and people are trapped when the elevators fail. Paul Newman plays the building architect and Steve McQueen is the fire chief who comes to the rescue.

Both Newman and McQueen wanted top billing as well as William Holden. Holden’s request was declined as his star had waned in the previous few years but McQueen and Newman continued to haggle about the billing. The issue was finally settled with a compromise by having their names appear together diagonally with McQueen lower left and Newman top right. Fred Astaire also appeared in the film receiving his only Oscar nomination despite his many classic musical films made in years gone by.

Summer Sport

One feature of the British summer is our great sporting events. Two in particular are Wimbledon and the British Grand Prix. I can’t say I have any great interest in tennis, in fact I have little or no interest in any type of ball game although in the past I have watched some classic Wimbledon finals involving people like Martina Navratilova, Bjorn Borg and so on but the British Grand Prix is a different kettle of fish as I’ve been a fan of Grand Prix racing since I was a child. It would have been nice to have visited Silverstone and seen the race in person but when I made a few tentative enquiries about camping there in our motorhome I soon realised that it would have been cheaper to fly to Barcelona for a week in a top class hotel. Oh well, the good thing was that here in the UK the Grand Prix was live on Channel Four so I was able to settle down and watch the race including all the build up to the big event and all the hoo har and ballyhoo surrounding the race.

I’m not a great fan of Max Verstappen and because he seems to be winning everything lately he has single handedly made Formula One a little boring at the moment. His win at Silverstone was actually the eleventh in a row for the British based, Austrian owned team whose greatest asset is probably the outstanding race car designer Adrian Newey. Adrian’s cars have won championships for his former teams McLaren and Williams and today his current motor car seems unbeatable.

This year’s event was won of course by Verstappen but the McLarens of Lando Norris and former F2 champion Oscar Piastri gave a great challenge to Max and for a moment I thought the Red Bull team were in trouble. At home it was a lovely warm day and I did think about turning off the TV and going outside to enjoy the sunshine but then a huge downpour came down and I just settled down deeper into my armchair, made another brew and enjoyed the race. It was great to watch the race live instead of waiting for the highlights show and trying to avoid social media giving away the result.

Perhaps I should cough up some money and subscribe to Sky sports. Yes I’ve thought about it but happily when I’ve been close to doing just that I’ve managed to get through to the hotline provided by the National Tightwads Society and one of my colleagues there has managed to talk me round! Phew, I reckon I’d be seriously skint without their help. Thanks guys!

And Just Like That.

One of my favourite TV shows has always been Sex and The City. I love that show and enjoy all the stories and relationships of the characters. The show finally finished after six seasons and two feature films. Now the producers have rebooted the series as And Just Like That which just follows on from the last feature film. Sadly, Kim Cattrall who played Samantha declined to appear in the show due to an apparent feud with the main star Sarah Jessica Parker and a desire to move on to other things. Her departure and the addition of several new characters who are not really part of the original quartet of female friends and to be honest, don’t seem as though they ever will be a part, has given the new series a slightly different appeal. Not only that, one of the characters, successful lawyer Miranda, has now come out as gay. She left her husband and has started a relationship with a gay female stand up comedian called Che Diaz and the two have gone to live together in California.

https://youtu.be/iHh1SkiptEk

I keep watching even though the show is only a patch on its former witty and vibrant self. Yes, they have added a more diverse cast rather than the previous WASP heavy one but none of the new characters fit in and after watching the first season, I’m still only interested in the three remaining girls and their lives. The other thing is this, I know the series is aimed at women but surely they must realise that a good percentage of viewers are like me, male. I’m interested in the girls but I also like the men. My favourite character, the outstandingly cool Mr Big was killed off in the first episode of season one. I kind of liked Stanforth Blatch played by Willie Garson. Stanforth was a gay icon but I personally saw him as an icon for balding bespectacled men. He always wore such great outfits. another favourite male was Steve, Miranda’s husband who used to be a great counterpoint to the smart and uptight Miranda, has now been relegated to a sort of stand by character who only appears on screen out of absolute necessity.

My other favourite male was Aidan. He was Carrie’s lover and boyfriend before she married Mr Big. The couple were engaged but when Carrie seemed to be reluctant to name the day, he gave her the bullet. He is due to appear soon in Series 2 which I have to say is something that has kept me watching so far.

Final verdict: I keep watching, hoping that things will get better even though I doubt they ever will. If the appearance of Aiden doesn’t improve things, I will soon be unticking the series record button. Still, we all have to let go of things sooner or later and I still have the entire Sex and the City box set on DVD. Maybe the time to uncheck that button has already come.

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John Cooper Clarke and Some Other Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s that time again for Liz and me to troll through France in our motorhome, on the look out for swimming lakes, cheese, wine and restaurants. The weather has so far been good but not great so sometimes I’ve been relaxing on my sun lounger, other times I’ve been inside wondering, where the hell is that sun?

As I write this we are about a week into our holiday and the sun has made an appearance. We’ve had three or four really hot days and a few of those spring days where it’s really warm in the sun but move into the shade and yes, it’s freezing. You might be thinking what do we get up to in France? Visit museums? Explore fascinating French towns? Well, we have done all that stuff in the past but these days we tend to relax in the sun, read a lot, sup copious amounts of red wine and visit a lot of restaurants.

In the past we’ve visited the blockhaus in Eperleque, a huge concrete structure where the Nazi V weapons were launched against the UK in WWII. The building was rendered useless by the efforts of the RAF Bomber Command and the heroism of those pilots has guaranteed the freedoms we enjoy in western Europe today. I’ve always been moved by the museums and memorials to those who lost their lives in the war. In one place and I can’t remember where it was, we went to a museum dedicated to the French resistance and an old French chap, noticing that we were English told us how much the freedom fighters were aided by the RAF dropping supplies and ammunitions.

Another thing I look forward to on a long trip is reading. Yeah, I know you might think that’s a bit boring but I do love a really good book and one book that has really inspired me this week is an autobiography by the Bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke. I should really save all this for a forthcoming book bag blog post but out on the road, drinking fine wines and eating good food, I really need to knock out a blog post whenever I can.

I love the way Clarke tells his story, maybe because he writes a little like me. I’ve always tried to make my posts chatty and colloquial, using the kind of language I might use when talking and John Cooper Clarke does pretty much the same thing in his book. It’s a very observational book and he talks about life in Salford in the 1950s and later in the 60s and 70s and very gradually slips himself into the narrative. It’s not a me, me, me type of autobiography. It’s not I did this and then I did that and then I did something else. It’s a fabulous book and though I’m not that interested in the punk music scene which John was very much a part of, I still love it.

Salford is the twin town to my home town of Manchester and a lot of the places and people in the book resonate with my own memories, even though Clarke is a north Manchester guy and I’m from the south. Many years ago though, I used to frequent a place just on the Salford/Manchester border. If you turn off Deansgate and go up Bridge Street and cross the bridge over the River Irwell, you are going into Salford. The bar there, the Mark Addy, was actually the last place my small family (myself, my brother and my mum and dad) had an afternoon out together. It might have been my dad’s birthday, I’m not sure. The four of us had an afternoon lunch at the pub where they served these really tasty cheese and pâté platters. They came with chunky bread and salad and were really lovely.

Mum had her one bottle of stout and then she wanted something lighter. I ordered her a tea and she was pleased to see it was served in a very elegant way with a little teapot, a small jug of milk and a bowl of sugar.

Some years ago the bar, of which the lower floor was down on the banks of the river, was flooded when the river level rose during a storm. They couldn’t get insurance and the place closed and remains empty till the present day.

Just across the road is a small square where Manchester’s first sports superstar George Best had his fashion boutique. Back in the 1960’s my friends and I travelled into Manchester by bus to hang about Best’s Boutique. We never saw the man in person although what we would have done if we had? Ask for an autograph perhaps? I don’t know but at that time George Best had a kind of local fame that was on a par with a film star. The newspapers even dubbed him the fifth Beatle in the sixties because of his Beatle like haircut and his undeniable charisma.

Best was born in Northern Ireland and came to Manchester to begin his career as a footballer aged only 15. In the 1970s he seemed to fold under the pressure of his own stardom. He began drinking heavily and was eventually sacked by his team, Manchester United. Best died in November 2005 aged 59.

Anyway, getting back to John Cooper Clarke. He decided early on that like Dylan Thomas he was going to be a career poet and to his credit he eventually achieved just that. He was and is very much a performance poet and became famous performing with punk bands in the 70s and 80s. His big problem from reading his book seems to be that he was a habitual drug user, even becoming a heroin addict. In the later pages of this book, it does seem that he is very laissez faire about his addiction and wherever he goes to perform, he always makes arrangements to score his drugs just like you and I might try to source a bottle of milk or a packet of tea bags. On one occasion he finds himself in New York, desperate for heroin. The only dealer available to him is based in some dead-end part of the city and a friend lends him a gun which he is advised to keep in view while he goes up to the seventh floor of a dilapidated building to score. Happily, all went well for him but this kind of thing appears to have been the norm for him, having to do what he has to do to get his drugs. In later life he realises he must break the habit which he eventually does, helped by the love of a good woman who he eventually settles down with.

Much of the text is written in his own rapid fire colloquial idiom and is for me, at any rate, a joy to read. Like me he is a man who loves his pies although Clarke prefers the meat and potato version to the steak variety which I rather like. Like he says though, a steak pie is full of gravy which makes it a little harder to eat on the move.

A memorable moment in the book is when he arrives in Scandinavia for a gig. He is starving but is advised that after the performance there will be a huge buffet laid on. There was, but this being Scandinavia it consisted of a great deal of pickled fish and not the hoped for pies.

Clearly he is a great rock and roll fan and lists various members of the rock and pop fraternity who he has either worked with or bumped into over the years and if you happen to be a fan of punk, Clarke points you in the right direction for either further reading or music listening.

I thought Clarke would have had a back catalogue of poetry volumes but that doesn’t seem to be the case although I did buy one of his few poetry books, Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt. That might be my next read.

OK, that’s enough reading and writing for tonight. Time for a glass of some vin rouge and perhaps a nibble on some cheese. Yes, don’t mind if I do . . .

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Scrapbook Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m always on the hunt for new ideas for blog posts so when I was a little stuck today, I thought I’d take a look at my old scrapbooks and see what was in there.

I started making scrapbooks when I was much younger and my prime source was a comic I used to buy, TV21. TV21 was based on the TV shows of Gerry Anderson all of which were set in the world of the 21st Century. In the 21st Century there was a World President, a World Government and many global organisations such as the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and WSP, the World Space Patrol.

Those organisations featured in Stingray and Fireball XL5, futuristic puppet series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and the two followed them with series like Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 and perhaps the most famous, Thunderbirds.

TV21 featured all the series above in comic book format and the front page resembled a newspaper style headline featuring the stories that were inside as well as smaller stories and items such as stop press columns, again all relating to items inside the comic.

I couldn’t find my oldest scrapbook but it must be around somewhere. I did find some of my newer ones though. One featured a page similar to the ones in that first book with clippings from TV21 featuring the submarine Stingray.

The first scrapbook I could find was labelled Scrapbook 6 and I can see my interests have moved on a little from TV puppet shows. There was a page featuring Olivia Newton John. Olivia was probably my first celebrity crush back in the early 1970s. One item was dated 1973 and says ‘Olivia to sing for Britain.’ She was chosen to sing for Britain in the Eurovision song contest. I didn’t care for her song though, Long Live Love. I bought many of her albums and records when I was younger and her poster adorned my old bedroom wall. Sadly, she died in 2022.

A more personal item in the scrapbooks was my ticket and programme from seeing Paul McCartney and Wings in 1973 in concert in Manchester together with a review from the Manchester Evening News.

I’ve always loved magazine covers and among the ones in my scrapbook is a cover featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I wrote a post about the duo some time ago; it was about famous couples like Burton and Taylor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and so on. On holiday I hope to take along my new copy of Richard Burton’s diaries with me to read which I hope will be interesting. Burton was a frustrated writer so I think his diaries might be a cut above some other diaries I have read.

The first season of F1 motor racing I followed was back in 1970. In those days a lot of races were not televised and I had to look to magazines and newspapers to find out the race results. I have scrapbook entries about Jackie Stewart, my all time favourite driver and lots of other newspaper cuttings about motor racing. Back then or so it seems to me, the only time the big newspapers were interested in motor sport was when a driver was killed and there are cuttings from the deaths of Jochen Rindt and Peter Revson to name but two. One more positive newspaper headline was when James Hunt won a dramatic world championship at the very wet Japanese Grand Prix of 1976.

Ronald Reagan went on to win a second term as President by beating the Democratic candidate Walter Mondale in 1984. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’ ran the newspaper headline in what might have been the Daily Express.

Reagan had previously defeated Jimmy Carter in 1979 and served two terms as President. Reagan also had various summits with Gorbachev, the head of the USSR and another news cutting is from August 1991 with the headline ‘Gorby arrest: Soviet Chief Toppled’ which as we all know was the beginning of the end for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.

A lot of my interests are showcased in the scrapbooks. I do love modern mysteries and there is a cutting about Lord Lucan who disappeared in 1974 after the murder of his children’s nanny and others about the JFK assassination in 1963. On the cover of the Sunday express Magazine is the so called ‘magic bullet’, the bullet that the Warren Commission said passed through John Kennedy and inflicted various wounds on John Connally in Dallas in 1963.

Could a pristine bullet like the one in the picture have really passed through two bodies?

While I’m on the subject of JFK, things must have been hard for his widow, Jackie. How she carried on after seeing her husband shot to death while only inches away from her, I don’t know. I saw a documentary about her today which asserted that she wanted to commit suicide afterwards but carried on, kept afloat only by her love for her children. In the scrapbook there is a clipping of her winning a trophy for some kind of horse event but horses may have helped her keep sane as she had loved and ridden horses since childhood.

Just like today I was a big Doctor Who fan back in my scrapbooking days. The first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast on UK TV the day after the JFK assassination in 1963 and as no one was interested in anything other than the JFK assignation that day, it was rebroadcast the following week. In January 1982 Peter Davison had just become the new Doctor Who, replacing the hugely popular Tom Baker. Tom Baker was probably my favourite Doctor and I was sorry to see him go.

One interesting news item I spotted was about John McCarthy and Jill Morrell. They were in the news back in the late 1980s when McCarthy, a journalist, was kidnapped in Lebanon and his then partner Jill was actively campaigning for his release back in the UK. McCarthy was finally released in 1991. He and Jill wrote a book together but they parted four years later. That was all pretty interesting but I’m pretty certain I stuck the item in my scrapbook because I actually rather liked Jill.

In my last scrapbook from the 1990s there are many empty pages but there are also a stack of cuttings that have yet to be stuck in. There are some F1 items and some from the news. One interesting one is about writer Patricia Cornwell who writes the Kay Scarpetta series of crime thrillers. According to the article, Patricia wanted Jodie Foster to play her character Scarpetta in the film version. Jodie had already played an FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs and apparently wasn’t keen to be involved in another gruesome murder film. That was in 1997 and as far as I know, Scarpetta hasn’t made it into the cinema yet although I did read an item only today which suggested Nicole Kidman might be soon playing Scarpetta on the small screen.

I spent quite a while last week relaxing and skimming through my scrapbooks and I think I’ll finish with my favourite item. It’s a small clipping which was on a page of smaller funny items.

Do you have a scrapbook? If so, what sort of things do you keep in it?

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Writing, the Village and Young Higgins

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Liz and I will soon be off to France in our motorhome. It’s had an MOT, it’s been taxed and has had a good wash and clean up and it’s pretty much all ready for the trip. As a writer, I try and get ready for the trip too, I like to get ahead with my weekly posts so I have a few all written and ready to be posted, even if I’m in the middle of the outback of the Loire valley. All I have to do is press the post button and I know that I will have met my deadline, my one deadline of 10:00am on a Saturday morning when my new post goes out.

A couple of weeks ago I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, I was actually three blogs in advance, a whole three weeks, all I had to do was keep writing one blog per week and then in the hoped for sunny Loire I could relax, read books, sunbathe and swim and still put out my one blog post every week. Of course, there are some writers, some bloggers whose output is considerably more than that. Even so, my one blog post per week keeps me honest as a writer and of course I do actually write more. I’ve started to recycle my old posts over on Medium.com to hopefully engage more readers and even sell more books. One day, when my royalties build up, I might even have enough to splash out on a pint of lager on our regular Thursday night pub quiz.

It was nice to get back behind the wheel of our motorhome and take it down for its first wash of 2023. I’ve already got a few good books to read packed aboard and it almost seems as though I can already taste the vin rouge and the French bread. Yes, that was a good feeling. A bad feeling though was when I realised that despite being three blogs ahead, it was soon two and then just one and as much as I looked at prompts and old posts, no inspiration seemed to come.

Parked by a lake in France

I did a post a while ago about Ideas, Inspiration and Effort. They, I thought, were the key things to any kind of writing, whether it’s a blog post, a story or a poem. The more I think about it, a better title might be Inspiration, Observation and Effort. Some ideas just come naturally. A writer is inspired, he jots down notes and then writes. Other ideas come just by observing things. A recent idea for a post came from a car journey and observing what happened during the trip and it got me talking about my former job, working as a motorway traffic officer and other ideas from my car stereo and the music I was playing. After that comes the effort, the actual work of putting together a blog or story or book.

This week it’s round about a year since I retired. I’m really still getting used to retirement. It’s nice having a free bus pass and it’s nice not having to go into work all the time. I did think about getting a part time job but I actually don’t need a job. Perhaps if I spend too much on holidays or restaurants then I might have to think about working but so far, I seem to be doing OK. When my father retired, he went out on long walks with his dog. He used to roam about the huge council estate where he lived and take in the farms or what used to be farms where he used to work in his youth. He once showed me an old farmhouse hidden in the estate surrounded by council houses. There was a large green there which he said used to be the farm’s orchard and indeed, there were still many apple and pear trees on the green.

After thinking about my father I thought that I might do a similar thing, have a little walkabout around some places I used to know well and see how they had changed.

Not far from the housing estate is a small village called Gatley and when I was younger I used to go there quite a lot. There was a fabulous model shop there and as a schoolboy I bought many a plastic model kit from there. I used to make models from scratch too using glue and balsa wood which I also bought from that shop. The shop itself was a wooden hut type of affair and walking down there the other day the shop was gone and only bushes and shrubs had taken its place. Right outside the shop was the bus stop for the 45 bus which came from Manchester, turned around in Gatley and then went back to Manchester. Today, the small block which the bus circled in order to turn round has been blocked off so the 45 bus is no more, although there is another bus which carries on through the village.

The Red Lion pub is now a Tesco store. There is still a café on the spot where there was aways a café but despite various visits recently, I have never seen it open. Further down, The Prince of Wales is still there. In that particular pub I had my first ever pint many years ago.

As I walked further into the village the traditional English chip shop I used to frequent is now a Chinese takeaway and the chip shop dining room is another shop entirely. The Tatton cinema was demolished some time ago although the builders kept the façade of the building when they built the new supermarket. Among many other films I remember seeing there was my first James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in what must have been 1969.

Next door is the Horse and Farrier pub. My mother once worked there at lunchtimes making sandwiches and my father too, he was the pub gardener. Once, when I was 16 and still at school, a couple of friends and I went inside for a pint. We left our briefcases outside with our school jackets and just as we bought our drinks and had our first sips of beer, who came in through the entrance but our physics master, Mr Farragher. The three of us shot out of the back door and into the gardens before going round to grab our jackets and briefcases from the front. Ever afterwards we three referred to the pub as the Horse and Farragher!

Today I often have a drink in that pub. On the outside it looks just the same as it always did and when I’m there I often think of Mr Farragher. That reminds me of Return Journey, the radio broadcast by Dylan Thomas I spoke about in last week’s post. Dylan returns to a pub of his youth looking for his younger self. He asks the barmaid about young Thomas and she in turn asks him what he looked like. He replies like this:

Thick blubber lips and a snub nose, a bit of a shower off: plus fours and no breakfast you know, a bombastic adolescent provincial bohemian with a thick knotted artist’s tie made from his sisters scarf. A gabbing, mock tough pretentious young man . .

How would I describe myself if I was looking for young Higgins I wonder?

A tall thin reserved young man wearing aviator spectacles. He sometimes wore tinted glasses even when it wasn’t so bright. A provincial adolescent wannabe writer and film director who packed in his job in an insurance company to travel through Europe and ended up as a bus conductor.

Such a shame we can’t go back and change things.

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Return Journey (More Thoughts in my Car)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s post is a sequel to the one last week and I’m going to talk some more about the thoughts and ideas that come to me while driving. OK, I’ve left my house in Manchester in good shape, trimmed the privets, cut the grass and tidied up inside. Final check in the fridge, nothing left behind that is liable to go off. OK, pack the car and let’s get off back to St Annes on the Fylde Coast.

Returning to St Annes is always a nicer journey that the one on the way down. I’m not sure why but perhaps it’s that all the bad traffic areas are closer to Manchester and generally I get them out of the way first and so I can then relax and drive along to some good music. I always tend to return via the M60, the M61, the M6 and finally the M55 motorways. The M60 is always busy around the turn off for the Trafford Centre which is a huge American style shopping mall. I’ve never been that keen on it and on the few occasions when I’ve been there I always have a job trying to find my car again in the huge car parks.

Just as I pass the Trafford centre the signs for ‘Reports of an Accident’ pop up on the VMS (variable message signs). The traffic slows to a crawl and I start to wonder if I should perhaps divert to the M62. I can see the M62 turn off up ahead but I decide to stay on the M60 for a while. When you see Accident on a sign it usually means that is a genuine confirmed accident but when the signs say Reports of an Accident, well there might not be an accident at all. Most of the accident reports come from motorists who dial 999 and tell the police what has happened. The big problem is that a lot of people don’t actually know where they are. They might tell the police they are travelling towards Manchester from Staffordshire and that they are on the M6. The last junction they noticed was junction 16 so they might perhaps reckon they are between 16 and 17 although in fact they might be further up the motorway than they thought. In some cases the informant might even get the motorway wrong saying M6 instead of M60. Anyway, my colleagues and I in the motorway control room would have checked the cameras and maybe we would find the incident on CCTV. We would also task a patrol to run through the area and check.

Approaching the Trafford Centre

Of course all that is behind me now. I’m retired. The traffic begins to speed up and soon we are back to normal speed again. It could have been there was no accident at all or sometimes the cars involved just get going again and leave the scene.

In some ways I miss my life at Highways England or whatever name it is going by now. (Actually National Highways.) In other ways I don’t miss it at all.  I had a long drive into work, forty-two miles and I certainly don’t miss that journey although on the positive side, most of my ideas for blog posts used to come to me while driving. Somehow concentrating on driving always seems to free up another part of my brain and lots of ideas will come. I even have a dictation gadget in the car so I can blab my ideas into that and save them for later.

Another thing I used to do was to create a room in my head for those ideas and make sure to leave those ideas in there. That might sound a bit silly but a long time ago I read a book by Jack Black called Mindstore and it involved using various techniques to help the reader. I bought the book to improve my confidence, especially in job interviews. The writer asked his readers to relax and create a house inside one’s own mind. In the house would be various rooms which one could use for different things. A bathroom with a shower that washed away any problems or negative energy and so on. Another was one for rehearsing events in a positive way, like a job interview for instance. You would rehearse the interview in your mind, imagine being successful and then save the result on a big monitor screen. One of my rooms was for storing my blog ideas.

An RTC on the motorway from quite a few years ago.

A big accident hotspot on the M60 motorway is junction 13. The big problem here is that traffic is entering the M60 from the M62 and the M602; this traffic is all merging to the right while traffic already on the M60 wanting to leave at 13, which comes up pretty quickly after junction 12, is trying to go left. I always try to stay in the outside lane and avoid all this although further up the road I’ll need to get over to the left to exit onto the M61.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve copied a whole lot of audio onto the SD card I’m using in my stereo so no need to be constantly changing discs in my CD player. The next item comes up and it’s not music but Dylan Thomas reciting his work. He reads some poems which really is what got me interested in Dylan. I like to read his work but it’s the power of his recitals that really hooked me. Dylan wrote various plays for radio and one of my favourites pops up now. It’s called Return Journey. It’s a brilliant work read by Dylan himself in which he imagines his older self going back to Swansea in search of his young self.

Anyway, time to get over to the left and merge onto the M61. The M61 is a busy road and once you come on to it you have to beware of traffic coming over to the left from the A666. The traffic is heavy but so far it all seems to be moving well.

Return Journey was inspired by the devastation Dylan saw in Swansea after the town suffered the blitz of WWII. His broadcast begins with ‘It was a cold white day in the High Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the Docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and headstoned with fences.’

Later Dylan is in a Swansea pub asking the barmaid if she remembers young Dylan. He describes his younger self to her and she replies ‘There’s words, what d’you want to find him for. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole’.

Later he meets the old park keeper in his childhood haunt, Cwmdonkin Park. Does the park keeper remember him as a boy? Of course, replies the man, he remembers all the boys who played there even the ones who would ‘climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old Swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of.’  It’s a very moving piece indeed.

I notice accident signs on the message boards and the traffic begins to slow. Ahead I can see the flashing lights of a Highways Traffic car, slowing the traffic down. A year ago one of my jobs in the control room would be running an incident like this. For a rolling road block the patrol would call for a dedicated radio channel and someone like me would shout up that they were ready to take over. On the M61 the dedicated channel was 28. We had dedicated channels so that any police patrol nearby could also change over and assist us. I’d confirm the patrol were on the channel and drop the speeds down on the motorway signals. The patrol would slow the traffic then sometimes bring it to a stop while they shifted any accident damaged or broken down vehicles to the hard shoulder. A quick sweep of any debris and the patrol would move to the hard shoulder and wave the traffic on.

Me in the Highways Agency Control Room

One particular traffic officer used to make me laugh. When he returned to the main radio channel he would always hail the control room and advise Romeo Echo Three One: Back from the dark side!

As we leave Greater Manchester and enter Lancashire, traffic begins to thin a little although on summer weekends the M6 gets busy with holiday traffic making to the Fylde Coast as well as the Lake District.

I pass a Police car on one of the Police Patrol parking points. They are distributed about on various points of the motorway network. There was a Police desk in our control room and I’m happy to say that generally we at Highways had a good relationship with them. The big surprise to me working with the Police was that I always thought the Police were, well the Police. The thing is, the UK Police are not just one single organisation, they are numerous separate Police Forces that actually all work differently and independently.

Appropriately The Greatest Hits of Sting and the Police starts up on my stereo. I’ve always rather liked the Police and I do love the music of the eighties.

Anyway, getting back to the actual Police, Lancs Police do things differently to Greater Manchester Police and Cumbria do things differently to everyone. Why there isn’t a more centralised Police Force I’ll never know. In our control room the Motorway Police Group is headed by Cheshire Police. They used a computer system that wasn’t compatible to the one used by GMP. When an incident occurred that came from GMP the staff at Cheshire had to copy the incident over to their system. We both used a system called Command and Control. They could then send the incident electronically over to us so we could set the motorway signals and respond with our patrol.

When I left in 2022, Highways had a new system called (I can’t remember!) and Cheshire Police had a system designed by Saab. I know it sounds a little controversial but why don’t all the Police and even other emergency services use the same system? Wouldn’t that be better?

The Police are singing Every Little Thing She Does is Magic just as I take the slip road onto the M55 for the very last leg of my journey. There are roadworks here that seem to have been going on forever. They are making an entirely new junction and of course all the slip roads and overhead bridges have had to have been constructed. A lot of it is nearly ready but it is still a 50mph zone.

Sting is the frontman to the Police and I read somewhere he got the nickname Sting because he used to wear a black and yellow sweater. His real name is Gordon Sumner and I’ve always thought his attachment to the name Sting kind of silly but what the heck, I still like his music. After leaving the Police, Sting went on to a successful career as a solo artist.

Just as I pull up at home, one of my favourite Sting tracks comes on; If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free. I’m tempted to sit and listen to it but I flip back to the beginning and switch off my stereo. Sting will be all ready for me on my next journey.

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