Category Archives: Sun Lounger Thoughts

Sun Lounger Thoughts: Stephen Fry, Highways and that Solitaire App

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Last week I finished reading the four books I had brought with me to read here in Lanzarote and so I scoured the bookshelf in our rented villa for something else to read. I came across Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry. It’s an autobiography of his life up till the age of 20 but it’s not in any way a conventional autobiography. It’s a sort of full throttle, stream of consciousness monologue which Fry kicks off in his second year of public school and proceeds to tell us a great deal about his thoughts and feelings, making numerous right and left turns along the way to discuss various issues and subjects that he decides to talk about. It’s very like a sort of confessional and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was taken down verbatim (or perhaps tape recorded) during a session with his psychiatrist.

Fry reveals his thoughts about homosexuality and his feelings, either obsession or lust over a boy at his school. Fry went to a public school which confusingly for our American readers is actually a private school. Actually, a private boarding school which eventually Fry was expelled from.

I’ve no idea where the title comes from although Stephen does mention various exotic authors, none of whom I’ve ever heard of so perhaps the title comes from a quotation from some esoteric book that only university bookworms are familiar with. Sprinkled throughout the book though are numerous authors I have heard of as well as many references to popular films and TV shows, all of which made the book, in my mind anyway, very relatable.

A good one comes later in the book when he is arrested for theft and declines to give his name. One of the cops calls him Stephen and he replies ‘yes’ so the cops say ahh, you’re Stephen Fry then. He compares it to a scene in The Great Escape in which Gordon Jackson as an escaped POW pretends to be a French worker and gets caught out when a gestapo man says ‘good luck’ to him in English. Jackson replies -in English- ‘thank you’ and reveals himself instantly to be an escaper. That was one of my late brother’s favourite parts of the film and one he always used to quote to me.

Anyway, Fry’s book was a real no holes barred, full throttle read.

Over the years I’ve written quite a few of these sun lounger thoughts posts which are basically the kind of thoughts that have arisen in my mind while lying on a sun lounger.

Today I found myself, after a swim and relaxing on my lounger in the sun, thinking about my old job at the Highways Agency.

When I was a child I used to have, just like Stephen Fry, lots of daydreams and fantasies. One of them was that the school would be taken over by terrorists and that they would be methodically trying to find someone who was actually a secret agent. That secret agent of course would be me and after biding my time I would, just like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films, sort out the terrorists one by one. My daydream would usually be shattered by one of the teachers asking me a question like ‘how many degrees in a right-angled triangle?’ and I would suddenly be brought down to earth and desperately try to answer before revealing the inevitable truth that I had not been paying attention.

When I worked at the Highways Agency, no two days would ever be the same. One day would bumble along and nothing much would happen and the next there would be crash after crash after crash.

Bad weather always plays a part in motorway crashes, the main reason being that your average driver whose journey from home to work normally takes 35 minutes, expects that same journey to take 35 minutes no matter what. Come the day when the network is covered by 3 inches of snow or a major downpour with various lanes closed due to flooding then that journey will not take 35 minutes and the average driver really cannot understand why.

If there is a major downpour many drivers tend to sensibly slow down. This slows the traffic movement down as a whole making journeys longer. Mr Average gets impatient, decides to speed up to 80 mph and either realises too late he is going to miss his junction, cuts in to his left and hits another car causing a crash on the inside lane (RTC in our Highways lingo) or possibly hits a puddle in the outside lane spins and causes a crash (Road Traffic Collision to use the full title) in lane 3.

On those summer days with perfect visibility things usually go reasonably well and that’s the time when the terrorist daydream would raise its ugly head. A team of terrorists take over the RCC (Regional Control Centre) and interrogate and torture people in order to find that ex secret agent (this is a subtle twist on the earlier daydream) who has retired from MI5 and joined the Highways Agency.

If I happened to be the radio dispatcher that day my assistant would usually nudge me and say Steve-debris incident or RTC.

The thing is, that daydream could easily have been avoided. Back in the early days when the RCC was brand spanking new, many dignitaries, councillors, police officers, firemen and other emergency services staff would be invited upstairs to a viewing area to look down on what was happening. Invariably this always happened on days when the network was calm and nothing out of the ordinary was going on, save for the odd breakdown here and there. The dignitaries used to look down and senior management would be horrified to find the dispatcher and his assistant playing solitaire on the screens.

Me at work in the Highways Control Room

Now this might have seemed a bad thing but back then we could float a solitaire game right on our command-and-control screens so if a job popped up, we would see it straight away because we were already looking at the correct screen. Anyway, management decided to delete solitaire from the system so then when things were quiet, we would either stare at the ceiling, talk to each other or, well that’s where the daydream came in.

The wall of the Highways control room (RCC) has various screens where we can highlight CCTV images of the incidents we are dealing with. In the centre is the TV screen usually set to Sky or BBC News. This being an operational control room the TV has no sound and it was sometimes quite amusing to watch the subtitles appear with the wrong word or sentence. Some of the best I’ve seen include MP Ed Miliband described as the Ed Miller Band and the BBC welcoming viewers to the ‘Chinese New Year of the whores!’

Later in life the RCC became the ROC (pronounced rock) actually the Regional Operations Centre. I’m not sure why that name change took place unless some nameless senior manager had found that his solitaire app had been deleted and unable to play a card game decided that it might be a good idea to rename the control room. As it happened, the Highways Agency was renamed Highways England and later National Highways meaning a great deal of taxpayer’s money had to be spent on new signage: on our premises, on letterheads and repainting our vehicles as well as rehashing all our uniforms.

Yep, they really shouldn’t have deleted that solitaire app!

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Blog 703: Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.

For our first night out we went along to the Gourmet Indian Restaurant where we had so much fun last year with the staff. We were rather surprised to find that this year, all the staff that had made us so welcome had now left. That is probably the same in restaurants the whole world over. Staff come and go but happily, the new staff, especially our waitress were fun and friendly and the food was just as superb as it was previously.

Last year’s Indian restaurant staff, sadly missed

Another favourite of ours is the Café Berrugo down in the Marina Rubicon. The manager Juan greeted us as warmly as usual. Last year the food wasn’t quite as good as it normally is so I wasn’t sure what to order but anyway, we went for five tapas dishes and they were all excellent, so much better than our last visit. Perhaps the café has gained a new chef during our absence, anyway, we were really impressed and happy and Juan gave us an extra shot of vodka caramel, a drink I don’t think I’ve had anywhere else except Lanzarote.

The interesting thing is that a few months back I was writing about a run of bad meals and I have to say, I much prefer this, a run of lovely meals.

Before we left the UK we switched on our Sky box and I was pleasantly surprised to see the film Nuremburg available to watch. I was surprised because it was only on at our local cinema a few weeks previously and it was something I wanted to watch. So, we poured ourselves a glass of wine and settled down to watch. The film is the story of the Nuremburg trials held in Germany after the Second World War. Hermann Göring, played in the film by Russell Crowe, is the most prestigious prisoner in the dock. He was the number 2 in the Nazi government until the last few days of the war when Hitler, incensed by a telegram from Göring in which he asked permission to take over the Reich, ordered his arrest.

By Charles Alexander, Office of the United States Chief of Counsel – Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, accession no. 72-911 (Retrieved 2017-04-26), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=161339177

Even so, when Göring handed himself over to the Americans, he was perhaps thinking of the events of the First World War when the Kaiser abdicated and fled Germany and left others to run the country in defeat. Göring, perhaps thought that he was the man to take over Germany in this new defeat. Things would not turn out that way however and Göring, amongst many others, was to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

The film is based on the story of Douglas Kelley, a psychiatrist who was tasked with examining the nazi prisoners with a view to determining whether they were competent to stand trial. Kelley also tried to get to the bottom of the nature of the evil they had practised. His theory was that they were just ordinary men rather than particularly evil men.

Kelley is played in the film by Rami Malek and the film focusses on his relationship with Göring. It was a good film though for me not in any way outstanding although Russell Crowe’s performance was excellent, I don’t think Malek’s portrayal was in the same class.

To be honest I remember a similar film, perhaps a made for TV film from some years ago which was much superior. I think it was a two part mini series also titled Nuremburg starring Alec Baldwin as supreme court justice Robert Jackson and Brian Cox as Göring.

Göring of course commits suicide rather than be hanged and in the mini series, they made much of the relationship between Göring and his American guard. Did the guard slip Göring a cyanide capsule with which to evade the hangman’s noose? It was probably more likely that Göring had it concealed all along. He was a charismatic character but at the end of the day, he went along with Hitler like many others.

Before leaving for Lanzarote, one of my friends asked me how many books I would be taking along to read. I wasn’t sure at the time but at least four I thought. So, she answered, we can expect another Book Bag post then! There will be a Book Bag post but to carry on from Nuremburg, I was surprised to see it on Sky cinema so soon after its theatrical release. I thought it might have been a Sky original production but it wasn’t so I was even more surprised to see it on Sky so soon.

Another film I watched recently on Netflix was the Thursday Murder Club. Again, it was on TV very soon after its cinema release, in fact I think it was actually a Netflix production. I enjoyed the opening part of the film but then lost interest somewhere around the middle. I might have picked up my iPad and started surfing and then got interested again towards the end. It was a good film with an impressive cast and its one that I should watch again and perhaps pay more attention to the next time.

It just so happens that I picked up the book to read here in Lanzarote. It’s written by Richard Osman who is more famous as the frontman on the BBC’s Pointless quiz show as well as various other TV shows. The book and film are about a group of people in a retirement village who meet to discuss cold case crimes but then find a murder committed on their very doorstop. The group of mostly eighty year olds then get on with the task of solving the murder. There seem to be a lot of things going on and a great deal of characters to remember which put me off a little at first but a great device used by the writer is having alternate chapters written as diary entries by Joyce, one of the club members. She goes over the past events, adding in details of her own life along the way, talking about her neighbours and daughter amongst other things and sometimes previewing the next chapter for us.

It’s a very original and witty book and even though I’m only half way through I’m already thinking about getting the follow up book. One minor complaint though, there is a large cast of characters and things do get complicated making it not always easy to follow.

You might have seen some horror stories on the internet and social media about Lanzarote lately. I’ve seen so many posts about the dreadful weather and the rain. OK, there has been rain, quite a lot of it which is pretty unusual for Lanzarote. The thing is, when it rains back home in Manchester, it tends to rain and rain and get pretty cold at the same miserable time. Here in Lanzarote, it rains for about five minutes and then the sun comes out and dries everything. It might get cloudy again and we might have another five minute shower but it soon slips away and despite what you may have heard, Liz and I have spent each day out on the patio swimming and sunbathing and occasionally moving our towels away from the edge of the patio canopy when the rain showers have encroached a little too close.

Now, time for another read or should I do a few more laps in the pool? Decisions, decisions . . .

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Reading Books and Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I thought for this week’s post I’d do a combination post, a little of my book bag mixed with some sun lounger thoughts. Let’s see how it all pans out.

Just now we have finished our touring part of the holiday and we have come to our rented gîte where we have parked the van and are spending time in this wonderful house that we regularly rent just outside the small village of Parçay-les-Pins.

I quite often, back in England, watch that TV show about people who want to buy a new house abroad. It’s called A Place in the Sun and it’s aways interesting to watch couples look for a dream home, especially when it features a location we know a little about like France or Lanzarote for instance. Sometimes the contestants -for want of a better word- will come across what I think is a really nice place and will criticise it and start saying how they will rip the kitchen out and knock this wall down and I really want to slap the pair of them. Now and then, the show will produce something really nice and the couple will fall in love with it, put in a bid and find themselves the new owners of a fabulous house in the sun.

Sitting by the pool outside this house in France I do feel that it’s really a place that Liz and I have both fallen for. It’s an old country house with very thick walls and our bedroom is a modern extension with an en-suite bathroom. In a morning our usual routine is for me to get up, make a brew and bring it back to bed and for Liz and I to check our emails and then see who will be victorious in a card game we play together on our iPads. Those thick walls come into play here though as being so thick we don’t get much of an internet signal in the bedroom so one of us will have to reach out for our phone and switch on our internet hotspot so we can play.

Card game done it’s time for breakfast and then out to the pool for a swim, a read and some sunbathing. Here’s the first of my holiday reads;

The Lady in the Van

I saw the film version of this a few years ago which was pretty good, if a little odd. It was presented in a very peculiar way in that the author, Alan Bennett, is portrayed as two people, one as himself as he appears in the story and two, as himself as he writes the story. That oddity aside it was really a rather good and original film. When I heard there was a book version I quickly went to one my usual internet book stores and promptly bought it.

I was disappointed to find that it was a very slim volume, only 100 pages in fact and the author might have been better saving it for a collection of short stories. Anyway, it actually made me feel better about my own book, Floating in Space, which is also a rather thin book, though I might add, much longer than this.

Anyway, moving on to the story it was a rather good read. It’s about an oddball character, an old lady who parks outside Alan Bennett’s house in a van and stays there for some time, actually living in the van. She appeared sometime in the 1970’s and when double yellow lines appeared moved into the author’s driveway, staying there until her death in 1989.

The lady, the enigmatic Miss Shepherd, lived in her van continually throughout the year, rain or shine, hot or cold and the author tells her story using his own diary entries. It’s a funny story but also a sad one too. When the lady passes away, he is forced to go through her things in the van;

“…I realised I had to grit my teeth (or hold my nose) and go through Miss Shepherd’s possessions.
To do the job properly would have required a team of archaeologists. Every surface was covered in layers of old clothes, frocks, blankets and accumulated papers, some of them undisturbed for years, and all lying under a crust of ancient talcum powder. Sprinkled impartially over wet slippers, used incontinence pads and half-eaten tins of baked beans, it was of a virulence that supplemented rather than obliterated the distinctive odour of the van. The narrow aisle between the two banks of seats where Miss Shepherd had knelt, prayed and slept was trodden six inches deep in sodden debris, on which lay a top dressing of old food, Mr Kipling cakes, wrinkled apples, rotten oranges and everywhere batteries – batteries loose, batteries in packets, batteries that had split and oozed black gum on to the prehistoric sponge cakes and ubiquitous sherbet lemons that they lay among”

In the van he finds about £6000 in cash and a name and telephone number. Bennett calls the number to find the man at the other end has never heard of Miss Shepherd but then after he describes her, the man realises Miss Shepherd was his sister, although she had for some reason been using an assumed name. Alan Bennett had a love/hate relationship with this strange old lady for many years and came to -I was going to say like, but that’s not the right word. He came to be connected to her in a strange way until one day her social worker arrived with some clean clothes only to find her dead in the van.

To sum up, this was a lovely read even though it only lasted a couple of days for me but I think now I might look out for more of Alan Bennett’s books.

Vide Greniers and Brocantes

Liz and I always visit a village fête at the weekend, usually those with a vide grenier or brocante attached. A vide grenier is just a car boot sale which we both love. I usually pick up connecting leads for my laptop or iPad, after all, you can never have enough electrical leads. Brocantes are more like flea markets or antique fairs. Just the kind of place to pick up those old telephones that I still love, especially those Bakelite ones.

We visited a couple of vide greniers last weekend although the rain put off a great many sellers. The refreshments area was still open though and I ordered sausages and frites undercover from the rain while Liz nipped over to the covered bar across the way and ordered two glasses of vin rouge.

Over the years I’ve picked up various things at French vide greniers including pin badges, glasses and decanters as well as old telephones, cables (of course) old photos and paintings including a framed poster from the Le Mans 24 hour race. What else? A small bust of General de Gaulle which sits on my mantelpiece back home and numerous other things which took my fancy.

Plenty of times we have sheltered in makeshift bars until a rain shower has passed over and the sellers have peeled away plastic covers to reveal their goods.

My Word is my Bond by Roger Moore

I picked this book up ages ago and thought it would be a good holiday read. I’ve always liked Roger Moore even though I absolutely hate his James Bond films. I love Moore’s self-deprecating humour, plenty of which is evident in this book. The first part of the book was really interesting and entertaining but like a lot of celebrity autobiographies, this one just gets a little tedious when Roger just seems to list the films and locations and other celebrities he seems to know. On the back of the book was a review claiming this to be the best film autobiography since David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon. Sorry but I can’t agree. Roger reveals numerous ‘funny’ incidents from behind the scenes of his films, all of which must have been from the ‘you had to be there’ category because I didn’t think they were that funny. His marriage to his third wife fizzles out with no explanation and the last section is just an endless list of his various travels as a UNICEF ambassador.

He seems to have had a great deal of fun making the Bond films but for me his tenure as 007 marked the series fall from serious spy films into farce. The crazy thing is that after making his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, in which he comes over as a sort of stuffed dummy rather than an action hero, he made a film called Gold. In Gold he starred as the boss of a goldmine and really looked the part of a very tough guy indeed so why he couldn’t have done that as Bond is beyond me.

I prefer to remember Roger as the star of The Saint and The Persuaders, two TV action and adventure classics I loved. Anyway, this was for the most part an entertaining read but don’t think for a moment that it comes anywhere close to David Niven’s classic book.

That’s all from me. The sun has come out so it’s time to put my laptop away and enjoy the pool.

Bye for now!

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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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Wet Weather, Books and Back Pain

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Our little motorhome has been fuelled and packed and it’s time to take another drive over to France. We decided to go over to France via Eurotunnel. The big drawback of course is that travelling from the northwest, it’s a helluva drive down to Folkestone. Not just the drive itself but we have to contend with the perils of the M6 and the M25, two of the UK’s busiest motorways.

What we did was take a break and stop at a place called the Bricklayers Arms in Sevenoaks. We parked up, had some food and drinks and entered the pub quiz. The next morning it was only a quick trip down to Folkestone and soon we were chugging smoothly along under the ocean and over to Calais.

We drove across to one of our favourite restaurants, Le Mas Fleuri. It’s a quiet family run place and the simple food is always wonderful. I have to say I sometimes wonder how the place survives as, certainly in the evenings, it is always quiet. Anyway, this time we were dining at lunchtime and we found that not long after sitting down, a steady stream of customers began coming in after us and soon the dining room was full. The French do love their lunches.

We left Lanzarote a few months ago fit and well after five weeks of swimming and sunning ourselves but the trip back via Jet2.com was on the most uncomfortable aircraft I have ever flown on and since then I’ve been suffering with a sore back. I went into our local doctor’s surgery and they told me that they now have a practice physio. The physio, who I’m sure was a very competent fellow, didn’t seem to feel it necessary to actually examine my back in any way but even so, he felt confident enough to recommend that I take some over the counter painkillers and undertake a series of exercises which he thought would help. I have been doing the exercises, not totally on a full time basis but I have done them, well some of them, but the pain has been gradually getting worse.

That’s perhaps not the best time to drive a motorhome over to France and it has been challenging to say the least. My back soon went from sore to very painful and from then on to some moments of intense agony. The pain started in my lower back, then after a few days migrated to my right hip and now seems to be remaining in my right leg. At one point the epicentre of the pain moved to an area in my lower back from where it sent out electrically charged bolts of pain down both legs to a point where it seemed like my legs would collapse. I’ve still got a lot of pain but recently, touch wood, I have not had any what I tend to call screaming agony attacks.

Luckily, since then I’ve tried to anticipate when the bad times will come and gulp down an appropriate amount of painkillers. The bad times usually come in threes; the first comes at about lunchtime when Liz is doing our late breakfast. (Sorry I can’t assist Liz, I’m in pain.) Secondly about 6pm to 6:30 when Liz is making tea (Sorry I can’t assist again) and lastly late on about 1am, our usual bedtime (Liz, any chance of a back rub?)

It’s difficult to deal with certain situations now, situations that previously I wouldn’t even think about. I’ve dropped my handkerchief/tissue on the floor. OK. How the heck am I going to get that? I can’t just bend over. I can’t reach down. It happened the other day in a restaurant and I had to kick it over to Liz and she managed to raise it up with her collapsible back scratcher and I just managed to reach it. Situation (only just) sorted. Other situations arise that I wouldn’t even think about. I need to have a wee but an electric shock is going through my right leg when I try to move. What can I do? Just hang on until the pain eases, I suppose. I suddenly have a new respect for disabled people,

These last few days it is my right leg that is throbbing quietly with an ache that gnaws at the inside of my thigh and makes it difficult to walk and also to sleep. Another interesting thing is that while I’ve been researching the issue over on Google and YouTube, looking for exercises that might help, a number of those mysterious things called ‘cookies’ have clearly latched themselves to my iPad because everywhere I go on the internet, I find little adverts from someone who has discovered the ‘real’ cure to back pain and sciatica.

I can download their quick self-help guide and even sign up (for a small fee) to their regular pain free back sessions and discover the ‘secret’ to a pain free life.

The other thing about this trip is the weather. It’s cold! We have been coming to this part of France and renting this same property in Parçay Les Pins for a number of years but this is the first time we have ever had to crank up the heating. Week one, pottering about in our motorhome was pretty warm and week two was a bit of a mixture, some warm and sunny days and some cold and overcast. Today as I write this it has been cold and wet.

We drove down to a local fête and vide grenier this morning. As it is a bank holiday Monday in France, we knew that the local supermarket was only opening until 12:30 so we popped in to update our diminishing cheese supply. There was no bread of course, the locals had come in early doors and removed all that but at least we had a few ‘bake it in the oven’ loaves for later and of course, some cheese.

Just round the corner there was a local fête taking place. The roads were closed off as usual but from what we could see when we arrived, the rain had caused people to pack up and only a few solitary stalls remained. OK we thought, might as well drive down to our local restaurant for lunch.

The Station Restaurant which we both love was closed so as the rain was easing off we went back to the fête to take a closer look at the few stalls remaining. We found that on the other side of the village square there were some classic cars and motorcycles, all gleaming and wet. The bar was open and also a full multi course restauration was being served. All we wanted was the usual sausage and chips takeaway and a glass of red so we looked at the classic cars and motorcycles, watched the display by the local dancers and then went back home for some bacon and eggs.

Yesterday we had a lovely swim when the clouds parted for a short while and a burning hot sun appeared. Somehow I don’t think today will be swimming weather.

As usual on holiday I always come armed with a stash of books and this year is no exception. A few of the books are ones I have dug out of a box at home and are ones I haven’t read for a while. One of them was Toujours Provence, a sequel to the successful A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle.

A Year in Provence has long been one of my favourite books. There are no gunfights or car chases. It’s a very gentle read, about the author and his wife deciding to move to Provence to live. The story of how they settle into their new home and their new country is told in a very easy going and humorous style. They have problems with their heating, they have a new kitchen built, they buy a great stone table for outdoor meals, the author describes the personalities of the locals as well as the restaurants and the wonderful meals they have there.

The follow up, Toujours Provence, is a slightly different book. There is no story linking the chapters together. Each chapter is like a short essay about all things French. Some are interesting and some are not and sadly, many fall into the latter category. One exception however is a chapter about writing that fits in totally with my own thoughts on the subject.

For most of the time, it’s a solitary, monotonous business. There is the occasional reward of a good sentence -or rather, what you think is a good sentence, since there’s nobody else to tell you. There are long, unproductive stretches when you consider taking up some form of regular and useful employment like chartered accountancy. There is constant doubt that anyone will want to read what you’re writing, panic at missing deadlines that you have imposed on yourself, and the deflating realization that those deadlines couldn’t matter less to the rest of the world. A thousand words a day, or nothing; it makes no difference to anyone but you. That part of writing is undoubtedly a dog’s life. What makes it worth living is the happy shock of discovering that you have managed to give a few hours of entertainment to people you’ve never met. And if some of them should write to tell you, the pleasure of receiving their letters is like applause. It makes up for all the grind.

In Peter Mayle’s case, various people have decided to not only write to him but sometimes to even seek him out and ask for his autograph on their copy of his book. One couple of complete strangers even arrived and made themselves comfortable in his house while the author himself was out on the patio. He only found them when he came inside for a glass of wine.

As for me, I’m happy with the occasional ‘like’ either on Twitter or Facebook or even here on WordPress but wait a minute, is that some sunshine breaking through the cloud? Time for a glass of wine on the patio!

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Fact or Fiction: Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Here in our rented villa in Lanzarote it has been hugely relaxing. I did plan to do a lot of writing but instead I’ve been doing a lot of reading, swimming and drinking a lot of wine. To be fair I have done some writing. I’ve started two new short stories, one of which I have the story fully in my head and another that I’m not sure where it will end up. I’ve also worked on a couple of unfinished stories and blog posts. What has been interesting is that one of the books I’ve been reading by author John Grisham was actually John’s first novel and he says in the introduction that he was proud of his first book and also in particular, proud of finishing it as like me, he starts a lot of things but rarely sees them through to the end. Clearly, he’s sorted that problem out because he’s written a number of best selling books and all the ones that I have read, with one exception, have all been riveting page turners.

Grisham’s first book, A Time To Kill was based on his time when he was what he calls a ‘street lawyer’, someone hustling for cases. He explains in the introduction how the book was very autobiographical and inspired partly by dealing with similar cases and situations to the one he based the book on.

One of my unfinished stories was based on a radio play I wrote. I was hoping to get the BBC interested in it but sadly they declined. Pity, because I thought it was rather good and also it would have given me such a lot of pleasure to hear my work on Radio 4.

It was inspired by two things, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and a film starring James Stewart. The film was called Call Northside 777. In the film Stewart plays a cynical newspaper reporter who is asked by his editor to investigate a small ad in the newspaper. The ad asks for someone to come forward who has information about a murder to call the eponymous phone number. Stewart finds the person running the ad is an old lady whose son is in prison for a murder she claims he didn’t commit. She works as a cleaner and is saving up to put together a reward for anyone having any information. Ultimately James Stewart proves that the woman’s son was innocent in part by having a newspaper photo enlarged. A key witness, and I’m going from memory here, had claimed she was somewhere on a particular date but a photo in the paper’s archive showed the woman with a paperboy in the background holding a newspaper and the photo was enlarged to show the date, which in turn somehow proved that part of her testimony was wrong.

The funny thing is that today a photo like that would have been taken by a digital camera and its quite possible the picture when enlarged wouldn’t show such detail yet with a film camera it’s a different story. Take something like the original Star Trek for instance, shot on 35mm film in the late sixties and still looking clear and sharp today. The following series, The Next Generation, shot on video in the 1980s is not remotely as sharp and it’s the older series which looks better on today’s HD TV sets.

Photography has played a big part in theories surrounding the shooting of US President Kennedy in 1963. One lady, Mary Ann Moorman, took a polaroid shot of him being struck by a bullet. The photographer was on the left of the President’s limousine and many have conjectured that in the background to the President’s right, the figure of the assassin can just be seen. I’m personally not so certain but the picture does show the grassy knoll where a second shooter may have been lurking. The other shooter, the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald was over in the Texas School Book Depository. Was he shooting at the President or having a coke in the second floor lunch room?

Polaroid by Mary Ann Moorman

Next to Mary was another lady known only as the Babushka Lady. This lady has never been identified but she also filmed the assassination and her film, if ever found, would also have great footage of the grassy knoll area. The other day I saw a very clear picture of her on a JFK site I follow. The picture had been cleaned up by new AI technology which uses computer programs to clean up blurred pictures.

Going from fact to fiction, in my story it was a UK MP who gets murdered and the accused assassin’s mother who places the newspaper advertisement. In the real murder of Bobby Kennedy, the assassin Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy from a few feet away and various people grabbed him just as he fired his first shot. According to the autopsy, the fatal shot was fired from point blank range, possibly actually touching Kennedy’s head so how could Sirhan’s bullet, fired from a few feet away have been the fatal shot?

The JFK assassination has inspired quite a few conspiracy films. The most famous is the Oliver Stone film JFK which dramatises the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his probe into the murder. Stone uses the Garrison investigation to take the audience through the various stages and theories of the assassination, the number of shots, the direction of the shots, the Oswald look alikes, the murder of police officer JD Tippet, the mafia connection, the intelligence connection, the background to Lee Oswald and so on. In the film Garrison played by Kevin Costner meets an informant known only as X. I’m not sure if this ever really happened but X was based on L Fletcher Prouty, an air force officer who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy. He gives the audience a view of the assassination from a covert intelligence CIA background.

Another film based on the assassination was Executive Action, a phrase coined by the CIA itself and referring to their capability of assassination. The film was written by three screenwriters including Mark Lane who was the author of Rush to Judgement, one of the first books to criticise the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination. Lane also made a film version in which he interviewed many assassination witnesses.

In the film, a group of men discuss the Kennedy presidency and agree that Kennedy must be removed for various reasons, his civil rights stance, his nuclear test ban treaty and his decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Then they set out to obtain funding from various Texas oil magnates who are also not happy with President Kennedy.

Mark Lane was actually a lawyer and he defended a magazine which was sued by E Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars, because the magazine claimed that Hunt was part of a JFK assassination plot. In the following trial, Mark Lane won his case and the jurors demanded action by the government to investigate further. Nothing of course happened but that’s hardly surprising according to another book I have just read called Mary’s Mosaic. It’s about a lady who was murdered by the CIA or so the author claims, because she knew too much about the JFK assassination. The book goes on to show how the CIA was able to manipulate the media into not delving too deeply or even not reporting at all, stories like these. I’ll be reviewing the book in more detail in an upcoming Book Bag post.

Anyway, that’s enough about conspiracy theories for now. Is it worth digging out that radio play for some more work or is it time for another dip in the pool? I know this is not good for my street cred as a writer but, you guessed it, time for another dip in the pool!

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The Big 601

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s that time of the year when Liz and I depart for the substantially warmer climes of Lanzarote. I wrote a post a while ago called It’s C C Cold which really sums up my feelings about this time of the year. I really hate the cold. Yes, I admit I it, I hate this time of year. To be fair, this winter hasn’t been so bad in the north of England. Yes we’ve had to put up with two big storms but to be honest, they weren’t that bad, not in my part of the world anyway and apart from a few chilly days it’s not been so cold either. Even so, the cold isn’t my cup of tea.

A long time ago I relocated to a place called Newton-le-Willows. I worked in the GM Buses control room at the time and our control room was about to relocate to Atherton, a mere stone’s throw from Newton-le-Willows hence our move. I’d even been to Atherton depot and checked out the offices that were to house our new northern control room but then our bosses decided to relocate to Oldham instead. I’m not sure why but then when Atherton depot was closed down, reduced to rubble and a new housing estate was built on the spot, I pretty much understood.

Assured of the move to Atherton I went ahead and bought my new house and a short while later I was forced to drive to Oldham to report for duty at our new control room which was a heck of a journey. In the winter I left Newton which was usually raining or sleeting to find there was about 2 foot of snow in Oldham and most days of the winter I had to dig my car out of the snow before returning home.

Anyway, getting back to the present, Liz and I have jetted off to Lanzarote for a little winter warmth. I don’t mind flying, at least not the actual flying but all the other related stuff can be a bit of a pain. Going through customs and passport control for instance. I always take a bag on board the flight for my camera, iPad and laptop, all of which have to be extracted from the bag and placed in a tray in order to be X rayed. Can take you jacket off please sir? OK, jacket off. Watch off as well? No sir you can keep that on. Belt off? No you can keep that on sir. Happy days. My stuff disappears towards the X ray machine and I myself go through the electronic portal and then- Can you take your watch off please? Is there anything in your pocket? Yes, my wallet. Can you take your shoes off please? Are you wearing a belt? Take it off please. Bloody hell!

Further down the queue I’m trying to grab my laptop, put my shoes on and fasten my belt all before my trousers drop to my ankles. I can see the headlines now: Flasher arrested in passport control!

After all that the flight itself was rather enjoyable. When I left home that morning a tune was strumming around my head and it was still there as I buckled myself into my seat. I tried to hum it to Liz but she didn’t recognise it. Anyway, I glanced through the flight menu, decided what I would order later and settled down.

When we checked in online we had a bit of a panic. We had booked the flight about a year ago and we chose our seats right at the front. Since then however it looks like Jet2 have decided to use a different aircraft. It was an airbus something or other and it was one of those planes with a 2, 4, 2 set up. Two seats then an aisle, 4 seats then another aisle and the final two seats on the other side. Anyway, we had to choose our seats again and the only ones near the front of the aircraft were ones sat either side of the aisle.

Only the other day I was watching a documentary about the early days of passenger flights and the passengers boarding their aircraft were served food on proper plates and had tea in proper cups as well as wine in actual glasses. Our cheese and ham toasties were served on a piece of cardboard and the wine came with a plastic cup. So much for the advances in passenger transport.

Lanzarote may be just a big volcanic rock in the ocean but it’s a warm rock, a friendly rock and full of welcoming bars and restaurants and just the place for a winter getaway. Prices seem to have rocketed in the last few years though. Looking at my video from Lanzarote in 2021, most of the tapas at the Berrugo bar, a favourite haunt of ours were round about 4.65 to 4.85 euros. This year most of those are in the 7 or 8 Euro range and the meal we had there the other day was €8.95 and it was nice but so much smaller than it used to be.

The flip side was that it was January and we were sitting outside eating and drinking in the warm evening. That tune was still in my head and I tried it on Liz again but she still didn’t recognise it. Do you remember any words she asked? Sadly no . .

Anyway, moving on. I knew I had my 600th blog post coming up soon and this last week before getting my passport and driving licence together, sorting some euros and packing my case I tried to put together a few thoughts about what to write about. Not a lot came to mind and to be fair, I did have a lot on my mind, all those things I’ve just mentioned as well as sorting out our airport transfers and so on as well as getting a blog post ready for Saturday, the day before we left the UK. Imagine my surprise then when I realised that last week’s post, the one about romcoms was actually my big 600th blog post and I never even realised.

This week then is my 601st blog post, stretching back in a line to the 23rd of May 2014 when I created my very first post. It wasn’t anything exciting, just three paragraphs about the book I was writing and about to publish on Amazon. It was actually a pretty dreadful post and I like to think my blogs have improved a little since then. There is more to them certainly. A typical post for 2014 had 638 words, and a post in 2024 has on average 1626 words. I’ve had over 52,600 views and I’ve been shared over 12,000 times each on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit as well as other social media sites. Every post I’ve ever produced finishes with a little bit of a plug for my book Floating in Space or my poetry anthology so clearly I’m getting my message out there but as sales for either haven’t yet gone viral I’ve had to call Ferrari and tell them to put a hold on the new sportscar I ordered a while ago. I hope that when I can finally afford it, I’ll still be able to actually get in it as my back is giving me a heck of a lot of pain lately.

The plan for this holiday has been to take it easy and do a little light exercise like walking and swimming and try and slim down a little. So far I’ve managed to swim every day and when we visited Casa Carlos, another of our favourite restaurants, I found I had to move my trouser belt up to the next notch which must be a good sign.

Another plan was to make a big effort at writing and while I have done a little of that, the lure of the pool, the sunbed and a good book has so far been a little too much.

Yesterday I still had that tune in my head and I finally began to recognise a little more of it. The singer was Neil Diamond and yes, I finally recognised the tune.

“What is it?” asked Liz.

“Yes I’ve finally got it, it’s The Reverend Blue Jeans!”

“What?”

“You must have heard it. Neil Diamond, The Reverend Blue Jeans?”

“You total divvy! It’s called Forever in Blue Jeans!”

“Forever in Blue Jeans? Really?”

Oh well, I might save that for a misheard lyrics post. Watch this space!

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Noel Coward, Pools and Flying Creatures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This could really be a Sun Lounger Post  but for clarity I thought I’d give it the title above because it’s actually mainly about Noel Coward and his autobiographies.

Here in the quiet village of Parçay-les-Pins, Liz and I are having a relaxing time. The weather is good, well actually, it is fantastic. Sunny and warm, perhaps a little too warm but either way, the perfect weather for barbecues, eating outside, reading by the pool and relaxing.

Here’s the itinerary: Up at whatever time we want. Breakfast later, usually before 12 noon but not always, a quick washing up of the pots and then out to the pool. I’ve spent most of this holiday reading the autobiography of Noel Coward and it’s actually three books in one. The first part is his first autobiography, Present Indicative, part 2 is an unpublished segment of his unfinished third autobiography, Past Conditional and finally his second published autobiography Future Indefinite.

Book one, Present Indicative was published in 1937 and concerns Noel’s early years, his childhood and his first tentative steps into the theatre. It’s an account of a vanished world of repertory companies, writers, actors and actresses who have long gone and whose names mean little today in the 21st century. Even so it is hugely fascinating and interesting and as always enlivened by Noel’s supremely witty text. Noel was a homosexual in a time when homosexuality was illegal and most of his private life he keeps private although armed with a little knowledge of Noel we can read between the lines and assume that Jack Wilson who comes to live with him at his home, Goldenhurst in Kent, was presumably his lover.

It is pretty hot here in Parçay-les-Pins and after a little reading it’s time to slip into the cool waters of the pool and have a swim. Just lately, on a physical level I’ve been very inactive. I keep meaning to cycle or take a walk every day but I can never get around to it and I’m conscious my health is suffering. Now, every 20 minutes or so I slip into the pool and do 8 to 10 lengths and go back to my sun lounger for more relaxation and reading.

Book two, Past Conditional is an unpublished and unfinished autobiography that was intended to fill in the gap between his first two autobiographical books. It starts where the first one finished off, in the early 1930s and differs considerably in tone as it was written much later in the mid-1960s and Noel was able to look back at himself in the 1930s and examine himself from a more in depth perspective. Such a pity it was unfinished.

An interesting segment concerns the death of his brother who is scarcely mentioned in the text as he and Noel were never close. The brother was clearly never part of Noel’s theatrical world and the family sent him off to South Africa only for him to return and die of cancer.

In Parçay-les-Pins, we have been tempted to visit our favourite local restaurant however, a couple of things have stopped us. Firstly, it is very hot and the Station Restaurant is only open at lunchtimes so we have decided to wait until next week when the weather forecast is not looking so good. Why waste all that precious sun-bathing time?

Tea time at Parçay-les-Pins

Round about 6 pm or sometimes later, we tend to move from the pool back to the house and crank up the barbecue and decant some wine and eat in the warm evening. One of the great pleasures in France, at least for me, is to sit outside until the sun slides over the horizon and then in the darkness, a darkness here in the countryside so velvety and complete that the view of the sky and the stars is uninterrupted by any ambient light such as traffic or streetlights. Then I can look up at the great vista of the night sky, the heavens displayed above us in such a way that can never been seen from a great city like Manchester in the UK.

The big problem I have found is that this is just the time for the insects of the night to come out and nibble at my legs. One night Liz mentioned that she had some of those citronella candles that are supposed to deter the bugs so at once I dug a few out and lit them. It was rather nice for a while sat in the dark with the candles fluttering away with a rather nice scent. What happened was that the rather nice scent seemed to encourage even more bugs, especially a great number of what I can only describe as hornets. They were two to three times bigger than a UK wasp and then seemed to be honing in on the scented candles. Luckily, Liz is a master of the fly swatter and after a short while a whole flight of the hornets lay dead on the windowsill although by then, I had shot inside to safety.

The final book in the autobiographical series was Future Indefinite in which Noel recounted his time during the Second World War. He seems like many to have had a very low opinion of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, although to be fair to Chamberlain, he was doing his utmost to avoid the horrors of war. Sadly, and clearly unknown to Mr Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler did not want to avoid war, he was in fact wanting war very badly and happily it was Mr Churchill who understood this only too well.

In June of 1939 Noel who was a great globetrotter decided to take a tour of Europe in the light of Mr Chamberlain declaring ‘peace in our time’. He visited Warsaw and Danzig, Moscow, Leningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. He found that many of the people in those places were just waiting for Hitler to invade, particularly the Poles. In Russia he found a state that declared it had found freedom in Communism but was in fact quite the opposite as the Stalinist regime had choked any kind of criticism or free thinking whatsoever.

When war was declared Noel was asked to be part of an Anglo-French PR unit in Paris which he seems to have enjoyed for a while and then become a little bored with. He was sent on a tour of the USA to gauge opinion there on the war and was on his way back when the Nazis invaded France. He also did a tour of Australia and New Zealand to entertain troops and did charity work for various organisations helping those who were bombed out in London.

By far the most interesting part was his account of the filming of In Which We Serve, a very patriotic film showing the activities of a ship in the Royal Navy and the lives of those who served in her, all the way through to the ship’s sinking. In his very first autobiography, the names of the many actors and actresses he worked with meant very little to me but now I began to recognise a few names, John Mills and Richard Attenborough for instance and David Lean who co-directed the film with Noel although in actual fact, Lean directed most of the film when Coward became bored with the long-winded filming process.

Lying by the pool after a lot of reading and swimming I invariably start to feel tired round about the 4pm mark and tend to nod off although I’m usually awoken by flies buzzing around my ears. What insects seem to find fascinating about my ears I will never know but they always seem to strike just as I am nodding off.

Books, Sudoku and a pool. What could be nicer?

As well as the flies a great horde of swallows seem to be fascinated by our pool and round about 5pm they gather on the telephone line above us, divide themselves into squadrons and make various sorties down to the pool, skimming just above the surface or sometimes dipping into the water with either their wings or their tiny feet. This performance is very remarkable indeed and quite a few times I’ve had to duck as the swallows make their dives from just behind my head.

It actually reminded me about the Dambusters, the raid by 617 squadron of the RAF on the dams of Germany. They had to drop low over the waters of the dams and hit a consistent height of 60 feet before dropping their ‘bouncing bombs’.

Coward goes on to talk about Blithe Spirit, my favourite of Coward’s plays which was made into a film in 1945. Coward was not keen on the resulting film. David Lean added an ending in which Charles Condomine played by Rex Harrison dies and joins his ex-wives in the spirit world. Coward complained that David Lean had f**ked up the best thing I had ever written!  Personally, I loved it.

Final verdict of the Noel Coward biographies; fascinating, always interesting and hugely entertaining.

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Thoughts From A Sun Lounger (Part 15)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This year we arrived pretty early at the Eurotunnel check in at Ashford. We’d spent the night near the Bricklayer’s Arms, a pub in Kent that has a quiz night combined with a special food offer and it was a short hop down the M20 into the Eurotunnel terminal. We were pretty early and fully expected to be upgraded to an earlier train but no, it wasn’t to be. So we relaxed for a while, made a cup of tea and then finally drove down to the customs. Both the English and French customs are over here in England. We passed quickly through the English passport control and then on to the French where they take a much longer time. I’m not sure why, after all it’s not as if anyone is trying to smuggle immigrants into France, that happens on the way back.

Finally, after a cursory check by the French we drive down to the loading area and soon we are driving onto the specially built trains that take us under the channel and into Europe. Once we arrive we are free to drive off into France as of course the French customs have already checked us out.

A couple of years ago we came into France pretty late, drove for about an hour and stopped at a small motorhome stopping place which was part of a farm. We had found the place in our motorhome stopping guide and although it looked a little unloved, there was everything we required, a nice pitch, water and a place to empty our toilet. Liz had brought along some leftover Bolognese and we heated it up and it went down well with a glass of red wine which as you may know, is compulsory in France.

Parked by a lake in France

As I walked around, I noticed a sign which mentioned a ten euro fee for the night which I hadn’t seen in our guide but I guessed as the place looked a bit run down, that notice was probably an old out of date one. Next morning though at 9am (8am UK time) I realised that wasn’t the case when the farmer’s wife came hammering on the door wanting her money. She looked and sounded a little fierce so not wanting to upset her I coughed up the ten euros.

Last year we had a late night crossing and parked next to a crematorium and this time it was free. We usually get ready, have a cup of tea and then drive off and search for a picnic place or an aire where we can get breakfast under way. I’m not an early riser and breakfast is for me probably more of a brunch than breakfast. My personal rules are that breakfast must contain (A) eggs and (B) toast. After that I’m pretty easy going but secondary items must be things like bacon and sausages and tomatoes but really, I’m not fussy.

I’m not really a lunch person but the other day we decided to dispense with breakfast and have lunch. We took ourselves down to a French restaurant we had visited before. Their lunches come complete with a basket of bread which usually gets refilled when the supplies get low, a bottle of water, a bottle of vin rouge and a bottle of cider. The cider is fairly low alcohol so as I’m driving that’s what I tend to go for.

The starter is a buffet with things like salads, pâté, cold meats and so on. The main course was a choice of four dishes. Choice one was roast beef. Now I knew this wasn’t going to be roast beef that we know and love in England so that was out. Choice two was fish, no thanks. Choice three was something I didn’t understand even when the waitress repeated it so that was out also though Liz later said it was some kind of turkey dish. Choice four was steak.

Now the problem with steak is that in France, French chefs don’t like to cook a steak too much. If you ask for medium rare you usually get rare. If you ask for medium, you’ll get medium rare and if you ask for well done, well that’s an even bigger problem. When the chef hears well done, he immediately realises the customer is a dreaded ‘Rosbif’, an English tourist as clearly, no Frenchman in his right mind would order a steak well done. Now the chef might be eager to teach the unsuspecting Brit a foodie lesson, so you might find your steak arriving pretty much like an incinerated burnt offering. (It’s your own fault, you asked for well done!) Now some French chefs will go the other way and give you a medium steak but now I think about it, you’ll probably find it’ll be medium rare because the French chefs just don’t like cooking their food too much. This is where I made the fatal mistake. Faced with those food choices, I went for the roast beef. It came in a tasteless red wine sauce and it looked like it had hardly seen the inside of a roasting oven when the chef decided to whip it out and slap it on my plate.

The good news though was this; the resourceful lady in my life, Liz, slipped the beef into a plastic bag, we took it home and she fried it up later with some onions, a little seasoning and served it up on a slice of a French baguette.

Of course this being a French restaurant I didn’t starve. There was still the cheese course and then the sweet which customers help themselves from a plentiful choice displayed in a glass cabinet. Lunch? Think I might just stick with breakfast in future.

The first week of our holiday the weather wasn’t great although it was pretty warm in the sun but cool, very cool in the shade. Afterwards things got hotter and we were able to spend many relaxing hours swimming in lakes or relaxing in the countryside.

Here’s a pretty crazy random thought that came to me in my sun lounger. Before we left the UK, I trimmed my hair with my trimmers but the other day I looked in the mirror and after only a week in France my hair had grown quite considerably. It is Spring of course and everywhere in the French countryside, things are growing. On our travels we saw fields of poppies and other wildflowers blooming, could it be then that people are linked in to the forces of nature? Does my body know that the season of Spring is upon us and has reacted in sync with the universe?

Or perhaps I should just have given myself a number two cut rather than a three?

After two weeks away some sad news came to us, my mother died.

She was 93, suffered with dementia and lived in a nursing home and although many times during my visits to see her I was able to put a smile on her face I knew she wasn’t happy. She always asked me to take her home even though she was no longer able to remember where her home was. Death was a release for her, something that has set her spirit free again.

She was a tough lady and very, very determined. On one particular visit, many months ago we spoke about the warm weather and the rose buds that were on the bush outside her room. We talked about her sister Ada who was a keen cyclist and was sadly killed in a road accident many years ago. I asked her how she was sleeping and she gave me a big smile and said ‘you know I never have any trouble sleeping!’

As usual I asked her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. We did a simple one, the three times table. One three is three, two threes are six and so on. Round about nine she began to falter and looked suddenly distressed. ‘I can’t remember anymore’ she said sadly.

We talked about other things and then I told her it was time for me to leave. I felt a little disappointed as my attempt to get her to use her memory had backfired when her memory failed her.  The disappointment of not being able to remember such a simple thing was evident in her face. We said our goodbyes and I went towards the door. As I turned back for a final wave goodbye, she said something and I stopped to listen.

‘Ten threes are thirty’ she said. ‘Eleven threes are thirty-three, twelve threes are thirty-six’. She looked back and smiled. ‘I remembered after all’ she said. Like I said, she was a very determined lady.

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Thoughts From A Sun Lounger (Part 14)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s still only January and yet here I am writing another ‘Thoughts from a Sun Lounger’ post. I love it! Yes, I’ve left behind the cold and wintery UK for the Spanish island of Lanzarote. It may be just a rock peeping out from the ocean but it’s a warm rock, warm and sunny, well mostly. We’ve had hot and sunny days but we’ve also had some dull and windy ones. OK so we’re not freezing in the snow and ice of the UK but I was hoping for a little more sun that we have had so far.

Travelling here wasn’t so enjoyable. Things weren’t too bad on the aircraft as I had an empty seat next to me which gave me a bit of much needed stretching room but the experience at Manchester Airport was not good. Security, which is inevitable these days was an absolute nightmare. A huge overcrowded busy scrum. I had a lot of gadgets in my hand luggage, my laptop, my iPad and camera. Those had to be x-rayed separately apparently and placed in a plastic tray and then I had to put my wallet and trouser belt in another tray which all went through at different times because of the amount of other people trying to get their things scanned and x rayed too. Our small case was held back because of a suspicious item inside which turned out to be our sandwiches. The security guy tried to hand back the case to me while I had my laptop and my belt in one hand and was holding my trousers up with the other. As it happened he could see my predicament and so a Carry On moment was happily avoided.

Security is important in order to travel safely but it can be a pain. I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of people like Dan Cooper. Dan was one of the first aircraft hijackers and he did what he did not for religious reasons or to further any kind of political cause, he just wanted money. The media have named Dan DB Cooper although there is no evidence to support those initials. Dan hijacked a Boeing 727 in November 1971 after paying cash for a flight from Portland Oregon to Seattle using the name Dan Cooper. He passed the stewardess a note demanding 200,000 dollars and a parachute and threatened to explode a bomb unless he got it. He showed the stewardess the bomb or what appeared to be a bomb inside his briefcase and then sat back chain smoking to await the outcome.

Official FBI artist rendering of Dan Cooper

He released the passengers in Seattle and when the aircraft took off again heading to Mexico, a destination specified by Cooper, he ordered the crew to all go forward then opened the rear exit and jumped out. He was never seen again although in 1980 some of the ransom money was found by a young boy along the banks of the Columbia River. It’s a fascinating story and I’ve read quite a few articles about the affair as well as having watched a couple of TV documentaries. A number of people have been named as being Dan Cooper but so far, no one has been definitively identified. I’ve added a picture of Dan just in case you happen to recognise him although these days, if he is still alive, he will probably be getting a little long in the tooth.

It’s been over a year since we were last in Lanzarote and one thing I have noticed is that in quite a few places, prices have gone up considerably. In the Café Berrugo, one of our favourite places, the meals were looking a little smaller and rather more expensive. When we first came here the staff boasted that this was the only place on the island that didn’t charge for bread with a meal. Nowadays, they charge.

Our local contact who picks us up from the airport, his fees have gone up too and a big problem we encountered on our first trip out was that no one seemed willing to answer the taxi number that we have always used. I checked and yes, the number was correct. We later found out that, just like in the UK, it’s better to use the app. Yes Lanzarote has gone all hi tech and instead of calling the taxi company it’s better and easier to book a taxi using the app.

The villa we wanted to rent wasn’t available and as rental property seems to be snapped up pretty quickly round here, we went for a villa we have rented before. It’s a nice place within easy walking distance of the marina and all our favourite restaurants. It has a nice pool, nice rooms, a nice kitchen and a nice barbecue area. Great you might think but there is a lot missing. There was only one wine glass for instance which was a bit of a pain and we had to go out and buy two matching wine glasses so we could share our evening wine together. In rental properties there are always items left over from previous tenants, a little olive oil, a half used packet of pasta, some salt and pepper and so on.

When we last rented this villa there was nothing, the cupboards were bare. We even had to buy a scourer to use for washing up as well as washing up liquid. Seeing as we have spent quite a few thousand on this place on both of our visits, I do find that a little mean. Once, we rented a place in Portugal. It was an out of season deal and was very cheap compared to the prices at the height of the summer but when we arrived there, waiting for us was a bottle of wine, some milk, a bottle of water and a loaf of bread. There were various left over bits and pieces in the cupboards too and because of that we felt not only welcome but were happy to pass on our left overs to the next people too.

The really big issue for me though is the pool. As lovely and inviting as it looks, the pool is unheated. There is no cover either so any heat gained during the day, evaporates during the night. On our first morning at the villa a lovely warm day opened up before us. We had breakfast out on the patio. We relaxed in the warm sun for a while. Time for a swim. Not a good idea. The pool was not only freezing but incredibly freezing! I did manage to get in and do ten lengths but I came out a shivering, tingling wreck. Later it warmed up a little. It went from incredibly freezing to just freezing.

As I mentioned earlier, the weather has not been all warm and sunny. We had quite a few dull and windy days and even a little rain. The bad weather should be good for a writer like me, you might think. Less sunbathing by the pool and more writing. Yes, I thought that too but so far I’ve been a little slow in opening up my laptop and writing. I love reading and it’s great to settle down with a book by the pool and read. Then of course I’ve got emails that need reading, TikTok videos to watch and unlike this blog, I’ve no deadlines to force me to work on my books and screenplays. I got kind of excited for a while the other day when a producer showed interest in a screenplay of mine, then a few days later he declined to take it further. Pity because I had mentally planned most of my trip to Hollywood by then.

Another of my emails mentioned that I had won a prize on the national lottery. Now that isn’t much to get excited about at all as I’ve had emails like that before. You click on the lottery site and find you have won £6.70 on Thunderball. Even so I might as well check I thought. I clicked onto the lottery web site to find you can’t access the site unless you are in the UK! What the heck, I know its going to be £6.70 again but I did read about that unclaimed million pound win the other day. Nah, it’s £6.70. I know it is. Probably.

Think I might try that freezing cold pool again.

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