Tag Archives: anecdote

More Back Pain Stories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve been suffering lately with a lot of back pain and I thought I might as well have a bit of a moan here and just get things off my chest. I’ve had a little mild back pain for a long while. I don’t mind that, I really don’t. I’m retired so I’m officially old so it’s only right to expect a little pain. I can’t run anymore; in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I ran. Maybe it was for a bus or something, I don’t really know but it’s certainly not something I can do now.

The very first time I had back trouble was back in the 1990’s. You won’t believe it but this is what happened. I was in the bathroom cleaning my teeth and when I went to put my toothbrush back on the holder I dropped it on the floor. I bent down to pick it up and then something happened. I don’t know what it was but I couldn’t get up again and ended having to hobble back to the bedroom. I was off work for a long time. Nothing seemed to help and someone suggested I see a chiropractor, one of those people who manipulate your bones.

This particular lady did a lot of work on my back and towards the end of the treatment she slid her arm under my back and then popped a pillow on my chest. My first thought was that she was going to suffocate me with the pillow. I know the two of us hadn’t really gelled but suffocating me, that was a bit extreme. Anyway, she urged me to shut my eyes and relax and then did exactly what I wasn’t expecting, she jumped on me and my back made a very loud cracking sound.

I didn’t feel any great improvement but not long afterwards I was able to go back to work. Fast forward to earlier this year. We had jetted off to the island of Lanzarote for some winter sun and warmth. The flight over there was pretty comfortable but the flight back was five hours of pain (the aircraft was delayed for an hour on the runway) going from slightly uncomfortable to highly painful. I’m sure that is what has set me off on the present trend of back pain.

A few weeks ago, Liz and I were in one of our favourite eateries, Olivers. We were dining there before going over to the Victoria pub to watch a band that we really like, The Boogie Brothers. The meal was excellent as usual and when I heard Angela, the boss lady of the restaurant behind me, I twisted round to ask for the bill and that’s when I realised that I had made a big mistake. Something had happened in my back. It wasn’t a crack or a twang. There was no moment of something giving way but my back began to hurt, so much so I could hardly walk. I staggered out of the restaurant looking and feeling like a complete cripple. I never made it to the concert, I had to call a friend and ask him to drive me home.

That was certainly a low point, not just the pain but the embarrassment of staggering out of one of my favourite eateries. Hope the owners didn’t think I was drunk.

Here’s another thing about back pain, how it affects your decision making process. The other day we were in Ego, another favourite eatery. I happened to pull my phone out of my pocket and a handkerchief slipped out at the same time. What could I do? Well, in the old days, my younger days, I’d just bend down and pick up the handkerchief. Easy! Today, it isn’t so square cut. Firstly, I can’t bend down, I just can’t reach it but the more I try I will just attract a lot of attention. What is that old guy up to? If it was a tissue, a paper hanky I would probably just leave it there. A proper hanky though and I would want to retrieve it, especially if I happened to have a runny nose. I could try and spear it with a knife or fork or I could kick it over to where Liz could grab it, assuming she wouldn’t mind picking up my slightly grubby hanky. Yes, we old guys have to make decisions like this all the time.

Finally, despite having little faith in some of our medical professionals I decided to try for an appointment at the doctors. I got in to see the practice physio and he seemed to take a little more interest in me this time. He actually decided to have a look at my back and to actually probe it with his fingers looking for the sore spots. As things happened, I was feeling pretty good that day and though I was a little sore, no amount of pressing could find any painful areas although they were there, I assured him.

He sent me off for an X ray, the results of which apparently take two weeks to get over to the surgery. Perhaps over in the X ray department they haven’t yet heard of email.

In the meantime I decided to take up an offer of acupuncture from Liz’s daughter, Zoë. Acupuncture works like this; the body is made up of two energies, the yin and the yang and acupuncture tries to balance the energies out, so healing whatever ails you. Those energies flow through meridians or pathways in the body which can be accessed and balanced by inserting tiny needles.

I lay down on the special bed in Zoë’s clinic and she chatted away quietly as she slipped in the needles. Some slipped in painlessly, others actually hurt which apparently is a good sign as those are the spots that will really help.

Later I felt better, again there was no ‘I’m cured’ moment but I did feel that my back had eased a little.

Another thing that interests me about my situation is that like a lot of people these days I look for solutions on the internet. As most things in cyberspace are connected especially by those cheeky little things called cookies, most of the adverts that I see online now seem to be about amazing cures for back pain. Everywhere I go I seem to be bombarded by items like the new miracle formula capsules that have enabled some old guy to take long walks again or some amazing potion that has not only enabled some arthritic old biddy to get out of bed but also to walk to the shops again, pain free!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said earlier, I don’t mind a little pain. It’s only to be expected when you’re getting older but I’m not yet daft enough to expect a miracle cure.

Still, how much were those miracle cure pills again?

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6 Takes on Dreams

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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

My Dream

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

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

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

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

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

TV

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

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

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

The Novel

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

The Quote

The Hit Single (John Lennon; Number 9 Dream)

The Film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sandwiches, Questions and New Technology

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back here in Manchester it was nice to have a few days to myself after Christmas and New Year. One thing I tend to eat a lot of when I’m alone is sandwiches. Yes, I’ve always loved the humble sandwich. As a child I took sandwiches to school, either ham, cheese or corned beef, almost always on white bread. Occasionally I’d have a salmon or salmon paste sandwich but generally salmon or any kind of fish just isn’t my cup of tea.

In a quiet moment during the Christmas holidays, I was skimming through Pinterest and came across a pin for a hot pastrami sandwich. I can’t say I’ve ever had pastrami either on a sandwich or not but the thought of one brings to mind American films where the characters go into a New York delicatessen to eat.

In the film When Harry Met Sally the two main characters, played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, visit a real deli for the film’s most famous scene. It’s the one where Sally shows Harry how easy it is to fake an orgasm by demonstrating it there and then in the deli. According to Wikipedia, the location was actually Katz’s Delicatessen at 205 East Houston Street in Manhattan. Also, just while I’m in the mood for dishing out useless information, the lady in the film who says to the waiter, ‘I’ll have what she’s having‘ when Meg Ryan, who played Sally, had finishing orgasming was actually director Rob Reiner’s mother and the line was suggested by Billy Crystal who played Harry.

Woody Allen’s characters spend a lot of time in New York Delis. In Broadway Danny Rose the film opens up in another actual deli, this time the Carnegie Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue across from the Carnegie Hall, where a bunch of comedians discuss a well known theatrical manager called Danny Rose who has had a sandwich named after him in that very place.

As a great fan of the sandwich, I reckon it would be pretty cool to have a sandwich named after me and in a previous post I put forward for consideration a sandwich of my own creation.

The Ham, Cheese and Coleslaw Higgins Special.

I prefer this with a fresh white bap but it’s equally as good with a brown bun; split and butter it, slap on some thinly sliced honey roast ham, then some grated cheddar and to finish off add a generous portion of coleslaw. Settle down, tune the TV onto your favourite channel, pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy. Give it a try, it’s lovely.

After writing the above I decided to pop to the shops and pick up some pastrami and cheese so I could have a go at making that hot pastrami sandwich I mentioned earlier. On the way out I picked up one of those free supermarket magazines. On the back page there was a question-and-answer article with a celebrity. The celeb in question was Fearne Cotton who I have to say, I’ve never heard of but anyway, here were her questions and I thought I’d have a go at answering them myself

Tell us about your new book.

Well, I don’t have a new book, just an old one, Floating in Space which you buy from Amazon. It’s about a young lad back in 1977 who gets fed up of his boring office job. Why not buy yourself a copy and help me out with that big electric bill I just received?

Best advice on keeping a positive outlook.

Well, I’d have to refer you all to my spiritual mentor Marcus Aurelius. He said that you and I have power over our minds but not external events, so any pain you might feel about any situation is not caused by the situation itself, but by your own thoughts which are under your control. Wow, bet you weren’t expecting philosophical stuff in this post, were you?

And your first novel is coming out in June 2024.

Actually, no it isn’t but if I manage to pull my finger out, I might have a short story collection ready round about then.

Who is left on your celebrity wish list for the Happy Place?

It turns out the Happy Place is a podcast which Fearne runs so if I was having a celeb on my podcast who would I ask? Lewis Hamilton perhaps. I’ve never seen a decent interview with him. Then again, I wouldn’t mind having Oliver Stone on for some serious chit chat about cinema and the JFK assassination.

You’ve got a busy schedule. How do you unwind?

Busy schedule? I don’t think so. I don’t even know what a busy schedule is.

As a vegan, what are your tips for anyone wanting to try a plant based diet?

A plant based diet? Listen, plants are for pots on the windowsill or out in the garden. I have grown chilli peppers before now which are great in a dish like chilli or curry. I’ve even grown small lemon trees from a pip but I’m still waiting for that first lemon. A plant based diet? I don’t think so.

What is your go to dish for those evenings when you’re stuck on what to cook?

Well, chilli and rice is one of my favourite dishes. I tend to start it in the morning in a big pan and then throw it all into the slow cooker. For something quick I usually have a jar of pesto in the fridge so I’ll just cook some pasta, throw in the pesto and then serve with parmesan. Of course, there is always the pastrami sandwich.

What are you most looking forward to in 2024?

Let me see, there’s our trip to Lanzarote in a few weeks. I look forward to the summer when we’ll once again be taking our motorhome over to France but most of all I’ll be looking forward to some warm weather. I really do hate the cold.

New Technology

I think I’ve written before about my brother and how when we were younger, we were always swapping things. My brother, whose name is Colin although I always call him Jimmy (I’m not sure why) still swaps things today, mostly with his friends. He recently came into possession of a television set which he didn’t actually want. It was quite a big TV set, much bigger than mine and so I offered to swap a portable TV set which I knew he had always wanted for this new, bigger TV set. He wanted the smaller portable because it had a built in VHS player and he wanted to play some of his old VHS tapes. Anyway, we did the swap and I plugged in the TV set which seemed to be working well and all seemed ok. Later I decided to set it up properly and to link it to my trusty old DVD recorder.

It’s a long time since I bought that DVD recorder and technology has moved on quite considerably since then. Back then the universal connecting element between TV sets and DVD players and set top boxes and so on was the SCART plug. These days it seems to be something else, the HDMI plug. Anyway, I shifted furniture about as I realised the new bigger TV wouldn’t fit on the old TV stand so I shifted more stuff about and put the TV on an old computer desk but I still struggled to fit the DVD recorder into the same area. Then I realised the new TV didn’t have a SCART socket. It did have an AV socket though but even though I had an AV lead I just couldn’t get the two devices to connect together.

A few years ago, I was in Currys or some other kind of TV technology hardware store and when I told the shop assistant that I wanted a new TV with a DVD player, He told me to forget about that as a DVD player was ‘old technology’. Of course, I could see his point, why buy a DVD when you can download a film or any TV show to your hard drive without a shelf full of discs? Even so, I had to tell the guy to go away because the thing is I actually like old technology, I like DVDs, I like their special features, I like the director’s commentaries and the ‘making of’ documentaries.

That night I ended up flipping through the TV channels because there was nothing much worth watching and to watch one of my DVDs I would have had to put everything back together with my old TV just the way it was before.

Oh well, that’s enough TV for today. Might as well give that hot pastrami sandwich a try.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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My Week with Man Flu

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s been a tough week for me, stricken with man flu, hanging at death’s door. I managed to get through but only just.

Friday was another cold and wet day here in the north west of England. We had planned to dine out at a nearby Italian restaurant and then walk over to the Pier Inn for a few beers and listen to the music. I wasn’t feeling at my best even though Liz and I knew our friend Ray would be performing and we do like his music. There was a 30% off deal at Allegria, the Italian restaurant in question but the catch was this: to get the 30% off, diners have to book a table 24 hours in advance. We hadn’t booked and that meant paying the full price. There was only one thing for it, I had to call for help. I quickly dialled the Northern Association of Tightwads and I was soon through to an advisor.

I outlined the situation and he answered immediately. There were two possible options, I could stay at home or I could try to bluff it out.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Bluff it out! Tell them you called up yesterday and booked the table. Make out they have lost your booking and insist they honour it.”

Knowing the guys in Allegria I knew they were a little touchy about their offers. It was always important to check the small print because if you didn’t meet the criteria, they wouldn’t give you the offer. Anyway, I wasn’t feeling too good and thinking about it, I suspected even then that I was suffering with the lethargic symptoms of pre-man-flu. What the heck, we had some leftover cottage pie in the fridge so after a quick look outside and taking in the cold and windy evening we gave it all a miss and stayed in.

I didn’t sleep well that night and the next morning I had a sore throat and headache and then the sneezing began. My worst fears were confirmed: I had man flu.

A quick look around the bathroom and I found a couple of old cough mixture bottles which was handy and in the kitchen I still had some Lemsips left. That might just keep me going I thought. It wasn’t going to be a good day. I dragged myself outside and filled up the coal scuttle. Then I raked out the ashes, got some wood together and finally got the fire going. A lot of people think it’s great to have a real fire and it is nice I must admit but it takes some time and effort to get it going, which is not ideal when you’re suffering with one of the most deadly illnesses known to man.

Soon the flames were roaring in the hearth and that felt good but the effort had worn me out. For a moment I thought about calling the emergency services but of course, these days our NHS emergency services are really stretched. Of course, I know they would help and be sympathetic but one of the problems the ambulance services have to put up with are these idiots suffering with inane things like the common cold or a headache who call for an ambulance. OK, I know I’m hardly in that category but I thought I’d try and brave things out, for a little while anyway.

The next day I was worse but I was able to light the fire again and watch the qually for the Mexican Grand Prix. It was a good qually but sadly my current favourite driver Alex Albon didn’t do too well despite a good showing in the practice sessions. It was great to see the two Ferraris both on the front row though. I managed to drag myself through the day, staying close to the fire and dosing myself with Lemsips and whisky. A few times I felt really poorly, constantly sneezing and coughing and the cold sweats and shivering were dreadful. That morning I reached out to call for the ambulance a few times but ultimately I just said to myself, come on Steve, we can get through this.

By Sunday I was feeling slightly better. I wasn’t getting much sleep but the sweating had eased off. The headaches were down to bearable and the only real problem was the constant sneezing and coughing. That seemed to ease off later and Liz reminded me that we had booked to go to a church charity night. I wasn’t sure whether I could make that but the thing was, we had already paid for two £5 entry tickets. There was only one option, I had to call the emergency hotline for the Northern Order of Tightwads again and I got through quickly.

“Hello, Northern Tightwads, Yul B Allright speaking, how can I help?”

I quickly outlined the situation to Yul and his immediate response was “Looks like an open and shut case to me Steve. Are the tickets refundable?”

“Sadly no,” I answered.

There was a long intake of breath on the line. “That’s your problem straight away Steve. If you don’t go to this function, you’re out of pocket by £10. I know you’re not well and I take my hat off to you even considering going out when you’ve got man flu, I know how tough that can be but it seems to me that shelling out £10 and getting nothing in return is just plain wrong. I’ll bet you’re not happy about that yourself.”

“Well, I didn’t actually pay for the tickets myself.”

“What?”

“Yes, my girlfriend paid for them so I myself won’t actually lose out but I don’t want to see her lose out either.”

“Wow, that’s a tough situation Steve. Firstly, let me congratulate you, making sure advance payments are paid by others is one of the great tenets of Tightwadism as you know. Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I need some further advice. I’m gonna make a few phone calls and get right back to you.”

“Thanks Yul.”

I put the phone down feeling already that a great weight had been lifted.

I made myself a Lemsip, put some more coal on the fire, wrapped myself in a blanket and waited for the call. I wasn’t well and on top of that, Liz had already told me what I could do if I didn’t turn up that night and it wasn’t pleasant. I did think of telling her that what she suggested doing with the coal scuttle was a medical impossibility but I decided to keep that to myself. Not long afterwards the phone rang.

“Steve Higgins,” I answered.

“Yul B Allright here. Steve, I’ve spoken to some colleagues and what we think is that health situation permitting, you should get down to that charity do.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yep. I know you didn’t buy the tickets but what we have to think about is our ideology here at Northern Tightwads. We could just say OK, you didn’t buy the tickets and of course your girlfriend, Liz, isn’t even a member but this a wider issue. Culture and ethos are important here and even if the loss won’t be sustained by a member of our group, paying for something and not getting the benefit of that payment is not acceptable. We think the only course of action for a true tightwad is to go down to that function and enjoy what you’ve paid for.”

“Well, there is a hotpot supper included in the ticket price.”

“That just confirms it Steve, you’ve got to get down there and make sure you get that hotpot and if humanly possible, make sure you get an extra portion!”

I was moved for a minute.

“Yul, you’re right. I just don’t know what to say. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your advice. No way we can leave that hotpot uneaten. Thanks Yul.”

“Anytime Steve. All of us at Northern Tightwads are right behind you and just remember.”

“Remember what Yul?”

“Anytime a round of drinks need buying, just make sure you need to visit the gents.”

“Thanks Yul, I’ll remember.”

We had a good night at the charity night, we even won a fiver and a bottle of gin in the raffle. I even started to feel better but that night things took a turn for the worse. I awoke at five in the morning with a major coughing and sneezing fit. I wrapped myself up in my dressing gown and staggered to the lounge. The fire had gone out but it was still warm in the room. I settled down with another Lemsip and watched the Grand Prix. Local star Perez got himself shunted off at the first corner much to the dismay of the crowd. The Ferraris tried to hang on to the tail of new three times world champion Max Verstappen but sadly failed and Max won again.

I watched a shed load of TV until about 9am when I went back to bed for some more much needed sleep.

When I awoke later my sore throat had eased a little, my temperature was down and the coughing and sneezing had begun to subside. I checked my pulse.

Yes I thought, I might just get through this.

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Writing and What Happened in 1977

Posted on by Steve Higgins

1977 was a different world. There was no internet and there were no mobile phones. The only phones were landlines and they were big and heavy with great rotary dials with which you had to laboriously dial a number. As more people wanted telephones they needed more numbers and so numbers got longer and longer. 061, the dialling code for Manchester became 0161 and the code for London which was 01 became two new codes 071 and 081

I should tell you that I’m actually quite interested in telephones, especially those big heavy ones with a dial. I used to collect them and in fact I have quite a few; my two favourites are an old Bakelite phone from the 1940s and a Trimphone from the 1970s. The Trimphone was a new style telephone created by BT. It was a wedge-shaped light phone and the handset fitted neatly across the dial. Although it’s a phone I’ve always associated with the 1970’s, it was actually first introduced in 1965 and had a warbling ring tone instead of the traditional bell. The original versions had a green dial which lit up in the dark although this was discontinued due to concerns about radiation as the phosphorous which gave off the green glow was energised by a small tube of tritium gas which was mildly radioactive. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought anything could be ‘mildly’ radioactive but happily my two trimphones do not glow in the dark.

Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:

Once in 1977 I had a bit of a crush on a girl named Anne. I was a bus driver and my conductor had gone out with Anne a few times before moving on to someone else. I asked my friend Des for her number and I called her up one evening. I didn’t have a phone so I had to use a call box. I dialled the number and the phone rang for quite a while and finally someone answered.

‘Can I speak to Anne’ I asked.

‘Anne?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Anne. Tell her it’s Steve.’

‘Steve?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Steve.’

‘Just a minute.’

I could hear someone in the background asking who is it? And someone saying it’s for Anne and I had the feeling then that Des was playing a trick on me but hopefully the girl, whoever she was, had gone to fetch Anne.

A vintage bakelite telephone bought in France

I waited for quite a while and soon the pips went on the phone and I had to put more money in. I was still hanging on when the pips went again and in went my last coin. After what seemed like ages Anne came to the phone. I told her I didn’t have any money left so I quickly asked her out, she agreed and we set a place to meet, just before the phone finally cut off. When I finally went out with Anne, she told me that the phone wasn’t hers, it was her auntie’s phone and her auntie lived around the corner so Anne’s cousin had to nip round to Anne’s house, tell her there was a phone call and bring her back to the phone!

I remember telling Des about it and he laughed his head off. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was her Auntie’s phone, you twit?’ I said.  Des just laughed even more.

Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book Floating in Space. Floating was set in the year 1977 and as I mentioned earlier there was no internet, there were no mobile phones and wireless was an old-fashioned name for the radio. What else happened in 1977?

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the USA and he had won the election the previous year, taking office on January 20th, 1977. He was a peanut farmer who defeated President Gerald Ford who had served as President after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. As I write this, Carter is currently the oldest living former President.

In the UK the Prime Minister was Jim Callaghan. According to Wikipedia, he was the only Prime Minister to have held all the four main offices of state; Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and of course, Prime Minister.

A previous Prime Minister, Anthony Eden died in 1977.

Today’s blog is my 578th post over here on WordPress. It’s my 578th time of reaching out and showing readers a little of my work and hoping it might stimulate a few of you to click the links above and perhaps buy a copy of one of my books.

Creativity is important to everyone and my creative outlet is here in these weekly pages. For others it might be painting or photography. It might be working on a car or motorbike or even a little woodwork or home improvement. Creativity can take many forms, even making a post on Facebook can be creative. If you are on holiday and take a picture of a sunset and make it into a post, that is creativity. You can even take it further, crop the picture, add a filter to the image. Add a quote, Oscar Wilde is always good for one and so is Noel Coward or the big daddy of the written word; Shakespeare. The more you add the more creative you are. You can even write more on the post, another sentence, another paragraph, even another page. Soon you are on the way to a chapter, then more chapters and in time you will find that you have written a book. You’ve become a writer which, let’s face it, is a big achievement but then you need to write more, you need more pages, more chapters and more ideas.

Some people might write more than 578 posts, others may fall by the wayside after a mere eight, after all we all have things to do, jobs, work, life. All of that gets in the way.

Perhaps it’s time to get back to 1977:

On the 16th August 1977 at 6am, it was time for Elvis Presley to get some sleep. Night and day were reversed in Elvis’ world. He spent most of the night awake doing all the things he wanted to do. If he wanted to see a film at the cinema, he paid the cinema to run a film for him and his friends at night. He ate and played games at night, like the racketball he played with his step brothers and friends before going to bed that morning.

His fiancée, Ginger Alden was with him and Elvis who had trouble sleeping, took his usual assortment of sleeping pills before turning in. Sometime around 9am, Elvis awoke and told Ginger he was going to the bathroom. His bathroom was huge and he had made it into a truly personal and private place. In the bathroom was a circular shower. One wall was mirrored and fringed with those lightbulbs that one sees on the dressing table of a stage or film star and Elvis’ toilet things were clustered around the basin. The room was carpeted in purple and as well as a circular shower there was a couch and a TV set.

Elvis may have been sat on a chair reading The Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson or he may have been using the toilet however, sometime during the morning he keeled over and fell face down to the floor wearing only a pair of blue cotton pyjamas. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll had died.

A few months before Elvis died, my friend Chris and I decided to pack in our jobs and travel to Spain and look for work there. His sister had already made the trip and assured Chris that there was a big British contingent and plenty of jobs available in bars and restaurants. Accommodation was readily available too. Chris and I hitchhiked to London where we caught the boat train to Paris. We wandered about in Paris trying to get a ride further south but after waiting for days trying to get a lift, we caught the train down to Spain.

We had a big reunion in a place called Lloret de Mar with Chris’ sister. Two Scots guys fixed us up with a pension, a small place to live and we met them later in the bar and bought them drinks as a thank you. After a while I became a little fed up of buying them drinks, yes, they’d helped us get a place to stay but that didn’t mean I was committed to providing them with free beer for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure they appreciated being told that and afterwards even though Chris got on with them pretty well, I didn’t. The incident contributed towards a certain unpopularity on my part in the local community but at least it kept the cadgers from mythering me. Still, other newcomers to Lloret were pretty popular, they had money in their pockets and the local Brits didn’t.

Quite a few notable people died in 1977. Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Wernher von Braun, Roberto Rossellini, Marc Bolan and of course, Elvis Presley.

I stayed in Lloret for two weeks and it was fun. Every night was like a Saturday night but after two weeks I realised I didn’t just want Saturday nights. Sometimes I wanted a normal Tuesday night watching TV. Sometimes I wanted a Sunday night and my mother’s Sunday dinner and sometimes I wanted a rainy Thursday afternoon. After a few weeks in the sun I left Chris in Lloret, hitchhiked north through France and finally back to Manchester.

We didn’t have a telephone at home so I couldn’t call to say I was on my way back. I always remember knocking on the door of our house. Mum opened the door and said ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be gone for six months. ‘It didn’t work out Mum,’ I told her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. I threw your old bed out!’

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Funerals and a Star of England

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Before I went away on holiday at the beginning of May, I went to see my mother. She had lived in a care home since 2020 and suffering with dementia, she would alternate between periods of deep depression and confusion. The first words she would usually say to me are ‘where am I?’ or ‘when am I going home?’ The home she remembered though is her childhood home, one that she left behind many years ago.

On visiting just before I left for France, the staff took me aside and told me that Mum had only a month to live. She looked bright and cheerful, if a little thin but certainly not someone with only a month to live. Over two years ago they had told me the same thing. Then on another occasion they told me she only had six months left. Both forecasts were inaccurate. This one however, proved to be correct.

When Elvis Presley died someone approached John Lennon with the news and waited for his reaction. He reportedly said, ‘Elvis died ten years ago’. Lennon despite his peace and love image always struck me as a hard faced sort of man who cared little for the sensitivities of others. Those words of his came to me when I heard the news that Mum had indeed died. Her name was Mary and the real woman, the real soul or spirit that made Mary what she was, had either long gone or been obscured by dementia.

Still, even though I felt as though I had lost Mum a long time ago, I still grieved at her passing and of course there was a funeral to arrange. I don’t really know much about funerals and what they involve so I began to cast my mind back to other funerals I had attended.

When my Gran died the funeral service was held in Marple. I’m not sure why as it was nowhere near where my Gran lived or was buried. The journey from there to Southern Cemetery in Manchester was for me, a masterpiece of motor car management, juggling with high water temperature and having to dive into a garage to top up my car with water and then hurry along to catch up the funeral cortège.

At the graveside I noticed my Dad making signs to the two grave diggers and after the coffin had slipped into the ground and the final words of the vicar had faded, my Dad, a former grave-digger in years gone by, had a happy and joyful reunion with two of his old co-workers, much to the dismay of Mum who stood with me and cried her heart out. (Not your finest moment, Dad.) At least he thought better of introducing her to his friends which I thought he was going to do at one point.

My Uncle Raymond was my favourite uncle and my Dad’s best friend. When he died his funeral cortège took a detour past the British Legion, one of his numerous watering holes, and the staff and customers came outside to pay tribute as his coffin passed slowly by.

The funeral was sad and tearful and the wake was pretty similar. A lot of sad people, a lot of tears and my Dad, who had lost his best friend was devastated.

I was driving that day and was asked to run some long forgotten relative home. I did so and returned a short while later. Only twenty minutes or so had passed but when I returned, I returned to a happy, noisy, enjoyable party, full of laughter and fun. I don’t know what had happened in the twenty minutes I had been gone but I came back to exactly the sort of party that my Uncle Ray would have loved.

Over in France I called the funeral home. They assured me Mum’s body would be looked after and soon someone would give me a call about further arrangements. The next day someone did indeed call and we set a date. I called or messaged all the relations that I could and then waited for the next step. The next step never happened so I called the funeral home again. No rush they said, finish your holiday and then come and see us and we’ll set a date for the funeral. Set a date? But we’ve already done that, haven’t we? It turned out that the date I’d set was a date to speak to the funeral home’s financial advisor! Perhaps I was more stressed than I thought.

I was full of nerves as we approached the day of the funeral but I went back to some of my old Paul McKenna confidence building routines that I used to use before job interviews. I woke on the day of the funeral feeling calm and confident. Everything went as planned and it was good to see my cousins and other family members who I hadn’t seen for many years.

My mother was born on Black Thursday, the day of the Wall Street crash, October 24th, 1929. She was born in Cheltenham, I’m not quite sure why, perhaps my Grandad was there looking for work. The family lived for a while at 36 Bath Street in Hulme, a suburb of Manchester. They moved to the new council housing estate of Wythenshawe in the 1930s. It must have been a wonderful place then, surrounded by farms and country lanes. Mum was the eldest in her family, followed soon by, in no particular order, Ada, Beryl, George and Frank.

The war came in 1939 and being the eldest, Mum helped with the cooking and shopping and used to tell me stories of queuing at shops and ration cards and swapping ration coupons for the things you didn’t want for the things that you did. She told me she could tell the German planes from the British ones by the sound of their engines and when the blitz came, the family used to troop out to the bomb shelter, all except my grandad who under no circumstances Mum said, would he ever step in there.

When Mum left school, she worked in a series of local factories and then later worked in Manchester city centre. She used to meet my grandad in Piccadilly; he would be going home after a night shift at Evans Bellhouse in Newton Heath and she would be on her way to work.

In 1948 tragedy struck when her sister Ada was killed in a cycling accident. Mum was deeply affected and told me about it many times.

Happier times came when she married my dad in 1954 and although they had their ups and downs, they stayed together until he died in 2000.

Mum was the centre of our small family. She organised everything we did. She arranged all our family holidays to places like Rhyl and Prestatyn, Blackpool and Morecambe and all the seaside destinations of northern England. They were always caravan holidays and as we had no car we always travelled by coach. We took the dog with us and no matter what preparations were made Bob, our dog, was always sick on the coach. Myself, my brother and my dad all looked the other way and pretended the dog was nothing to do with us while Mum, always prepared as usual, cleaned up the mess.

She also arranged all the decorating in our house taking charge of the wallpaper and preparing all the surfaces for painting. Dad would appear in his overalls, do the painting and then Mum would clean everything up.

She was devasted when he died in 2000 but like always, she just carried on.

I used to ask her if she wanted any shopping and she would always say, when she couldn’t go shopping herself anymore, then she was finished.

Once, when I was living in Merseyside, she bought a new lawn mower from Argos and asked me to pick it up. I kept putting it off but eventually drove back to Manchester and down to Argos. I had the code she had given me but the staff told me it had been picked up. I insisted it couldn’t have been but they were equally insistent that it had.  I drove round to Mum’s and it turned out she had got tired of waiting for me and had picked it up herself. She had gone to Asda, got herself a trolley, pushed it to Argos, the staff put the mower in and then she pushed it home, returning the shopping trolley the next day.

When she began to suffer with dementia my brother and I looked after her with the help of carers and believe me, it was very difficult indeed. She would forget she had eaten and demanded more food. She complained that her clothes were not her clothes and after an illness which I personally thought might have been covid she moved into a care home.

Sometimes I’d visit her and she could hardly put two words together. Other times she’d be bright and happy and talkative but even so, her death was more of a freeing of her spirit than anything else.

A lot of the words above came from the eulogy I read at her funeral. I’d decided to finish with these words from Henry 5th by William Shakespeare: Small time but in that small most greatly lived this Star of England.

You might those words were perhaps a little inappropriate, after all, Mum wasn’t a king or a queen. She was a simple lady who loved her husband and children and did her best for her family. She was proud to be a housewife and a homemaker but I truly believe she was, in her own way, a Star of England.

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Memory, Memories and Memorabilia

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I got to thinking about memory the other day, after all memories are important. Our whole past experience is made up of memories so in effect, everything that has passed, everything that has gone before, exists only in memory.

My mother who suffers with dementia will be 93 later this year. Sometimes when I visit her she is talkative and chatty, other times not. A sad moment a few months ago was when her only words were please help me, intoned over and over like a ritual or a prayer. I left her feeling extremely saddened and upset that day but when I visited a few weeks later she was the complete reverse, bright, happy, talkative and chatty. She couldn’t remember her address, except for her childhood address, the one she left behind many years ago but still, she was bright and asked about her home and her garden and what about the rent? Was I keeping up to date with the rent?

The Auntie I never met.

I brought her a photo I had found of her sister Ada. Ada was a keen cyclist who was sadly killed in 1948 in a traffic accident on her bike. I showed her the picture and she knew Ada immediately telling me about her many achievements in cycling and also winning a place at the Manchester Central Grammar School for Girls.

The photo, as I had hoped, stimulated her memory and we talked for a while about the past and her long-lost sister.

Sometimes I wonder about my own memory. I forget names quite frequently and sometimes when Liz and I go to the pub quiz and try to identify celebrities in the picture round I end up saying things to Liz like ‘It’s the woman who was Mrs Peel in the Avengers on TV’ (one point for Diana Rigg.) Or ‘It’s the woman from the film Titanic’ (another point for Kate Winslet.) Or even ‘the guy who used to be on the breakfast show on Channel 4 with that woman who’s on Celebrity Gogglebox’. (Outstanding if you got Johnny Vaughn!)

The other day I was sorting out some of my old CDs. There wasn’t much on the TV so I popped one in the player. It was by Elton John called simply ‘Elton John’ and contains the hit single ‘Your Song’ and various other tracks. As Elton tinkled the ivories and began to sing, I realised I knew all the words despite not having listened to that album for many years. I’ve also got it on vinyl and when I was in my early twenties and discovered Elton, I played and played his records until my parents yelled up the stairs telling me to pack it in.

Memory is important too in today’s electronic devices. I mentioned in a previous post about how a shoot for one of my videos was curtailed because the camera’s memory card was full. I usually have a spare but on that particular day I hadn’t popped one into my camera bag. Result disaster! Well, almost disaster as I still had my spare camera. When I came to edit that particular video which was about Manchester Airport I also had a lot of unused video from previous visits as well as some video from the VHS days shot in the late 1980s so I was able to change direction a little bit and also to look at how the area has changed in recent years.

Going back further to the 1960s and 70s, my schoolfriends and I used to visit the airport regularly and go on to the viewing terraces to watch the aircraft land and take off. My old schoolfriend Steve used to be a real aircraft expert and when we made a video about the airport in 1986, he would comment on my photos saying things like ‘that was a 747 just arrived from Heathrow’ or ‘that was a Lufthansa 757 off to Munich’.

My mother too was pretty knowledgeable about aircraft, well, World War II aircraft anyway. Manchester was bombed in the war and mum’s suburban home of Wythenshawe was frequently hit as it was just up the road from the airport, a particular target of the Nazi bombers. The famous WWII pilot Guy Gibson did some of his training at Manchester airport, then called Ringway and mentions it in his autobiography, Enemy Coast Ahead. My mother says she could tell if the aircraft were British or German by the sound of their engines. The German bombers had a deep droning sound apparently.

A lot of my photographs are routinely backed up on Google Photos but recently they advised me about the new limits of their online backup service. From June 1st 2021, instead of free back up, that now only extends to 15 GB, after that we will have to purchase a plan with Google to continue our image storage. All my laptop images are backed up at Flickr.com but again, that isn’t a free service, I pay a yearly fee. Of course, I could just cancel but then how could I access my images? Well, it just so happens that all my images and videos are backed up on my three hard drives but Google is so much easier to use. If I want a picture for a blog post I tend to just search my Google photos rather than search around the house for my drives and then plug them in. When I went to back up my 2021 photos and videos the other day, I realised I didn’t have enough memory on my current drive so now I’ll have to get another one.

Loss of memory is a regular theme in the film world. The Bourne Identity and its sequels were about an intelligence agent who wakes and does not know who he is. Matt Damon plays the lead character who is picked up by a fishing boat near to death suffering from bullet wounds and total amnesia. The Bourne films are a series I’ve always wanted to watch but I never seen them. (Note to self- set the TV recorder next time The Bourne Identity appears on the TV guide.)

Hitchcock made an amnesia themed film in Spellbound starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. A doctor, played by Gregory Peck, arrives at a mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director but Ingrid Bergman discovers Peck is an imposter. Peck’s character fears he may have killed the former director but cannot recall anything. Not my favourite Hitchcock film but it’s an interesting one with dream sequences designed by surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

Finally, here’s my favourite amnesiac film, Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. It’s a film not often seen on TV and now and again I’ll get out my old VHS copy if I want to watch it. Based on the book by one of my favourite authors, James Hilton, the film concerns a shell-shocked war veteran, played by Colman, recovering in a sanatorium during the latter days of WWI. The man cannot remember his past but makes a new life with Greer Garson. After they are married the man now known as Smithy, journeys to Liverpool to see a newspaper editor about a story he has written. In the city Smithy is hit by a cab and knocked unconscious. When he awakes all memory of Smithy has vanished but his true identity returns.

He returns home to his lost family but what was he doing in Liverpool. Where has he been in the years since his wounding in the trenches of the Great War?

At times a little sentimental, I’ve always loved this film. Colman is wonderful as the man who rejuvenates his family’s business, becomes a respected MP but cannot find happiness until he knows what happened to him in those few lost years.

Here’s a last thought on the subject of memory. When you are at the pub quiz and are struggling to recall the name of the guy who played Jason King in TV’s ‘Department S’, never say to yourself ‘I can’t remember’. According to Paul McKenna, the guy who produced all those books and tapes about confidence boosting which I used to use when preparing for job interviews, you are sending a message to your subconscious saying ‘don’t remember’. What you should say to yourself is ‘I’m not sure at the moment but the answer WILL come to me soon.’ That way, you’re sending a positive message to your subconscious telling it to get working on that long-forgotten name.

Now, who did play Jason King? Peter Wyngarde! Told you it would work!

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A Few Holiday Reflections

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always a bit of a let down when you return home after a holiday. The weather isn’t that great, there’s a whole lot of washing to do of your holiday clothes. You start wishing things like, maybe we should have had another week? We were travelling in a motorhome and I start to think why didn’t we go there or go to see that? There’s always the next trip of course and the good thing is that as I’m now retired, I don’t have to go back to work. Anyway, while I’m feeling a little deflated looking out at the rather dull suburban view from my window it might be a good idea to take a look back at the last few weeks in France.

One of the things I’ve always liked about France is their laid-back lifestyle. Over there, and perhaps more so in the rural areas than the big cities, everything stops for lunch. No, not a quick sandwich grabbed on a 30-minute break, lunch times in France are something to be enjoyed and for care to be taken over. Shops close between 12 and 2 pm and it’s only in recent years that some supermarkets will stay open during those times.

At picnic tables all over france, the French descend on sunny days with huge containers of food and wine. Tablecloths are laid and the food is eaten and enjoyed at leisure.

Restaurants in France always have a plat du jour, a dish of the day and many are served as part of a formula menu comprising of starter, main, dessert and/or cheese. I always thought that the plat du jour was something a French restaurant had to serve but I couldn’t find any evidence of that on the internet so perhaps it’s just a tradition. Plenty of bread is always served with a French meal and it is usual for the waiter to top up your bread basket when he or she sees it is empty.

My favourite French restaurants are those which have a buffet starter. There is usually a small choice of main courses but over on the buffet table there will be a large selection of salads, cold rice and pasta dishes, pâté, cold meats in various dressings, shredded carrots and chopped beetroot. I try to avoid the various fishy dishes like cold rice and tuna but I usually find my plate piled with goodies.

House wine is usually served by the pichet, small jugs. Very small at 25cl and larger ones at 50cl. On hot summer days I tend to go for the house rose but more often than not Liz and I will share a pichet of red.

Cheese in a French restaurant with a pichet of vin rouge

Our first French meal this year was in the Buffalo Grill, a franchised restaurant you will see all over France. It’s like an English steak house serving steak, burgers, ribs and so on. A small salad in a bowl came first before our choice of mains. Mine was an excellent cheeseburger, Liz had a steak and the dessert was some ice cream.

In the town of Saumur, we had our first proper French lunch. The starter was the lovely French buffet I talked about above and the main was confit duck for Liz and a chicken in curry sauce for me. Curry is an unusual dish to find in France as the French don’t seem to go in for spicy food. The curry sauce was to me very mild and more of a slightly curry flavoured cream sauce. It came with fries and the traditional green beans and I have to say, I do love French green beans.

Curried chicken and frites

For dessert we ordered ice cream for me and cheese for Liz and we split the two between us. It was a lovely meal although perhaps a little too much for someone like me who rarely eats lunch.

Most weekends we scour the internet and find ourselves a few brocantes or vide greniers to visit. Vide greniers or car boot sales are usually part of a village fete and there will also be music, wine and food to be found. I remember going to one a few years ago which was interrupted by a pretty heavy shower of rain. In the UK, the vendors would have quickly packed up and been off but in France it was a different story. Plastic covers were quickly whipped out and people took shelter in the food and bar area. Liz and I stood at the bar and drank a glass of cheap red wine and when the skies cleared, we carried on looking for bargains.

I like travelling in our motorhome but after a few weeks living in a somewhat cramped environment I was glad to get to our French villa. I say our French villa even though it is a rental property. We have stayed here a couple of times before and it is ideally placed for everything we need although a bar or restaurant within walking distance would be nice.

The sun going down after a day by a plan d’eau

At the villa I usually try to act like a writer. I get up fairly early and after a cup of tea and a quick scan of my emails on my iPad I crank up my laptop and do some work on my writing projects. In my draft blog folder I’ve currently got eight blogs awaiting attention. Most are just ideas but some are partly written blog posts that need an injection of effort and inspiration to get them finished. The sequel to Floating in Space is still only half finished but I still chip away at it, a few pages at a time as well as a few other stories, screenplays and poems that all need urgent work.

After a little of that it’s time for a late breakfast, brunch might be a better word, and to have a swim and a read by the pool. I remember once reading about Noel Coward that while staying at his house in Jamaica, he rose at 8 am and worked at his writing until 12 when lunch was served. No wonder he produced a fine body of work while I have only produced one novel and one poetry anthology.

A big disappointment on this last trip was the failure of one of my video cameras, my GoPro Hero. I had intended to put together another travel video and at first, I thought it wasn’t going to be possible as I hadn’t shot enough video. However, looking back through my video files I see I’ve got hours of unused video from our previous trips so perhaps I can just cobble something together after all.

Looking back through some of my old video I came across what was quite a scary moment. We were travelling through the town of Rouen, a lovely old town but quite a busy one. I’m always a little nervous driving in big cities, especially in an area where there is lots of traffic and also when the road goes into multiple lanes. I’m pretty good at driving on the right-hand side but in multiple lanes I find myself drifting to the left-hand lane and I usually have to say to myself, Steve, get over to the right.

As you leave Rouen, there are numerous roundabouts and the French have come up with an interesting congestion busting idea. If you are carrying straight on you can duck under the roundabouts down a tunnel and in fact, Google maps which we often use, tends to direct you down into the tunnels. The big problem is that our motorhome is between 2.8 and 2.9 metres in height, just over 9 foot and the tunnels have a height limit of 2.6 metres if I remember correctly. One year I was getting flustered and ended up in the lane for the tunnel but then realised I wasn’t going to fit. Luckily there was an exit lane back to the main carriageway and after some scary reversing we managed to get out.

A big disappointment this year was not seeing much of my favourite cheese, Rondele Bleu. It’s a blue cheese produced in a light mousse style. I think we managed to buy the last tub in one supermarket and then failed to find it again in any other store.

Naturally, we brought quite a bit of French wine and cheese back to the UK but already our stocks are getting low. Time to plan another trip perhaps?

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Writing, Tapes and Chocolate Biscuits

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again, it’s Saturday and time for me to entertain my small band of readers with a new blog post. Just lately, having produced over 500 blog posts, I’m starting to feel a little pleased with myself. I started blogging in 2014 but now I think of it, I’ve been blogging a lot longer than that. As a schoolboy I used to publish a blog every week. OK, it wasn’t digital, it wasn’t called a blog and it wasn’t available on the internet, in fact the internet itself wasn’t available either.

My ‘blog’ was very low tech. It was written on the middle pages of a schoolboy exercise book and passed around to my fellow pupils. It was called ‘The latest from the Perverted Press!’ It was mainly a spoof on the then current news stories from the late sixties and early seventies. They were things along the lines of, President Nixon issues apologies after visiting the nuclear command centre and saying ‘time for launch’ when in fact he had really said ‘time for lunch!’

I used to bill myself as the celebrated author of that great trilogy, the ‘Master’ novels. There was the first one, ‘Master Smith’, the follow-up, ‘Master Jones’, and the one that caused a great deal of unwarranted attention to the Perverted Press, ‘Master Bates’.

I had a friend called Jeff Langdon who, as far as I know, was the only pupil from my rough and ready suburban high school who ever made it to university. Jeff created a blog, sorry, I mean pamphlet, called simply The Steve Higgins Story, so I was forced to reply with The Jeff Langdon Story.

My pamphlet was rather popular, far more popular than Jeff’s and he always complained that my popularity stemmed from the fact that my pamphlets looked better because of the liberal use of coloured pens and drawings. Alas Jeff, art always was one of my top subjects. Even so, I thought my blog -sorry, pamphlet- was much better anyway, coloured pens or no coloured pens. Jeff, I’m sure, would disagree.

Talking about The Perverted Press has made me look at my blogs and videos in a different way. One of my regular blogs is my Holiday Book Bag in which I review the books I’ve taken on holiday. Back in my teens I used to make a similar review about the records I used to buy. I didn’t have a video camera back then so I recorded my review on audio tape. I still have a few of those tapes. One was called simply Tape Review and in it, I played excerpts of records and tapes I had bought and talked about the best ones. I remember on one of them I chose my favourite guitar solo of the year and if I remember correctly the winning guitar solo was one from One of These Nights by the Eagles.

Another one was Self Portrait in Tape, a possible precursor to my podcasts or perhaps my Life Story blog posts. In it I rabbit on about myself and play some favourite music tracks.

Those tapes were the forerunners of my book reviews and podcasts. Back in the 1970’s there was a show on Radio 1 called My Top Twelve. It was actually a straight rip off of Desert Island Discs in which someone would choose their top 12 tracks and talk about them. My old friend Steve and I decided to interview each other and we both introduced our own top twelves. A few years ago, I digitised my copy but I changed some of the tracks as in the intervening 40 years my tastes have changed a little. Neil Sedaka’s Laughter in The Rain was a pleasant enough track but hardly Top Twelve material so that had to go as did a couple of other tracks that are no longer my cup of tea. Barry White got a bit of a slagging off from my younger self so I felt compelled to add a few interjections from the present day -actually 2017- to redress the balance and explain my changed attitude towards Barry. (What would my younger self think if he knew I had a copy of Barry White’s Greatest Hits in my car?)

I play the resulting Top Twelve CD in my car quite a lot. It’s nice and perhaps a little surreal to hear my old self from 1974 and my somewhat older 2017 self, chatting with my old friend Steve, sadly no longer with us, once again.

Now I think of it, my past life has been the inspiration behind quite a lot of my writing. My early life inspired a lot of Floating in Space and many of my blog posts. I like to take something, some incident from the past and make it into a funny story or compare the situation to one in today’s digital, internet, mobile phone 21st century world.

As I’m looking back and getting nostalgic, I thought I’d throw in the following story from when I first started work. It’s nothing whatsoever to do with blogging but now I think about it, I bought my tape recorder with my very first wage packet so I must have made the Top Twelve recording round about the time of the following events so there is a faint connection.

When I lived at home with mum and dad and my brother, I occasionally might have got to eat a chocolate biscuit. My brother and I would have had to have been good, done our homework, tidied our bedroom and eaten all our dinner and so on. Then and only then would we be offered a chocolate biscuit with our after dinner cup of tea. Even today I find it hard not to have a biscuit with a cup of tea; old habits die hard.

One day at work I went out for lunch with our company surveyor and on the way back he nipped into a small shop nearby. He emerged with a large pack of chocolate biscuits. Back in the office he offered a biscuit to me and my colleagues. Most people said no but I took one thinking that if I was offered one later by my mother, I would have doubled my chocolate biscuit intake for the day.

Coming back from the tea machine with a cup of tea I watched Dave the surveyor, settle down at his desk which was on a slightly higher level than mine. Dave took a biscuit and quietly scoffed it. Then he took another and then another, and then another! I remember watching wide eyed as Dave ate the entire packet of chocolate biscuits, one after the other. I felt I had witnessed an act of unbelievable gluttony. A grown man eating an entire packet of biscuits. What would my mother have said?

Looking back, I reckon that was the moment when I decided to leave home. Away from the constraints of my family I would be free to stay up late, drink alcohol, invite women home and spend as much time as I desired on my writing projects.

And eat chocolate biscuits of course.

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Good Decision/Bad Decision

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Decisions can change your life. That’s why it’s important to make the correct one but it’s always seemed to me that I tend to make the wrong one.

I wrote about my spectacles a few weeks back. You might think that in the general scheme of things specs don’t really amount to much but for someone like me who has worn glasses pretty much all his life they are a really big thing.

Just recently, being the tightwad I am I have trolled through the internet in search of cheap specs and as a result I have a pretty tasty pair of rimless distance specs, some handy readers, a slightly dud pair of varifocals which after I complained, the vendor replaced with another slightly less dodgy pair of varifocals and a pretty good pair of varifocals.

One day recently I got it into my head that for some reason I needed yet another pair. I thought that I could use the frames from my old and now defunct previous pair of specs and have new lenses added. So off I go to my opticians to sort it out. The old frames were actually pretty stylish and in good condition so all I needed was a set of new lenses however, that’s not quite how the optician saw it. New lenses meant having my old frames ‘reglazed’. This apparently entails a reglazing cost so actually it would be cheaper to buy some new frames. Ok I thought, how much are new frames? Well the optician directed me to a range that started at a mere £40 so I chose a pretty conventional pair of metal frames. Yes, said the optician, those frames look really good on you. Really? I said, giving myself a quick preen in the mirror. Ok she went on, let’s do a quick calculation. I myself had already done a calculation £40 plus lenses, still a little more than I intended paying so how much are we talking?

Of course, we had to factor in the anti glare coating and I had asked for what I always call Reactolite lenses, lenses that go dark when it gets sunny, apparently now called ‘Transition’ lenses. Yes, I can do you a great price said the optician, £245!

Now I’m not sure whether I was just a sucker for some smooth sales talk or perhaps had paid too much attention to the comment about the glasses looking ‘really good’ on me but instead of legging it straight for the door as per the instructions on my emergency tightwad help card I heard myself saying ‘OK’. Shortly afterwards I found myself drawn towards the card machine and paying money for another pair of expensive specs that actually I don’t really need. Good decision? Bad Decision!

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

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

Okay, one last story. Years ago when I first lived in Didsbury I shared a flat with my friend Declan. (As usual names have been changed to protect the innocent.) Declan, or Dec as I called him worked at a garage and he was doing a day release training course. One particular day he was due to be on this course but he wanted to get away early to go out with his mates. He asked me to call in to his work and claim some kind of accident had happened and he had to leave. As it happened I wasn’t able to get to a phone that day so he asked one of our neighbours who was a chap who I had always thought wasn’t quite all there. In fact, he was what I’d probably call in no uncertain non pc terms, a nutter. Anyway, Dec was working happily away on his college course when he was called into the office. The principal was there looking pretty concerned and his secretary placed a glass of water in Dec’s hand.

‘How was your dad when you last saw him Declan?’ asked the principal. Dec wasn’t quite sure where this was going but he was eager to get off and get changed and to join his mates in the pub. ‘He seemed ok’ answered Dec and then took a long drink of his water.

‘Only he died this morning’ said the principal just before Declan sprayed the water all over him. I did tell Declan not to ask that guy to make a bogus call for him but he wouldn’t listen. Bad decision? Very bad decision!

Just now I’m on the verge of a very serious decision. I’m semi retired as I may have mentioned in previous posts and I’m thinking of just retiring now and spending more time on my writing, maybe even taking another step towards finishing the sequel to Floating in Space. I’ve tried to think of a film clip that’s appropriate and here’s one from one of my favourite films.

Robert Zemeckis directed the Back to the Future films as well as Forrest Gump and of course Castaway. At first I wasn’t sure about that ending, in fact I wasn’t even sure I liked the film itself but now I’ve come to think of it as something special. Tom’s character has to make a decision too, whether to go jetting off in a storm or staying with the girl he loved. He goes off in the plane, crash lands into the sea and spends four years on a desert island. When he is finally rescued he finds that the girl he loved has married someone else. After all, she thought he was dead.

Then comes the scene above, right at the end of the film. Which way does he go? Does he go back and follow the girl, after all it’s probably her place he has just visited with the fed ex parcel he has kept with him all these years so he can complete his job, that of delivering it. I like to think he goes back to see the girl and if you watch the clip on YouTube and read the comments, you’ll see that a lot of people thought the same.

Perhaps there are no good decisions or bad decisions. Just decisions.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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