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Film Connections #8

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As regular readers will know, I am a great fan of classic cinema and I do love making these posts in which I try to tell a story by linking together various films, actors and directors. My last connections post ran a lateral course linking the film Pygmalion to Star Trek; The Motion Picture. This week I’ve worked out a very roundabout connection from Greta Garbo via Frederick March, James Mason, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman, right back to Garbo again.

At first glance, Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman seem to belong to different emotional climates; Garbo, distant and enigmatic, Bergman, luminous and searching, her humanity worn closer to the surface. The threads run from the migration of talent across studios and continents and in the way both women, in very different ways, redefined what it meant to be a star of the cinema.

Greta Garbo was one of the first stars of the silver screen. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden on the 18th September 1905. She is best known for her beautiful but melancholy screen persona. In 1924 she was spotted in a Swedish film by Louis B Mayer the head of MGM and the following year he brought her over to Hollywood.

Greta Garbo

In 1930 she made the successful transition from silent pictures to the ‘talkies’ with her first sound picture Anna Christie which was promoted with the phrase ‘Garbo Talks!” The film was a great success and her career in the cinema continued until her last film in 1941, Two Faced Woman. She signed for various pictures afterwards but all the projects either never came to fruition or she dropped out for one reason or another. Billy Wilder asked her to star in Sunset Boulevard in 1949 but she declined.

In one of David Niven’s books, Bring on the Empty Horses, the author relates how he asked Garbo why she stopped making films and she thought for a moment and then replied “I had made enough faces”.

In 1935 Garbo starred in the screen version of Anna Karenina directed by Clarence Brown. Among her co-stars was Fredric March.

March began his career as an extra in silent movies. He made his stage debut in 1929 and not long afterwards signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He made numerous films but in 1937 he played the part of drunken movie star Norman Maine in the film A Star is Born. Maine helps aspiring star Esther Blodgett, played by Janet Gaynor up the ladder to movie stardom. The film was shot in Technicolor and became one of the first colour films to be nominated for an Academy Award.

A Star is Born is a film that has been remade a number of times and all the remakes have been musicals, including the most recent one produced in 2018 which starred Lady Gaga. My favourite though was the 1954 version with James Mason and Judy Garland. Judy Garland plays the part of Esther Blodgett who is heard singing by the boozy Norman Maine, this time played by Mason. He takes her along to the studios and after introducing her singing voice to the studio boss, gets her a breakthrough role in a new film.

Esther, now known as Vicki Lester, becomes a big star and of course falls for Norman Maine. The two marry but will their marriage survive Maine’s alcoholism and failing career?

James Mason was born in Huddersfield in 1909. He became a stage actor and was later hugely successful in British films. In 1949 he moved to Hollywood and after the success of his starring role in the film The Desert Fox about German General Rommell, he was given a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.

It was in 1954 that Mason was asked to be Judy Garland’s leading man in A Star is Born. Cary Grant had been offered the part but turned it down.

Both Cary Grant and James Mason starred in the 1959 picture North by Northwest directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Mason stars as a suave but ruthless secret agent who mistakes Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for a man known as George Kaplan who Mason suspects is a government agent tailing him across the USA. As the film unfolds, we see that George Kaplan is actually a fake identity created as a decoy.

After a murder in which Thornhill is wrongly supposed to be the murderer, he escapes on board a train to Chicago where he meets Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint who helps him get away.

North by Northwest is one of my personal favourite films. Apparently, Hitchcock had engaged screenwriter Ernest Lehman to work on a story adaption but he couldn’t work out what to do and offered to quit. Hitchcock replied that he enjoyed working with Lehman and that the two should just work out an entirely new story. North by Northwest was the result.

Cary Grant appeared in four of Hitchcock’s films. Suspicion (1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959) and most importantly for this post, Notorious (1946).

I’m sure I’ve seen Notorious but it’s not a film I can really remember even though when I looked it up many people say it’s one of Hitchcock’s best ever films. Cary Grant plays a government agent who is on the trail of Nazi Claude Rains. Grant enlists the help of Ingrid Bergman who plays the daughter of a war criminal. Grant and Bergman fall for each other but Ingrid Bergman’s character has to seduce Nazi Alexander Sebastian played by Rains.

Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca

Ingrid Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939. She was invited by Hollywood producer David O Selznick to star in an English language remake of one of her earlier Swedish films Intermezzo. Bergman expected to be in Hollywood for this one film and then return to Sweden but the huge success of Intermezzo made her a star and more Hollywood films followed. Her husband and daughter came to Hollywood to join her and later they both applied for American citizenship.

Ingrid made a number of classic films in Hollywood including Casablanca, Spellbound and Notorious.

In 1949 she wrote to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini telling him how much she admired his films and expressing her wish to work with him. Rossellini cast her in Stromboli and she flew to Italy to begin work. While she was there, she fell for Rossellini and began an affair with him, becoming pregnant with his child.

This caused a huge scandal back in the USA. Bergman herself thought that because she had played a nun in The Bells of St Mary and a saint in Joan of Arc these roles seemed to make what she had done appear much worse. Ingrid went through a much publicised divorce and custody battle before marrying Rossellini in 1950.

Ingrid was born in August 1915 in Stockholm which brings us back full circle to Greta Garbo who was born ten years earlier also in Stockholm. Two wonderful actresses separated by only a decade.

(All pictures reproduced via creative commons.)

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About Blogging

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always nice to see my regular post published on a Saturday at 10am but almost as soon as it goes out into the world of the internet the first thing I think about is what shall I do next?

Well, the next step is to try and plug the post everywhere I can think of so this post goes out on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, on Threads and on Tumblr. I also add it on any relevant Facebook pages so for instance if it’s a sci-fi post I might link it to a sci-fi Facebook page or a sci-fi page on Reddit or any other relevant page. I also publish some of my posts over on Medium and again, link them back here to WordPress. Sometimes I even make a video version and share it over on my YouTube page.

Very few of these posts will work as a video but a couple that come to mind were a post about a letter to my younger self which translated well to a video except that the narration wasn’t really much good. (Must make a note; try remaking the video with a better narration). Another was a post about how to write poetry. The video version involved me just talking to the camera about the ways I write poetry.  To be honest I think the video version was better although looking at it again recently I do seem to rabbit on a bit.

On social media I’m always trying to bring in more readers to my blog page and so I try to add something other than just a link to my latest post. Lately I’ve been making these short 5 second videos that can be made pretty easily on Grok or most other AI image making sites. I usually use these on X or on Instagram but recently I thought I’d upload a few to YouTube. YouTube seem to be trying to get on the bandwagon created by Instagram and TikTok of very short videos that viewers can just scroll quickly through. On YouTube they are called ‘shorts’ and I’ve found that my shorts have actually been really successful, bringing in lots of viewers who will hopefully watch these quick videos and then click on my website to actually settle down and read more.

One of my shorts, a very short AI generated video shows a young woman roaring off on a motorbike with the words ‘NEW BLOG POST OUT NOW’ inscribed on the back of her leather jacket. Currently that video has 4.7 thousand viewers and my YouTube followers have begun to increase. I still need another 60 followers in order to actually make revenue from my videos but happily things seem to be moving in the right direction. A small group of my main videos have great viewing figures but until I hit the magic number of 500 followers, I make no money at all from YouTube.

It’s only fair to say that after publishing that last video on YouTube a little box appeared which said promote this video for only £10!  Ten pounds I thought? What’s ten pounds today? Two or three pints of lager in Wetherspoons? A CD album? Okay I thought, ten pounds, even a tightwad like me can live with that. Of course, that’s where the 4.7 thousand viewers came from, an advertisement. Even so, many of those watchers must have clicked onto my landing page and maybe even read a few posts. Did they go one step further and buy a copy of Timeline or Floating in Space? Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I’ll find out when a few royalties hit my bank account but until then I won’t be holding my breath. Nice to see that recently though my readership has been steadily expanding.

What I find really interesting is when a post from years ago suddenly gets a little attention. Why did that reader go for that particular post? Did he or she stumble upon it? Were they using a search engine and what were they searching for? Happily Google or Yahoo has directed them my way which is always nice to see.

The other day I was watching one of my favourite films Julie and Julia. It’s a film by Nora Ephron which is about a blogger called Julie Powell who decides she will make all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cook book in 365 days. Julia was an American woman who learns cordon bleu cookery in France and writes a popular cookbook for American housewives. Obviously, things don’t all go smoothly for Julie the cook and blogger but she manages to get through a different recipe every day and in doing so gets some attention from the local press which boosts her blog even more and eventually enables her to become a published author.

It’s a great story in its own right but also for bloggers everywhere. Of course, they’d have a job making this website into a film unless they wanted endless shots of me, or someone playing the part of me, tapping away on my laptop writing blogs and short stories. Of course they could dramatize some of my stories. The Hollywood Meeting for instance in which a young writer goes to Hollywood to pitch one of his scripts to a producer might make a good film.

This is the point where I try to link a relevant feature film. Films about authors. That’s a tough one. There was Misery, a film based on a Stephen King book where an author is kidnapped and tortured but I don’t think I’m going to go there. Another film I remember seeing some years ago was called How to Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon. Jack plays Stanley Ford who authors a comic strip in a newspaper and acts out various situations which are then photographed. Jack’s character uses the photos to inspire his comic strip drawings. Look out for it if you see it on your TV schedules although it’s one of those films I haven’t seen for a long while on TV. When Stanley gets married, he takes many of his real life situations with his wife played by Virni Lisi and uses them in the comic strip. His comic strip character then decides to murder his wife but the wife, on seeing the strip, decides to walk out and people think Stanley has actually murdered her.

The comic strip art used in the film was by an artist called Mel Keefer who penned various comic strips in US newspapers and comics. That reminds me of another social media post I sometimes use below.

So in a world of short sharp TikTok and Instagram videos, can a blog post still work? Are there still people out there who want to read, who want to invest more than ten seconds on a post, who actually have an attention span, who can spend five to ten minutes reading something like this very post?

The answer is hopefully yes. There are even still people who want to buy and read books, after all, I certainly do.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

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

The World of AI Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I did a post some time ago called Manipulating the Image. It was all about photo manipulation and how they used to do it in the old days when cameras used film and not a memory card and how they do it today using artificial intelligence. Things have quickly moved on and now it is just as easy to make a short video with AI as it is to make an image.

My go to AI imaging site has until recently been nightcafe.com. Users can easily make images there as well as short video clips and you can even use an image as a starting point. Nightcafe requires a subscription for a small sum but also, if you use the site regularly, you can build up a raft of free credits with which to make even more images. I soon found that my image credits were soaring so as a fully paid-up member of Tightwads Anonymous I thought wait a minute, I might as well cancel my subscription as I don’t need it anymore as I have a shed load of free credits.

So, I cancelled my subscription and soon realised that I was now no longer a ‘pro’ user and as such no longer entitled to use the top AI models. I still had lots of credits but I could only use them on the less powerful models. Not only that, I could no longer make my images into videos.

You might be thinking that perhaps that wasn’t such a big deal for a writer. After all, a writer deals with words not pictures. Yes, that’s true but in the 21st century world of the internet, it’s images that bring people into your orbit. A Twitter or Facebook post with a picture or video will apparently get 120% more engagement than a plain old text post, so in order to bring people into the clutches of stevehigginslive.com, I need pictures or videos.

A lot of my posts over on Twitter are basically promotions for the blogs on this website. I try to produce an interesting image to pull in my readers and then add a message; things like Read A New Blog Post or something similar. Here is one of my first video clips made using AI.

I’ve always rather liked this image below, an inviting pub with the name on a sign: The Blog Post Inn.

Here’s the same image made into a video over on meta.ai.

Many years ago as a schoolboy, one of my favourite doodles was to draw a frogman swimming underwater with a big flow of bubbles rising up to the surface. I was probably inspired by the TV in the 1960s, things like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in which Admiral Nelson and Captain Crane took us on all sorts of underwater adventures in their submarine, Seaview. Anyway, that was probably the source of some more videos involving a scuba diver finding an underwater carving which says -wait for it- Read a New Blog Post!

I always enjoyed both Voyage and another undersea TV show Stingray. Stingray was one of Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows. It was about the WASPs; the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and their amazing submarine Stingray commanded by Captain Troy Tempest. No doubt inspired by the scenes of Stingray and Seaview I decided, and this brings us back to AI, to make some submarine images. Here are a few below.

The really annoying thing about making AI images and videos is that they rarely come out how you want them. If they do, then they always seem to go wildly wrong when I try to tweak them. How do you make an AI image in the first place you might be asking. Well, simply from a text instruction, for instance:

A wide-angle view from low down; a moon rocket launches from Cape Kennedy. As the rocket blasts off in a cloud of smoke and steam, we see the words stamped vertically on the rocket: “NEW BLOG POST ” .

It’s always good to add in a few descriptive terms like hyper realistic as well as some camera terms like wide angle lens and so on.

In my video editor I’ve quite a few saved templates so it was easy to slot in the rocket video, add some sound effects from my trusty sound effects CD and here’s the finished video.

There are some pretty good AI generators out there that are completely free. Meta is the company that owns Facebook and you can use their app meta.ai to make free images and videos. I tend to start with an image from elsewhere, perhaps create something on Nightcafe and then upload it to meta and ask it to animate the image. I’ve had some good results and also some frustrating ones. I made an image of a woman wearing sunglasses with a neon sign saying ‘read a new blog post’ reflected in her specs. I asked meta to create a video from the image in which the girl ‘lifts up the specs, winks at the camera and replaces the specs’. Simple? No not really. In one version the woman took the specs off but then they disappeared. In another, they took themselves off and in a third they went up and down by themselves. Would she drop the specs slightly, wink and then put them back on? No. In the best result, the girl takes off the specs but seems to wink both eyes!  Not exactly what I wanted.

Another site, perhaps more well known is Grok which you can find on the former Twitter site, X.

Another new dimension to AI is audio and on some AI sites you can get an audio model to read a short script. I tend to put various elements together, pictures, video and audio, edit them in the traditional way and add either sound effects or music. I particularly like an audio model I found of an American man with a deep baritone voice which I use on a lot of my promo videos or sometimes an American lady. On Grok, you can actually produce a video in which your video subjects can speak but they tend to rattle off the dialogue so quickly it isn’t natural, although after some experimentation you can add pauses in places but even so, it comes over as a little odd.

Here’s one in which I asked the AI model to say ‘wow’ and then matched up some audio of my American AI voice saying that same word.

Going back to that earlier idea of the girl with the glasses, I thought I’d try again without the wink. The girl was supposed to look over her specs, smile and put them back. In the resulting clip the girl did all that but seemed to be mouthing ‘Hi’. I went off to my audio program on Freepik and produced some new audio, fitted them together and this was the result.

Whether these little clips bring in any new readers I’m not sure. In fact, now I think about it, it might put readers off if they assume the entire site is AI produced, including the writing! Of course, that would save me toiling away over a hot laptap trying to think up new ideas for blog posts.

Even so, I have a lot of fun messing about with AI images and audio. I wonder if perhaps one day I could even make an entire film using AI generated visuals and audio. Things are happening so quickly in the world of AI I can image that happening in the very near future.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really do love it here in Lanzarote. Warm but not too hot. OK there’s a little rain but it only lasts for 5 or so minutes and then the sun is out, drying everything up. If I had the money I would be buying a place here and settling down to a life of sunbathing, swimming and dining out. I could invite all my friends over, for limited times of course. Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t. Either way, I think I’d be very happy.

Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.

Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacking roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brew can. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brew can.

I reckon he would have loved it here in Lanzarote. Back in Manchester the Highways depot where he worked closed down years ago and now a small private housing estate occupies the spot where he used to work. Funnily enough, just next door on Fenside Road was my old school, Sharston High School. It was demolished years ago and on the spot there is now another private housing estate which is surrounded by the old iron fence that encircled our school many years ago.

Dad

My Dad, working on the road, directing traffic.

Our school gym still stands on Fenside road. It is now some sort of fitness or sports centre. Apart from those railings I mentioned it is the only surviving reminder of our old school.

The school was large and was built in a sort of ‘C’ shape. There was a north and a south side and inside the ‘C’ were the school playing fields; cricket and football for the boys and rounders for the girls.

On the north side -to be honest I’ve always got the north and south sides mixed up, but the top of the ‘C’ anyway- there now stands a nursing home and it was here that my mother spent the last years of her life suffering with dementia.

I took semi retirement from work to help look after her and my brother and I shared caring duties. We had carers coming in four times a day. Morning to help get her up and have breakfast. Another at lunchtime, one at teatime and a final visitor at night to help get mum ready for bed. The final carer was due at about nine but they started to get earlier and earlier. Once we had someone round at about 5:30 to help mum with tea and then instead of 9 the final carer turned up at about 6:30. I remonstrated with them and said no, you need to come back at 9. I guess it was the last visit and they were eager to get off early.

Believe me, it was very difficult dealing with mum back then. She would forget she had eaten and would demand more food after being fed. Getting her clothes off her to put into the washer was a nightmare and when they had been washed, she complained that the clothes were not her clothes after all but someone else’s.

Once it worked out in my brother’s favour. I used to work shifts and would arrive home about 10:30 and take over from my brother. That night he wanted to leave early at about 8pm. Could I get time off to get to mum’s earlier? As it happened I couldn’t but he and the carers put mum to bed early and when the carer had left, my brother let mum nod off and then he left too.

Some months earlier we had brought a small bed downstairs into the lounge for mum. When I got in at my usual time, mum had woken up and, thinking it was early morning, was trying to get up.

I tended to have a small supper when I got in from work so I calmed mum down, explained that it was late at night and together we had a small supper of sausage sandwiches and we watched some television. I’d recorded a documentary about the comedian Bob Monkhouse and when it finished, we chatted for a while about Bob and his rather difficult life, then we both went to bed.

The next morning when the carers arrived, she had reverted to her slightly mad self, complaining once again that her clothes weren’t her clothes and that this wasn’t her house but some other strange house and that she didn’t live here.

The conversation about Bob Monkhouse the previous night had been one of our last sensible conversations ever.

I think it was 2021 when she moved into the nursing home. She had been very poorly with a cold that had gotten worse and worse. I personally thought it was one of the first Covid cases. She went to hospital and began to recover. We went to see her on Christmas day. We brought her a Christmas present, I can’t even remember what it was but I was surprised to find the nurses in her ward had brought presents for all the patients, hers was a pair of woolly gloves. Sadly she never got to wear them.

When she began to recover her social worker moved her to a nursing home saying she only had 6 months to live although she went on to live another two and a half years. At the nursing home she recovered rapidly and even attained something almost like her normal self. When Covid and the lockdown struck we were unable to visit her. When things eased we could visit but only outside of the windows. What was mad was that Mum was profoundly deaf and without her hearing aids couldn’t communicate. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t seem to get it across to the staff how important her hearing aids were and there we were, separated by a window, mouthing and gesticulating but poor mum, without her hearing aids could only wave.

When the lockdowns ended we could finally visit mum again but sometimes her hearing aids would be lost or without batteries. I decided to take one of her aids home and just fit it when I visited so we could have something like a normal conversation.

My mother in her last years

When I visited mum I used to ask her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. One day 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 to leave. The disappointment of not being able to remember her times table was still 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. She was a very determined lady.

After she died I put a picture of her on the Facebook Wythenshawe page, announcing her passing. Various people commented but one lady in particular said that she used to work at mum’s nursing home and that she counted it a pleasure and a privilege to have looked after this lovely lady.

As you can perhaps imagine, I was moved to tears.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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The Big 700/701

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Today marks my 700th blog post, and I reckon it’s probably the perfect time to take a look back and perhaps even re-evaluate exactly what I’ve been doing over the past 12 or so years.

700 is quite a milestone, certainly for me anyway. I started writing my blog posts back in 2014 and I’m quite pleased to have got to this point. 700 hundred blog posts. Anyway, after all that and a quick recount later I see that this is actually blog 701. Last week was my 700th post and I didn’t realise. It’s a bit like missing my birthday or waking up on the 2nd of January and realising you’ve missed New Year’s Day.

Seven hundred and one. It’s a number that made me stop for a moment when I began writing this morning; it’s not quite as round and flashy as 700, but somehow more meaningful. Like that first step after reaching a mountain top, it feels like a quiet, intentional nod to where I’ve been and a fresh start for where I’m heading next.

The whole point of this blog, at least when I first set out blogging, was to have a sort of platform to talk about my book Floating in Space. I wanted to introduce myself to the world, promote my book and then settle back and enjoy the millions of pounds that would surely pour in.

As you might imagine, the millions haven’t appeared and although I have had a little success initially with Floating, my other books Timeline and A Warrior of Words have yet to make their mark even though there are links to them within this website as well as more links at the end of every weekly post.

Timeline is a collection of blog posts and short stories and I have to say I really feel quite proud of my posts. I have written about all kinds of things although I mainly stick to books, classic films, Formula One and me and my little life. Some of those posts I have worked quite hard on and I’ve written and rewritten them and researched and sometimes rewritten again. At other times I have found myself on a Friday staring at my laptop wondering what on earth can I write about and then, right at the last moment, I have either thought of something or remembered a post that was made up of various short elements and decided to take one of those elements and develop it into a new post.

Blogging has so taken over my life I’ve noticed that even when I’m not sitting in front of my laptop I find myself writing a post in my head at various odd moments. For instance, a few weeks back Liz and I went to a Christmas party at a hotel in Blackpool. There were about fifty in our group and the hotel and its entertainment area was filled to capacity. We had a three course meal which was excellent followed by a cabaret style entertainment and then the usual disc jockey playing music. Something came to me while we were eating and when I looked up from my food I realised that a lady opposite was talking to me and I hadn’t heard a word. I sort of started nodding and murmuring yes and getting very funny looks back. It turned out she was actually asking for something, the salt or pepper or something that was right by me. Oh well. The really annoying thing is that whatever I had thought of went right out of my head.

Occasionally, and I do mean occasionally, I’ll have a whole raft of ideas come to me and straight away I am able to pump out two or even three rough drafts of a new post. Then over the next few weeks I’ll work on each one and gradually finalise them for publication. I love it when lots of ideas come especially when we are about to go travelling and then I usually set them up to publish on subsequent Saturday mornings while I enjoy my holiday.

I always jot down notes for blogs, especially those where I try to connect various classic films together so for instance I’ll start with a director or an actor, let’s say Noël Coward for example and then try to go through various films and link together different actors or personalities and eventually end up back with another Noël Coward production. The links on the right are a bit thin but Coward worked with director David Lean, Lean worked with Jack Hawkins on The Bridge on the River Kwai. When Hawkins contracted throat cancer later in life and was unable to speak, his voice was dubbed by Charles Gray. Gray played Blofeld in the Bond film Diamonds are Forever. Diamonds was written by Ian Fleming who was a friend and neighbour of Coward in Jamaica. Click here for the full post.

Sometimes when I wake early in the morning or the middle of the night, I’ll begin to write a blog post in my head. When I’m done and ready to go back to sleep, I’ll save it. In my head I have a house I created after reading a book called Mindstore. Mindstore is a technique for personal improvement designed by a man called Jack Black and it involves creating a house with various rooms for certain activities. The house has a video room in which one can prepare for a job interview for instance by rehearsing the interview and then viewing the future result -the getting of the job- on the video screen.

In my house I created a room where I can store the posts I write in those early mornings and so far it seems to have worked.

In 2024 my readership hit an all time high, in fact since 2014 when I began blogging, my stats have begun a steady climb upwards but this last year, 2025, readership has dipped a little bit. Have my posts not been as good? My all time most read post was one from a few years ago. It was called Manipulating the Image and was about exactly that. I talked about an Instagram model called Olivia Casta and a claim that her face was a creation of artificial intelligence. That led to Lee Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy and his claim that a picture of his with the murder weapon was manipulated and then I went on to outline other similar stories of image manipulation.

My next most read post was actually my introductory page and then a post from quite a few years back about David Cassidy and a Haircut in 1975.

Quite why a post has had so many hits I’m not sure but that is something that really gets under my skin. I get lots of readership highs and lots of lows but what makes the highs? Why does one post do better than another? Posts aside the big question is do my successful posts link to bigger sales of my books? When it comes down to it, in the world of sales and marketing, I’m just an amateur but what can I do except just carry on blogging until I don’t want to blog any more.

The flip side is I actually really like writing and one aspect of my stats that was really pleasing is that the page dedicated to my book Timeline has recently been pretty popular but then, is that because people like the idea of a collection of blogs and short stories or is because I recently used one of my Timeline videos in an advertisement?

I’ll tell you what, I bet Charles Dickens never had this trouble. Not only that, I need to start thinking about blog #701. (Or is that blog 702?)

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2025: My Blogging Year

Posted on by Steve Higgins

So here we are fast approaching the end of 2025 and I think it’s time to look back over my year and the blog posts I have published over the past 12 months. It’s almost unbelievable but this is my 699th Blog post. All the links to the posts mentioned below open up in another window.

January

Back in January Liz and I had jetted off as usual to Lanzarote but sadly, a fabulous villa we had found the previous year was fully booked and so we had to settle for another property. On paper it looked like a lovely place and to a great extent it was. A nice living space, comfy bedroom and a nice patio with comfy sun loungers. The pool was a little small but the big problem was that it was an end property at the top of a rise and next door and across the way was a big expanse of empty ground. It looked good but it meant that as Lanzarote tends to get a little windy in the winter a regular gale force wind often seemed to blast across our small terrace which sadly, in the afternoon, tended to be in the shade. Happily, in 2026 we look forward to occupying our favourite villa which not only gets the sun all day but has other properties around which act as a windbreak.

As usual in Lanzarote I was able to combine swimming, sun bathing and blog writing and produced my usual weekly post including January: Don’t You Just Hate it! and The Democratic Way, a post about the election of Donald Trump to another term as president of the USA.

February

In February I wrote Underwater Adventures which was a post about films and TV that involved underwater stuff, things like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I even threw in an anecdote about the time I tried to get my scuba diving licence. Another post that month was one of my favourites, Changing the Narrative, which involved how the storylines of film and TV and even books can change when required. When it comes down to it, there have been times when I wouldn’t have minded changing my own narrative too.

March

In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, The Men in White Suits, a post that linked people like Alec Guinness who starred in the Ealing film comedy, The Man in the White Suit and David Essex who used to wear a white suit back in the 1970’s and other similar situations and characters.

April

In April I was reliving some old bus driving memories in Driving the Bus and in Painters and Paintings I published an art post looking at my favourite artists and pictures.

May

In May Liz and I were off to France in our motorhome. We had hardly arrived when I became a little concerned as my brother Colin wasn’t answering my calls or messages. This led to a really upsetting situation in which we had to ask one of his friends to go and check on him and later when he got no response we had to ask him to call the police. A really odd situation began to commence. The police wouldn’t attend but said they would send an ambulance. The ambulance service wouldn’t attend as they couldn’t gain entry so the fire brigade were called. After about two hours the fire service turned up, forced open the door to Colin’s flat and found him dead on the bedroom floor. He was my younger brother and only 64 years old.

June

In June I wrote Sadness and Telephone Menus, about the difficulties faced dealing with the practicalities of death; reporting the death, closing bank accounts, arranging the funeral and so on. I don’t publish much fiction on WordPress but another post was A Genie Called Ralph, a quirky fantasy story. By the way, if you’d like to read more of my fiction head over to the downloads page where you download a few of my stories to read at your leisure.

July

It was a fairly good summer in the UK and most of the time it was sunny and warm; in other words, perfect barbecue time. Heatwaves and Barbecues was a post I wrote in July and in another I wrote about memories of past Saturday Nights as well as linking in films and music on the same theme.

August

I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. I must have been in a pretty nostalgic sort of mood that month because another post was Comfort Food, talking about the memories that my favourite food conjures up for me.

September

In September I was Travelling and Writing in France and another post was Working with AI Images. My latest obsession is making AI pictures and short videos to use on social media, hopefully to tempt more visitors to my blog page and maybe even buy my books.

October

October was another sad time as my late brother’s birthday was on the 10th. I’ve always tried to get him a birthday present, even if it was only just something simple like aftershave or something. Last year I didn’t get him anything but I didn’t feel bad because he rarely if ever got me anything. Even so, he seemed really hurt about it so I picked up something simple from Asda, a toiletry set, wrapped it up and gave it to him. He must have liked it because after his death I found a lot of the same product in his bathroom. Back to my blogs and another film post I wrote in October was one about the films of Ridley Scott.

November

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Image courtesy Wikipedia Creative Commons.

November was the centenary of the birth of Richard Burton. He was born on November 10th, 1925 and I’ve always loved his wonderful speaking voice. Someone else with an interesting voice although hardly in the same class as Burton was Woody Allen and Woody got a mention in a post called Bad Meals, North Roxbury and Woody which was inspired by a remarkable autobiography of Mia Marrow called What Falls Away.

December

The Formula One season finally finished in December and so I wrote a post about the World Champions, McLaren and their champion driver Lando Norris. In another post I remembered the sad death of John Lennon in New York 1980 in a post about 4 Things That Happened in December.

That brings me to the end of this little review. I hope you have enjoyed reading my posts this past year. If they have given you as much pleasure as it was for me to write them then I’ll be very pleased. I hope you had a great Christmas!

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McLaren, Big Ron and Lando

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do find it really strange that the F1 season should still be going on in December. Still, the F1 season these days is a long one. It starts off in March and winds its way around the world until it ends up in Abu Dhabi at what is essentially a twisty turny mickey mouse sort of track in the middle east.

The first full season of Formula One that I personally followed was in 1970 and so 2025 was the 55th season that I have been a motor sport fan. Back in 1970 the final race of the season was in Mexico which was round 13 on the calendar. The eventual world champion that year was Jochen Rindt who was sadly killed during practice for round 10, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. It was thought that a brake shaft failed on the car sending Rindt’s Lotus into the barriers. The car hit a solid stanchion holding up the crash barrier and Rindt, who had not fully fastened the crotch straps on his seat harness, slid down into the cockpit in the crash and suffered a fatal neck injury.

Jochen Rindt (Picture via creative commons)

This year the final race of the season at Abu Dhabi was the 24th round of the championship which has made it a heck of a long season. Back in 1970 I was a major motor sporting fan, subscribing to various magazines and writing to my favourite drivers asking for pictures and autographs. These days I still follow the sport but I’m not quite as enthusiastic as I once was. I don’t subscribe to the Sky F1 channel and I’m content to watch the race highlights on channel Four.

Last Sunday this meant that I had to put down my phone and iPad after the race started about 1pm UK time so I could watch the later Channel Four broadcast without knowing the outcome. Lando Norris came home third which was enough to secure him the world championship by 2 points. Strangely, I actually found myself almost wanting to root for Max Verstappen. In the past I have not considered him to be a particularly likeable character but recently he seems to have matured quite a lot. The commentators on Channel four made great play about how Max has recently made up a deficit of over a hundred points to become a contender, along with Lando and Oscar Piastri, for the ultimate title in motorsport. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Lando turned out to be the champion but I always find myself wanting the underdog to win and this year, Max was the outsider who just could have done it. All it needed was a bad pit stop for Lando or maybe a puncture or something to drop him outside of the top three and Max would have won a really incredible victory. As it was, he won the race but Lando was able to secure the championship. It was good to see Max magnanimously congratulate the new holder of the crown and I’m gradually starting to find four times champion Max much more likeable.

picture courtesy monsterenergy.com

After the race various pundits gave their opinion of how Lando did it but there was one aspect of his win that was never mentioned and which I personally think was the key to his victory and that was loyalty. Lando joined McLaren in 2019 when the team were just middle of the grid runners hoping to move up towards the front. Lando stuck with them unlike his team mate at the time, Carlos Sainz who I bet was probably wishing he had stayed put instead of moving to Ferrari and later getting dropped in favour of Lewis Hamilton. Lewis of course is probably wishing that he had stayed put at Mercedes as this season has been his worst in F1. It turns out that Sainz has actually had a better season at Williams than Lewis has had at Ferrari.

Fernando Alonso. Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Another driver who may be looking at McLaren wishfully is another of their former drivers Fernando Alonso. Alonso is one of the all time greats of the sport, still soldiering on and looking for success in his twilight years. He is the winner of two world championships but he has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ron Dennis, the former boss of McLaren, enticed Alonso over to McLaren in 2007. Alonso wanted to be the undisputed number one driver there but his new team mate Lewis Hamilton had other plans. Alonso left but came back again with the promise of Honda engines in 2015. Sadly, Honda arrived late into the hybrid F1 era and their engines lacked development so after enduring a torrid time round the back end of the grid, Alonso moved on as did the great Ron Dennis who sold his shares in McLaren and retired from the sport. Ron had previously merged his old team Project 4 Racing with McLaren back in 1980 which is why all the cars were designated McLaren MP/4’s. Dennis took Bruce McLaren’s old team and made it one of the most successful in the sport taking Niki Lauda, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton to multiple world championships.

By Matthew Lamb – FoS20162016_0626_105537AA, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49763509

In 2007 the ‘spygate’ scandal emerged in which a former McLaren employee, Nigel Stepney, then working for Ferrari, decided to send his former colleague at McLaren, Mike Coughlan, copies of the latest technical designs at Ferrari. The FIA fined McLaren 100 million dollars for having had private information about a rival team although according to Wikipedia, they only paid half that, 50 million dollars, still a huge amount of money. No evidence that Ferrari’s designs were used on the McLaren cars was ever found. In 2017 Ron sold all his shares in the McLaren Technology Group and McLaren Automotive and effectively retired from motorsport.

The current CEO of McLaren is Zak Brown and it is he who has led McLaren back to the winners circle, winning back to back Constructors’ Championships in 2024 and 2025 and of course winning the 2025 Driver’s World Championship with Lando Norris.

In 2026 there is a big rule change coming to F1 so all the teams with their designers and engineers will be starting with a clean sheet of paper. Will McLaren still be on top? Well the Aston Martin team have paid a huge amount of money for the sport’s number 1 engineer and designer, Adrian Newey to build their new car so could Fernando Alonso at the very end of his career find himself back in the winners circle? Well, we won’t have long to wait. The first Grand Prix of 2026 opens up for practice on March 6th 2026 in Melbourne Australia. Will I be tuning in? Well I wouldn’t want to miss my 56th season, would I?

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Things that Happened in October

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Here I am, raring to go. Laptop at the ready, focussed, ready to write this week’s blog. The thing is after 688 posts I’m not that sure what to write about. OK, so what about . .  things that happened in October? Let’s dive in.

One thing that happened in October was me! I was born on October the 3rd, quite a considerable time ago which is annoying on a number of levels. One, I’m getting a bit knackered. My back hurts, my knees ache. It’s hard to stand up straight but what is a real pain is when you get one of those things on the internet where you have to add your date of birth and I have to scroll back through the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, the 60s and finally to the 1950s.

Anthony Eden was the prime minister when I was born. He carried on until his resignation in 1957 due to ill health. At the top of the music charts or hit parade as they called it back then was Doris Day and Whatever Will be, Will be, Que Sera Sera.

My brother Colin was also an October child. He was born on the 10th of October but sadly wasn’t around to celebrate it this year. He would have been 65. My mother too was also born in October but more about her later.

John Lennon

Lennon was born on the 9th of October in 1940. His mother and father were Alfred ‘Freddie’ Lennon and his wife Julia. Alfred was a merchant seaman and was away at sea when John was born. He apparently went absent without leave but later turned up back in Liverpool. By then Julia was involved with another man, John Dykins and actually pregnant by him. Julia’s sister, Mimi decided to take John home and look after him in order to give Julia a chance of happiness with her new love John Dykins.

The last vinyl album I ever bought, and the last one that John lennon made. Double Fantasy. £2.99, what a bargain.

Mimi told Philip Norman, author of the book Shout, the True Story of the Beatles that ‘no man wants another man’s child’. Perhaps the fact that she had no children of her own played a part too. Julia continued to visit her son at Mimi’s house at 251 Menlove Avenue until 15th of July 1958.

John was staying with Julia and John Dykins for the weekend but Julia had called round to see her sister Mimi. When she left to catch her bus home she was hit by a car and killed. John Lennon’s world had been tragically changed.

Many moons ago when I worked for a cigarette vending company, I used to visit a small pub in Woolton in Liverpool and the owners of the pub were two retired ex shell tanker drivers. They were both friendly guys but one in particular was outgoing and talkative and if he was on duty at the bar we would always have a good chat while I sorted out the cigarette machine. One day we got onto the subject of the Beatles and I was surprised to hear that John Lennon’s house was just around the corner. Woolton is a very pleasant middle class suburb of Liverpool and I remember thinking what! This is where Lennon was brought up?  Lennon’s image as a sort of working class hero led me to assume he had a background in a rough and tumble area of Liverpool, like the Dingle where Ringo lived. The truth was different. Perhaps Lennon fermented the working class hero thing, perhaps the fault was mine, I just assumed something without knowing the facts.

Driving round the corner I found Lennon’s old house, 251 Menlove Avenue. He was living here when he started his first band, the Quarrymen and also when he met Paul McCartney. Lennon’s life was one heck of a journey taking him around the world with the Beatles and finally to New York with Yoko Ono where he was shot and killed in 1980.

Marie Antoinette executed 1793

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in the film version directed by Sofia Coppola

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette, the deposed Queen of France, was executed by guillotine in Paris’ Place de la Révolution. After a swift and merciless trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was found guilty of treason. Dressed in a simple white gown, her once-elaborate hair cut short, she was taken through the streets in an open cart, exposed to the jeers and insults of the crowd. Despite the humiliation she endured, she remained composed. When she accidentally stepped on her executioner’s foot while mounting the scaffold, she turned to him and said politely, “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose.” It was a final gesture of grace amid the chaos of the Revolution. Moments later, the blade fell, and with it ended the life of a woman who had once embodied the grandeur of Versailles and become the Revolution’s most reviled symbol. Her death marked both the destruction of the monarchy and the deepening ferocity of the revolutionary cause.

A famous phrase she is said to have spoken is ‘let them eat cake’ after being told that her subjects were starving and had no bread. Did she really say that? Probably not but in the original French, Marie referred to brioche, not cake. Brioche is a sort of sweet bread popular in France but either way, the phrase has been used as propaganda by the revolutionaries to show that the Queen had no time for the peasants.

Ghandi born October 2nd 1869

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a leader of India’s struggle for independence and a global symbol of nonviolent resistance. Born in 1869 in Porbandar, India, he trained as a lawyer in London before developing his philosophy of satyagraha—the power of truth and peaceful protest—during his years in South Africa. Many people think his name is Mahatma but this was in fact a title bestowed upon him in 1915 and means ‘Great soul’. Gandhi became the moral and political heart of the freedom movement, leading campaigns of civil disobedience, boycotts and marches that challenged British colonial rule without resorting to violence. Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 shocked the world, but his ideals of peace, equality, and nonviolence continue to influence movements for justice and human rights across the globe. Quite a few years ago I picked up Ghandi’s autobiography and lost it before finishing it. I know I still have it somewhere and one day I will find it and finally finish it.

A biographical film about Ghandi directed by Sir Richard Attenborough was released in 1982. Attenborough had been trying to make the film since 1962 and the final production marked the realisation of a dream for the director. Ben Kingsley starred as Ghandi and the film won 8 Oscars at the Academy awards although there was some criticism of the film. I was surprised to find that the opening sequence where Ghandi is thrown off a train in South Africa was entirely fictional.

1990 East and West Germany Reunited

When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, it marked not just the collapse of a barrier but the beginning of a profound transformation. For nearly three decades since the end of the Second World War, Germany had been divided, East and West separated by ideology, politics and a concrete wall that sprang up in 1963. The fall of the Wall was followed by a wave of hope and uncertainty as both sides faced the challenge of becoming one nation again. On October 3, 1990, reunification was officially declared, and the Federal Republic of Germany absorbed the former East German state.

The process was far from simple. Economically, the East lagged behind after years of communist rule and integrating two very different systems tested the country’s resilience. Yet, despite the struggles, rising unemployment, cultural adjustments and political growing pains, the spirit of unity prevailed and Berlin once again stood as the capital of a single, democratic Germany. Today, the reunification remains one of the most remarkable examples of peaceful transformation in modern history.

24th October 1929 Wall Street Crash

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a catastrophic collapse of the U.S. stock market that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, the American economy had boomed, and millions of people invested heavily in the stock market, even buying shares on credit. This speculation drove prices far above the real value of companies, creating a dangerous bubble. In late October 1929, confidence began to crumble. On October 24, known as Black Thursday, panic selling set in and by October 29, or Black Tuesday, the market had completely collapsed. Billions of dollars in wealth vanished overnight, leaving investors ruined and banks in crisis. The crash didn’t cause the Great Depression by itself but it exposed deep economic weaknesses and triggered a decade of mass unemployment, poverty and hardship across the United States and much of the world.

One of those who escaped disaster was Joe Kennedy, father of President John F Kennedy who apparently had invested in property, real estate as they call it in the USA, rather than stocks and shares.

Finally, bringing this blog back to a personal element, in 1929 my grandfather and grandmother had gone to Cheltenham to find work and on the 24th of October, the very day of the crash in the USA, my mother was born. She died in 2023 aged 93.

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Working with AI Images

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This has been a busy week for Liz and me. We had to say goodbye to our rented gite in France with its lovely relaxing gardens, patio and heated pool and make our way back to what will probably be cold and wet England. What then could I write about this weekend? Well, as I spend a lot of time making images with AI I thought I could give you a quick account of my experiences, good and bad, with AI imaging.

The idea of AI imaging is pretty simple; on a site like Freepik or Nightcafe, you type into a text box and describe your image and AI or artificial intelligence will do the rest. Here’s a recent example of an image I made for use on social media.

The description was pretty simple and, in my experience, the simpler you can make your description, the better. Once you get complicated, anything can happen. Here it is:

A solitary lighthouse keeper, weathered and wise, stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking a turbulent sea. The lighthouse beam cuts through a thick, mystical fog and the beam projects the following words into the sky: ‘READ A NEW BLOG POST!’ The scene is rendered in a hyper realistic fantasy style. The overall mood is one of stoic endurance and ancient mystery.

The image came out pretty much the way I wanted it. I added the web address later in Microsoft Designer. I also made it into a video which didn’t really work as the lighthouse lamp only turned halfway but the actual light it sent out turned a full circle so it all looked a bit odd. Oh well!

Another idea I had was of a girl hitting a tennis ball and the ball is frozen close to the camera with the words ‘READ A NEW BLOG POST’ seen clearly written on the ball. I must have tried the prompt for this about 30 times and have never really got what I wanted. Here are a few versions.

In the end I thought what about just using the ball without the tennis player? That turned out to be much easier.

Another idea I had was a girl in an art gallery looking at paintings. One would say the usual, A NEW BLOG POST AVAILABLE NOW or something like READ A NEW BLOG POST. The poster would be sharply focussed, the girl blurred but believe it or not every time I tried that prompt, the poster came out blurred and the girl sharp.

Anyway, let’s take a look at some which came out pretty well.

Many of these images I use in my promo videos which can be found in places like Facebook and X. Here’s a recent example.

Freepik is a site where I have always got some good results and recently I spotted an AI voice section on their site. I sorted out quite a few good voices which can be edited and made faster or slower and other refinements but sadly, just as I was getting started, I ran out of credits which was really annoying especially as being a major tightwad I wasn’t inclined to pay for more. Oh well, here’s one voice I used that I thought might resonate with my American readers.

Here’s another video which used an AI image of a bottle floating in the water which came out pretty good as a video. The sound effects were added from a sound effects CD I bought from eBay years ago.

This next one features a pulp fiction paperback with the title, new blog post out now. I tried this prompt a number of times but somehow the text always came out mixed up. This one isn’t perfect; it was supposed to show my name on the spine but shows it on the side where the pages are.

Here’s a final one which will probably reflect the UK weather back in Manchester.

Of course, they don’t call Manchester The Rainy City for nothing!

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Saturday Nights

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My book, Floating in Space, is set in the Manchester of the late seventies. There were no smartphones, no internet and no wireless networks. In fact, ‘wireless’ was an old fashioned word for the radio. I’m tempted to say that things moved at a slower pace then but that’s not true. Things just moved at a different pace. In 2025 you hear a lot about pubs closing down but back in 1977, pubs were far from closing down; at the weekend they were the place to be! That was where my friends and I met up, drank beer, listened to music and chatted up the ladies. Saturdays were the focus of our week back then but these days I’m actually not that keen on going out on a Saturday. I much prefer a weekday night out; things are a little quieter and there are fewer drunken idiots.

Having said that, Liz and I went into St Annes last Saturday to see our friends, Ray and Dean, perform as the Boogie Brothers at the Pier Inn. The Pier Inn is only a few years old and it’s a rather small little pub. The night we went in it was a hot and muggy evening and even with the door open it was hot in there so we decided to take a break and pop into Wetherspoons which we expected to be much cooler and it was. It did strike me though that most of the clientele in both those pubs were pretty similar to my own age group. OK there were a few young people but most people out that night were in my particular age bracket. Where do young people go these days on a Saturday night?

Back in 1977 Saturday nights were the culmination of the weekend for my twenty-one year old self. I always preferred it to Friday nights because things were more relaxed, there was no rushing home from work, no rushing to get your tea down your neck so you can get changed, then leg it out for the bus. Saturday, you could take your time and leisurely work up to things. Sometimes I would go out shopping and buy myself something new to wear for that evening, a shirt, or perhaps even a new pair of trousers. Then later I would have a long relaxed soak in the bath and dress unhurriedly in my room to the tune of my favourite music. In 1977 my favourite album was Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and as I dressed I would mimic Nigel Olsson’s measured and rhythmic drumming to ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’, or ‘Candle in the Wind’.

These days I just pop into the bathroom, have a shave and a shower and throw on one of a number of short sleeved shirts that I tend to favour. Still, even back in 1977 I could sometimes get bored with the usual pubs and bars in Manchester. I remember one boozy night in which my friend Chris and I decided to go out on the train somewhere. We ended up in Nantwich if I remember correctly. We took our tent and put it up somewhere in a field or a park and proceeded to spent the night drinking in a local pub.

The next morning we woke in our tent which had partially collapsed around us. We staggered up and packed everything away and thought about making our way to the railway station. As we walked into the town various people hailed us ‘Hi Steve!’ ‘Hi Chris!’

We dropped into the local pub and the barman greeted us like old friends. ‘Great night last night wasn’t it?’ he said.  I guess it must have been.

Here are a few facts about Saturday compiled after a quick search of the internet.

Saturday is named after Saturn, the Roman God of agriculture.

Saturday is the 6th day of the week in western culture although in some places the first day of the week is considered to be Sunday, making Saturday the last day of the week.

In Hinduism, Saturday is dedicated to the planet Saturn and is considered a day for spiritual cleansing and fasting. Devotees may visit temples and perform special rituals on this day, or abstain from certain foods and activities as a form of penance.

In the UK, Saturday is the busiest shopping day of the week. Many people use this day to do their weekly grocery shopping and high streets and shopping centres are often crowded with shoppers. One of my hard and fast rules is to never go shopping on a Saturday. Tuesday works better for me, it’s much quieter.

Time for a music break. I was going to go with Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting by Elton John but to be honest, as much as I like Elton, that song really isn’t my cup of tea these days. Here’s something much more enjoyable, Saturday Night at the Movies by the Drifters.

Talking about movies, Saturday Night Fever was a film released in 1977 starring John Travolta. Travolta plays Tony, a young man who spends his weekends drinking and dancing at a local disco. I haven’t seen the film for years until I watched it recently and was surprised to be reminded that, apart from the disco dancing interludes and the music of the Bee Gees, it is actually a gritty and dark film.

Here’s what I wrote in my book Floating in Space about Saturday nights;

“There was something about Saturday nights in Manchester. Some quality of security, of expectancy, a feeling that the night and the future were going to be good. A feeling that you might just meet some gorgeous girl and that even if you didn’t, it didn’t really matter because there was always the excitement of the people, the music, the drink, and everything else that made up the evening. And then there was always the expectancy of the next night, and the next, and on and on into the future. The past building up inside you like a great data bank, reminding you, reassuring you, like a light burning in some empty room in the corner of your mind.”

The Playground as it is today

Back in the late 70s, my friends and I used to go to a bar in Manchester called the Playground. We loved it in there. Inside the Playground, flickering multi-coloured spotlights rotated across the red carpeted room which, on Fridays and Saturdays, was generally packed. It had a small dance floor sunk low like a pit where people up on the raised bar level could look down at the gyrating girls and where also, on week day lunchtimes, a topless dancer appeared at the stroke of one o’clock to translate the soul and disco music of the time into pulsating physical motion, the eyes of jaded office workers glued to her as she did so.

There was a paltry fifty pence charge to get in, the solitary bouncer was silent but not unpleasant and the DJ, who always began the night with ‘Love’s Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco, and chart music. We were all mad about Jenny, the barmaid. She was lovely. She had a kind of round, open face framed by thick blonde hair and her skin was a creamy white. She served us Worthington ‘E’ and we melted into the hubbub of people on their Saturday night out while the music of the seventies drifted through us.

Yes, we had a lot of fun nights in the Playground until one night we turned up and the place was closed. We went somewhere else that night and for some reason it remained closed for a long while. Perhaps the owners had gone bust or their lease had expired. Eventually it was refurbished and opened under another name but it was never the same again. Even so, every time I walk down Oxford Road, I always stop for a moment and remember those long gone nights in the Playground.

What shall I do this Saturday night? Get dressed up and go into town?

Actually, I think I might just order a takeaway and watch television!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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