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.
Yes, It’s that time again. As I write this there are only a couple of days left before the big event, Christmas day.
I had a huge amount of recorded music of course. By the mid-seventies my record collection was already pretty big and I was buying vinyl records, usually 45 rpm singles, every week. My tape recorder had a built-in radio so I could record my favourite tracks straight onto tape for free and I spent a lot of time taping the new top twenty which came out every Tuesday. The other thing I could do with my tape recorder was record myself with a microphone.
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.
It’s been a little chilly this week although here in the north west we had one rather sunny day in which I was able to give the lawn and the privets a final trim before the winter.
Perhaps that’s a consequence of nearing the latter stages of my journey through life. Recently when we were travelling through France motoring along through the endless country lanes of the Loire valley, it seems as if I only became aware of the speed when I reached a new village or hamlet and had to slow down. Perhaps that’s the way it is with time too, that you only notice the passing of time with some new event, something that brings time into perspective.
I started off with a post called 
One of the places I visited this year was Compiègne in France where the armistice was signed which ended the First World War. Hitler came here in 1940 when Nazi Germany defeated France and forced the French to sign the surrender in the same railway car where the Germans had surrendered in 1918. I shot a short video at the site and wrote a post titled 
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s a desire that I suppose came from reading a lot of books. Someone had an idea, wrote a book and I read the book and in doing so the author transmitted his thoughts and ideas to me through the book. It’s only natural, at least it seems so to me, to want to do the same, to not just receive the thoughts of someone else but to transmit my thoughts and ideas, in the form of a book, to others.
Right, I thought, that’s it. I’m finally published. Now I can just sit back and wait for people to buy it. The thing is, who would know about my book? How would readers even realise that a new novel was available? Yes, that’s the thing. Writing a book isn’t enough, nor is actually publishing it. This is where marketing comes in. To sell your book you need to advertise. You need to use all your social media channels to tell everyone and his dog, here is a new book, come and buy it. You need to start an author page at Amazon and one at Goodreads too. Then you need an author website which is where this page comes in. How can you keep people coming in to read your blogs? Well, you need more social media and more blogs and for more blogs you need more and more ideas. How can you make your social media posts more interesting? Well you might want to add some graphics. Then you might want to add some animated graphics and even video so now you might find not only have you written a novel, you’ve written over 500 blog posts and graphics and made over a hundred videos, all to bring in more blog readers who may, or may not, buy your book.
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.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 