Tag Archives: memories

Old Friends and School Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This last week I met up with two of my old friends, both of whom I haven’t really seen for perhaps thirty years. Carl (names have been changed to protect the innocent) was a lad I first met at junior school. We met through a mutual school friend called Peter as Peter and Carl lived in the same avenue.

Carl’s brother Martin and I once shared a flat together in Didsbury. It was a rather nice place as I remember. It was small and I had the best bedroom because I think it was me who had paid the deposit or at least the bulk of it and it was right in the centre of Didsbury, a stone’s throw from numerous pubs, bars and takeaways.

Martin seemed to have a lot of health problems when he was younger. Once, many years ago, I used to work nights and when I came home one morning, Martin’s three alarm clocks went off in succession, each placed further away from his bed so he would have to get up to switch them off. I went to bed and was soon asleep. I woke up at about 3pm and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As I sat down in the lounge to drink it, Martin staggered in having just got out of bed. “What time is it?” he asked.

We laughed about that in the pub the other day. I and others used to pull his leg about being lazy and being a hypochondriac but as it turned out, Martin had MS; multiple sclerosis, not an easy disease to spot even now.

Carl was the best man at my wedding and I was his best man when he married. We lost regular contact over the years especially when I moved out of Manchester to Merseyside. Anyway, it was good to meet up again and after a while the three of us slipped pretty easily into the old comfortable camaraderie we used to have.

We filled each other in about marriages, divorces and new partners. About jobs and retirements as well as about old friends and acquaintances.

We talked a lot about our schooldays. We all went to the same school and way back then, my two top subjects were English language and art. In fact, now I think of it, I was the toast of the art class. People loved my paintings and drawings and I loved art. Our art teacher was a guy called Mr Markland. He wasn’t a man with a great affinity for people. In fact he was a rather cool customer but I always liked him and got on well with him. Martin though hated the guy.

Another teacher, probably the most disliked teacher in the school was Mr Ashton, the metalwork teacher. He had a rather bad habit of getting very angry at his students and throwing whatever was handy at them. As this was the metalwork class, that would be something metal and heavy. Many a time a hammer or a chunk of metal flew past my head towards some offending pupil. What would have happened had he hit someone, well I don’t know. Maybe he had a good aim and was choosing to deliberately miss students. Of course, that was an age free of the health and safety restraints that we currently endure. We all had our Mr Ashton stories to tell.

Mr Markland was a superb artist. I remember one day sketching something. I think we had to produce some kind of large human figure. I had chosen a cowboy for some reason and Mr Markland took my pencil and started to make some gentle curves on the paper. He held the pencil not like someone would hold a pencil to write but in the way someone would hold a paintbrush, holding it lightly at the top and making these confident curves on the paper.  After a few moments the shape of the cowboy became apparent; the waistcoat, the bandana tied around the neck, the gun belt at an angle, the hat and so on. I have always wished I could draw like that.

One day there came the moment when we had to choose. Choose which subjects we wanted to study and to take forward to O level or beyond. When I look back now my thinking then was just, well, bonkers!

My number one love in those days was motor racing and I harboured some kind of distant idea of working in motor sport, of perhaps even being a racing driver. Problem number 1: we had no family car and my dad couldn’t drive so any idea of doing what Jensen Button and his dad later did in Karts went out of the window. Anyway, that’s why I chose metalwork because I thought I could become a mechanic, get work with some motor sporting garage and maybe break into motorsport like that. The thing was that when we came to choose our subjects it wasn’t just ‘I want to study this’ and ‘I want to study that’, it was a case of this OR that. Chemistry or biology for instance, you couldn’t do both. I wasn’t happy and it had come to a straight choice of metalwork or art. Foolishly, metalwork won. After all, a metalwork O level would help me get a job whereas an art O level, well, what could that do for me? (What a fool I was!)

One day I met Mr Markland in the corridor and he stopped me and said “Steve, you’re going the wrong way. We’ve moved to the new art room on the first floor.”

It was then I had to tell him. “Mr Markland, I’m going to the metalwork class.”

“Metalwork?”

“Yes. I’m in the metalwork class.” Clearly, he didn’t understand. “I chose metalwork.”

Mr Markland looked as though he had been slapped in the face by a wet kipper. “You chose metalwork instead of art?”

“Yes,” I said meekly.

Mr Markland thought for a moment and then said, “I see,” and walked on. He never spoke to me again.

It would be nice to record that I excelled in metalwork, left school and became a mechanic for a formula one team. The fact is I hated metalwork although the hated Mr Ashton became a much nicer teacher now that he knew (well, thought he knew) that I actually liked his class. After many years of hard graft, I produced a metal bolt that was rather stiff. I thought I could attach it to the back door but when it was screwed to the door it proved rather difficult to open. One day my mum told my dad, “Get that bloody bolt off that door. I can’t get the door open in a morning!”

I gave up the idea of working in a formula one team. Instead, I had a new vocation. I would become a journalist. I went to my careers teacher, Mr Sherrif and told him.

“So how are you going to do that then?” he said.

Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to tell me what to do?

“I’m not sure,” I answered.

“Ever thought of going to the Manchester Evening News?”

Now, that’s more like it. “That’s a good idea,” I said.

“Only they don’t take trainees.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I’ve got just the thing for you.”

Mr Sherrif rummaged around on his desk, produced various papers, flicked through a notebook and dialled a number. After some idle chit chat he seemed to be arranging an appointment, I could hear my name mentioned and something about ‘nine thirty’ tomorrow. Of course, he’s onto the Evening News. He’s got me a job interview and to think people say Mr Sherrif is rubbish and all he ever does is get people interviews at Barclays Bank!

“There you are,” said Mr Sherrif when he put down the phone. He scribbled something on a slip of paper.

“Tomorrow at nine thirty. You know where Barclays bank is don’t you?”

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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.

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January, Don’t You Just Hate It?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I might as well start off this post by coming out and saying what I think straight off the bat; I don’t like January. I don’t like it at all because the thing is, I just hate the cold. I reckon it would be rather nice to just hibernate for the entire winter period just like many creatures do.

I’m not that keen on Christmas so maybe late November would be a good time to just settle down somewhere warm and comfy, snuggle up into my duvet and perhaps wake up round about late March. I know that March can be unpredictable in terms of the weather. It’s generally windy and cold but certainly not as cold as January. Waking up in March would give me time to get my bearings before moving into April, my favourite time of year when the days are getting longer, nature is starting to revive and warmer days are coming.

January 1970

Recently while pottering about trying to sort out the tons of ‘stuff’ I seem to have accumulated over the years I came across my schoolboy diary from 1970. As this post will be published on the 18th of January, I thought I’d take a look and see what I had written. Back in 1970 the 18th was a Sunday and all I decided to record was “Watched Captains Courageous and Randall and Hopkirk”.

Randall and Hopkirk was a TV show first broadcast in 1969 through until March 1970. It was an action and adventure drama despite the slightly tongue in cheek premise. Randall and Hopkirk are private investigators but Randall is helped by his partner Marty Hopkirk who is murdered in the first episode but comes back as a ghost to help his partner find his murderer. Marty stays on and continues to help Jeff Randall for the entire series of 26 episodes. It was later remade with comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in 2000. Personally, I prefer the original.

Captain Courageous was a film starring Spencer Tracy based on a book by Rudyard Kipling. The story follows the adventures of spoiled brat Harvey Cheyne Junior, the son of a railway tycoon. Harvey falls overboard from his father’s yacht and is saved from drowning by Portuguese fisherman Manuel Fidello played by Tracy. The boy demands to be returned home but the fishing vessel is on a three month fishing expedition and will not return early. The captain offers to sign Harvey on as a crewman until they return and under the tutorship of Manuel he begins to learn about fishing. Harvey becomes close to Manuel and is devasted when he is drowned. Returning home, he is reunited with his father as a changed person.

January 1649

This week I watched an interesting documentary about Charles the 1st. Back in January 1649 parliament was deliberating about what to do with Charles who had been defeated by the Parliamentarians. The parliament was known as the ‘rump’ parliament because any MP who was suspected of supporting the king was prevented from entering. Parliament voted to put the King on trial but the upper house, the Lords, declined to support this and then promptly gave themselves a holiday. Parliament then went ahead without the Lords.

King Charles was put to death on the 30th January, 1649.

January 1965

Another great British leader died in January 1965, Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was an army officer, an MP, an author and a Prime Minister. Nothing I can write in a short post, even one dedicated fully to his life can do justice to this great man’s many achievements but let’s have a go. Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace on November 30th 1874. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, his mother Lady Randolph was formerly Jennie Jerome from the USA, the daughter of Leonard Jerome, an American businessman.

Churchill began his military career with the 4th Hussars but later left to become a politician. He failed to be elected as MP for Oldham then went to South Africa to serve as a journalist. He was captured by the Boers and later escaped which brought him much publicity which must have helped him when he stood again as a Conservative candidate for Oldham in the 1900 general election. This time he emerged as the victor. Later Churchill became a Liberal and later still moved back to the Conservatives. The years between 1929 and 1939 became Winston’s Wilderness years when he was out of office but began to warn against the rise of the Nazis. On the 13th December he was visiting New York when he was knocked down by a car which incidentally inspired my story Timeline, the title story of my new book.

Churchill’s warnings about Nazi Germany proved correct and with the outbreak of war in 1939 he returned as a government minister and later succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister when Chamberlain was forced to resign as the Labour party declined to serve in a national government headed by him.

As well as serving as a politician, Churchill wrote many books and one, My Early Life, was made into a film, Young Winston. I’ve always loved that film but it annoys me no end when I see it on TV these days as for some reason a final scene in which Churchill falls asleep and dreams of meeting his late father, is cut out.

January 2003

Looking at my diary for 2003 I see I was suffering with a sore neck that January. I was off sick from work and my boss was not happy. While off sick I had written a screenplay and wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was living in Merseyside at the time so decided to send it to Phil Redmond, the producer of the Liverpool soap Brookside, thinking that he might like it enough to either give me some advice or even a job on the writing team. I had sent it with a self-addressed return envelope and guess what, I received it back in the post only a few days later minus any sort of feedback or a job offer.

January 1986

In January 1986 the spacecraft Challenger was ready to be launched into space. It was a unique mission in that school teacher Christa McAuliffe had been selected to broadcast lessons from space. The flight was the 25th shuttle mission and the 10th flight for Challenger itself. The mission was originally scheduled for July but the date was put further and further back until NASA finally decided on the 28th January. The temperature of -8 degrees was a record low for a shuttle launch and many engineers were unhappy. Their cause for concern was the shuttle’s O ring seal in a joint between the shuttle and the solid rocket boosters. In cold temperatures it was thought that the rubber rings might not be flexible enough to seal the joints. Sadly they were correct. Hot pressurised gas was released which burned into the external propellant tank which then exploded 73 seconds into the flight. All the astronauts were killed.

January 2025

To finish on a somewhat lighter note, today as I write this I was in Manchester. I decided I needed a few items of shopping so I walked into the nearby civic centre. It was still pretty cold despite the melting snow so I wrapped up well.  I had a woolly jumper on, my anorak and a baseball cap and gloves. Happily, it wasn’t quite as cool as I had originally thought. At the civic I popped into the cheap bookshop there but after a few minutes I realised that it was far too hot and I had to get out. Instead of walking further to Asda, I popped into the Iceland store a few hundred yards away from the book shop. After about 5 minutes I realised that in there too, the management had for some reason decided to crank the heating up to a level usually experienced in a Sahara Desert heatwave.

I grabbed the few things I wanted then headed for the till. Sweat was running down my face but there were two people at the till, both with enough shopping to last the entire winter. I opened my jacket and then heard some wonderful words, “can you come this way please?” Yes, a new till was opening up and me with my 4 or 5 items was through and soon out into the open air.

January, don’t you just hate it?

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My Life in 5 Meals

Posted on by Steve Higgins

That may sound like an odd title for a blog post but I actually pinched it from the BBC website before adding a small but subtle change. I was scanning through the news and right at the bottom of the page I saw something about My Life in 5 Dishes. It was actually a BBC podcast series in which several celebs are interviewed and asked to name 5 meals that somehow relate to their lives. One episode which I partially listened to was Nigella Lawson talking about elements of her life including her mother who had various eating disorders and died when Nigella was young. A dish she used to make was a sort of chicken stew and Nigella used to make the same dish for her family which in turn brought back memories of her mother.

(Click here to listen to the BBC podcast)

Anyway, that’s enough about Nigella, time to crack on with my five dishes.

Boiled Eggs

Yes I know boiled eggs is a rather simple dish but actually it’s the first meal, apart from cereal and tomato soup, that I ever actually made myself rather than just putting cornflakes in a dish and adding milk or opening a can of soup and heating it up.

I’ve always liked boiled eggs, not only because it’s the first thing I ever made for myself but also because I just like eggs. I prefer my boiled eggs soft but not runny although like a lot of the things I make myself, they don’t always turn out the way I want them to. Still, I like eggs soft or hard so even if I overdo them, I’ll still enjoy my eggs. Two minutes and fifty seconds is my optimum boiling time but I tend to be slow in putting the toast in and so usually at the two minutes fifty deadline I’m still buttering my toast and so my eggs will be overdone. (Note to self: start the toast off sooner!)

Liz makes great boiled eggs. She usually takes the eggs out of the fridge in advance and brings them up to room temperature by popping them in a pan of warm water for a while which also stops them cracking in the pan.

Egg on toast with beans and a sausage

One of the reasons I like this dish is that when I was a bus driver, I always used to have this meal in our canteen. The canteen used to have a breakfast special which was egg, bacon, sausage and either beans or tomatoes and a slice of toast, all for a very cheap one British pound. This was of course back in the late 70s and early 80s. I used to find though that the breakfast special didn’t quite fill me up so that’s when I developed the egg on toast with beans dish. There was a time when I didn’t like my egg to touch my beans and the canteen staff used to make me a barrier with the sausage between the beans and the egg which they all seemed to think was quite funny. After a few trials with just beans on toast I decided to go adventurous and have the beans on top of the egg and then I found I really liked it that way, especially when I threw in a sausage on the side.

Here’s a sort of odd footnote though. Yesterday I had egg, bacon, sausage and beans for breakfast and guess what, I used the sausage as barrier to stop the beans spreading all over the plate to my egg!

Sunday Lunch

I’ve always loved the great British Sunday roast. My mother used to make a really lovely roast beef dinner. The beef always had that wonderful melt in your mouth texture. I once asked her how she made it and she told me she roasted the beef in a casserole dish with a little stock or water at a high heat for 20 minutes and then lowered the heat down and cooked the meat very slowly. These days my favourite for Sunday dinner is a gammon joint. Liz cooks it slowly in a pan of water and dried peas and the result is lovely. Throw in some roast spuds, some peas, some carrot and turnip or swede, some Yorkshire pudding and gravy and you can’t go wrong. Just thinking about it brings back the memories of childhood, huddling up in front of the fire watching television and of course if mum called out that dinner was ready my dad took great delight in switching off the TV while we ate.

Later my brother and I would be back on the rug in front of the fire drinking tea and watching some old black and white film while Bob, our family dog, tried his best to push past us and get as close as possible to the fire.

Chicken Curry

In my late teens, when my friends and I used to go out, we’d sometimes end up at a Chinese restaurant in a village called Gatley. A long time ago Gatley used to be a traditional country village but these days it has been caught up in an urban sprawl and is not quite the same as it used to be. I always used to plump for chicken Maryland which was probably the only non Chinese dish on the menu and was just chicken in breadcrumbs. After tasting some of the dishes my friends were ordering I one day took the plunge and ordered a Chinese chicken curry with fried rice and today it’s one of the only two dishes I tend to order in Chinese restaurants, either that or chicken with green peppers and black bean sauce.

Not so long ago I went back to Gatley and had a walk round and even made a little video. One of the former pubs there is now a Tesco supermarket. A café I used to go in was still a café but seemed to be permanently closed. The Prince of Wales, the pub where I had my very first pint of beer is still there. Another pub, The Horse and Farrier is just a few minutes walk further on. Once, when I was in the 5th form at school, my friends and I nipped inside for a lunchtime pint. We left our jackets and briefcases outside and had just ordered a few pints when who should walk in but our physics teacher, the highly unpopular Mr Farragher. Luckily there was a back door that led to the beer garden so we legged it out the back way, picked up our jackets and bags and quickly left.

After that we used to refer to the pub as the Horse and Farragher!

Back in the 80s after a night out in Manchester, we would sometimes pop into a place called the Plaza Café in the city centre. They served curry but they only had three types, mild, hot and suicide. I can still hear one of my friends calling out for ‘three suicides please!’

Chilli Con Carne

I wasn’t sure what to choose for my last dish. I’m not a great pizza fan although I do like making a pizza but the quality of my home-made pizza dough is not consistent. Sometimes it’s good and other times it’s just average. I like to serve my pizza with a fresh side salad or coleslaw. I like a lot of Italian dishes these days, particularly spaghetti aglio e olio which is spaghetti with garlic and chilli. Another dish I’ve always enjoyed making is chilli con carne. I like to start it off in a big pan or my old wok and then transfer everything into my slow cooker and serve it later with chips and rice.

Well after all that I’m not sure what to have for tea. Chilli? Well, I should have started that a while ago. Egg on toast with beans? Nah, I had eggs for breakfast. I think I might go for that old favourite, one thing I’ve not mentioned yet. A cheese sandwich!

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A Slice of My Life 2024

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s a long time since I’ve made a video for my YouTube channel and recently I’ve been trying to think about what my next project should be. When I’m stuck for a video I tend to tweak or even remake some of the short videos I use on social media to promote this page and my two books. In fact my YouTube page is made up of quite a lot of videos like that as well as numerous short video versions of my poems. Every now and again I try and put something different together. I usually make a video about our yearly trips to France in our motorhome and I’ve made a few videos about Manchester, my home town and also the place where my book Floating in Space is set.

Liz and I have just spent 5 weeks in Lanzarote and although I took my video camera over there I actually didn’t use it except to take some holiday snaps.

Last week I decided to take a little jolly out on the bus over to Stockport and see how the new bus station, currently under construction there, was coming along. Travelling to Stockport on the bus made me think about how our lives change and move on. Back in 1979 I was a coach driver for National Express but I wasn’t happy with the job. In the summer of 79 I was 22 years old and far too young and immature to do such a responsible job. Covering the long distance National Express routes wasn’t too bad but private hires were difficult as the driver had to plan his routes and to be honest I didn’t know my way about the country particularly well.

After being stuck on the same long distance bus route from Manchester to Lowestoft far too many times I packed the job in. I went to ask for my old job back at GM Buses but they gave me a big lecture about how they were fed up of training drivers only for them to resign and go driving for other companies and so I was turned away. That same afternoon I drove over to the GM Bus depot at Stockport where they were short of staff and they started me the same day. For over ten years I spent every working day in Stockport taking fares and later, driving buses. Returning in 2024 after over 30 years away was interesting, I must say.

Most of Mersey Square, the square at the very centre of Stockport, was fenced off while the builders worked on the new bus station. A huge railway viaduct spans the centre of Stockport and the bus station or bus interchange as they are now calling it is mostly on one side of the viaduct with part of it spilling over onto the other side. Someone told me it was due to open in two weeks time but looking around, that seemed to be a pretty tall order.

I shot some video in the square then walked around the construction, filming as I went. I was planning to film myself with my trusty selfie stick and chat away to the camera about my memories of Stockport but as usual, I felt a little self-conscious and just stuck to filming the new construction. I couldn’t walk through the area as of course the builders were still working so I had to walk around it.

When I got to the other side a new Stagecoach bus went past on its way into the Stagecoach garage. It was displaying the route number 192 which is a very busy bus route indeed, going down the A6 from Hazel Grove into Stockport and then on into Manchester. Back in my day there was a 192 every six minutes and each one was packed. Looking back I must have spent an awful lot of time going up and down on that bus route.

When the bus services were deregulated in 1986 the Busy Bee bus company tried to muscle in onto our route and so the service moved up to one every three minutes! Yes we would load up in Piccadilly, Manchester. An inspector would count three minutes and then you were off. Straight away there was a set of traffic lights and if you hit those on red you were in trouble as the bus behind was already following you out.

I followed the Stagecoach bus round the corner to the old GM Buses depot, now of course owned and run by Stagecoach. Inside it was full of buses and for a moment I remembered the old days when it was full of the old orange and cream of GM Buses.

I left the bus company in the early 1990s and started my own company selling motorsport memorabilia. I loved that job and spent all my day chatting to various regular people about F1 and motorsport but sadly, I didn’t make a lot of money, eventually selling all my stock to someone who had a similar business. After a failed attempt to become a TV producer I ended up short of money and went back to GM Buses. I worked for the GM coaching company known as Charterplan. After a short while there I transferred to an office job in the GM Buses control room in Ardwick, Manchester and that was the last time I set foot in Stockport, until last week.

The Comfy GillI walked round to the other side of the bus depot and there opposite, what used to be the main exit for our buses, was the Comfortable Gill. The Comfy, as we affectionately called it, was the pub where we busmen used to drink after the day’s shift was over. At one time if a driver was due to finish after last orders at 11, the landlord used to accept telephone orders for a pint so sometimes we could pull in at 11:20, park the bus in the depot and then pop over to the Comfy to find a pint waiting for us to sup while we cashed up our day’s takings. When I saw it the other day the Comfy was all closed up and looked neglected. So many of Britain’s pubs have closed down and I walked away hoping that the Comfy might be saved in the near future.

It’s always interesting to look back and have a stroll down memory lane. I can’t say working at GM Buses was a great job and looking back I wonder why I stayed so long. Of course back then I had bought a house and I had a very expensive mortgage to pay and I put in a lot of hours to pay for it. Perhaps I would have been better served by prioritising my career rather than my house. Oh well!

Liz and I went to the pictures this week. It was the first time we had visited the cinema since seeing Oppenheimer last year and although I didn’t rate it as the work of genius many people seem to think it is, Oppenheimer was certainly an excellent film and deservedly won the best picture Oscar.

The film we went to see was Wicked Little Letters set in England after the first World War. It’s about an Irish lady who comes to live in an English village. She is outspoken, very rude and swears a lot and is soon branded as the author of a very nasty series of poison pen letters. It wasn’t a bad film but what was odd was the way the 1920s were portrayed. There was a black judge, a black Asian policewoman, numerous other black people and the Irish lady was living with a black man. It was if they had substituted 1920s life with today’s multicultural society. I’m not sure why they would do that but the end result was that the entire film looked a little bit strange. Why didn’t they just set the film in the present day when different ethnic groups, as well as bad language is just the norm? Or was the director trying to make some point about society that perhaps I have missed? Wicked Little Letters isn’t a bad film in fact it’s quite amusing in a way and was actually based on a true story but that cutural shift just didn’t work for me.

Perhaps we all look back at the past in different ways.

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A Few Random Thoughts about Time

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Time is a pretty odd thing when you think about it. You can’t see it or touch it but it’s there just the same. As far as I understand, time is uniform, it bumbles along at exactly the same speed, year after year. There are always 24 hours in any given day and 365 days in every year, except of course for leap years. I mentioned last week about encountering each new birthday with a sense of apprehension. After all, each birthday brings me closer to my inevitable end, my dying day but it seems to me that as we get older, time seems to speed up and the months and years pass by faster and faster.

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.

One of my friends has a daughter born on my birthday and the other day the child’s grandmother mentioned to me that she would be soon off to school. School already I thought? After all, I still think of that child as a baby, which clearly she no longer is. (Quick check and the little girl in question was born in 2019!)

In the boot of my car are two big yellow anoraks with reflective stripes. I put them there in case I ever break down on the motorway although they were given to me when I first joined the Highways Agency. They were compulsory clothing for being out and about seeing the motorway network first hand with our traffic officers, our area contractors and the police. I remember being out with the motorway police for a day and looking down at the speedometer as we made our way to an RTC and seeing it registering 120mph. That was an interesting day but it was actually back in 2005, 18 years ago. Can those yellow jackets really be 18 years old?

Music is another thing that always registers the passing of time. In the pub quiz that we visit every Thursday there is always a music section. The quizmaster plays 10 tracks and asks for three answers for each; the title, the artist and the year. We are helped in the year aspect as the DJ plays two tracks from each of ten decades and gives us the year endings. Now back in the 1980’s I was at the height of my love of vinyl singles. I bought singles every week, usually when they dropped out of the charts and were sold off at half price and not only that, later in the 80’s I bought my first video recorder and spent a lot of time recording my favourite music on video. What this means is that I should be spot on with the 80’s music but a lot of the time I sadly am not. Last week at the quiz, one of the tracks was Red Light Spells Danger, a hit by Billy Ocean which I was convinced was 1987. Actually it was older and was released in 1977. Fortunately Liz’s recollection was better than mine.

I have always been one for skimming through records and CDs, especially when the word ‘sale’ can be seen. Some years ago, a prime location for buying cheap CDs was Woolworths which sadly went bankrupt in 2015. In Woolworths many years ago I picked up a compilation CD. It had some really nice tracks and a few I’d never heard of but I chose it particularly because of one track, ‘Horse with no Name’ by America. I’ve always loved that song and I don’t have a copy of it so I bought the CD. Later when I had got home and played the album I was surprised to find another track that I hadn’t spotted earlier, it was Desiderata, a poem by Max Ehrman made into a pop song, of sorts, by an American guy called Les Crane.

Now not only is that poem one of my favourites but so is the musical version. It was played a lot at school by our headmaster in the morning services and as soon as I heard it again it brought memories of those long ago schooldays flooding back to me: The registrations, the morning assembly, the prayers. Back in the late sixties a lot of those morning assemblies were about Vietnam and how our headmaster, Mr Trickett wove his morning address from Vietnam to the Desiderata, I do not know but that musical version was something I loved and finding it again on a CD was like getting part of my youth back.

 

Quite a few years back Liz and I visited many of the war cemeteries in Northern France and like many others were moved by the many monuments to those who lost their lives in two world wars. I made a video about the many war memorials we came across and in the video commentary I spoke about the passing of time.

I have a theory about time and it’s this, it’s that time flows differently in different places. OK; sounds a bit mad doesn’t it? Let me explain further.

On many occasions when trundling through rural France I’ve come across many bunkers, fortresses and other sites. In northern France Liz and I stopped at a war grave cemetery that was picture perfect in its own way. The lawns were incredibly neat, and the hedgerows immaculately trimmed. Sadness pervaded the site like a scent coming over from the adjacent fields. Throughout there is a feeling of peace, of slowness and a feeling that time has stopped here or perhaps just slowed. That’s not strange when you think that time must have speeded up during the action of the first and second world wars, so it seems only fair that nature must compensate, that time must slow later to make up for the fast and frantic earlier time.

You can imagine the pace of things even a hundred years ago: The early morning bombardment, the whistles blowing as officers called their troops to go over the top. The advance parties who made ahead to cut the barbed wire, the troops walking apprehensively forward until they walked into the deadly machine gun fire that cut most of them down. Many found their final resting places in these cemeteries, places that are now quiet and peaceful with a silent beauty, timeless and moving with the beat of nature as a backdrop; the humming of the insects, distant cows mooing, and the birds flying past.

All the places we visited have had their moments in the spotlight of world history. They all lived through times of accelerated pace when time flowed swiftly. Perhaps it’s their time now for a quieter pace while time flows slowly.

Back to me then and my 67 birthdays. Time as I mentioned seems to speed up with age but there is still time to mention one more thing.

Time for a cup of tea!

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Taking the Man out of Manchester

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I do love it here in Lanzarote but lately the bad weather has given me a different viewpoint. Yes, this is a wonderful place when the sun is shining but then, so are a great many places. When the winds are blowing and the rain is coming down, Lanzarote is as miserable as anywhere else. I have often thought about upping and leaving for pastures new, especially when I spend time in the other lovely villa we habitually rent in France. I love the pool, I love the quiet, I love the relaxing patio where we barbecue food in the evening. When it’s cold and the rains pour down I often think how I’d much rather be at home, back in Manchester.

Many years ago, one of my friends was a CB radio enthusiast and he told me that the CB code for Manchester was ‘Rainy City’. Manchester is renowned for the rain so yes, I can understand that. Anyway, that got me thinking about Manchester and I thought I’d take a close up look at the place where I grew up.

When I was a youngster growing up in the suburbs of south Manchester, we were a little short of cash and every year we would take the bus into the city centre and then go north to Ancoats to a huge former mill that had become the Silvana warehouse. Silvana had everything I needed for my years in high school and everything was cheap, much cheaper than the usual stockists but actually ever so slightly different. My school uniform consisted of a green blazer and jumper and Silvana stocked them, and they were green but actually a very slightly, ever so slightly different shade of green. It was hard to tell but kids being what they were, they knew we had gone to Silvana and bought the cheap uniform. It was the same with my briefcase. It was pretty much the same as all the other kids’ briefcases but then ever so slightly different. Silvana was huge and I remember wondering what the place was like back in Victorian times when it was part of the thriving cotton mill industry.

Nowadays a lot of those same mills have either been knocked down or made into flats. One of the media guys at my former job told me he lived in a converted warehouse in the city centre and I always used to think wow, how great was that, actually living in the city centre, a stone’s throw from all the bars and restaurants and everything that made the city centre, well, the city centre.

Looking up at the Beetham Tower

Not true he told me. His apartment had been created by building thin new walls within the old warehouse and he could hear everything that went on in the apartment next door. He quickly sold up and moved on. Either way, I reckon I’d still like to have a city centre apartment.

One of the more recent iconic buildings in Manchester is the Beetham Tower. The building cost £150 million and was completed in 2006. It was Manchester’s tallest building until 2008 when the slightly taller South Tower on Deansgate Square was finished. The skyscraper towers over Deansgate, one of the trendier areas of Manchester, like a modern abstract sculpture looking down at the converted warehouses and the regenerated canal area where Manchester merges subtly into Salford. Further down in Salford is the brand new revitalised Salford Quays which is the home to Media City where the BBC and ITV have based their television studios. The new set for the TV soap Coronation Street is now in Salford and the old set can now be seen on YouTube videos looking like a sort of post-apocalyptic street full of weeds and decay waiting for the bulldozers to move in and knock down the remains before, I suppose, new apartment buildings are erected. Oh well, nothing stays the same.

When I left school in 1973 my first job was in the Refuge Assurance Company on Oxford Road. The very first day that I commenced employment there I was told the difference between assurance and insurance. I’ve often thought about that and wish I could remember what the hell that difference was. Anyway, I mention the Refuge because it was and still is probably the most beautiful building in the city. It wasn’t knocked up in a matter of weeks, it was built with reverence and dedication by craftsmen, people who cared about what they were doing. Today it is a hotel and whenever I am in Manchester I like to pop in there and have a look around. The last time I was there I was shooting the video shown below. Now in my videos I tend to occasionally use stock pictures and video clips but one of the things I try to do in those videos -and I should explain here that I like to continually update and re-edit my videos- is to replace a stock clip or photo with my own shot, when and if that particular photo opportunity turns up.

In the bar at the Refuge, I asked for a pint of lager and then asked the barman if I could film him pulling the pint. I hoped it would be perfect for a video about pubs and bars in Manchester. ‘No!’ said the barman. ‘What if I shot you without showing your face?’ I asked. ‘Well, is it for YouTube?’ ‘It might be.’ I said. ‘We have a policy of no filming in the bar sorry,’ ‘Ok’ I said. I was disappointed but then I took a seat and relaxed with my beer for a while and then . . . I took a few shots when he wasn’t looking. Pity I didn’t get the one of the pint being pulled because that was the one I really wanted.

Just across the road is a pub called the Salisbury and when I worked at the Refuge my colleagues and I used to visit there frequently for lunch as well as in the early evening for after work drinks. On my 18th birthday I had a memorable lunchtime there and as I came to work with only my sandwiches and my bus fare I have to thank the company architect and others for treating me.

Many years later working at my last job before retirement with Highways England my team were planning a night out in Manchester and didn’t know where to meet. As they wanted to dine in the ‘curry mile’ in Rusholme, a short way from the city centre I suggested the Salisbury and we duly met there before leaving to eat which meant that the Salisbury brings back memories not only from my very first job but also from my very last one.

The Manchester Central Library

Further up Oxford Road is another lovely Mancunian building, the Central Library. The library was built in 1930 and in fact Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald laid the foundation stone on the 6th May that year and King George V was on hand in 1934 to declare the library open. The building is a domed structure with a columned portico and the design apparently was based loosely on the Parthenon in Rome. I’ve always thought it to be a beautiful building and when I worked in Manchester, I used to eat my sandwiches sat upon a bench across the way in St Peter’s Square. Sadly that seating area has gone to make way for the new tram.

You might think that I’m writing this post about Manchester after another visit there however in fact I’m a few thousand miles away in Lanzarote. I’m not sure what made me think of Manchester although perhaps it was having a meal at a resort in Playa Blanca where the staff and patrons were all English and the food they served was all English pub fare.

Like they say, you can take the man out of Manchester but you can’t take Manchester out of the man.

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A Few Christmas Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I always find it hard to write a Christmas blog post. I’m not sure why but then Christmas isn’t really my favourite time of the year. Anyway, here are a few of my Christmas memories, some of them culled from previous Christmas posts.

I used to like Christmas way back when I was about 12 years old. There were three presents I wanted as a child for Christmas and I didn’t ever get any of them, well not for Christmas anyway. One was a Secret Sam Briefcase which was a toy briefcase based on something James Bond might have had back in the 1960’s. The other was a toy rifle called a Johnny Seven which was very much like the big blockbuster rifle that Ripley wields towards the end of the film Aliens and the final thing was an Action Man. It was apparently too expensive my mother told me.

Secret Sam case. Picture from Pinterest

After Christmas I still had dreams of getting an Action Man and I eventually did. I bought or swapped one from my old schoolfriend Peter. It had a broken foot but I stuck it back together and had many happy hours of fun with it. I built this huge flying car I called a Jet Raft but sadly the co-pilot’s seat went unoccupied for quite a long time. The next Christmas, Action Man must have come down in price substantially as my brother received one as part of his Christmas box.

Many times I borrowed his Action Man to occupy the co-pilot seat in the Jet Raft. If we fell out during our games as we frequently did, he would depart and take his Action Man with him. Later I bought his Action Man off him outright at what was probably, knowing him, a hugely inflated price.

Back then when you bought an Action Man outfit, each outfit came with a number of stars. If you saved up 21 you could get a free Action Man. I only ever bought a couple of outfits as I mostly made my own. My favourite was an Apollo astronaut outfit I made out of cardboard and some white fabric. However, I did cadge the stars off various schoolfriends and eventually saved up the 21. Yes, it was a great day when the Jet Raft was finally fully manned with pilot, co-pilot and navigator!

This is a picture of my old childhood home. It didn’t look like that when we lived there, there was no drive for a start and there was no metal fence, we used to have privet hedges but of course don’t forget the first rule of karma; nothing stays the same.

Christmases back then were cosy affairs. My brother and me lying on the mat in front of the coal fire and Bob, the family dog, trying to push past us for prime position. He used to get as close to the fire as he possibly could. When his nose dried up my mother would shout at him and drag him away as a dog with a dried-up nose is, as we all know, such a terrible thing. Well, mum thought so anyway.

We used to watch a lot of old black and white films back then, in fact many of the films I saw were films that my dad had seen in his younger days at the cinema. Once we watched Angels with Dirty Faces and I could see from my dad’s face that the film must have brought back good memories for him. I won’t tell you the end of the film because it has quite a clever twist but for whatever reason, just as we approached the final reel, dad felt so moved by re-experiencing the film that he had to tell me the ending! Thanks a bunch dad!

Yes, I’ve experienced many Christmases, some good and some bad. Many years ago I lived with my girlfriend, I’ll call her J. (J for Judas.) On Christmas morning J went out early to take her two children to Christmas day mass. While she was away, I charged up my video camera and when they returned, I shot various things, opening presents and having Christmas dinner and so on. It makes me sad to see that video now although I haven’t seen it for years. When the children came back from mass, they were anxious to open their presents but we were still waiting for their mum. Where is she, I asked? Oh, she had to make a phone call they said. Phone call? Why use the call box round the corner when we had a phone. Two phones in fact, one in the hall and one upstairs. When J eventually came home, she told me she had been chatting to a neighbour. A little alarm bell went off in my head at the time but I dismissed it.

Later it turned out that she had used the call box to phone her new boyfriend, the one she eventually left me for.

Another Christmas I remember was when I had bought my first car. I was still at home and we had moved out from Manchester just over the border into Cheshire. It was freezing cold and my radiator was leaking so I topped it up with water from the tap. I drove back into Manchester, went to a party which I ended up walking home from. When I went back the next day, the radiator had frozen and ruined the engine. That was an expensive Christmas and an expensive lesson to learn about motor cars.

My first car, a three wheeled Bond Bug

Here’s one last Christmas memory. One far off Christmas spent with another ex-girlfriend in our small home in Merseyside. I’ll call the girl in question X. I had some time owing me so I had taken a few days off after Christmas. It had not been a great Christmas as it was the first one since X’s mother had died and she had sadly put the previous year’s Christmas card from her mother in pride of place right on the top of the TV.

Anyway, everyone was getting used to going back to work and there was me, who had worked during Christmas, knackered, worn out and ready for a break. I spent one day with my brother having a nice post-Christmas drink in Manchester and the next day I was relaxing, catching up on some TV of the type hated by X, yes, sci fi stuff, Star Trek, black and white films and so on and then a revelation came to me.

What if I took down the decorations, got rid of the tree, and chucked out the rubbish? There were piles of wrapping paper and empty bottles about and so on. I could actually come out of this looking good for once. Anyway, there and then I just got stuck straight in. I took the tree down, packed away all the ornaments and decorations and put the box back in the loft. The tree was chopped up and placed in the correct bin, the green one.

All the papers, wrapping paper and empty chocolate boxes and stuff were all removed and placed in the correct bin, (Don’t want to upset those hard-working bin men by putting stuff in the wrong bins, do we?) Old Christmas cards were removed also and placed into the brown bins.

After that a quick hoover up and a sort out of the furniture, all put back in its proper place.

Well, I think I worked up a bit of a sweat there as I remember. Great! Time now for a well-deserved cuppa, a bacon butty and get that black and white movie I recorded the other day cranked up.

As I sat there watching Ronald Colman, I could hear the sound of the bin men reversing down the avenue. Yes, my trusty van was on the drive, well out of the bin wagon’s way. (I don’t want to cast a slur on the bin wagon driver but accidents had been known to occur. And there was that incident last year when my next-door neighbour had the affrontery to park a huge transit van in the road making access difficult for the bin wagon so, well they just refused to come up the drive and empty our bins.) I had placed all the bins down by the end of the drive just within easy picking up distance for the bin men. (Can’t have them walking all the way up the drive to get the bins can we?)

Just then X came in through the door, I stood there foolishly thinking she would be happy and waiting for the praise that was bound to come my way. I hadn’t spent my day self-indulgently doing ‘my’ stuff. I had cleaned and tidied. I had helped. Hadn’t I?

X took one look at the tidy lounge then looked at me and said in a sort of scary accusatory sort of way: “What have you done?”

Well, I thought it was pretty obvious what had been done but just then the reversing horn of the approaching bin wagon set off a warning bell. What was wrong? The tree was in the correct bin. The plastic stuff and empty bottles in the glass and plastic bin. The paper stuff, the Christmas cards were all in the paper bin. The Christmas cards . .

I legged it outside just in the nick of time to dive into the paper bin just as the binman was about to empty it. Sprawled across the bin I rummaged frantically through the cardboard and wrapping paper and retrieved X’s mother’s card from certain destruction.

‘Afternoon’ I said nonchalantly to the bin men. They just looked at me with that ‘it’s that nutter from number 4’ look on their faces. Back inside X grabbed the card from my hand with a lethal black look and it was then that we became aware of a certain amount of what appeared to be tomato soup that had somehow attached itself to the card. Now, where that had come from, I do not know, I had not even eaten tomato soup that day (although perhaps I did throw a used tin of the stuff in the rubbish.) Oh well, at least my quick thinking had rescued the card!

Not long after, X and I parted company.

Those were a few of my Christmas memories. Hope you have a great Christmas and New Year.

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The Day I Finally Cracked It

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m still feeling rather fed up lately. It’s great to have no work to do but it’s important to fill that time and to keep busy, neither of which I’m currently doing.

Because I’m a little bored my writing has been affected too, I’m not doing much so I have little to write about. I don’t have the 42 mile trip to work so I’m not in my car as much and when I’m in my car that’s when a lot of my ideas come.

Years ago when I drove for the bus company I decided to pack the job in and try my hand at driving coaches. It was a bad mistake, I was only 21, I was too immature to take on a responsible job like coaching. I hadn’t travelled about much and so I didn’t know my way around the UK. On every trip I had to spend ages planning my route and where to stop and frankly, I just wasn’t up to the job. The result was that I ended up back at the bus company again. There were no vacancies at my old garage where they were gearing up to be all one man operated buses so I agreed to move to Stockport. At Stockport they still had a lot of old fashioned buses that were driver and conductor operated but to be honest, operating a bus with two people was much more fun.

Two staff members retired which I remember well. They were both characters. The first one was a long serving conductor whose name I can never remember. I’ll call him Tony. Tony was looking forward to retirement. He had worked for North Western before buses were nationalised and he always looked down on those who had worked for the ‘corporation’, the municipal bus companies. North Western had run a lot of long distance routes but the corporation had only local routes. When buses were nationalised the long distance routes went to National Express and Tony was forced to work for GM Buses which took over local routes.

Tony had planned well for his retirement. He had gone on a few retirement courses, he had invested well and had also topped up his pension with a private one. He wouldn’t miss the bus company for a minute. On his last day he walked over to Sainsbury’s for something and dropped dead in the frozen food aisle. He never got to enjoy his retirement at all.

Another long-time employee was Bert, known to all as ‘Cracked it’ Bert. Bert was a crusty old guy who always wore the full uniform including the cap. He worked on the 900 rota on which all the old timers worked. They didn’t do weekends and they worked easy split shifts covering the morning rush hour and then returning later for the evening one. Bert always used to say to me that it was hard work because the staff were ‘always in the thick of the action’. Don’t believe a word of it. Split shifts were busy, very busy but not the ones on the 900 rota.

The 900 rota was unofficially known as the ‘Sick, Lame, and Lazy Rota’, and it was all easy work; the odd works’ service and a couple of the easier school runs.

Thrown in to their duties was also a gratuitous share of standby time. Standby was when you have spare drivers or conductors, ready to fill in to replace another crew when a bus had broken down or staff had called in sick. The thing was, with the 900 rota, their standby time was only a couple of hours so they were ninety nine percent certain they would never be called to go out. The drivers were fairly amenable old chaps but the conductors, all mostly clippies, female conductresses apart from Tony and Bert, were all quite the opposite. Go out on their stand by time, when they could be supping tea and knitting? Not likely! As you can imagine the 900 staff were universally unpopular.

When I was a one-man driver, in the latter days of conductor operations, we used to do a trip from Bramhall in the morning rush hour. When we got closer to Stockport the bus was always packed to the seams and the extra rush hour bus, covered by the 900 staff, always used to hang back and let the one-man driver do all the work. Well, we can’t expect our senior 900 staff to cover that busy run can we? And knitting won’t do itself, will it?

I remember pulling into Mersey Square in Stockport with a bus bursting at the seams and the 900 bus pulling in behind me with about five people on board. I went back to that bus and told them in no uncertain terms they were out of order. The driver was about to say something when his clippie, Doris, the laziest conductress you ever met, pushed him aside and gave me a right mouthful about how I hadn’t been doing the job five minutes and how she and her driver had been at it since before I was born and well, I think you get the picture.

Now I have always believed in the interconnectedness of the universe, how one good deed will come back to you twofold and how those evil doers, as they used to call them in my old comic days, will eventually be punished. Anyway, one fine day it came to pass that I was asked to work my day off. I came in for my stand by duty and sat down with a cuppa and a slice of toast hoping for a nice relaxing read. After a while the tannoy called my name and I went over to the desk to see what was in store for me.

Doris, the laziest conductress in the world was there waiting for me. ‘Are you driver Higgins?’ she bellowed.

‘What’s it to you?’ I replied in the same happy tone.

Well, it turned out that Karma, that magical mystery force of the universe had poked its nose into our life that day and her driver had called in sick and, guess what? I was her driver for the day. Well, when we came to do the Bramhall rush hour bus, instead of hanging back, I passed the packed one-man bus and we did most of the work coming into Stockport. That’s the way it should have been done with the workload, and the passengers split evenly between the two buses.

When we got to Stockport our passengers piled off leaving our flustered conductress in a state of disarray and her cash bag full of coins. Her ticket machine had issued more tickets in an hour than it normally did in a week. She was looking a little peaky, if I remember correctly.

Perhaps that’s why she went sick for the rest of the shift!

Anyway, getting back to Bert. His place in the canteen was the very first table just by the entrance. He let on to everyone who entered with his usual phrase ‘Have you cracked it yet?’

If you had just come on shift you could only reply ‘Not yet Bert’. If you had nearly finished work the obvious answer was ‘nearly done Bert’.

Bert took his retirement and that first table by the entrance was empty for many a week. Then one day I came in for my break and who was there but Bert, dressed in his civvies of course.

‘Have you cracked it yet?’ he asked.

We had a bit of chit chat and then I went on to order my breakfast. After that I saw Bert pretty regularly as he took his usual place in the canteen most days. Buses and that canteen had been his life for so long he couldn’t stay away. He must have been 65 back then and that was over 30 years ago, so I doubt if he would still be alive today. Even so, I can just imagine bumping into him and him asking me his usual question, ‘have you cracked it yet Steve?’

I’d smile back and answer ‘I’ve finally cracked it, Bert’.

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A Short Collection of Bitesized Posts

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A bunch of short posts were lying in my drafts box waiting for me to either finish them off or merge them into another blog post, so I thought I’d put a few of them together and with a bit of luck, these bitesized posts might even link together.

It was a lovely sunny day when I last visited my mother. She is 92 years old and suffering with dementia. Most of the time she looks fresh and healthy but her problem is not in her body but her mind. I visited about a month ago and her first words were ‘please help me’. I asked what was wrong and what did she want but all she could do was repeat endlessly ‘please help me’ like a record stuck in a groove. She did that for the duration of our meeting and I left saddened to see her that way. On the last visit she was completely different; chatty and alert. We spoke about the warm weather and the rose buds that were on the bush outside her room. We talked about her sister Ada who was a keen cyclist and was sadly killed in a road accident many years ago. I asked her how she was sleeping and she gave me a big smile and said ‘you know I never have any trouble sleeping!’

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

Saturday has always been the traditional first day of rest. The Monday to Friday grind is over and we can finally get down to some serious relaxing. Now that I’m retired though, I find that a much nicer day is actually Monday. Everyone else has mostly gone back to work and the kids are off to school. The street outside is quiet and it’s great to go out in the evening and find pubs and restaurants not quite as packed as they were at the weekend. In the book A Kind of Loving the hero who works in a drawing office is asked to go out to deliver a letter to an absent colleague. When he is outside, he remarks how busy the streets are. Who are all these people? Why are they not at work? I remember having the same thoughts myself when I first started work and was occasionally sent forth from my office job to visit other businesses in Manchester.

I’ve not been to Manchester much lately, mostly because of the pandemic and the various lockdowns we have experienced. On one of my last visits, I visited the beautiful building in Manchester which once upon a time was the headquarters of the Refuge Assurance building where I first started work many years ago. I was a fresh-faced youth of 16 when I started there and now that my old workplace is a hotel I often visit there and remember my old job as an insurance clerk.

When I visited last year, I had my camera with me as usual and one thing I have always tried to do is to use my own pictures in my many YouTube videos. When I have had to use a stock picture either from Unsplash or Adobe, I tend to try and replace it with my own photos in my inevitable re-edit if I have taken an appropriate picture at a later date. In one of my videos, I wanted a shot of a pint being poured, so in the bar of the hotel in what used to be our old reception area, I asked the barman if I could take a shot while he pulled my pint. No was the distinctly unfriendly reply. I explained that his face wouldn’t be in the picture, it would be a close up so only his hands would be visible. Was it for me personally or would it be displayed on the internet or used in a YouTube video? Well, yes, it would be used possibly in a YouTube video. No came the answer once again. It wasn’t the hotel policy apparently for staff to get involved in ‘unofficial’ photography. Pity. Anyway, here’s an ‘unofficial’ shot of my pint in the bar which wasn’t really what I wanted. (It wasn’t a great pint either!)

This last week Liz and I went to her friend’s 60th birthday party. Her friend Alice (names have been changed to protect the innocent) is a singer, actually a cabaret singer and she has always struck me as being very normal, very down to earth and non- showbizzy. That of course was before I saw her in her proper showbizzy environment. The party was in a nice hotel and a pretty good singer kept us entertained while we found seats and bought our drinks. Later Alice took the microphone and belted out a few numbers in a very Shirley Bassey/Judy Garland sort of way. Her boyfriend took the microphone to wish her a happy birthday and then Alice herself responded with a short but emotional speech. Later there was another song and another speech thanking various friends for their friendship over the years. Later still came yet another speech when the birthday cake was unveiled. The cake, like the speeches, was a little too sweet for me.

Alice’s singing style brought to mind Judy Garland who was one of my mother’s favourite singers. Once, back in the 70’s or 80’s, The Wizard of Oz had a cinema re-release and I took mum to see it. 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.

Judy Garland was a great star but sadly was a victim of the Hollywood studio system. Given uppers to give her more energy to work and downers to help her sleep, she became addicted to the pills fed her by the studio. She died in England in 1969 from an accidental barbiturate overdose. She was only 47 years old.

I’ve written about my lemons before. I’ve always loved growing things from pips or seeds and I have two large lemon trees grown from pips. They must be at least three years old, possibly more and my big ambition is for one of them to give me a lemon. Yes, my own home-grown lemon, I’d love that, I really would. I’m not sure what I’d do with my first lemon. I think I might just pop a big chunk of it into a glass, add some ice, some gin and some tonic and sit back on a sunny evening and just relish the achievement.

My lemon trees have survived another winter and are looking good. I’m a bit short of room so I took one of the lemons and planted it in the garden in a sheltered spot. I wasn’t really sure it was going to survive but happily it did. The other one wintered in the porch and the other day I gave it a bit of a pruning and repotted it. I left it outside overnight but sadly, the early spring warm temperature dropped a little during the night and my poor lemon shed a heck of a lot of its leaves. Should I bring it back into the porch or would another change in temperature upset it?

I do have another lemon tree. It’s only small and it’s one that Liz bought me a few years ago. Towards the end of last summer, a flower appeared but sadly died away. This last week I put it outside for some sunshine and a good feeding and noticed another flower. On closer inspection there are actually a considerable amount of flowers which I hope will soon grow into lemons. I reckon I can taste that gin and tonic already.

Back at the nursing home with my mother I was getting ready to leave. I felt a little disappointed as my attempt to get her to use her memory had backfired when she couldn’t remember anymore of her three times table.  The disappointment of not being able to remember such a simple thing was evident in her face. We said our goodbyes and I went towards the door. As I turned back for a final wave goodbye, she said something and I stopped to listen.

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

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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