Tag Archives: memory

One Old Picture

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s post is about the picture just below. Not a particularly outstanding picture I know but that house is the one in which I spent most of my childhood. I took the picture a long time ago after a sort of nostalgic drive around my old neighbourhood of Wythenshawe in Manchester. Yes, the house with the white door, that’s my old home. It’s changed a bit since I lived there. The privet hedge has gone and the car space is new. One amazing thing I found out on that visit is that the walk to my old junior school, which seemed to be a heck of a walk as I remember it, (surely at least a thirty or even forty minute walk) was actually more of a ten minute walk, well, it was a long time since I walked to my junior school. I stopped in the road, took my picture, became lost in thought for a moment as a thousand memories crowded my mind, then drove off.

Those memories and other ones always come back every time I look at that picture. I happened to be looking at it this week as I scanned through some of my old posts looking for inspiration. The photo only took a moment to take but it’s nice to think about that house and all the happy times I had there. Not only that, my Grandmother and Grandfather lived there before us. They later moved to Prestatyn in Wales and my Mum and Dad took over the house when they were first married so it’s almost like a little bit of Higgins’ history, wrapped up in a picture.

Wythenshawe is supposed to be the biggest council estate in Europe, at least I remember reading that somewhere. When my dad left school at 14 during the Second World War the estate was surrounded by farms and market gardens. Gradually as the estate became larger the farms were swallowed up and built on. Dad worked on a farm in those early days and one day he decided to show me that same farm he’d worked on. I doubted there would be much to see but he took me through some unfamiliar streets and we came to a green with a few trees and there, just at the head of the green was an old house. The house was surrounded by the council estate which had been built around it. This, he told me used to be the farmhouse where he once worked. The green had once been part of the orchard. As we looked closer, I could see that the trees were pear trees and I tried to imagine this place in a rural setting, instead of the urban one it had become.

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 tarmacing 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 brewcan. 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 brewcan.

The Highways depot where dad 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 in its place there is now another private housing estate which is surrounded by the same old iron fence that encircled our school many years ago.

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.

Getting back to my old house, I was living there in July 1969 and one morning when mum got me up for school I came downstairs for breakfast to find that the TV was on. Now back in 1969 there were only two TV channels (or was it three?) Anyway, neither of them broadcast in the early morning but this was a pretty special day as Apollo 11 had landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking about on the moon’s surface.

I was 12 years old at the time and I was crazy about sci-fi and space travel and how on earth my mother managed to drag me away from the TV and off to school, I’ll never know.

Back in the late 60s was when I got my first adult sized bicycle and I learned to ride it in the very street in the picture. It was a big bike and my feet couldn’t quite reach the ground so it was important to either stop by the kerb or jump off the seat before coming to a stop.

Like many other local kids my friends and I made a soapbox cart with some wood and parts of an old pram and we careered through the streets with it. One time my friend Gary Chapman was given a set of walkie talkies by his dad for Christmas and he and I used to chat to each other at night as our houses were pretty close together. We used to have conversations like this;

ME: Gaz, are you receiving?

Gaz: Gaz here. Loud and clear. Are you receiving Ste?

ME: Steve here. Loud and clear.

GAZ: Receiving you loud and clear Ste.

Years later when I worked for the Highways Agency and became the radio dispatcher, I would be using the radio once again, this time to deploy officers to incidents on the motorway network in conversations like this:

Me at work in the Highways control room.

ME: Romeo Echo 24, can you make to an RTC on the M6 northbound just after junction 18, over.

RE24: Message received. ETA 10 minutes.

Once I was training a new staff member called Clive and he took a message from a patrol which had encountered a pedestrian on the network. We contacted the Police and they seemed quite interested and asked for the person’s name and date of birth. We passed the details over to the police but the pedestrian had one of those dual gender names, something like Leslie Smith. The police came back again asking for the pedestrian’s gender and Clive, the trainee was having a difficult time. He wasn’t making himself particularly clear over the airwaves which wasn’t helped by the patrol being stuck in one of those airwave black spots where reception was bad.

CLIVE: Is the pedestrian a man or woman? Over.

RE24; Say again control, over.

CLIVE: The police are asking for the sex of the person, over.

RE24: You’re breaking up control, please repeat, over.

CLIVE: Can you confirm the sex of the pedestrian, over.

RE24: No answer.

CLIVE: Romeo Echo 24, we need the sex, over.

No answer

CLIVE: Romeo Echo 24, I need the sex, I WANT THE SEX!

Cue for the entire control room to burst into gales of laughter.

That’s probably enough memories and personal history for this week, all inspired by one photo taken on my mobile phone so many years ago. Looking at it again, I find myself wondering what the house is like inside. Would I recognise any of it? Perhaps there will be a new kitchen. What is the garden like? Will our old coal bunker still be there? Will it all be different?

One thing is certain, the people who I remember, the people who used to live there, are all gone.

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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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Memory, Memories and Memorabilia

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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

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

The Auntie I never met.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 Diary and Some Random Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

DiaryTravelling to work on Christmas day afternoon was interesting. I expected the roads to be quiet, after all, Christmas day is not usually a day for travelling, especially when we are in the middle of a pandemic. The lockdown then was a bit of an odd situation, especially where I work because my workplace is right where three different counties meet, Cheshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside and all three were in different states, or tiers of the lockdown. Now that we are all locked down the situation has at least been clarified.

Oh well, it was certainly quiet enough and I was able to sit back and listen to my music as I drove into work. As I came through junction 28 on the M6 motorway two people were on a bridge wearing Father Christmas hats. They looked to be a middle aged couple but as I passed under them they waved and sadly I wasn’t quick enough to wave back. To surprise myself, the previous day I had slapped five new CDs into my CD changer randomly without trying to read the labels, so as I drove into work on Christmas Day, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself listening to the themes from the various Rocky movies complete with the odd quote from Sylvester Stallone, things like ‘Yo Adrian’ and so on.

As a blogger I read quite a lot of my fellow bloggers posts, some even inspire my own posts, but a blog I read a while ago was about millennials and 10 things they are not doing. Millennials, I assume, are those people born in the 21st century and one of the 10 things they are not doing is apparently learning to drive cars. Not all of them of course but 20% less than usual. I can understand that in the big cities where there are good transport links but even so, as a youngster I longed to have my own car. When we moved to a new estate in Handforth, transport links there were dreadful but not only that I wanted a car for the freedom to travel when and where I wanted and also, I liked cars and I liked driving, even though it took three attempts to pass my test. These days, cars are clogging up the roads of the world and the day must surely be coming when everyone will not be able to own a car simply because of the sheer numbers of vehicles out there already.

My Dad wasn’t a driver. He went everywhere on his old push bike but never showed any interest in having a car.

Every week day he rose early to get ready for work. He had porridge for breakfast, mounted his battered old bike and taking his shoulder bag with his box of sandwiches my mother had made for him and his brew can, he left for the ride to work. He did that every day of his working life and, come rain, snow or sunshine, he rode his bike to work. In the mid seventies we moved to the Manchester overspill estate in Handforth that I mentioned above and the result was a much longer journey for him.

He was a fit man, much fitter than me but sadly he and I wasted such a lot of time when we were younger, not getting on together. One day something quite shocking happened to me. It seemed like the end of the world at the time. Anyway, I knew I would have to tell Mum and Dad. I couldn’t face Mum, so I told Dad. Instead of getting the negative response I expected, my Dad was full of support and from that day on our friendship never looked back.

When he died, those wasted years always seemed to haunt me, but then, we were people from such different generations. Young people and their parents are so much closer these days in terms of cultural identity but for me and my Dad things were not like that. He came from a background where he was given an apple and an orange for Christmas whereas my brother and I, who received a sack full of presents on Christmas Day, were part of a new youth culture involving music, television and film that he struggled to understand.

Dad had served in the South Staffordshire regiment of the army and I remember once my brother did some research and found the regiment had been merged with the North Staffordshire regiment in 1959 and later with other regiments to become the Mercian regiment. He told me that when he had called the regiment to enquire what kind of records were kept, they had asked him various questions. When my brother replied that Dad had done his national service as a lowly private they said rather coldly that records of enlisted men were not kept.

DadThe record keepers of the regiment may not have cared about my Dad but he certainly cared about his regiment. He was very proud of his army service. He served in Northern Ireland, Germany and Hong Kong, and told me many stories about his army life. In fact some time ago when I posted a picture of him on Facebook showing him at work for the council highways department, one of his old work mates replied mentioning the stories he used to tell his workmates about his army sergeant major.

One of my Dad’s early jobs was as a milkman but not for him the electric milk van. No, he had a horse drawn milk trolley and he told me with pride how, as he ran up and down through the gates of the various houses dropping off milk on doorsteps, he didn’t have to run back and move his trolley up. No, just a whistle was all it took, and his horse would trot quietly forward to my Dad and he would replace the empties and take out fresh bottles for the next house. My Dad was pretty attached to that horse. It was stabled not far away in Northenden. Once his father, my grandfather, a WW1 Veteran of the Royal Horse Artillery, came to see the horse. He checked the horse’s teeth, apparently a good indicator of equine health and pronounced himself satisfied.

This week I was trying to sort some of my Mum’s things out and I came across my Dad’s diary for the year 2000, the year he died. It was a sad read.

The diary starts out on the third of January and continues with a daily entry for many months. There is nothing exciting to read. Dad records the weather and where he went on his daily walk. He talks about trips to the shops and days when he and Mum went to get their pensions. He walked every day with his dog.

He once owned a pedigree dog. It was a dachshund he bought from someone. The dog came with a long certificate listing his various forebears, but he was the nastiest bad-tempered dog I have ever met. When I visited he would be reluctant to get off the chair, so I could sit down. I sometimes had to use a water spray on him to get him to shift. If Dad was there though, it only took a word from him and Ben would obey, give me a mean look and saunter over to his master where he would glare at me for the rest of my visit.

He died not long after Dad adopted my late gran’s dog Mickey. Mickey was a wonderful dog although he had his own little quirks. He would always chase after a thrown ball but would never give it back. He would take it and bury it and long after he too departed, Dad would find balls buried in the back garden. The dog he had in later years was Bouncer. Bouncer was a rescue dog whose previous owners tired of him because of his supposedly constant jumping up and down. If he did do that, my Dad, an ardent dog lover soon cured him or trained him not to jump up and in his diary Dad records all the many walks the two went on.

As the diary comes to April the daily entries become briefer, sometimes just one sentence about the weather. Dad’s handwriting seems to become a little less firm. It is still the same hand, sloping gently to the right but it somehow seems perceptibly weaker. On July 17th there is an entry in my Mum’s hand. She always wrote in capitals for some reason. FOUND RALPH IN BATHROOM ON FLOOR she says. He went to the doctor and they found nothing. Another entry on July 20th, again in Mum’s hand, FOUND RALPH ON FLOOR IN KITCHEN. He was taken to hospital and on the 26th July a brain scan found that he had a tumour on his brain.

I remember meeting the doctors at the time. Mum and I sat down in their office. My brother must have been there also. The doctor said to me, ‘great news’.

Great news? What was it.

‘You’re all OK. You, your brother and mother, you are all OK. A brain tumour is not something that you’re all going to get.’ I felt for a moment we had slipped into some alternate reality. We are all OK? What about Dad?

There was a problem with Dad they admitted. He needed an operation to remove the tumour. Great, we said, go ahead.

Looking back, I wonder whether doctors are trained to try and give some good news before they give some bad or maybe they want to try and break things gently.

That reminds me of the joke where the guy goes abroad and asks his brother to mind his cat. He gets back and asks the brother ‘how’s the cat?’ the brother replies, ‘The cat’s dead’. ‘What!’ says the guy. He is heartbroken. ‘That was the cruellest thing I ever heard. You know how much I loved that cat, why couldn’t you have broken it to me gently. When I called you should have said something like, well she’s OK but she is up on the roof. And then when I called the next time, tell me, bad news, she fell off the roof and she’s at the vets. And then the next time break the news that she passed away. At least I would have been a little prepared for the bad news.’

‘Yes, you are right. I am sorry for being so heartless.’

The guy accepted the brother’s apology for being so uncaring, and then said, ‘Oh, by the way, how’s Mother?’

The guy thought for a moment then said, ‘Well, she’s OK, but she’s on the roof . . ‘

I’ve flipped the mood a little there, as if there is going to be a happy ending. Sadly, there wasn’t. Dad had the operation and improved a little. He came home for some days then they moved him to a nursing home. Mum visited him frequently. I came usually after my early shift or on my days off. I remember being with him once and talking about death. He must have known the end was coming and I think I asked him to try and be prepared. He answered that he thought about death sometimes and it was ‘frightening’. That was the last time I ever saw him.

In the diary Dad’s last ever entry was on June 2nd. It says he took Bouncer for a walk and went to visit my brother who lived not far away. Underneath my Mum has arrowed across to May 31st, so it looks like Dad wrote his entry on the wrong date. His eyesight was failing, He was due to have an eye operation for cataracts but the operation was cancelled because of his tumour.

On the 15th November Mum wrote that he slept all day. On the 22nd she spent the whole day with him from 11am to 11pm. He slept a lot of the time. On the 23rd November Mum had written RALPH PASSED AWAY AT 2AM.

That of course was over twenty years ago. He was born, he lived and then he was gone, just like the wind.

I’ve mentioned the wind for a particular reason. He had a notebook in which he jotted down all sorts of items he found in newspapers and books. If he ever came across a word he didn’t know he looked up the meaning and jotted it down. He was someone who left school at 14 with a poor education but that didn’t stop him wanting to learn. One item caught my eye.

I don’t suppose it was something he actually composed but then, who knows:

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I

but when the leaves are trembling

The wind is passing by.

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Bicycles, Barry White, and a Man with a Chip on his Shoulder

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Bicycles, Barry White and a Man with a Cjhip on his Shoulder!Digital memories are pretty easy to save these days. Take a picture with your camera or smartphone and press the save button. That’s your picture saved.

Later you can transfer the picture or video to a laptop or a hard drive for safekeeping. Years ago it wasn’t so easy but at least today you can scan those old photographs into your PC and save them as digital media. Even old videos and 8mm home movies can be digitised and saved if you have the right software.  Still, memories are not just pictures. There are all sorts of things that can trigger your thoughts and bring back some long forgotten moment or event, or just something you haven’t thought of for a while.

It could be a piece of music or passing some old haunt, some pub you used to go in when you were younger but haven’t visited for a long while.

Something that was a trigger for old memories for me was an old tape recording I made when I was in my teens.

I used to make lots of recordings when I was much younger. I saved up and bought a tape cassette recorder and apart from recording music –they call them mix tapes these days but I never heard that term years ago when I was making ‘mix’ tapes- I used to record little plays and sketches I had written. My brother was press ganged into helping with these enterprises and I used various techniques to get him involved:

  1. Bullying
  2. Threats and intimidation.
  3. Violence
  4. Bribery

Yes, they all worked to greater and lesser degrees. It’s funny to listen to the tapes now because I can tell pretty much by his attitude when he went along with me willingly or otherwise. One other inducement I used was swapping. He might want a particular record or something that I had so we would swap that and some weeks later usually swap back. Lots of times I used to swap a record for my bicycle and that’s where I felt I really had one over on Colin, my brother, because he couldn’t, and still can’t ride a bike! Yes, I was on to a winner there because I’d swap my bike for a record or book and I had full use of the item while he couldn’t use the bike because he couldn’t ride it!

One time he really got one over on me. I had swapped my bike for one of his records or something or other; I can’t really remember what. Anyway, one day I went to go out on my bike- OK, his bike- opened the shed and it was gone. What had happened? Had it been stolen, where was it?

‘The bike?’ he answered blithely; he had sold it to his friend because he wanted money to buy a new LP!

My Mother facilitated the removal of my hands from his throat with a firm whack to the back of my head and asked what was going on?

‘He sold my bike!’ I yelled.

‘Your bike?’ she replied. ‘Didn’t you swap it with him? Isn’t it his bike?’

‘Yes but, yes but,’ was all I could say.

The tapes were mostly comedy sketches on the lines of Spike Milligan who was then a hero of mine. One of them went like this;

CUE COWBOY MUSIC

ME: Hey Stewart, I’m gonna knock that chip right off your shoulder!

COLIN: That’s no chip –it’s a potato!

ME: King Edward’s?

COLIN: No, he can get his own, it’s one of mine!

(These are the jokes folks, as someone used to say!)

My brother wasn’t the only person I dragged into making tape recordings. My old school friend Steve was a music fan like me. Well, I say like me but his music knowledge was prodigious. Name any record and he would say with certainty- ‘that went to number 2 in July 1974’ or whenever.

There was a radio programme we both liked. It was My Top 12 on Radio 2 and it was something on the lines of ‘desert island discs’. Someone from the music world would be interviewed and would choose their top twelve records.

Anyway, Steve and I decided to make a version for each other. One weekend I interviewed him talking about his favourite music for which he provided full chart statistics, naturally. On another weekend we reversed roles and he interviewed me for which I provided limited chart stats, usually something like, ‘that one just nudged into the top twenty to which my friend would reply, ‘yes, actually number 23 was the highest chart placing in October 1975.’

We slagged off all the music we looked down on and praised all the music we loved. Poor old Barry White (the same Barry White whose Greatest Hits is sometimes played in my car) got something of a drubbing. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel were praised as a musical discovery of the highest order. (Steve who? Was he the guy who did ‘Come up and See Me, make me smile?)

Through the magic of the digital age I recently processed that old tape and converted it into a CD which I played in my car on the way into work today and it was lovely to listen to my old friend again.

Steve was the inspiration for the character of Matty in my novel Floating In Space. He was a lovely guy although something of a music nerd. We had a parting of the ways years ago when his brother came to rent a room in my house. He proceeded to wind up my bills; gas, electric and telephone, to such an incredible volume I could no longer afford to have him living with me. Steve took his brother’s eviction personally and alas that was the end of our friendship.

I always assumed one day we would have a pint together and talk about music, sci-fi and cult TV once again, just like we used to back in the seventies and eighties. We did keep in touch through an intermediary, my brother Colin. We last had a long telephone chat in the early 1990’s and talked about a reunion. I never heard from him again and when I enquired about him to his sister, whom I located on social media, she revealed he had been taken ill with cancer and had passed away.

Steve, as well as being a great music fan was something of an aircraft anorak too. He stars in my second most watched video on you tube, a documentary we made in 1986 with Steve espousing his love of aircraft. I think he’d be thrilled to find that over 11,000 viewers have watched it. Here’s another re-edited version with somewhat less views. I took out the chart hits of the 80’s and replaced them with copyright free music thinking I’d start to earn some money off YouTube. (No chance, they decided I had to have 1000 followers before shelling out!)

One tip just to finish with. Hang on to the recordings you make with your iPad and iPhone and all the other modern day gadgets. Keep them safe; invest in a portable hard drive to store them.

Get ready to invest in new software which will convert the files to whatever new application we will be using in the future because in thirty years time you’ll want to look back at those memories and relive those earlier times.

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Buses, Nicknames, and the Scaremonger!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

quotescover-JPG-28My current job is a safety critical one. I work in an emergency control room and many of the decisions me and my colleagues take have highly serious implications. It can be stressful work and sometimes I look back to a much easier control room job I had years ago. I once worked in the GM Buses Control room in Manchester.

Back then in the mid nineties the buses in Manchester had radio communication so the driver could advise control of late running or breakdowns, and even call for help in an emergency. I worked in a team in the enquiry section and we took queries from the bus travelling public of Greater Manchester.

In many ways it was a good job, lots of fun, good workmates and plenty of practical joking. Everyone had a nickname and one fellow I worked with, Paul, was known as ‘Mister Nasty’. He was the guy to deal with abusive callers and when a caller turned unpleasant we would put him on hold with a cheery ‘hold the line please!’ and shout across to Paul who would take the call and give back as much abuse as the caller would be giving.

One day ‘Nasty’ realised he had perhaps overstepped the line and the caller demanded to speak with his manager. The call was sent through to the duty Inspector who on that particular day was a nice guy called Alan who had the nickname ‘Leave it wi’ me’. Paul ran from his desk in the enquiry section, through the control room to where Alan sat on a raised dais where he could survey the whole room. Paul wanted to get his version of events in first and knew that with our antiquated telephone system the call would take its time to ping across the room. However, just as he reached the Inspectors desk the phone rang and Alan stopped Paul in mid sentence. ‘Just a minute Paul, I’d better take this call.’

Alan took the call, listened for a moment and said ‘Someone in enquiries called you a bastard? Leave it with me!’ and put the phone down. He turned to Paul and asked him to carry on. Paul thought for a moment then said, ‘Actually Alan, it doesn’t matter . .’ and went back to his desk.

Another staff member had the nickname ‘Norm’ which I think was based on a character from the TV comedy ‘Cheers’ but anyway, Norm had a particular dislike of the identity badge we had to wear in the control room. When it was time for a break, Norm would pull off his badge, slap it down on his desk and go off to the canteen. One day, some of the guys decided to cut out a shapely pair of breasts from that day’s newspaper page three model and insert the picture into Norm’s badge. I personally could not stop laughing and everyone was calling me to shut up and be quiet but I couldn’t help it. Thirty minutes later Norm returned, sat down at his desk, put on his headset, switched on his phone and clipped on his badge. I must have looked ready to burst and after stifling my laughter for about five minutes Norm looked over at me and asked what was wrong. He eventually found the offending picture and removed it convinced that I was the offending culprit.

GN BusesYes, that wasn’t the best job I have ever had but we did have some fun with fake calls and wind ups. We used to get calls from the Police and they would ask our radio staff to broadcast radio messages to our drivers. ‘Please be on the look out for a red Ford Fiesta registration number . .’ and so on. One day Norm called our radio man, an old chap called ‘Stoddy’ and pretending to be the Police asked him to put out information about a stolen Ford Camper van with a registration number of . . and gave out the registration of Stoddy’s beloved camper van. Stoddy had a near hysterical reaction and rushed out to the car park where of course his camper van was still parked. When he returned fuming to the control room we were still laughing.

Finally, I must tell you about Mr Scrimingeour who was one of the top bosses at GM buses and in charge of our fraud team. His rather unwieldy name was pronounced  SKRIM- IN- JUR- and many calls  came through the switchboard asking for him as anyone caught fiddling their bus fare received a letter demanding a five-pound fine which was signed by him. We had a list on the wall of the many mispronunciations of his name but the best, the very best came in a call taken by our very own Mr Nasty.

A caller had asked to speak to a Mr Scaremonger!

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Fathers Day and the Green shoots of an Apple Tree

Posted on by Steve Higgins

DadSunday, yesterday as I write this was Fathers day in the UK and I thought I’d take a few minutes to look back at my Dad who died in, well, I was going to write the year but was it 2000 or 2001? Can you believe that, I can’t even remember the year he died!

The thing is, the year isn’t really important, what matters is that he’s no longer here and what’s worse is that me and my old Dad spent a lot of time not getting on with each other and that was a lot of wasted time, time that neither of us will ever get back.

My Dad and I were from different generations. Dad was born in 1928 and he was part of the World War II era. A time of shortages, of national emergency and an uncertain time when you weren’t sure if you or your loved ones were going to make it through that next air raid. Christmas for my Dad, he once told me, was an apple and an orange and maybe, just maybe, an out of the blue present like a tin of lead soldiers that were, of course, second-hand. Anyway, perhaps that’s why he couldn’t really relate to TV obsessed youngsters like me and my brother who were given a pillow case full of gifts on Christmas morning. In the seventies when I was a teenager my long hair and my denim outfits didn’t sit well with my Dad either who used to put a tie on to take the dog for a walk!

Anyway, the good thing is that when something really dreadful happened to me in my late twenties I told him about it rather than my Mum and instead of the usual moans and groans I had come to expect, when the chips were down he stood up and supported me. I’ll always remember him saying to me ‘don’t worry about your Mum, I’ll talk to her.’ It always seems to me looking back that that was the start of our relationship proper.

I describe my Dad pretty accurately in my kindle book ‘Floating In Space’. He was a big man but he was quiet and cat-like too. Everything he did had the same qualities of quiet and calm. He worked for the Manchester Highways department building roads and pavements and every day of his working life, come rain or shine, he set out for work on his old pushbike. One day the gears on his bike stripped and he took it in to the bike shop for a repair. They couldn’t fix it there and then so Dad had to borrow my bike to get to work the next day. What he didn’t know was that at the time there was a new craze -the chopper bike- and as I couldn’t afford an actual chopper bike, I had bought a chopper seat for my bike and fitted it the previous day. Looking back that bike looked pretty ludicrous and later I reverted to the normal seat but I can still see my Dads face as he pulled my bike out of the out house where it was stored and then me and my brother watched as this middle aged man set out for work on his hybrid chopper bike!

For fathers day many years ago I bought him an apple tree to plant in his back garden. When I turned up late on the Sunday my Mum was really pleased to see me and said that my Dad apparently was feeling a little neglected that day as until then, neither me nor my brother had turned up to see him.

We planted the tree in the back garden and years later, whenever I looked at that tree it reminded me of him. Of his quiet ways, of his ‘lets get on with it’ nature, of his spirit so like my Mum’s really of never letting anything get them down. Imagine my feeling one day last year when I looked out of my Mum’s back window to see the tree had been chopped down! I was seething and was all ready to get on the phone and give Manchester City Council some major grief when Mum told me she had asked for the tree to be cut down. What on earth for I asked?

Well, my Mum is a little unsteady on her feet and the tree was crowding her washing line and she was worried about falling over. So, she got the council to chop it down. It was clear she didn’t see the tree as I saw it, as a sort of living, growing, monument to the man I had given it to many years ago. Still, last time I was there, only last week, there were green shoots growing from the stump. The tree had beaten the man from the council and its indomitable spirit was still alive. I am sure my Dad, who loved nature in all its forms, would have smiled.

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