Tag Archives: nostalgia

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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The TV Shows of Gerry Anderson

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Many years ago when I was still at junior school, one of my friends asked me if I had seen a new TV show about a flying car. I hadn’t but apparently it was really good and so I made a mental note to watch out for it. As a child I was pretty keen on TV. My dad used to call me ‘square eyes’ because I watched so much TV and as you might imagine I soon found the TV show my friend had told me about. It was a short puppet show about a special machine called Supercar that could not only fly but also dive under the sea. It was designed and built by Professor Popkiss and Dr Beaker and the test pilot was a guy called Mike Mercury. I loved Supercar and everything about it and even though I didn’t realise it then, I had become a huge fan of TV producer Gerry Anderson and his Century 21 Productions.

Gerry Anderson was born in 1929 and after the war earned a traineeship with the British Colonial Film Unit. Later he worked for Gainsborough Pictures and had various jobs, subsequently as a director. He and cameraman Arthur Provis formed a production company called AP Films after their two names and began producing TV shows for children. Their first project was in 1957 called The Adventures of Twizzle and was the first time Gerry worked with puppeteer Christine Glanville, musician Barry Gray and special effects supervisor Derek Meddings.

They followed up with more puppet shows, Torchy the Battery Boy and the first series I remember, Four Feather Falls, a cowboy show about a sheriff with magic guns.

Anderson married his wife Sylvia in 1960 and the two collaborated on Supercar, Gerry’s first sci-fi puppet show in 1960. The series marked the first time Gerry used the name Supermarionation to describe the process which enabled the puppet mouths to move in synchronisation with pre-recorded dialogue. All the characters in the shows had American accents so the shows could be sold to the USA and it was Sylvia who was responsible for the characters and their fashions while Gerry concentrated on other aspects of the shows.

The next series was Fireball XL5 about a spacecraft that was part of the World Space Patrol piloted by Steve Zodiac. The following show, Stingray was the first to be filmed in colour. Stingray was a submarine in the service of the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and was piloted by Troy Tempest and his colleague ‘Phones’ who was a master at using sonar equipment. The duo discover an undersea kingdom where King Titan holds sway over his people, the Aquaphibians. Troy and Phones rescue the mute undersea girl Marina who joins them onboard Stingray. Most of the characters had sea related names like, Marina, Commander Sam Shore and his daughter, Atlanta. Atlanta was voiced by Lois Maxwell who played the original Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Stingray was probably my favourite of Anderson’s TV shows. I particularly loved the opening sequence in which Commander Shore exclaims ‘Anything can happen in the next half hour!’

Stingray was filmed in 1964 and the show fitted neatly into the expanding Anderson universe set, like all his sci-fi shows, 100 years into the future. Around this time AP Films developed a merchandising company responsible for licensing all kinds of items related to the shows, things like models and puppets and so on. I used to have a puppet of Venus, the space doctor from Fireball XL5 although I think I would have preferred a Steve Zodiac puppet. I had a Fireball XL5 rocket which could be fired into the air with a big catapult and as it came down, a parachute deployed to float it down gently. I also had quite a few Stingray models. One was a plastic kit I had to put together and another was a plastic Stingray shaped water pistol.

image courtesy flickr

There was also a comic which I absolutely loved called TV21 with comic strips of all the sci-fi Anderson shows. TV21 had a front page fashioned like a newspaper with headlines referring to the stories coming up on the inside pages.

The next project for AP Films was probably Gerry and Sylvia’s greatest success and it was called Thunderbirds. Thunderbirds was about a secret organisation called International Rescue that had a small fleet of highly advanced machines and equipment with which to perform rescue operations. Millionaire ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy was the head man and the organisation was secreted in his island home. His five sons were the Thunderbird pilots, John, Scott, Virgil, Gordon and Alan, all named after US astronauts of the 1960s. The genius behind the Thunderbird craft was Hiram Hackenbacker, known as ‘Brains’. Thunderbird’s nemesis was a secret agent known as the Hood because of his talent for disguise and in many episodes the Tracy brothers had to ask their London agent, Lady Penelope, to track him down and sort him out.

Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward lived in a huge mansion somewhere in southern England and her manservant and chauffeur was Parker, a reformed safecracker. The head of ITV Sir Lew Grade saw the first episode and was so impressed that he asked for the episodes to be extended from 30 minutes to a full hour, less TV adverts of course. Gerry wanted Fenella Fielding to voice Lady Penelope but in the end Sylvia herself took on the role.

Thunderbirds is probably my second favourite of all the Gerry Anderson series. The great thing about it and really, the secret of its success was the highly intelligent scripts which treated its audience of children not as kids but as intelligent young adults. Two scripts that spring to mind were one called The Cham Cham about a code transmitted on a musical melody and another where Parker was called upon to break into the Bank of England. Later in the episode someone is trapped inside the vault and Parker is asked to break in again to rescue the man before the air is used up in the vault. Parker though thinks that his old mate, a bank robber recently released from prison, is about to complete his life’s ambition to break into the bank and so he tries to slow down his and Penelope’s drive into London.

A successful feature film, Thunderbirds are Go, was made in 1966 and AP Films began a new life as Century 21 Productions.

The follow up TV series was called Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. Captain Scarlet is part of an organisation called Spectrum in which all the members have code names relating to colours. The Mysterons have the power of re-animation and both Scarlet and Captain Black have been re-animated giving them powers of indestructibility. It wasn’t really my cup of tea but the puppets in the series made a step forward in having normal dimensions instead of large heads like the previous shows.

Two further puppet shows followed, Joe 90 about a young boy who becomes a secret agent by using the brain patterns of various people. His father, Professor MacLaine had designed a machine called the Big Rat (Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record and Transfer -funny how all these old acronyms come back to me!) The Big Rat takes the brain pattern of a pilot for instance, feeds them to the professor’s young son -the Joe 90 of the title- and he is able to fly a plane.

The Secret Service was a mixed puppet/live action series about a secret agent who is shrunk down to a small size and the producers used puppets in normal sized sets. Stanley Unwin played the role of an eccentric vicar who is part of a secret organisation called BISHOP (British Intelligence Service Headquarters – Operation Priest). The series was cancelled after 13 episodes as Lew Grade didn’t think the inclusion of comedian Stanley Unwin and his gobbledegook language would work in the USA.

Gerry Anderson’s ambition was always to leave the puppet shows behind and move on to live action features and after a live action sci-fi film Doppelganger, Gerry began work on UFO. UFO was set in the 1980s and was about a secret organisation called SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation). The Earth is under attack from UFOs and it is SHADO’s job to defend the world. The headquarters is based in the Harlington-Straker film studios with an outpost on the moon called Moonbase. Moonbase tracks the UFO’s with the help of SID (Space Intruder Detector) and launches their interceptors. Ed Bishop, previously the voice of Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet, played Ed Straker and Gabrielle Drake was the Commander of Moonbase.

I loved the series but the TV networks were unsure whether UFO was aimed at children or adults, presumably because of Gerry Anderson’s previous childrens’ shows. Anderson prepared for the second series in which the American networks had asked for more lunar based stories. Many new sets were built and then series 2 was cancelled. Gerry then offered the networks a new show, Space 1999, centred entirely on the moon.

In Space 1999, a series I never really liked, a nuclear explosion pushes the moon out of earth orbit and out into space and the series chronicled the adventures of those still living on Moonbase Alpha. Husband and wife team Martin Laudau and Barbara Bain starred in the show which ran for two seasons but during the production Sylvia and Gerry divorced.

Gerry returned to producing more TV shows for children like Terrahawks and Space Police but even though new technology and techniques helped with the puppetry and filming, without Sylvia and her characterisations, those productions were a little lame.

In the 1990s Gerry produced a new series of Captain Scarlet replacing the puppets with computer animations.

Gerry Anderson died in 2012 aged 83 while Sylvia lived to be 88. In 2015 she made a guest appearance in an episode of a new animated series of Thunderbirds are Go as Great Aunt Sylvia, a relative of Lady Penelope. She died in 2016.

The two left behind a legacy of some much-loved television shows but what was the secret of the success of Gerry and Sylvia’s original productions? Personally, I think there were a number of elements: Outstanding and intelligent scripts that treated the younger viewers as young adults. The fabulous music and theme tunes of composer Barry Gray. The wonderful characters created by Sylvia. The special effects from Derek Meddings who went on to work on the James Bond films and of course Gerry Anderson who brought all those elements together.

This year, 2023, Thunderbirds can be seen on the Talking Pictures TV channel, 58 years after it was first seen on TV.

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Tapes and Tape Recordings

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started work in 1973 and one of the first things I wanted to buy with my new found income was a cassette tape recorder. To be honest I can’t think of anything that had such a profound effect on me until the video camera or the home computer which both came along many years later.

I had a huge amount of recorded music of course. By the mid-seventies my record collection was already pretty big and I was buying vinyl records, usually 45 rpm singles, every week. My tape recorder had a built-in radio so I could record my favourite tracks straight onto tape for free and I spent a lot of time taping the new top twenty which came out every Tuesday. The other thing I could do with my tape recorder was record myself with a microphone.

I used to write some rather silly plays made up of sketches based on Monty Python and Spike Milligan and my brother Colin and I used to read the parts. One tape I digitised some years ago featured a cowboy sketch with dialogue something like this:

Colin: (Fake John Wayne voice) You’ve got a helluva chip on your shoulder.

Me: (Fake James Stewart voice) That’s not a chip, it’s a potato!

If you think that was bad, here’s another sketch, this one was a spoof on The Glenn Miller Story.

Me: (Fake James Stewart voice) You know I’m still searching, still trying to find that sound, that special sound . . .

(Colin aka Special effects man: Flushes the toilet.)

Me: (Fake James Stewart voice) That’s it! The sound, the special sound I’ve been looking for!

Later on, I bought myself a music centre which for the benefit of any younger readers was a record deck, a tape recorder and a radio all in one unit. I could then record my music onto a tape and make up music collections. They called them ‘mix tapes’ which to be fair was not a phrase I ever heard back in the seventies but I seem to hear quite a lot these days. Anyway, I used to make lots of mix tapes which became even more important when I bought my first car. To record music back then you had to actually play the record to copy it onto tape so each of my tapes in a way reflected the atmosphere in my bedroom as I played and copied one track after another, each track in turn inspiring the next and then the next and so on. I loved my mix tapes.

Probably the most famous tape in TV fiction was the tape used in Mission Impossible.

The TV show was created by producer Bruce Geller and concerned a team of special agents known as the Impossible Missions Force. They are a US government agency which takes on hostile foreign governments, South American dictatorships and criminal organisations.

A great feature of the series was the opening title sequence which involved a match being struck and then lighting a fuse shown over quick clips of the upcoming episode to the sound of the iconic theme tune written by Lalo Schifrin. Next, Jim Phelps, the head of IMF would listen to his tape-recorded instructions which, after being played, would then self-destruct. Phelps would then look through his agents’ files complete with photos and choose who he wanted for the mission. Sometimes a guest star would play one of the agents who would be introduced by Jim checking out his dossier. A team briefing would then take place and the mission would get under way.

The show was re-booted in 1996 as a film franchise starring Tom Cruise.

When I bought my music centre, I realised I could actually connect my old tape recorder into the music centre and make tape to tape copies so I began to edit my tapes, particularly those radio recordings where I could edit out things like DJs who talked too much or songs I didn’t like. I also used to review my recordings and put together what I called a Tape Review in which I spoke with a microphone and introduced various recordings.

Another tape I made was called ‘Self Portrait in Tape’ which was me yakking away into the microphone talking about my favourite books, TV shows and of course introducing some of my favourite music.

My childhood friend Steve and I were both big record buyers and music fans. We interviewed each other on tape about our music loves in the style of a radio show of the time called ‘My Top Twelve’. The show was really a rip off of Desert Island Discs in which a celebrity is interviewed and talks about their favourite music and Steve and I did the same. I reviewed my tape back in 2017 when I digitised it and transferred it to a CD. I have to say I was surprised at some of the music choices I had made back in the mid-seventies and in the CD version I did give certain tracks the chop and add some additional ones plus I added some comments in a new voiceover discussing how my musical tastes had changed.

In the 1990s I bought another music centre, a mini one with a CD player and tape recorder with which I used to copy my CDs onto tape to play in my car. My car at the time was a Rover and it had a tape player and it wasn’t until 2020 that I bought a car with a CD player and it was only then that my mix tape producing days were over.

The Watergate Tapes.

I have always understood that John F Kennedy was the first President to install a taping system in the White House though Wikipedia seems to think the practice began with Roosevelt. Many of the recordings made during Kennedy’s presidency have been released to the public including those of cabinet meetings during the missile crisis of 1962.

President Lyndon Johnson carried on the tradition of taping and recording phone calls and numerous calls have been declassified and released by the authorities. Some with a special poignancy were even recorded on Air Force One on the 22nd November, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot and Johnson elevated to the presidency.

Anyway, despite his two predecessors, the President most famous for taping in the White House was Richard Nixon and it was the ‘Watergate tapes’ that were at the heart of the Watergate scandal.

The White House under President Nixon was worried about security. When Nixon realised the FBI weren’t willing to do his bidding, he created a security team which became known as the Plumbers. It was their job to plug the leaks to the press and they were also used to get information on Nixon’s rivals in the election.

A team of five men entered the Watergate building on the night of June 16th/17th 1972. Sometime after midnight on the 17th a security guard noticed that various doors into the building had been taped, preventing them from locking. He called the Police and the five men were arrested. They all had connections to the White House. Various investigations began and the President himself was implicated but things changed when investigators became aware that conversations in the Oval Office had been recorded. Would the tapes prove or disprove that Nixon knew about the break in? Well President Nixon refused to hand over his tapes at first but when he finally succumbed to pressure and handed over some, they revealed him to be foul mouthed, bigoted and small minded.

Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 8th 1974.

The Watergate tapes can be listened to on the university of Virginia’s Miller Centre for Public Affairs. (millercenter.org)

I read on the internet that cassette tapes are making a comeback. CDs and digital recordings are of a much higher quality than cassette tapes but tapes are handy, easy to use and certainly in the old days they were pretty cheap. I’d make a music tape up and if it jammed or broke, I’d just throw it away and record a new tape. Recording a music tape was always an experience because, as I mentioned earlier, you had to record it live, you had to actually play the record or CD to copy it onto tape unlike the CD compilations I make nowadays. Those are made by just dragging and dropping a track into the CD burner file so you only get to hear it after it is made.

Tape cassette

Prior to the digital revolution, singers and musicians recorded their songs on vinyl but the vinyls were produced from master recordings made on tape in a recording studio. Pressings of a record are made from a mixing of the master tapes. These days, quite a few classic albums have had their master tapes digitised and many new mixes of old recordings have been released. I’ve got a few albums which have been rereleased in this way; they are a little like ‘director’s cut’ versions of old albums with new mixes, outtakes and alternative versions, so Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run becomes three CDs instead of one, same for Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. Two interesting albums but to be fair, I prefer the original versions.

As I write this, the Beatles are once again running high in the pop charts with a ‘new’ release. Back in the 1970s, John Lennon switched on his cassette recorder high up in his New York apartment and recorded a demo of a song he had written called Now and Then. Yoko Ono passed the tape to the surviving Beatles some years ago and Paul McCartney, Ringo Star and George Harrison tried to make it into a new song. Alas, the background hum on the tape could not be removed and neither could the sound of Lennon’s piano. Recently however, new technology has enabled Lennon’s voice to be cleaned up, Harrison’s guitar has been added as well as new additions from Paul and Ringo. The result is what people are calling the very last Beatles song ever.

Many fans think the result is wonderful and it’s certainly pleasant and interesting but hardly in the same class as the Beatles classics that we know and love.

These days I tend to listen to music via Spotify. One of the great things about Spotify is that it listens to the kind of music you choose and then suggests similar music. On my Spotify page I have various playlists I can listen to but you do need that all important Wi-Fi connection which isn’t always available. Of course, as a fully paid up member of the noble order of Northern Tightwads I still only use the free version of Spotify which means every now and then I have to put up with the bane of the music world – advertisements! (Even the Beatles video above starts with an ad!)

Perhaps that’s why I’m still listening to my mix tapes!

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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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Writing and What Happened in 1977

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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

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

Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:

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

‘Can I speak to Anne’ I asked.

‘Anne?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Anne. Tell her it’s Steve.’

‘Steve?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Steve.’

‘Just a minute.’

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

A vintage bakelite telephone bought in France

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

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

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

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

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

A previous Prime Minister, Anthony Eden died in 1977.

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

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

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

Perhaps it’s time to get back to 1977:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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.

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Writing, Tapes and Chocolate Biscuits

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And eat chocolate biscuits of course.

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Make me a Child Again, Just for Tonight

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve not been at my absolute best this last week. Liz brought the last dregs of a cold over with her from the UK here to Lanzarote and gradually gave it to me. While I’ve been coughing and sneezing I’ve been lacking in a little inspiration for my blog posts and so have just written about our holiday. Two things have given me some ideas. One was a new book I’ve started, the autobiography of Agatha Christie, one of the best-selling authors ever. Her book has so far been a delightful read. She describes scenes and events from her childhood, in the days before Queen Victoria passed away, (Agatha was born in 1890) with great charm.

Another was a blog I read recently on the website Medium.com and the author quotes a poem, Rock Me To Sleep by Elizabeth Akers Allen, which in part goes like this:

Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight,

Make me a child again, just for tonight!

In my early teens we moved to a house in Cheshire which was on a new ‘overspill’ estate built by Manchester city council. It was only a two bedroomed house so my brother and I had to share a room, much to our mutual annoyance. Originally both beds were under the window, one on either side of the room with a chest of drawers in between. Later I moved my bed to the opposite end, just by the door and closing my eyes I can just see the sunlight coming through the thin curtains. My brother is not there, he has gone to school I suppose and I must either be off sick or it was one of those wonderful days when the school boiler broke down and everyone was sent home on a Thursday for an early weekend.

After a while Mum comes in with a cup of tea and announces that lying in bed all day will not be permitted. She opens the curtains and the light comes flooding in.

‘Your breakfast will be ready in ten minutes’ she says. ‘If you’re not there I’ll be giving it to the dog.’

That’s me told I think so I drink my tea and scan through whatever comic or book is down by the bedside. Later Mum shouts ‘It’s on the table!’ and I throw on some clothes and go down to the kitchen. There bacon, egg and tomatoes await me.

‘Have you had a wash?’ Mum asks.

‘Not yet,’ I answer.

‘Well make sure you have one.’

I start eating and Bob our dog walks over. He sits down on the floor beside me and I look at him, hold out my hand and say ‘Gimme your paw’ which he obediently does.

‘Don’t go feeding that dog,’ warns Mum.

After breakfast Mum makes more tea and sits down herself with some bread and jam before reminding me to have a wash. Then she shoos me away saying that this is her and Bob’s private time. She had probably been on the go all morning getting my dad ready for work, making his breakfast and his sandwiches as well as doing the same for my brother. She was always busy.

Some years later I had left home and came to visit on a Sunday. Mum was in tears because Bob had dropped dead on the previous evening. Dad was going to bury the dog where all the family animals were buried, in the garden but this house was a new build, and he found that when he dug down there was a layer of rubble there that he couldn’t get through so Mum resolved to take the dog to the vet on Monday where she knew they could dispose of the body.

She had intended to put poor old Bob in her shopping trolley but by Monday rigor mortis had set in and she couldn’t get Bob into the trolley. Happily, one of her neighbours came to the rescue and drove Mum and Bob to the vets.

Bob the Dog.

I have to add this one last story about Bob before moving on. A few years ago, Liz and I were motoring through France in our motorhome and we stopped in a pretty big town where they had a large municipal stopover for motorhomes. We found ourselves a spot in this busy place and the parking bays backed onto a grassy area with picnic tables. It was really quite a lovely spot. Liz began to sort out our food while I took plates and cutlery over to the table. As I approached, I had a sort of odd feeling that something was about to happen and there was a really friendly dog who greeted me like a long lost friend. He wasn’t jumping up or anything but he was pleased to see me. Anyway, we brought the food and wine over and sat down and the dog sat just by me.

I looked at the dog and held out my hand and said ‘Gimme your paw’ and the dog gave me a doggy smile and placed his paw in my hand. Now I know you’re not going to believe this but I’m certain that dog was my old dog, either reincarnated, or possessed of the spirit of old Bob in some way. Whether by accident or design, Bob had come back to see me. A few people passing by saw him and asked about him and what his name was and so on. I told them I didn’t know and assumed he came from one of the many vans parked nearby. All the while he was there he watched me intently with that same doggy smile on his face. Later when I took the plates and things back inside the van, Bob the dog was nowhere to be seen.

Mum had mentioned her private time but my private time back then was reading books and comics and there was little in the way of daytime TV in the late 1960’s and early 70’s although sometimes there were some pretty good school programmes. I always remember watching one about how newspapers and journalism had been used or portrayed in films. In one part they showed clips in which a comic strip artist set up various scenes and had a photographer take pictures. Later he rendered the scenes into a comic strip for a newspaper and the character, played by Jack Lemmon turned to his valet played by Terry-Thomas and started to talk about their next ‘caper’ as they called it. I wish we’d been able to watch it at our school. We had this huge TV in a cabinet. The teacher used to wheel it out and we’d watch some schools programme but we never saw one half as good as the comic strip one. It took me years to find out what the film was. It was called How to Murder Your Wife and if you ever catch it on TV, it’s well worth watching.

A bit later on I was tasked to take out the dog so we walked up to the old abandoned RAF camp that was just across from our estate. Entry was strictly forbidden but the locals had opened up gaps in the fence and it was easy to walk in. I loved that RAF camp. It covered a huge area and all the camp roads and buildings were still in place. The roads were in good condition but a lot of the buildings looked ready to collapse. There were about three or four huge towers going up about three storeys high. One had an iron ladder attached to the outside wall but it started about six feet up so to get to it you had to scale the crumbling brickwork just to get a handle on the ladder. One day I managed to do it and hauled myself up the ladder. I went right to the top and was just able to pull myself into a small space right at the very pinnacle. If I’d have fallen off or had the ladder fallen away, I’d have been killed but it was one of those daft things that kids do. There was a great view but the hard bit was slipping down from that top space onto the ladder to get down.

My brother Colin and mum at the Heysham Kart Racing Track

Sometimes on the camp a kart racing team appeared. It was just a man and his son and they prepared the kart; Dad did some engine tuning and his son took off for a few laps. I was always asking if I could have a drive but they wouldn’t let me although we chatted a lot about motor racing. They told me about a kart track in Heysham where they had raced and once, when we went on holiday to Morecambe we visited the track although sadly, there was no racing on.

I took Bob home and it was time for more tea and then I took my bike to the RAF camp for some laps round the camp roads. I had worked out a racetrack in my note book around the camp and timed myself racing round there on my bike and used to jot down my lap times including things like fastest lap on a weekday, fastest weekend lap, all time fastest lap and so on. One day the council decided to send in a tractor which deposited a load of rubble at each of the junctions so neither me nor my friendly father and son kart team could race around there anymore. Later the tower and all the buildings were reduced to rubble. Today all remains of the camp have gone and a new private housing estate occupies the site.

Later my Dad arrived home from work on his pushbike. In Agatha Christie’s autobiography she describes her own father as ‘a very agreeable man’ and even adds a quote from my favourite book David Copperfield:

‘Is your brother an agreeable man, Peggoty?’ I enquired anxiously.

‘Oh what an agreeable man he is!’ exclaimed Peggoty.

My Dad was an agreeable man just like Agatha’s and it was that comment which sparked off most of these memories. Anyway, after Dad arrived home it was usually time for tea. My Mum was a good cook but she had a limited repertoire of dishes. Curries, pizzas and pasta dishes were unheard of for her and even today when she is 92 years old, stricken with dementia and living in a home, if I can’t seem to get a reaction out of her, I’ll simply tell her curry is on the menu for tea and she will be almost jumping out of her chair ‘I’m not eating curry!’ and she won’t relax until I say I’m joking.

Back then my favourite meal must have been meat pie. Mum used to buy her meat from the butchers and she always minced the meat herself with an old metal mincer which she screwed to the table top. She cooked it slowly and always made her own pastry. She’d serve it with either mash and carrots or chips and peas, both with lashings of gravy and piles of bread and butter. It was lovely.

One of my favourite TV shows then was MASH with Alan Alda. I just loved it and still do, the way they could mix madcap humour with tragedy, and I used to record my favourite episodes. Alas, there were no VHS recorders back then and a hard driver recorder was just a twinkle in some pre-teen inventor’s eye. What I did was record the soundtrack on my cassette tape recorder. Our TV didn’t have a jack plug either so I had to use the microphone and ask people to be quiet which was an absolute impossibility for both my Dad and my brother.

Once during a recording, Mum called ‘dinner’s ready’ and we all trooped silently out to the kitchen. Afterwards Dad and my brother would try to be the first back to make some silly comment on the tape.

Bedtime was usually about 10pm. Sometimes I’d myther Mum so that I could stay up late to watch either Monty Python’s Flying Circus or something like The Invaders. I loved the opening titles to the Invaders and the way the narrator read out everything. ‘The Invaders: A Quinn Martin Production!’

David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed, deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow, he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun!

Eventually I would be sent off to bed. Back then I couldn’t sleep without reading something for a while. My brother would complain because I had the light on and I’d say to him ‘go under. Go under the covers just for five minutes!’ Eventually I put out the lights. Just outside was a street light that would light up our room with a reddish amber glow. I can see it now and I can look over and see my posters, one of Jackie Stewart in his F1 Championship winning Matra and another of the lovely Olivia Newton-John, my childhood crush.

I close my eyes for a moment and then open them again. I’m back in my room in Lanzarote, the overhead fan sending cooling air towards me. It is 7.30am. Should I get up or go back to sleep?

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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