Authors Electric

I write this in greater haste than usual, having forgotten what day it was for all sorts of reasons, some of them more convincing than others! We had an extremely busy July, which was also very frustrating in some ways, involving as it did some chaos in the garden and a series of phone calls to and from the bank because they had decided someone was trying to do something fraudulent with my current account when actually it was only that I had to pay a small fortune to tree surgeons to get rid of a tree that had well outgrown the space in our garden. You will see from the stump that remains how big it must have been. RIP the big tree The only thing that kept me (relatively) sane during July was writing. Despite all the upheaval, I stuck to my regular writing slot almost every day, between 11 am and 1 pm. Incidentally this coincides with the timing for letting the cats out, although of course I couldn't do that while the tree work was going on. Our current cats are rather wary about b...

  Encounters, remembering David Hockney*   I’ve written on Authors Electric previously about 1960s meetings with Paul McCartney (roughly ten minutes) and poet Barry MacSweeney (a good deal longer), and so the recent death of David Hockney prompted some thoughts and memories which I thought I’d share with readers of this blog.    I met him in 1968, or it may have been 1969, I can’t quite remember the year. Time often blurs the boundaries of our thinking. Anyway, he came to our college literary society to give a talk about his art and he spoke to his audience of degree students for an hour or so about his growing success as an artist. The most memorable part for me was his account of his life in California, beginning in 1964, which was always bright and sunny, and which was making him extremely happy.    I drank it all in. I was in the first year of an English degree at Hendon College. I was by now delighting in the experiences of life in London which was so ...

The Silly Season is upon us. Indeed, some might say it began early this year... but that’s enough about the state of the UK government.  Since the heatwave has filled my mind with thistledown, this will be a post all about trivia. Verbal trivia, that is. Specifically, some of the proverbial metaphors we pepper our speech with every day (see what I did there?).  Recently, when describing a sudden realisation I’d had to a friend, I used the phrase, ‘the scales fell from my eyes.’  I like that image. My friend knew exactly what I meant.  Fish scales. Odd to have them covering your eyes. Photo by Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ close-up-of-fish-scales-with-natural-texture-33654489/ It was only, some time later, it occurred to me to wonder… what did I mean? Scales? Eyes? Why would there be scales on my eyes in the first place, and what kind of scales? Fish scales? Piano scales? A weighing machine?  These kitchen scales would give 'heavy-eyed' a whole new ...

During the past month, as the heatwave continues to sweep across the country, I have mostly been inside. It isn't for sun avoidance, or because my house is cooler; it isn't even because I can boast of finishing my writing projects; it is because I have been marking exam papers. An online precedent has been set so I am allowed to say that - I am not allowed to say the exam board I am marking for or reveal any details, but because of TikTok, the subject of one exam has already been leaked: it was about technology and AI. And I have begun to realise that the younger generation is just as uncomfortable with it as any of their elder curmudgeonly complainants. This, dear reader, fills me with optimism. Perhaps there is hope for the future of humanity after all? As well as writing and leaping about on stage, I run a tuition company. It sounds grand, but in reality, I run a company of one - me. I do it all, from navigating the complexities of the timetable to sorting out invoices (as A...

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

This month, we take a look at a classic novel you've probably heard of even if you aren't a horsey person and don't normally read books with ponies on the front cover!  Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Being pony mad, and with Black Beauty  accepted as a children's story at the time, I read this book when I was about 10 years old. I can remember enjoying it as a story written from a horse's viewpoint, although not much else of the plot stayed with me over the years. I don't even remember what the cover looked like, only that it was a library book like most of my reading back then, so it was probably a hardcover edition. Weirdly, I've never actually owned a copy of this book, so I picked up a paperback edition from a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye to re-read with adult eyes for this review. First published in 1877, the story follows Black Beauty's life from a foal in the meadow with his mother, through good times and bad, as he travels from Hampshire to B...