Authors Electric

 Take two. If this blog came up blank put it down to the best laid plans going wrong yet again.  Last month, for the first time since I started posting on this blog, I missed my spot. We were in the middle of a somewhat stressful house move when we didn't know whether we'd sold our house till the removal men were loading the van. Due to the buyers insistence that we move a week earlier than we wanted we were also effectively homeless, though thanks to my son and daughter-in-love we did have somewhere to stay until we could move into our new home in Somerset.  Now that we're here and some of our 79 boxes have been unpacked my office was set up and this afternoon I thought I was ready to go. Not so. Switched on the PC displayed not even the blue screen of death but the Megaton message of despair. I was to press F1 to restart the machine, but the computer had frozen and no pressing was possible.  Back in Stoke I would know who to call. Here I need to find a computer per...

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 Just before the pandemic (the 2020s, to clarify for when I beocme nothing but a blip in history), we sought a better situation for our daughter and enrolled her in a private school. Moving from a class of 30 to one of 12 transformed her academics, though it strained our finances. Among her new classmates was an unexpected addition—a guinea pig named Miss Addie. The school asked for volunteers to care for Addie over Christmas break, and we eagerly stepped in. Addie and I bonded instantly (I’m a self-proclaimed pet whisperer), and when it came time to return her, I delayed by almost a week, because I just couldn't! I mean, look at those lovely, soulful, pink eyes! Pink! When the pandemic closed the school in March, they asked me to take her in again. By May, the school announced its closure (lack of funds... and at 1500/month, in a rural farm area, I understood why), and Addie became a permanent part of our family. During lockdown, my daughter discovered, through taking a guinea pig...

There was a moment, last autumn, when I was rummaging through old storage boxes and came across a container I’d never seen before. This happens periodically. It’s as if the layers of softening cardboard boxes, plastic crates and vintage suitcases convulse and shift to throw up unexpected treasure. Metal detectorists would understand the breath-stopping moments of surprise, the quickening excitement with which one picks out the unfamiliar item, brushes off the dirt, peers at the possible treasure.  This trouvaille  is a cuboid cardboard box, 8 ½” square and 6” deep. I’ve no idea what it had have held originally. A teapot perhaps? It was tied with string and marked LETTERS / Old Letters (Family). I prepared myself for disappointment: business correspondence, school Sunday letters kept out of duty.   Inside there was a mass of letters, hundreds of them, many on blue airmail forms  – I haven’t counted them all yet. I felt a thrill when the first letters I glimpsed w...

  People who’ve read previous posts of mine will know I have a deep love of music, primarily classical but other genres as well. It forms a permanent soundtrack to my life, and provides a palette of colours as a background. See, I have synaesthesia. I ‘see’ colours when I hear music (well, all sound, really, but music is much more overt). It’s not something I’ve spent much about – I was in my twenties before I realised it wasn’t the normal state of being for people, and that it had a specific name. All I knew up to then was it was easy to tell when my guitar was in tune as each open string was a specific colour. I say I ‘see’ the colours, but that’s probably a simplification. It’s not the same as seeing something visually, as closing my eyes makes no difference – I still get the same images as I do with eyes open. It was earlier this year, when the BBC Proms were on, when my wife discovered that when I talked about the different colours of the music, I was being lite...

 I'm delighted to be in conversation with Barbara Nadel at West Barnes Library, on Tuesday 28th January at 7.30pm. Barbara is the author of the Inspector Ikmen series, the inspiration for the TV programme,  The Turkish Detective, as seen on BBC2 last summer. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and it's a compelling watch. Barbara has written 26 books so far about Inspector Ikmen and I'm looking forward to finding out more about how she created this character and why she chose Turkey for her location. I've only written 4 books in my DI Bernie Noel series so I'd also love to know how Barbara sustains her series. If you'd like to join us, you can sign up  here.  Cost is £2 cash on the night. West Barnes Library is right next to Motspur Park train station which now has lifts for disabled access. Please note: there are no disabled toilets at the library.