Authors Electric

Tomorrow we meet in a pub, with no alcohol, to say goodbye to a friend. We first met Heidi when our children were at primary school together. It was a very small village school where I can remember being on first name terms with all the other parents. Some of us ran an after school club together. Heidi was part of this. She was musical, artistic, imaginative, affectionate, alternative. Sometimes her suggestions were a bit fey. Sometimes she didn’t turn up when we expected her. Heidi was a single mother with a single child, Oliver, who she loved dearly. He too was musical, artistic, affectionate, full of enthusiasms, never quite in the mainstream. Sometimes they were very late for school. Occasionally Heidi wasn’t there when it was time for the children to go home. Once or twice I went to Heidi’s house and couldn’t make her hear me. There was a day when she started to tell me how unhappy she was. People occasionally made remarks. I began to worry about her. I was also the school governo...

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, or even dedicate much time to writing. IT issues, both parents ending up in hospital at different times and needing help, coupled with increased work pressures mean I’ve barely written anything for the last six months. Things are settling, though, finally. Parents on the mend, work settled, and have a new laptop all configured with backups restored at last; I got the last few pieces sorted out over the Easter weekend and can now return to scratching that itch I get when I don’t write for a while. On the plus side, I’ve got a notebook full of random jottings I’ve managed to get on paper, and feel sure there’ll be something in there I can use in future work. I’ve not been completely dormant, though. I’m around 10k words from revising the third draft of my Young Adult adventure set in the Middle East. (As a wee side note, my wife has pointed out that my timing is impeccable – I was gearing up to launch a dystopian YA adventure set a few ...

This post was inspired by the discovery that there’s an apparently endless supply of videos on YouTube which focus on a number of players fighting each other and various enemies on Minecraft (don’t ask me how I know this). Before I watched some of the Minecraft videos, I was tempted to write about the great Kit-Kat heist,  with the illustration below.  Glad to have my Kit Kat stash at the moment I had a difficult history with computer games even before Minecraft. That history, I’ve just worked out, goes back around fifty years, which was when some of my work colleagues discovered they could access a game I think was called ‘Space Wars’ on the mainframe computer at our place of work. Once the senior staff found out about it, they ruled that it wasn’t to be played during working hours but playing after hours was all right. This was a workplace that had very few other rules even compared with others of the time. I never quite understood the attraction of Space Wars, if that was r...

  In Isfahan                                                                                Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing.   Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad:   “Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done.   “This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no hist...

I’ve been reading a number of memoirs recently, thanks to Slightly Foxed Editions, the publishing wing of Slightly Foxed magazine. Mostly this has been a sheer delight. While the writing quality may vary, what doesn’t is the fascinating glimpses of detail of peoples' lives in the past .  To War with Whitaker by Hermione Ranfurly My Grandmothers and I by  Diana Holman Hunt I was going to write ‘ordinary peoples' lives’ but that would hardly fit My Grandmothers and I , Diana Holman Hunt’s hilarious account of being brought up by her two grandmothers, one of whom was almost dangerously eccentric (guess which one). Or Countess Ranfurly’s determination to follow her husband into battle during World War 2 ( To War with Whitaker ). Other volumes in this series don’t have quite the same glamour but provide invaluable accounts of growing up in wartime London, for instance (V S Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door ). Or learning traditional farming, complete with horse-drawn implements such...

  Faustus (to Mephistophilis): First will I question with thee about hell. Tell me where is the place that men call hell?   -- <*> -- IRAN ATTACK ISRAEL LAUNCHES MISSILES AT HEZBOLLAH THE HOLOCAUST   -- <*> -- Mephistophilis:   Under the heavens. Faustus: Ay, but whereabouts?  -- <*> -- TRUMP: ATTACKS ON IRAN TO CONTINUE... NOT EVERYONE BORN IN BRITAIN IS BRITISH, SAYS REFORM CANDIDATE   UK ALLOWS BRITISH BASES FOR STRIKES AGAINST IRAN -- <*> -- Mephistophilis: Within the bowels of these elements Where we are tortured and remain forever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place: for where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must we ever be...   Faustus:  Come, I think hell's a fable.  -- <*> -- TRUMP PROMISES: "I'M NOT GOING TO START WARS, I'M GOING TO STOP WARS." [OCT 2025]   TRUMP SAYS MORE DEATHS OF US TROOPS LIKELY RESCUERS DESPERATELY SEARCH THROUGH RUBBLE OF SCHOOL ...