Authors Electric

 There is something about the turn of the year. It's a midpoint a moment that hangs between. This particular solstice has been  a particularly odd one in a year where the beginning was lost to lockdown and there is no certainty that the year's end might not deliver more of the same. It's a kind of limbo for all of us. We are caught between pessimism and optimism, between fear of the virus and a desperation to return to some kind of normality. This new world that is emerging isn't quite the same as the old one. Perhaps we have a greater sense of the fragility of things, the speed with which shops can empty and hospitals become overrun; the ease with which we can drop certain social contacts and the pain the loss of others causes. Even if we have escaped personal loss, we have all lost quite a lot. Everything is ever so slightly out of joint and old certainties now seem contingent though on what I couldn't say.  One thing that I have lost is certainty. In the 'bef...

  Photo taken by Kirsten Bett on 21 June 2021 Eilandverlangen or Island Longing is something I relate to. We went to Terschelling on Monday 21 June, and on the window of the ferry building in Harlingen, I saw the above poem with that very title by Gerda Posthumus. It's perfect because it always looks different. Blue skies would have made it easier to read but the grey background and rain gave it a more poetic atmosphere, wouldn't you agree? It's in Dutch because the poet and the location is in the Netherlands. The north of the Netherlands is made up of the Wadden Islands. They are part of Unesco World Heritage . Below you can see the ferry connection to Terschelling. Gerda Posthumus is the island poet of Vlieland, the island to the southwest of Terschelling -- that ferry also leaves from Harlingen. I adore the Wadden islands as I am an island lover. I would not want to live on one but if I am in a rut, if I need to clear my mind, there is no better destination. Of course, y...

  It’s amazing how stealthily new stages of life creep up on us. Just a few years ago I considered myself to still be a middle-aged father, with much of my life still ahead of me. Now I find myself a grandfather to three, with a fourth on the way. Having downsized from the family home of the last thirty five years, we are living in a rental in a pleasant village, watching our children ascending the property ladder in order to house their burgeoning broods. The flow of work hasn’t changed all that much, Zoom and Skype having replaced exhausting hours in airports and hotels, thanks to the current plague, but much of the pressure of the previous forty years seems to have floated away. I still don’t have as much time to read or daydream as I would like, but I dare say that comes with the next stage. Watching my mother-in-law lose her grasp on reality is a sobering reminder of what might lie ahead. Although it is sad for the rest of us to watch her slow decline, she seems remarkably...

  In my mind, these quotes belong together. I was emotionally mature and schooled enough in sorrow to understand the truth of Hardy's statement even in my early youth. Successive decades have only proved its veracity to me in ever new ways. The Lawrence quote, however, I have come to fathom only very recently. It's not easy, after all, to understand in one's youth just how many skies can fall...! ***** We go through life, aided in no small measure by favourite books, songs, poems. But sometimes, just single lines can remain companions for life, touchstones to live by. So it has been for me, with these - by two all-time favourite writers. I love these quotes because they go beyond facile articulations of 'pessimism' and 'optimism'. Hardy observes an undeniable truth about life with Olympian detachment. Just saying it like it is. Nothing more. While Lawrence injects a poetic passion even in this one sentence, making it an ultimate statement about the will to l...

  No cultivated rose is more beautiful. And the bees and hoverflies go mad for these. They patrol up and down the length of fence the rose grows on from morning until late in the evening. The bees fly away with bright yellow, bulging knee sacks. Somewhere not too far away, honey-stores are being crammed full. A tour round my (tiny) garden. Right outside the kitchen door is a bonsai cherry ( bonsai meaning 'grown in a pot' rather than small.)  It is hung with ripening cherries which, I hope, will actually ripen this year instead of falling off. So far, it's looking good. Not exactly a bumper crop but I hope to get a handful of cherries at least. (We moved the cherry to a more sheltered spot this year, which is one advantage of having your orchard in pots.) To the other side of the door are the lilies. Also in a pot. These Asiatic lilies are great but I prefer the taller, fragrant Oriental lilies which are still to come.       The bench is a good place to sit -- e...

  Last month we managed a few days away. Just four short days and we didn’t go far. We live in a beautiful part of the world, so it was a case of just escaping from our hometown that is a busy holiday hotspot, to a much quieter place – a caravan in a field twenty minutes away! While we were away we had time to visit some lovely places, one that despite being so close to us geographically, we had never visited before. Between the early- nineteenth century and right up until the 1960’s Dorothea had been the site of an extensive series of deep slate quarries gouged out of the landscape. Over the years the quarry pits had been dug deeper and deeper, eventually falling beneath the natural water table and requiring pumps to pump out the water whilst they were still being mined. Alongside the quarries were industrial buildings and workshops, a spectacular Cornish Beam pump and even a fine three storey Victorian house built for the Quarry owner on site, with it’s own walled gardens and ext...

Evidently a very informative programme... Yesterday our usually human-oriented, friendly cat spent eight hours lurking under the sofa bed in my ‘den’ (or writing space), which doubles, with the sofa in its bed pose, as a guest bedroom.  For him, ‘lockdown’ was most definitely over: a small fast-moving human creature, whom he had forgotten about, was again whooping and shouting around the house…   I could agree with the cat. Lockdown provided a quiet routine life, when writing could be fitted into the daily round of on-line shopping, exercise classes, meetings and chat. Ever since my husband’s office sent everyone off to work from home (16 March 2020) this routine has given our cat ‘sit-on time’ around 10.00am, as we three met up for our tea and biscuits morning break, and again around 4.45pm for tea and a slice of toast (the cat of course had cat kibble, if hungry, but the specialness of these times is that he can sit on a lap, one of his very favourite things).  I...

  So it didn't happen, then? I hate being right (see last month's poem ). The curse of the speculative fiction writer is that we can usually see ahead of the curve. Mine tends to whizz me about 10 years into the future, which is pretty useless for planning purposes since 10 years is plenty long enough to forget what I once thought I knew. But for a bit of fun this midsummer (when we all thought life could finally restart but it can't yet), here are my predictions for the long awaited post-pandemic years:  There will be a revolution in England. It will fail. Wales will have to wait two weeks for their revolution, and do it better than us. Scotland will declare independence and apply to rejoin the EU. The EU will say 'non'. The Scots will remember William Wallace and decide they are better off alone, anyway. When we are finally allowed to vote again, the current government will not be re-elected. The opposition will not be elected, either (since they do not seem to be...

  We’ve just been with a group of friends in Northumberland. Beautiful Northumberland. We are a disparate lot and apart from us Southerners, members of the group hail from Berwick on Tweed, Glasgow, Cumbria, Yorkshire. I just love listening to the musical lilt in the conversations around the table, and the discussions about all and sundry, in particular, words: ‘what do YOU call…?’ It made me think about how furious I get when our language is reduced – especially so-called ‘strong language’ which is anything but strong. Rather, it’s weak as it conveys so little except, usually, ire. It isn’t far removed from grunt-and-point to keep on saying ‘fuck’, for example – and, while I’m at it, its usage in everyday speech is relatively new. It makes me angry when it is used in films supposedly set in, say, the post-war years. It was then considered so rude and vulgar that it would have been very shocking to hear anyone use it, and if someone said it in front of a woman he (probably he) wo...