Authors Electric

  Imagine you’re a you ng journalist from  The Times , reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their   Götterdämmerung   p eriod, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!). Anthony Horowitz By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848 So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language ( as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works ), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books.  Yup, that’s what he said. Well, he must have said that, there’

  I suppose I should have known that a blog I wrote back in August, about odd phrases and words , was going to attract comment from writers. I didn’t expect quite as many comments, though.  Of course, this set me thinking about other old sayings…   Legging a Lemon Author Ivar Leidus If we asked my mother what was doing, she always replied, “I’m legging a lemon.” Or, possibly, “I’m leg in a lemon.” I never knew which it was, or ever understood what it meant. I still don’t. Which, I suppose, was the point: she answered us but told us nothing. Did she mean that she had one leg poked through the rind of a lemon? However that would work… Or did she mean that she was ‘legging’ a lemon, as you would a canal boat? I was brought up in the Black Country, where the Industrial Revolution got under way, and the place is awash with canals, or ‘cuts’ as we call them. I was born in the town of Oldbury which, famously, you can’t enter or leave without crossing a cut. Canal boats had t