Authors Electric

‘Happy New Year’ - how many of us stayed up, let off fireworks, made resolutions, or toasted 2021?   Did anyone still think we’d be rid of the Pestilence, which seemed to’ve been celebrating its own capacity for moving into what we call a ‘New Year’? Enthusiastic about its own persistence, and whether human beings would stick to their resolutions? New Year’s Eve, someone was defying any gloom: fireworks which began at 11.00pm banged and boomed, illuminating the sky until 12.00pm.   Will this be the year we escape into ‘normal’ life, the Year of the Vaccine? I rather think that display was for something else… something a bit divisive… the 21st century looks to continue divisive and conflicted, set with clashing cultures, discontent, instability, and powerful urban myths.   In January 2021, looking back on childhood, adolescence, early adult life, there was none of this. Refugees (now officially labelled ‘migrants’) were people we supported by holding ‘Jumble Sales’.  ...

 So, this blog was going to be the sad end of year reflection on a year of Covid, of the last year in which all of Europe was still  ours to explore at will. I went to Paris at the end of February as the world woke up to virus and I went to Venice post Covid in the early summer when, briefly, the world opened up again: memories to hold on to.  This year has been about hanging on. I wrote a poem everyday through lockdown - hanging on to creativity and small pleasures: the birdsong in the garden, sunlight striping the floor, walks with a friend and wine -  probably too much wine. This year has been about hanging on to connections, contriving safe ways to meet family and friends. We hung on to Christmas by having it outdoors in November in a festive gazebo. I have decided to hang on to  59, though my transition into young old age was marked memorably and well with a walk in the park and champagne, I think I'll celebrate it again next year - when I may be able to se...

2020—It started with so much promise. January 23rd, I wrote my first blog for Authors Electric, celebrated Chinese New Year with my family a few days later, and left for a two-week holiday with a girlfriend to Cuba shortly thereafter.  Life was good.  No … I take that back.  Life was great.   Fast forward eleven months, and here we are.  I don’t need to tell you how 2020 has devastated the lives of so many all over the world. Life with Covid is not coming to an end any time soon even though we have a vaccine. Each day brings an increasing number of cases, further lockdowns, and a new strain of Covid-19 is now upon us, just in time for Christmas. It’s not good, but I choose to remain optimistic, so I don’t want to talk about Covid. Let’s talk turkey instead—three turkeys to be exact.  Early November, I thought I’d get a head start on the holidays by purchasing a few Christmas food items. I don’t go out to buy groceries. I order online and drive to the superm...

The scent of dew on barley (photo credit Jack Thorogood) Regularly at this time of year I snuff the air for that warm, baked biscuit smell and listen out for the rumble of heavy machinery hurrying past or working late into the evening until the dew falls. Harvest hymns run on a loop inside my head as the fields open yet more widely to the sky. Harvest feels purposeful, potentially triumphant, but breath-holdingly tense. This is a triumph that won’t be earned until the last load has been brought in.  There’s no other moment quite like it.   It's a vestigial response from forgotten generations of farming ancestors and the period when I was living in a farming family and would likely be found packing a basket at tea time and hurrying to the field with a flask and sandwiches and the children clamouring to be lifted up for a ride. Two things prompt this month’s blog (three, if you count Francis’s barely concealed expression of dismay when I threatened to re-share someth...

Happy New Year to you all (here are some lizards having a party with some rather nice-looking cake to help you celebrate) although by the time this blog comes out, the new year will already be almost a month old. It began badly, with the probably illegal assassination of a very bad man. I have no tears for him, but it happened via very Twenty-First Century technology - the attack directed from very far away from the target - reminding me disturbingly of the ethical issues raised in the film "DRONE", and of how we sat in the cinema rigid with fear for the little girl who kept returning to the target zone in spite of heroic efforts on the ground to keep her out of it. This guy was no innocent child, but he was in another country, and this was an invasion of its air space. Once, a long time ago, an equally unlovely guy called Hitler decided to invade Poland, thus starting the second world war. None of the protagonists in the current drama wants an outcome like that, but som...