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’.  ...

  When writing the first blog of the year it always leaves me wondering what I should say. As this one falls on the 16th of the month all the usual New Year's Resolutions have been covered and most people are gazing in dismay at the bills from Christmas. Add in the added pressures of COVID (there I said it) and lockdown and it really leaves me wondering - what the heck can I do to make this better. Well, I'm a definite glass half full girl and a great believer in making lemonade from the lemons of life. So, I handed myself a challenge to think about what good has, or could, come out of this as a writer. So let's see what it's like on the bright side.  The first thing that has happened since last March and the first lockdown is that I have had to stay at home. When I say stay at home, I don't just mean inside my house, I mean no travel and all speaking engagements have had to be cancelled. Usually I spend many weeks of the year travelling which I love. However, it me...

Jobim, 1981 Águas de Março, Tom Jobim's poetic, meditative, 1971 Bossa Nova gem celebrating southern Brazil's rainy month of March, has been playing in my head as we free-fall into 2021. Back in the 1980s, I memorized the lyrics so I could strum to it with my Goya, Spanish guitar. The song - about endings, beginnings and timeless flow, Zen and the beauty of common things - helped me through a rough patch. I can neither recite nor strum it from memory now, as this new year begins in which we all hope to emerge from a rough patch. But it's there, still flowing. "A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush... ... It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope"  - The Waters of March , Antonio Carlos ...