Authors Electric

Jan Needle - Baxter Ferret or Boddington Stoat? * Reposted from 9 May 2014 * In memory and appreciation of Jan Needle, 1943--2023 When I was making  plans for a party to celebrate the new edition of Jan Needle's Wild Wood  I began to fantasize about asking all the guests to arrive dressed as the character who most closely resembled their secret self.  The male guests would have had a generous choice: the Big Four from Wind in the Willows -- Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad ( and perhaps Otter for the more elusive spirits) and then Wild Wood 's dour ideologue Boddington Stoat, flamboyant champagne  socialist,   O.B.Weasel, geriatric Harrison Ferret and any number of old sea rats and enthusiastic volunteers. I would be Wild Wood 's Daisy Ferret, the tyrannical illogical mother, always ready to lash out with her ladle at any furry offspring within range while dimpling at O.B.Weasel's waistcoat and raising ...

Reading Julia Jones's lovely post a few days ago led me to wondering (for no very good reason) why or how one decides to become a writer. Her evocation of sitting on Peter Duck, all alone, with the river water rushing past her, did all sorts of things to me. Firstly it reminded me of one of my recurring childhood dreams - being alone on a boat, conjuring up whole new worlds. Which led me to Arthur Ransome, and then to Secret Water and the stranded barge with a focsle stove and splendid isolation on which a young boy could order his own universe. Flat calm dreams of piracy, off the Llyn Peninsula I come from Portsmouth, and in the upper reaches of the harbour in those days there were many abandoned and rotting hulls, some of which had once been barges. Great rusty, open-bellied steel masses, with only the tiniest area for men to live, surrounded at high water by the impassable sea, and at low water by even more impassable acres of gleaming, treacherous mud. God, how long I use...