Authors Electric

     My old father, sadly, got to be quite a grumpy old git in the years before he succumbed to seventy years of constant smoking (he started at eight; I leave you to do the sums). But even as a younger man he wasn’t keen on such foolishness as Christmas. He once acquired a miniature costermongers barrow as a surprise present for me, and when I found it hidden at the bottom of the yard, sold it to someone else. Didn’t tell me, and when I’d spent most of the festive morning happily hunting for it, was quite surprised when I burst into tears on hearing the sad truth. Come to think of it, maybe he was always a grumpy old git. Who knows? The point is, when I got children of my own – and mindful of the old saw that we all turn into our mums and dads – I was determined to be the Christmas party animal par excellence. My greatest triumph was when I got a local handyman to run me up a sit-in perambulating railway engine for Hughie when he was about five. I’m...

I had an interesting virtual conversation with John Logan the other day, which I’d love to refer to but can’t find in my new technology nightmare. I’m running three computers at the moment – big desktop Mac (never liked Big Macs, fries or no fries), which is old and slow and infuriating, a laptop Mac, which is good but prone to sulking now and then, and losing things I haven’t yet saved, and a PC laptop the bloke over the road gave me. This one’s good, but VERY old, and throws enormous wobblies if the document I’m working on is more than twitter length. The doc I’m working on at the moment is about 300 pages. Serves me right. John and I were conversing about nasty reviews on Amazon and why they happen. I’d had a couple of humdingers, which appeared to have a slightly orchestrated tang to them, and I think he was impressed (can’t check, sadly – see above!). But his idea was to embrace them with love and affection, because if they went on it would make an interesting...