Authors Electric

Greetings from what is currently a very wet Vancouver, Canada – though the rain is due to stop some time on Saturday, I believe. Never mind the weather – it’s great to be here visiting my daughter, who is now a permanent resident of this beautiful country and may well be a fully-fledged Canadian citizen before next year is out. She came here nearly five years ago, a qualified architect with several years’ experience of working in Glasgow. She found a job and quickly settled here, and I can see why. Vancouver is one of the finest cities in the world – it truly has everything, including mountains, beaches, forests and some wonderful traditional cultures. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia is one of my favourite places on earth and I’ve visited it on every one of my trips so far (this is trip number five), and this time will be no exception. It’s enthralling to see all the wonderful First Nations artefacts, though of course there are some very sad aspe...

This is a bit of an experiment. I’ve written and published before now about my mental health, including a post on Authors Electric a few months ago about anxiety and panic attacks. I’ve mentioned my recurrent depression and I may even have summarised the effects it has on me – but I’ve never published anything I actually wrote (or tried to write) while depressed. There are good reasons for that – one of which being that it can be bloomin’ difficult, if not impossible, to write anything at all when depressed. It’s certainly not something I’d advise anyone in that condition to try – not unless they really want to, and feel that it might help. The last thing someone with depression needs is another thing that he or she ‘should’ do. Depression is enough of a burden and a severe taskmaster without adding to its demands. But this time, recently, I wanted to write. Perhaps I wasn’t as bad as I’ve sometimes been. Certainly I seem to be coming out of it, thanks partly to my trusty...