Authors Electric

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

Blindness in Gaza*   I have been taking The Observer, an English Sunday newspaper, for as long as I can remember, and my story arises from this. When I first began teaching History in Guildford in November 1973 I was asked by my 12-13 year old pupils to explain to them about the Yom Kippur War. This had just broken out when the Egyptians and Syrians had invaded Israel in an attempt to recapture The Golan Heights which they had lost in the 6 Day War of 1967 against the same enemy. I was a recent graduate in English Literature rather than a historian, but to help explain the conflict I spread pages of The Observer, then a broadsheet paper, across the blackboard. I did my best to tell them what I knew.    The Observer was a newspaper which did then and still does favour the liberal arts. I was trusting it then to give both me and my pupils a fair and unbiased view of what was happening in the Middle East. Fifty years later this November in The Observer I read Kenan Malik’s C...

There’s an old saying that if you see a flock of crows, they’re rooks, and if you see a solitary rook, it’s a crow. It has been claimed by those who know these things that it isn’t true but it’s true-ish, as many of the old tales are.   Black birds congregating in large numbers in trees are mostly rooks, and crows are more likely to be alone or in pairs.  I remember being fascinated by a book about raven behaviour when a carcass is discovered by scouting birds. They report back to their clan by distinctive cries and then there’s a hierarchy of who feeds first, regulated by patterns of calls. I was enjoying the book very much but it descended into a miseryfest by the writer. He was cold, it was hard to find roadkill, the water ran out, etc. etc... It reminded me of my bête noir, him off the tele who goes off on ‘adventures’ all over the world and then moans into the camera because he’s all covered in boils or he’s left his horse in a field in Mongolia and they’ve all d...