Authors Electric

My late mother was a marvellous raconteur (or raconteuse, to be correct). She’d regale a whole room with her funny stories of life as a diplomat’s wife, or – cringemaking for us – the hilarious things her children had said and done. Growing up, I began to spot embellishments in these anecdotes, not to say downright twisting of the truth; but whenever I pointed this out (with a doubtless annoying puritanism), I’d be silenced. ‘So what?’ she’d roar. ‘It makes a far better story this way.’ Cue uproarious laughter from her audience.  It didn’t matter, of course it didn’t. Or not very much. But over the years I found myself increasingly treating her accounts of her early life, family history, relationships, discussions and quarrels with a large pinch of salt, to the point when I would doubt her version of a certain important event, only to find out later that it was true. The problem was, how could I tell? Knowing her talent for spinning dull, factual straw into exciting, gleaming, semi...

A couple of months ago I promised you a particularly intriguing example of a false cultural memory , before being derailed by discovering that this phenomenon has been labelled the Mandela Effect.  Well, it can just get relabelled, because I refuse to trivialise that great man by association with a group of dopey people with a shaky grasp of real life events.  Instead, I give you the Casablanca Effect ( see here if you don’t immediately get why), followed by my contribution to this rich field of research.  Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, beautifully restored. My husband and I visited Paris recently, and, after having admired the astonishing restoration of Notre Dame, retired to a café. The great cathedral bells began to ring, prompting me to squawk, ‘The bells, THE BELLS!’, in a mock-heroic tone, a tired old joke that still appeals. (My children will tell you how much tired old jokes still appeal to me, and by the way, that wasn’t an intentional pun. A good one though.) No...

Now THIS is what I should have posted last month, just ahead of the 80th anniversary of VE Day on 8th May, and if I’d been more switched on (and less distracted by the disturbingly named Mandela effect ), I would have done. Still, we’re only a few days away from celebrating the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings on 5th June, 1944, so very much still in the remembering mode, in which eye witness accounts have increasing value as that generation passes away altogether. Going through the papers left by my late mother, Ruth Heppel, I found all the letters she wrote to her elder brother and sister-in-law in India during the Second World War. As a portrait of a teenager living through the Blitz (her home was bombed twice and the family had to be rehoused), they make a fascinating record; but what stands out is the one dated 10th May 1945, in which Ruth, by then a 19 year-old art student, gives an astonishingly vivid account of the VE Day celebrations in London. The joyous uproar she d...

Alas, poor Yorick! from Hamlet. By Eugène Delacroix - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid=150167 Now here’s something I never expected.  I knew there had to be a word for a false collective memory of a line in a film or play, famously always slightly misquoted because it sounds right. ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,’ for instance, instead of what Shakespeare actually made Hamlet say, which was ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.’ Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca By Trailer screenshot - Casablanca trailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=1757187 Or, ‘Play it again, Sam,’ which feels much more prosaic than the haunting, ‘Play it, Sam, play it,’ from a dewy-eyed Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca .  So anyway, I googled the phenomenon, of course I did, and you’ll never gue...

Julia Jones’s moving post of 9th January  about discovering long lost letters between her mother and grandmother came into my mind recently as I, too, sat down to look through some family memorabilia.  Wonderfully silly visual joke from Kate Corner's scrapbook. Opening an enormous, scruffy, leather-bound scrapbook dating from 1855, I was stunned. I can’t even remember what I expected: some dull, holy verses extolling faith and humility, a few cut-outs depicting blowsy roses, nature walks described in spidery handwriting, that sort of thing… Caricature from Kate Corner's scrapbook. Instead, a wealth of well-drawn caricatures greeted my eyes, some wonderfully silly visual jokes... ... and two beautifully and comically illustrated invitations, framed as the planned outings of an exclusive club called the Fraternitye of Noviomagians.  Noviomagus Anniversary Meeting 1st July 1856. By George Godwin. Soberer items appeared in between: many carefully scrawled poems I haven’...

The Magic Pudding  by Norman Lindsay What does the word ‘magic’ in a book title conjure up for you?  Not a silly question. There’s method in my magicness. Because before I read one of my favourite books as a child, I’d have assumed a story with that word in the title would be about fairies, or wizards, or mysterious lands where animals can talk and rivers run silver… a benign, happy kind of magic in other words. Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree , for instance, or Aladdin's magic lamp in A Thousand and One Nights , or Alison Uttley’s Magic in my Pocket .  Then my uncle returned from Australia with a copy for me of  The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay.  Nice title, thought I, if a bit predictable. Obviously, a version of the Brothers' Grimm Magic Porridge Pot that miraculously feeds the impoverished family who owns it, without ever running out. (As long as they obey the rules that is. There has to be a catch somewhere.) All about generosity, in other words, from...

What does BBC Radio 4’s long-running, much-loved soap opera about Everyday Farming Folk have against Hallowe’en? BBC Radio 4's The Archers The Archers began on 1st January 1951, as a 15-minute daily serial intended to spread the word about new developments in farming. It centred on 3 or 4 farming families, most of whom were called Archer, with the addition of the Aldridges at the posh end of the scale, balanced by the Grundys and Horrobins at the other. The characters took off, and a wealth of other storylines got woven in, some for comic effect, some for their gripping dramatic pull, but most as vehicles for messages about Good Social Behaviour. No one is ever racist, for instance, except in a clumsy way, because unless one of the villagers says something objectionable (and, needless to say, quite out of character), how are we, the listeners, to grasp that a newcomer to the Ambridge village is from an ethnic minority? Halloween pumpkins... at least they're not plastic. Photo ...

Many years ago, at the height of Britain’s football hooliganism problems, I came across a delicious comedy sketch on BBC Radio 4 which went something like this:  Policeman : I'm arresting you for affray leading to grievous bodily harm, with intention to commit. Do you have anything to say?  Lout : Yeah, well, it were like this. Me and my mates was just leavin’ Waiting for Godot at the Prince Edward theatre, like, when these guys come up to us and start rantin’ and swearin’ that Beckett’s rubbish, everyone knows that, not a patch on Chekhov whose Three Sisters could wipe the floor wiv us, yeah, and our muvvers too. Well, that crossed a line that did, I’m not takin’ that lyin’ down. So yes, officer, I did clock ‘im one but there’s provocation, see.  Laugh-out loud comedy, ah those were the days.  Having the temerity to issue a challenge.  Photo by Daisa TJ: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-holding-sword-3408420/ Anyway, this popped into my mind because recently...