Authors Electric

  Have I ever told you about the day I went to Heaven for the first time? Via St Pancras? I arrived, not by a straight and narrow way, but via a broad and inviting set of steps.                                                                                          from Wikipedia   Of course, as St Petra explained to me, you can’t just walk in; there’s a ticket system. I was crestfallen at that, thinking I had come on this long and difficult journey only to be denied. What saved me and gained me admission was a dirty,   crumpled-up letter in the bottom of my bag.     It bore the logo of Barefoot Books. ‘Oh, you’re a WRITER,’   said St Petra, touching her forelock as a mark of respect, ‘Com...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pleasures and pains of handing one’s work over to someone else. I’ve enjoyed writing for performance ever since I was a child. We lived in a cul-de-sac   then, and the blind end had a street lamp over it which made the perfect evening performance space.   I can’t remember much about the scripts, although one play involved costumes made of raffia knotted round string to make ‘hula hula skirts.’ I wrote and directed them and carried on doing that through school, devising my own versions of My Fair Lady, Snow White, and a something Shakespearean with someone playing a recorder, for which I wrote the music. I can’t write music. When the hapless player asked me what key it was in, I said, ‘C’ because it didn’t have sharps or flats (what?) She gave me a funny look. Maybe I had/have a control-freak streak, but I knew how I wanted the parts to be played, my words to be spoken. I've gone on doing it intermittently ever since. Writing f...

I once inherited a marmot-fur coat. By one of those weird coincidences, my friend Di inherited a mink one at more or less the same time. Both coats were short and boxy; very 1920s-30s, so the poor little beasts had gone to meet their makers (ho ho) long before either of us was born. What to do with them, though? They were potentially saleable (especially Di’s mink) but that didn’t seem right. In the end, we discovered that Oxfam would take them to send to folk in very cold climates, so we decided to donate them, but we would first wear them once and once only. I can’t remember why we thought this was a good idea, but it was probably a nod to the elderly relatives who had bequeathed them to us. The one-and-only occasion we chose was Midnight Mass in Romsey Abbey, which would be perishing cold. So we went in our outdated finery, a touch of Mammon in the holy place, and shortly after the service began, a couple of noisy drunks staggered in. There was much tutting, some moves to evict...