Authors Electric

Yellowhammer The other day - maybe due to my advanced age, or upon hearing that I've been writing a memoir - a friend asked me how I would choose to come back in the next life, if there is one.  "As a busker," I responded. I didn't give my answer much thought, except that I've always liked street performers. "Maybe as a great orchestra conductor, like Toscanini, maybe a pianist too, or Arthur Fiedler . My mother took me to see the legendary Fiedler lead the Boston Pops at the Shell in the summer of 1941 beside the Charles River. I recall the outdoor spectacle vividly though the mists of early memories. After that, I took to conducting radio music with a yellow pencil. One of my aunts gave me a baton, real or perhaps a toy one.  Beethoven  That began my childhood busking career. Housing was scarce. For a while, my parents and I lived at the house of my paternal grandparents in the then toney, Boston district of Brighton. It was a spacious three-floor affair fo...

Something happened to me recently that gave me a terrible fright. (No, this doesn't have anything to do with Hallowe'en!) I completely lost my hearing overnight. I had caught a really bad cold, possibly as a divine judgement for enjoying a performance of 'The Book of Mormon' at Edinburgh Playhouse or possibly because I'd spent an afternoon playing with my grandson and some bug he had picked up at nursery had breached my defences. At first it was just a normal cold, and then I woke up three nights in a row with earache and had to sit upright in a chair for a couple of hours each time until I was comfortable enough to lie down again. After the third night of earache, I woke up and found I couldn't hear anything. Only the previous day I'd been able to hear music, and audiobooks, and the sound on television, and then suddenly I couldn't. I couldn't even ring the doctor to ask for an appointment, so my son had to do it for me, and then he had to come with...

     First things first. Kay's visa unexpectedly arrived on Wednesday 17th, the day before polling day for the Scottish Referendum. We don't think there was any connection between the two events, though for us one was as epoch-making as the other. Did our campaign have any effect? Who knows? It may be that they suddenly sent it to rid themselves of a minor irritant.           We'd contacted our MP  and a message had been sent to a friendly reporter on the Oxford Mail and Times  which I quickly had to retract. It might  have been on the way anyway. Only sometimes do I consider the futile fantasy that our MP took my letter outlining the points I made in my last blog to Theresa May, saying, 'We've been rumbled.' However, we can't discount the possibility of this bureaucratic monolith having one or two nice people working for it. Nevertheless, I stand by every word I wrote except for one thing. Julia Jones in ...