Authors Electric

Casting around for what to write about as we begin the Silly Season, my mind turns to the irritating grammatical errors indulged in by People What Ought To Know Better…. Jacob Rees-Mogg: like Ko-Ko in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado , he's got a little list, he's got a little list... ... and lo, that great Jim Lloyd* of politics, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has beaten me to it.  And the wooden spoon goes to... whoever fails to use imperial measurements.  I’m not going to repeat the Mogg’s Little List, as spelled out in The Times on Saturday 27 July, but it did strike me as an odd collection of: 1. Genuine grammatical mistakes 2. An obsession with how to address an MP (4 rules apply to this alone) 3. A personal dislike of well-established English words that go back - not just to Gilbert and Sullivan (see caption above) - but to Chaucer and beyond ( got ) 4. A refusal to modernise beyond 1971 ( Use imperial measurements ). To be fair, it’s...

It's early Autumn, or, if you prefer, late summer, and in my very peaceful part of North London, there's a kind of golden silence which seeps into my head. The very last of my huge crop of tomatoes remains to be picked, and this morning I gathered an unexpectedly large bunch of runner beans - all this richness from a small suburban garden. This time of year feels like a kind of dream time through which I wander almost mindlessly. Soon there will be the first breaths of the winter to come, and I love that - it's thrilling. I am not a summer person. Recently I found myself picking lawn daisies just before their decapitation by lawn mower - these lovely little things always come back. I haven't picked daisies since making daisy chains with my kids and my grandchildren, and I suddenly wanted to - they are so sweet. The movie based on one of my books has now progressed to the stage of location and actually filming, and I will be shown the first images in ten days time...