Authors Electric

I can’t remember now how many years ago it was when I first read Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, but I do remember the delight I felt in the cast of comical grotesques and the mad inventiveness of the wonky cows, the sukebind, the whatever-it-was in the woodshed that Aunt Ada Doom saw, that ‘something nasty’ that sealed all their fates.   My husband shared my enjoyment of the book but sailed a bit close to the wind when he christened my parent’s smallholding, which was indeed in deepest, darkest Sussex, Cold Comfort Farm. We’re still married and I am still inclined to mutter, on occasions when I’ve achieved something I alone find praiseworthy, ‘I ha’scranletted the bottom acre.’ I once sent a copy to a friend who was in need of cheering up and she phoned to say that at first she hadn’t realised it was satirical and wondered what on earth I had sent it for. I was reminded of the business of ‘not getting it’ recently by Bill Kirton’s humourless and dopey reviewer ...

Where’s this ruddy spring, that’s what I want to know. It’s been a long, gruelling winter what with one thing and three others, and I’ve had just about enough of it. Packed the grandkids and their ma n pa off to some damn theme park or another today, and it’s so cold out (Pennines/Lancashire/Yorkshire border) that they’d have been better off staying in bed. Not that they’ll think that, of course. I can remember days at Alton Towers (not where they’re going; apparently they charge £20 a day for the use of a wheelchair, which sadly now is needed for one of Spring is sprung? Come to't sunny north! the party) when it rained so hard the waterproofing of my skin gave up and I filled me wellies from the inside by osmosis. Honest! You ask Donald Trump. And the children? They never noticed it. Just demanded more ice cream… Talking of wellies, my darling Mac rendered it as ‘willies’ both the first time I typed it, then again just then (which is po...

I’ve just visited the Chip Museum in Bruges. Sounds utterly ludicrous, doesn’t it? How can you have a whole museum devoted entirely to that very Belgian food item, the chip? But you can – and I think this is one of the secrets of humour, when you take something way beyond the obvious.           The Chip Museum starts off the way you’d expect, with the history of the potato and a delightful display with potatoes of every shape and size and colour suspended in mid-air. Then there’s the fascinating topic of freeze-drying, the invention of the chip (with crisps as a by-product) and the correct way to cook them; oils or fats? And just when you think the place must run out of steam, there is a whole host of chip-cutting machines. Every sort of fryer you’ve ever thought of, and more besides, and the dinky little stalls that have sold them through the ages with their candy-striped canopies or corrugated iron roofs. Lots of cartoons, with baby...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...