Authors Electric

The Poldark series "'I'm not sure," Ross said, 'that the maintenance and transaction of government is at all well served by the present system of representation and election...I have been taking more notice of the system as it exists in England today and it's like some ramshackle old coach of which the springs and swingle bar are long broke and there are holes in the floor from bumping over rutted roads. It should be thrown out and a new one built.'  Ross Poldark goes on to argue that a situation where sparsely populated Cornwall could send several MPs to Parliament (all of them the puppets of wealthy landowners), while the densely populated new cities of the North were often unable to return even one MP, was desperately unfair. The book from which I took this quote is 'The Four Swans', first published in 1976, when Graham was 68.  And here we are in 2022. Forty-six years after the book was published, two hundred and twenty-six years after it...

The Carpenter and Other Stories  Years ago, more than forty of 'em, I landed a year as a writing fellow at a teaching college in Scarborough. I apologise to the college. Young and inexperienced as I was, I didn't shine as a fellow. In fact, I think the only reason I got the place was because as soon as I saw the calibre of the other applicants, I gave up all hope of getting the job. (One was, for instance, Authors Electric's very own Jan Needle, who would have made a far better fellow in every way than me. Sorry, Jan.) Knowing that I had no chance took all the pressure off and I decided to just practice my interview technique. When called in to meet 'the board,' I was relaxed and chatty and rather looking forward to a cuppa at the train station. Only towards the end of the interview did I start to read the glances the interviewing board were shooting each other and realised, with cold horror, that they might actually choose me. I knew I'd be no good but, if...

After watching the last episode of Line of Duty, when I think I forgot to breathe much of the time, I needed something to read in bed that would let me cool down and get to sleep. In the pile of re-reads by my bed is Jill Paton-Walsh’s The Serpentine Cave. Perfect.  As you’d expect, it’s beautifully written and beautifully crafted, a story of a mistaken episode in childhood and a search for a missing piece of identity – and it’s set in Cornwall, which is a plus for me. My Grandmother, Little Nan (so-called to distinguish her from Big Gran, my Great-grandmother) was as Cornish as cream.   Mar’Ellen Harvey from St Just in Penwith. She was from a poor family (tin-miners?) and was born in the workhouse at Madron. She’d had pernicious anaemia as a child and had lost all her teeth to gingivitis by the time she was fourteen. She was ‘taken up’ by a couple of early property developers she worked for, and went with them when they left St Just – a scandal still talked of...

I have spent the past few months house hunting in Cornwall. I thought I was looking for a new home, but actually I'm finding a lot of sad stories, any one of which expanded into fiction would make the basis of a good novel. People splitting up so the house has to be sold to split the equity... people who love their small home but have to move on because of a growing family... tenants who have lived there happily for years, but are being evicted because the landlord wants/needs to sell up... death in the family... infirmity forcing older people out of their much-cherished cottage into something more practical... redundancy. And then those strange places where the estate agent seems reluctant to tell you anything at all, and my writer's imagination starts working overtime... What exactly does "ready to go" mean? Are the neighbours horrible/drug dealers/axe-murderers? Truth is, a new home is not the easiest of things to find, even (I imagine) if you are looking f...