Authors Electric

Tomorrow I am heading up to Stonehaven, a wee town just south of Aberdeen. Wendy Jones - a keen AE member and blogger (as well as successful crime writer) does a monthly radio show on the local station, called BookBuzz. She has invited me to be this month's guest author. So I am feeling quite energised and ready to rock 'em in the aisles. I actually love radio as a medium and have been a listener since the 'tranny' days of my misspent youth. I even worked briefly for a local radio station and chaired an advisory panel for another. That was a great wheeze since it involved going to twice yearly to the IBA HQ in London for meetings. Their offices were directly opposite Harrods. My children were quite the envy of their friends as I shopped there for those little 'bring-you-back-a' presents, with which we parents assuage our guilt when we dare to have a life of our own and leave them - albeit perfectly well cared for - even for a short time. I also love radio b...

Let's hear it this morning  for Radio 4 and too much wine the night before. I don't normally listen to Desert Island discs in bed of a Friday morning, because like all good conscientious writers I'm up and at my computer. Naturally. But the islandee, the castaway, was Sally Wainwright, and I heard her name luckily just before I hopped out of me pit to frighten off my hangover with a sunshine walk. I don't imagine that I'm alone in this, but I think Sally Wainwright is the best TV writer of series that we've got, and possibly ever had. No, that's nonsense. Come back Dennis Potter and Pennies from Heaven, all is remembered. And Tutti Frutti, come to think of it. She turns out to be a woman with a wonderful West Yorkshire accent in the Elland/Halifax mode. When she went to university to study French, the other students used to laugh at  the way she spoke the language. (How would a Parisien say Ecky Thump. I wonder? Not that that's Yorkshire, I suppos...

A book I love so much that I not only have a precious battered paper version but digital and audio editions too. (Incidentally, Neville Jason narrates it brilliantly) Listening to Desert Island Discs recently, I thought about what my own choices would be. And as I’ve mentioned in one of my previous blogs, my desert island book would definitely be TH White’s Once and Future King. Except that nowadays, the advent of e readers means that you don’t have to stop at just one book. Instead of a single volume, before the ship sank, I’d snatch up my Kindle instead – preloaded, naturally, with a selection of 3000 books, and complete with a cover incorporating a light so I could read at night. Maybe I might finally get around to tackling War and Peace, as well as working my way through some of the backlog of reading that has built up. The desert island experience might actually turn out to be rather pleasant. For my luxury I was considering asking for Ray Mears, as his survival exper...