Authors Electric

The stepmother in Pebble is not a bad person. Her name is Lottie Livesey.  She’s sensitive and caring (if occasionally a little too determined to do what she believes to be right) and there is never any doubt that she loves her stepsons (Luke and Liam) just as much as she loves her daughters (Anna and Vicky). She’s also far too principled and clear-thinking to allow her deteriorating relationship with their father to lessen her concern for his boys. So, how to get her off the stage and allow them the freedom to get into jeopardy? The solution seemed delightfully simple…put her on it.  Lottie is a folk-singer whose career is beginning to take wings. In The Lion of Sole Bay I dispatched her to a recording studio in Italy to make her breakthrough album. I thought she’d earned a holiday after her grim time as an invisible, illegal, worker in the early volumes, living  in a shipping container somewhere half-finished in the Ipswich docklands. Three of the four chil...

"The curfew tolls the knell of passing day The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me." Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) Ramsholt Church by Jack Merriott (1901-1968) All Saints Church, Ramsholt,stands alone at the top of a low hill overlooking the River Deben. It may have been a watch point to give warning of invasions from the sea and it’s impossible to sail past in either direction without looking up at it and feeling recognition. My father’s ashes are in the churchyard and my mother plans to be buried there as well. Even Francis, non-Suffolk-born and a non-believer, has said he would choose Ramsholt to be his resting place. The church yard is unkempt and full of wild flowers, either blooming, delicate and colourful, or withering and dying, gently, in due season. The round tower has buttresses that make it appear oval. I wonder whether...

A friend who is a professor at Ankara University mentions that she's reading Daniel Defoe as part of her current research into the relationship between Place and Fiction: James Canton, a lecturer at Essex University runs an MA course in 'Wild Writing'. I'm reading his book Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape and realise that the next chapter is entitled 'Finding Defoe. Mmmm, yes, I like this minor coincidence and I like Defoe as well. His A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724) is an impressive early example of travel journalism and Robinson Crusoe (1719) is the great-grand-daddy of all adventure stories. One presents itself as fact and the other as fiction, yet they're not so far apart: Crusoe was based on a genuine piece of experience -- Alexander Selkirk's solitary survival on a Pacific Island -- and the Tour is by no means all sober reportage. James Canton carries out a simple piece of fact-checking into one of its ...