Authors Electric

Hello and welcome to my loo, my little downstairs loo, which has a small library on the lower left, which you can't see in this image, and into which we put odd, unclassifiable books - ancient paperbacks with yellowing pages which really should go to a charity shop, but not yet, odd self-help books to dip into and promptly forget, and then the odd treasure like this French story book (I can't describe these stories as fairy stories because they don't contain any fairies) which I haven't looked at for decades, and which I recently began reading. I love its surreal cover illustration, reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, and the inside line drawings are similar in feel. The illustrator is Sylvie Francois, the writer Robert Escarpit, and the book was first published in 1975!   What has most struck me about these fantasy stories is how very French they are. Here we have a country afflicted with sadness - absolutely nobody is happy. The king tried to organise a ball to cheer...

This was provoked by a recent stay at the birthplace of Stanley Henderson (or, more correctly, the place of his conception). No, don’t Google him. That's him on the left, drawn by my nephew, Joe. I’ll explain. I’ve written some stories about Stanley and, for me, he’s taken on a life of his own. I ought to be treating him as a commercial proposition, and I will, of course, but even as I do so, he’ll be there as a presence, casting a sceptical eye over and shaking his head at my efforts. Regrettably, my grandchildren are growing up faster than I am but I’m talking now about the days when story ideas were generated, with apparent ease, by the early morning arrival  of grandchildren in our bed , bright, wide-awake and wanting to be entertained. If I was clever, I could get them to do their own inventing (such as when Tracey the lion took the part of Goldilocks in Tracey the Lion and the Three Giraffes), but sometimes, a riff would start and it would easy for me to pursue it. ...