Authors Electric

We find it relatively easy to write about what we see and what we hear – and smell and taste are important when it comes to food. C.S.Lewis was well aware that food is the way to a child’s heart before puberty strikes. But what about sensation? Touch, temperature, proprioception? When you're so numb you don't know where bits of your body are in relation to other bits? It’s very important as far as pleasure is concerned, and also pain if you’re writing a torture scene, but describing extreme heat and extreme cold need a bit of thought. How easy is it to remember what it felt like, when you’re sitting at your computer in a centrally-heated room? Jumping into a pool whilst on holiday somewhere hot brings immediate relief, along with cold drinks and ice cream. I’ve found it’s quicker to cool yourself down than it is to warm yourself up. Wrists and ankles are key – run your wrist under a cold tap and you can feel the cooler blood travel down your fingers. The fad for leg warmers in ...

My love affair with ice hockey goes back a great many years: to the late 1970s in fact, when I spent a couple of years teaching English Conversation to adults in Tampere, Finland. My students mostly worked in the large paper mills of Tampere, which is a long, thin and rather beautiful town, sandwiched between two lakes. I taught engineers, management, secretarial staff. Sometimes I went out to the factories by bus and sometimes students travelled to the language school which was above a department store in the middle of town. There were a few other people - all ages and stages - doing evening classes for various reasons. When we weren't teaching, we clustered in the cafe downstairs, chatting, drinking coffee and eating rice porridge with milk, a fabulous creamy, sticky version of yoghurt called viili or piirakka munavoi, the cheap and cheerful Finnish equivalent to scrambled eggs on toast. Finns are friendly but - on the whole - quite shy and private people. Teaching conversa...