Authors Electric

Tomorrow we meet in a pub, with no alcohol, to say goodbye to a friend. We first met Heidi when our children were at primary school together. It was a very small village school where I can remember being on first name terms with all the other parents. Some of us ran an after school club together. Heidi was part of this. She was musical, artistic, imaginative, affectionate, alternative. Sometimes her suggestions were a bit fey. Sometimes she didn’t turn up when we expected her. Heidi was a single mother with a single child, Oliver, who she loved dearly. He too was musical, artistic, affectionate, full of enthusiasms, never quite in the mainstream. Sometimes they were very late for school. Occasionally Heidi wasn’t there when it was time for the children to go home. Once or twice I went to Heidi’s house and couldn’t make her hear me. There was a day when she started to tell me how unhappy she was. People occasionally made remarks. I began to worry about her. I was also the school governo...

Chen Min was born in Fujian Province, China. He was an only child in a rural family. When he was very small his father left home to work in the city. So many other men had done the same that Min’s village was nicknamed the Village of Living Widows. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in China has been a period of huge internal migration -- the largest in human history -- as people flood from the country into towns to work in factories. Though the scale is different it’s hard not to be reminded of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century when internal migrations made this the first country on earth where more people lived in towns than in the country.  Like many c19th British migrants Min’s father suffered from poor working conditions, overcrowding and lack of healthcare. The traditional Chinese "Hukou" system means that people born in the countryside cannot expect education for their children or social welfare in the cities. They have no rights, they are a...

In memoriam HMS Bounty, Claudene Christian, Robin Walbridge, Dave Harris, Dick Cronin, Cassandra Jardine, Tom Carter, Richard Morris, Patricia Moran HMS Bounty, caught by Hurricane Sandy My family and the Mayan calender tell me that the world is going to end at this winter's solstice so perhaps it's time to say some farewells. The ship was HMS Bounty , built in Nova Scotia in 1960 for the film starring Marlon Brando. I wish I could describe the thrill it was in the summer of 2011 when I received a message from Doug Faunt, a deckhand on the Bounty , telling me that he was reading The Salt-Stained Book, volume one of the Strong Winds tri logy .  I met Doug later when he took some time away from the Bounty and visited Peter Duck . He was one of the first people to convince me that it was worth publishing the Strong Winds trilogy in electronic format so the stories would pack easily into a sailor's kitbag. Thank you for that advice, Doug. Doug and I kept i...

I spent two nights on board Peter Duck this weekend. It had been an unsatisfactory week, unproductive, full of petty stresses. I’m in the marketing stage for Ghosting Home , (concluding volume of the Strong Winds trilogy) and scrabbling for the time to make final cuts and corrections to Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory, another long term project which is scheduled for publication in September. (September? I must be mad!). There’s the ever-present buzz of family life, more insistent some weeks than others – GCSEs for Archie, booking university open days for Bertie, a birthday for Frank, a birthday for the twins, a sharp dip down the confusional roller-coaster for Mum, builders making a start on Francis’s new shed, a close friend rushed into hospital, visits, extra school runs needed – you know the sort of thing. It goes on …   What a joy to close the computer, hug the littlest ones, reassure the oldest one, turn off the mobile phone and row down the river with the ebb. It ...