Authors Electric

  An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad . Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down. Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I mus...

Ben Tucker's Snow Petrel Three years ago, almost to the day, I opened my AE blogpost as if I was in Antarctica :  So, here I am in Boat Harbour, Cape Denison with five shore lines attached and the anchor down with 60 metres of chain.  It’s the windiest place on earth but today, miraculously, the sun is out and the water calm. I’m being observed by crowds of Adelie penguins while dark brown Weddell seals lie like slugs on the stained ice.  It’s taken two months to get here – six weeks of frantic, relationship-testing preparation and then two weeks sailing south through the most feared waters in the world. Some readers took me at my word – and, to some extent, they were right, I was in Antarctica, but only in my imagination. My mind and body were elsewhere. Paragraph two began:  Goldenray 2015 It is dark and damp in Suffolk and I should be conserving my torch batteries. It’s four in the morning and I can hear the tide running through the gap in t...

(I did realise there was a US Presidential election happening as I wrote this but found nothing that I wanted to say. Perhaps, this morning, all I can do is re-direct everyone to Jan Needle's recent post The Rise of Ronald T Rump  then go back to seeking solace from the trees. It's not enough of course.) "Even oldies can still have this" It’s November and the clocks have gone back and the nights are closing in and we’re heading into the dark time of the year. Every evening at five o clock Mum’s confusion intensifies and her mood plummets. You might think it couldn’t get much worse when most mornings she wakes lost and bewildered, resentful that she’s still alive. But it does: in the mornings I can find things to do (if she can summon the energy to do them) --  a walk or a poem or a song.  By early evening the last of her brain is tired and, when the light from the outside world is gone, even crooning a hymn often becomes too hard. Then she has no idea where she...

Goldenray Here I am writing my blog on board  Goldenray,  again. This wasn’t my plan. I'm spending the day with my mother and I’d had it in mind to settle her on her sofa after lunch and hope she’d doze off whilst I  made a start on this month's AE post.  Almost as soon as I'd arrived I realised this wasn't going  to work.  Mum was stomping around worrying about her youngest grand-daughter: “How can they be teaching Our Baby two languages? I've only just been told. It's an awful thing to do.”  "Our Baby" -- alias my youngest niece Louisa-- is one year old and growing up bi-lingual.   She isn’t being taught two languages: she is  learning  them. It’s a joy to hear her mother talking intimately and privately to her in the fondest German while Louisa is simultaneously absorbing English from the world around her.  Mum loves Louisa and  communicates effortlessly through songs and funny faces and strange gruff...