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 ...

In the UK we tend to be very preoccupied with the weather. Which may seem strange, when we are not a country of great extremes. A few snowflakes are a talking point, and rain is a disaster when a cricket match is in jeopardy. The old joke about what to do in a drought; a lot of men in white walk onto a field, the shaman tosses a coin, and it starts to rain. We did have a real heatwave last summer, but we weren’t prepared for it and few houses have air conditioning. It’s just not needed normally – open the window for a bit. Of course, you may well need the central heating on instead for a day or two in August. We get fog, but not that often, we get ice, but not that often either. Which is why it is such a shock when we travel abroad and find out how well they cope with such disasters as a couple of centimetres of snow, or a bit of wind. The public transport elsewhere always seems to function. If a bus is two minutes late in Tromsø , up in the Arctic, people look at their watches, shake ...