Authors Electric

  I watched Peter Duck being lowered those final few inches back into the Deben. I heard her sigh with relief as she settled into the water where she belongs. Her own weight, which had been supported by four rigid cradle struts  through the eighteen months she’d spent ashore, was now dispersed across her underwater surface, the river pushing her up as gravity and the weight of her own superstructure pulled her down.  Aaaah… It was like sinking into a sofa at the end of a long day, kicking off tight shoes and letting the shoulders slump. Aaaah… As the thick webbing slings from the crane were loosened, it was like undoing the top button of a too-tight waist band. Aaaah… as I stood deliberately alone on the pontoon, watching that final return to her element, I sighed too. A piece of my soul was back where it belonged. Soul is a difficult word to use here. I experimented with ‘being’, ‘pysche’ and ‘self’ but none of them quite worked. It’s difficult, anyway, to analyse how...

More than a decade ago in The Salt-Stained Book   (2011)  D onny, the hero, was by the shores of Gitchee Gumee (okay, fact checkers, it was Alton Water, a reservoir near Ipswich in Suffolk) when he felt the tang of the North Wind. It was a life-changing moment, the extent of which he has yet to experience fully. That’s a thought-in-progress. More recently I’ve been reading Paul Heiney’s Goodbye Mr Puffin which includes a wonderful page of praise for that same ‘tang’. ‘ I love anything with the word ‘north’ in it. I adore the air that blows in northern parts for its freshness and its tang. I can sup on it as if it were a glass of the finest claret. The true north wind is the tastiest of all and best when it is close to frigid.’ Heiney writes of the ‘spirituality to be found by heading in the direction of north.’   Is this something that Donny will experience? I’m not sure. In 2018, at the end of Pebble , I left him on a Russian superyacht (she was originally an Arctic s...