Authors Electric

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

  My Dad used to say to me that if I was in a room on my own, I would argue with my finger-ends. He said, "If somebody says 'Up,' you say, 'Down. If somebody says 'Straight', you say, 'Crooked'. You can't help yourself."  Later, my partner would get quite exasperated at finding himself suddenly having to defend an opinion he'd assumed I shared-- and which I often did. But no matter. He'd rashly put the opinion into words -- 'Singer Sargent was a great artist' -- 'The M6 is a busy motorway' -- 'The Sun comes up in the morning.' I would immediately contest it. "Why have you always got to argue about everything?" I have to admit that I have often listened to people making a point that I absolutely agree with-- or did, up until then-- while in the back of my head, forming an argument against it. I then often argue myself round to my original viewpoint, although not always. But I think I know when and why th...

As we reach mid-Winter darkness, and the feast of the Unconquered Sun, a blog full of old pagan gods, death and resurrection... Green Man boss below crossing at Rochester Cathedral.( Akoliasnikoff ) There were three men came out of the West, Their fortune for to try, And they have taken a solemn oath, John Barleycorn must die. They've ploughed, they've sown, they've harrowed him in, Thrown clods upon his head, And these three men took a solemn vow, John Barleycorn was dead. They've let him lie for a very long time Till the rains from heaven did fall, Then little Sir John sprung up his head And sore amazed them all. They've let him stand till midsummer's day Till he looked both pale and wan, Then little Sir John's grown a long, long beard And so become a man. They've hired men with the scythes so sharp To cut him off at the knee They've rolled him and tied him by the waist, Served him most barbarously... They've hired men with the crab-tree sticks...

I would be very surprised if anybody who writes or reads these blogs would consider that what children under eleven are in future expected to know about language is anything but a disastrous misunderstanding of the true nature of both language and learning. Let's take at random one of the fantastic assertions the onlie begetters of the futile new tests peddle as stone tablets. What are the situations in which you can use the the humble exclamation mark? It would appear that children need to know that one of the very few places in which it can be used without fuelling the experts' anger is when the sentence begins with 'How' or 'What' . Actually, as the last sentence but one above begins with 'What', there's a good case to make that I should have used one instead of a question mark. On reading the paragraph over, it occurs to me that I've said something serially stupid.  'What? Can he be serious about that?'   I hear you cry? S...