Authors Electric

My Dad and his sister, my favourite aunty Peg Last month Terry Pratchett departed for the black sandy desert ... He was greatly loved by his readers, as were the characters peopling the world he dreamed up to house them all. Want a copy? Hard to find these days, and it'll cost you ... Try HERE And his family will of course miss him greatly too ... which made me start thinking about my own Dad. When I was a kid he told me amazing bedtime stories which he'd made up. And of course, like all Dads, he knew about Everything. When I asked him why people on the underside of the Earth didn't fall off, his eyes lit up with excitement at finally being able to explain stuff like gravity to me. He started off by firstly explaining centrifugal force, demonstrating it by whirling a bucket full of water round his head. My Mum wasn't impressed because the place he chose to do this was the kitchen, but it enthralled me. Exciting though it was, unfortunately I still didn...

As a child, staring at an old atlas, Czechoslovakia was a country that somehow fascinated. The spelling of the country’s name, the pronunciation, the shape of it on the map. I was twenty-four by the time I saw the place for myself, arriving there three years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, so no visa necessary, the country was open now to European travellers. Prague. That’s where I first ran out of money for food, and had to eat on alternate days, lying on public benches to conserve calories, nose bleeding. Getting kicked awake in the mornings by railway station guards in pale green uniforms with wooden-handled revolvers in their waistbands. I’d first been introduced to the novels of Milan Kundera four years earlier, by a guy I met who had written a book on film while he had been unemployed for three years. Perhaps the connection between this person and Kundera was that Kundera had been a film lecturer at one point, or, more correctly, a lecturer on world litera...