Authors Electric

There’s an old saying that if you see a flock of crows, they’re rooks, and if you see a solitary rook, it’s a crow. It has been claimed by those who know these things that it isn’t true but it’s true-ish, as many of the old tales are.   Black birds congregating in large numbers in trees are mostly rooks, and crows are more likely to be alone or in pairs.  I remember being fascinated by a book about raven behaviour when a carcass is discovered by scouting birds. They report back to their clan by distinctive cries and then there’s a hierarchy of who feeds first, regulated by patterns of calls. I was enjoying the book very much but it descended into a miseryfest by the writer. He was cold, it was hard to find roadkill, the water ran out, etc. etc... It reminded me of my bête noir, him off the tele who goes off on ‘adventures’ all over the world and then moans into the camera because he’s all covered in boils or he’s left his horse in a field in Mongolia and they’ve all d...

          Well it's nearly that time of year - yes, Valentine's day is almost upon us once again. Mostly it makes me cringe, but although part of me wants to exclaim "Pfffftttt!" and throw up my hands in disgust, I'm not totally without a heart. You may find it hard to believe but beneath this gruff exterior hides a true romantic: just not the slushy sort.              For this post I was going to pose the question "If you were a book, which one would it be?" but with Valentine's Day looming, it sounded too much like the sort of thing Cilla would ask contestants on Blind Date. Once that image was in my mind it was too horrible to pursue and I could feel my teeth beginning to grind.            Then I thought a bit more about it. One of the Valentine's Day rituals is of course the Special Meal, with the table cosily set for tw...

After twenty years in the US, my uncle finally returned to the country of his birth for a visit. He spent a lot of time grumbling: the cars were smaller and the roads narrower than he remembered them, the pubs more crowded, the beer warmer, and far from enjoying the traditional white Christmas which the weather had laid on, even the snow was apparently far colder than in days gone by! But worst of all for him was how much the places he so fondly remembered from his youth had changed and in some cases vanished entirely...  JLS Happily, you can revisit a book and it won't have changed at all. The problem is that while the book will be the same, you may not be ... I recently picked up my battered copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. As an angst-ridden teenager I thought this was just the coolest, the most profound book ever: as an adult, I found it ... well, let's not go there. No longer t...