Authors Electric

                                                                                                                  Sefton Park, Liverpool 1970 Looking Forward, Looking Back   As you may know I am a frequent Twitter user and now that it has changed to X, despite some misgivings, I have continued to interact the with the site. So it was that during December I became the follower of another Twitter user, Beci, who had posted there a recording of a poem by Charles Lamb, poet and essayist, who had lived from 1775-1834. I knew very little about Lamb apart from the fact that he had written  Tales from Shakespeare together with his sister, a book designed to make the plays more accessible to children - I h...

The author's eyewear collection. Congratulations on your membership in the exclusive worldwide club of those who are blessed to wear glasses.  Worldwide, the club's membership has over four billion people.  In the UK alone, 77% of women and 68% of men wear specs. In t he US those percentages are 50% and 42%. The club has a long history. Far longer than many might think. Some credit Salvino D'Armate with the invention of eyewear in 1317. Others find references to eyewear as far back as 1000 BC. The evolution continued for hundreds more years for reasons of function, not fashion: Ben Franklin's bifocals...monocles...pince-nez. But all iterations of 'glasses' expressed their own bifocal vision: those who wore them were weak physically and bookish. ( A recent study by the College of Optometrists confirms that today 33% of adults think those in glasses look more professional and 43% think they look smarter.) And no survey was needed to tell that a boy growing up in t...

          Happy December, folks. As I told my partner in the early hours of last New Years Day when we were driving home from a gig, it'll be Christmas again before you know it - and I was right! And doesn't it seem to come around fast these days? Or is that because I'm getting older? Anyway, for people my age, who were hanging around music stores in their teens, one Christmas Album will surely stick in their minds above all others. Commonly know as The Phil Spector Christmas Album - the actual title is - "A Christmas Gift For You." Now I know Phil's reputation is not squeaky clean, rumours of gun-toting in the recording studio with The Ramones and John Lennon are rife, although Yoko Ono says they are untrue. He's now serving life in prison for murder. However this doesn't detract from the fact that he was one hell of a record producer. Probably the best there was at that time and still hard to beat nowadays. No one has come up with a...