Authors Electric

  An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad . Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down. Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I mus...

Snow Petrel reaches the Antarctic So, here I am in Boat Harbour, Cape Denison with five shore lines attached and the anchor down with 60 metres of chain. It’s the windiest place on earth but today, miraculously, the sun is out and the water calm. I’m being observed by crowds of Adelie penguins while dark brown Weddell seals lie like slugs on the stained ice. It’s taken two months to get here – six weeks of frantic, relationship-testing preparation and then two weeks sailing south through the most feared waters in the world. Three thousand kilometres through the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties. We’ve survived a knockdown, felt our way through the pack ice as if crossing a minefield and now we’re here and the sky is a hard, bright blue and my two boys are out in the dinghy as if this is a childhood picnic spot. We have reached Antarctica. It is dark and damp in Suffolk and I should be conserving my torch batteries. It’s four in the morning and I ca...

'And closing her eyes she saw the Wren , filled with children, going down the river before dark. “Ghosts,” she thought. Putting her hand in her pocket she felt the sharp blade of her penknife. That was real enough. She smiled to herself and went into the house.' (from The Bellamy Bird by Clare Havens) You know how you think you've had such an exciting idea – and then everyone else has had it too? Over the last few weeks I've read four novels by authors living in Tasmania, West Yorkshire, Australia, and South West France. All of us share the lowest common denominator that we've been inspired by Arthur Ransome's 'Swallows and Amazons' series to write versions of our own. The novels are: Those Snake Island Kids by Jon Tucker, Brambleholme Summer by Duncan Hall, The Bellamy Bird by Clare Havens, The Boat in the Bay by Alan Kennedy and my own, The Salt-Stained Book .  This isn't intended as a collective review of the four novels – we have...