Authors Electric

A coot scurried away across the basin, feet paddling furiously, a wary eye peering astern as I left the library building and paused at the edge of the dock, looking over its quiet space. I was naturally pleased to see the coot but was almost more interested in the colour of the water. Last time I was here Limehouse Basin was an unpleasant emerald green, algae visibly choking life beneath its surface. That word ‘e utrophication’ that I’ve relatively recently learned, sounds like suffocation, asphyxiation, atrophy, all in one killer blanket. There’s no beauty in water which looks like mown grass.  View from CA library It was worth upsetting the coot to stand still in the February drizzle when I'd finished work and welcome this (temporary?) improvement in the water colour. It’s still not blue or grey – or even caffe latte East Coast brown but it’s better than it was. (Feb 8th 2024)  Inside the Cruising Association library I'd been picking through the shelves like a godwit plun...

Heading from Yachting Monthly 'RNVR Journal' 1940-45 Since the publication of Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers of WW2 I’ve become more and more aware how little I know. I worked hard to research the book and can confidently say that I left out much more than I put in. That’s not hard when you’re researching from memoirs, lists, websites and histories. The source material fills several shelves; the book itself is a single volume. Even my bibliography had to be rigorously selective – only including the books I’d used directly in the finished product, not everything else I’d read along the way.  As it was, I got into trouble with the publishers for going over the contracted word count. I hadn’t fully realised how tightly managed their budgets must be and the extent to which rapidly rising paper costs could threaten the viability of a project. I felt rather sorry and amateur when I delivered 15k excess words – but I still fought like a pitbull for my Right to an Index....

On September 3 rd 2019 I had the perfect invitation – I was asked to talk about my father, George Jones’s book, The Cruise of Naromis , to members of the Little Ship Club in London. The Cruise of Naromis , you may remember, is the slim volume I was able to make from my father’s 1939 diary, a suitcase of somewhat random photographs and papers from his wartime RNVR service and the account he wrote of his trip to the Baltic in August 1939. He had returned home on Sept 2 nd to find that his call up papers had been waiting for a week. On September 3 rd 1939 therefore he was hurrying north to join the submarine depot ship HMS Forth at Rosyth. The Forth was a floating workshop, a hotel, an operational centre. She had a crew of over 1,100 men, displacement 8,999 tons and was armed with 16 AA guns. Quite a contrast with the trim little pleasure yacht he had just left .   HMS Forth  Both vessels had been launched during 1938 but whereas HMS Forth had been built by ...