Authors Electric

'All this world is but a play...   Alan, an old friend from Liverpool who featured in a piece I wrote for AuthorsElectric in 2023, took this photograph at The Queen Elizabeth Hall in September this year. Yet when I asked more recent acquaintances, do you remember The Incredible String Band ?   I was met with blank looks, and I found that nobody did remember them much at all. I think that on reflection they were a musical phenomenon which happened in the late sixties, appearing as if from nowhere, making a few cherished albums, and then disappearing like shooting stars, their force all spent. Or was it? At the  Celebration of the Incredible String Band  last month, I met up with Alan at the performance and we sat together afterwards discussing the concert and old times. I then thought I would put together my own retrospective of what they meant to me at the time and in some respects still do today.    I’ll start with Alan’s comments about the 'Celebration' w...

Tigers have played a big part in literature, from the factual in Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon to the literary in The Life of Pi , And then there’s the children’s market – Tigger, in Winnie the Pooh and Hobbes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes . Tigers seem to be able to represent just about anything, from the Nazis in The Tiger who Came to Tea , to the dishonourable side of man – Shere Khan in The Jungle Books . And in some way they all retain their basic nature; Tigger exhibits tigerishness, but it is muted to the less threatening play of a kitten: Tigger said: “Excuse me, but there’s something climbing up your table,” and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully: “Have I won?”          ...