Authors Electric

    When I started my MA in creative writing, I was asked who I wanted to write like. I was immediately indignant – I didn’t want to write like anyone else, I wanted to write like me. Then the question was rephrased – if you wanted to write like a piece of music, what would you choose? There were a number of different responses from the rest of the group. Smoky basement jazz, a clarinet maybe, or a trombone or a saxophone. Someone else wanted a piece by Corelli, there was Ravel’s Bolero and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. I chose Danse Macabre, by Saint Saens, long before it was popularised by Jonathan Creek. This quickly established me as someone who went for something a bit different, due to the necessity to retune the E string on the violin to E flat, which gives the whole piece its unique flavour. So the lines I wish I’d written are always a bit off-beat, and I am still in awe of the lateral thinking that creates them.         ...

 Hedgehogs are part of British culture, and are so distinctive that they have figured in our literature for a long time. They are in serious decline in the UK these days, thanks to road kill and pesticides, so I was thrilled when I set up the camera trap to see if foxes were digging up our Jerusalem artichokes and discovered a hedgehog bustling past instead. The artichokes are fine, by the way, just a bit slow to emerge, and are now three foot tall. Since then we reckon we have spotted five different individuals, thanks to Brambles Crunchy Hedgehog Food , which is very popular, and makes their munching audible halfway down the garden when they arrive for their breakfast – 21.30 at the moment. Bread and milk, the traditional offering, is very bad for them, and cat biscuits make another acceptable and safe alternative. They are incredibly entertaining, as they have no compunction about shoving competitors for their lady friends out of the way, and have very noisy and lengthy wooing s...

  It’s highly probable that only older readers will remember the success of The Goon Show . In school, the day after the latest adventures of Harry Seagoon, Eccles, Bluebottle and the rest had been broadcast, we repeated them to one another, quoting the best bits (of which there were unfailingly many), doing the voices, and laughing all over again at the genius Spike Milligan’s imaginings. A quarter of a century later most of those same readers would probably have been part of the audience demographic for Monty Python’s Flying Circus , and joined by thousands of adherents less advanced in years. There were predecessors, of course, all bringing a world view that was mildly anarchic, certainly surreal, and whose principal aim was to entertain or, put more crudely, to provoke unreasoning, energising laughter. Then, later, when I’d fooled enough people enough of the time to get a job in a university, part of my good fortune was to give lectures and tutorials on, among other thing...

I’ve just visited the Chip Museum in Bruges. Sounds utterly ludicrous, doesn’t it? How can you have a whole museum devoted entirely to that very Belgian food item, the chip? But you can – and I think this is one of the secrets of humour, when you take something way beyond the obvious.           The Chip Museum starts off the way you’d expect, with the history of the potato and a delightful display with potatoes of every shape and size and colour suspended in mid-air. Then there’s the fascinating topic of freeze-drying, the invention of the chip (with crisps as a by-product) and the correct way to cook them; oils or fats? And just when you think the place must run out of steam, there is a whole host of chip-cutting machines. Every sort of fryer you’ve ever thought of, and more besides, and the dinky little stalls that have sold them through the ages with their candy-striped canopies or corrugated iron roofs. Lots of cartoons, with baby...