Authors Electric

The NHS belongs to the people.   It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives. It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health. It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.”   Try reading this passage aloud. To my ears the  rhythm  and the  phrasing  achieve an almost prayerful quality:   to stay as well as we can to the ends of our lives . This is the introduction to the most recent revision of the NHS Constitution and, while I’m not advocating the NHS designed-to-be-read-as-literature I’d be glad if you left this blog and went there now. I think we need to remind ourselves of the beauty of the concept.  https://www.gov.uk/government...

It's a biliously grey November day, rain falling softly all morning (tolerable) and then working itself up to an undramatically dreary all-afternoon downpour - yellowish-grey sky with no hope on the horizon. It was during weather like this that I began work, many years ago, on TO SUMMON A SPIRIT - wading past soggy leaves drained of their Autumn colours, and watching the kids from the nearby secondary school waiting, in a damp and morose huddle, outside the newsagent's shop to buy their after-school treats ( only one customer at a time please... ) As in Pauline Fisk's recent fascinating blog on AuthorsElectric about her Young Adult novel 'TELLING THE SEA', weather and the landscape are great incubators of stories. Pauline's comments on re-publishing her previously published and well-reviewed novel were interesting, too, because we writers never really let go of our work - we're always polishing and improving, even after we're 'out there', which...