Authors Electric

  It’s been a funny month. I’ve been a bit of a party animal (by my standards, anyway) which on the surface should mean less time to write. I’ve also been spending more time on the garden this year, as since moving last year I now have a huge amount of space for flowers and vegetables, as well as a large expanse of lawn to keep tidy. Yet it hasn’t worked out like that. The physical time to write has shrunk, that’s for sure. But I’ve found I’ve been using what time I do have much more productively. All those hours in the garden weeding and mowing and watering and nurturing the plants (and the rhubarb, started from seed last year, is now almost four feet tall and there’s some ready to harvest already) gives one time to think, and sub-consciously, that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s the only way I can explain it – every night when I sit down to write, the words have flowed, minimum of 500 but often edging close to (or even over) the 1k mark. In a maximum of two hours. And ...

Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't like Autumn? There are those who puff and pant their way through summer complaining about the heat, or who like me dread the dreariness of winter with its cold feet and chilblains - ugh! And however lovely spring can be, how many days of it do we usually get between the blizzard and the heat-wave? On our wedding day in Scotland it actually snowed -  and that was in April. But autumn! I feel a collective sigh of appreciation going round. Even for those without a personal orchard, mellow fruitfulness can be found in abundance in the hedgerows: - sloes, damsons and blackberries. Scavenging - we love it! Then there's that feeling of pleasant wistfulness that goes with misty mornings and low sun through the trees as one year dwindles into another.  Kick those leaves and light those fires. Autumn perpares us for what is to come - soon I might be ready for hygge after all. All these meanderings were brought on by our trip on Satu...

Here’s a nice bit of irony.  What do the following have in common? "Bluebells" in "Beech" woods Ash No more "larking" around Bluebell Fern Hazel Heather Ivy Lark Willow If you’ve been following the row over the  Oxford Junior Dictionary  that’s been rumbling on since 2007, and now just blown up again, you’ll assume the answer is that these are some of the dozens of ‘nature’ words omitted from the dictionary, on the grounds that they are no longer relevant to children’s lives.  And you’d be right.  Together with  beech, heron, kingfisher, buttercup, conker, mistletoe,   nectar, newt, otter , and a number of other words brimming with bright colours, textures and the sheer, quivering life of the natural world, they’ve had to be junked to make way for the dreariness of  blog, broadband, bullet point, chatroom  and  voicemail . If you can come up with anything else that so encapsulates how stuffy...