Authors Electric

I’m home from my travels. So surely I should be returning to the blank screen with renewed vigour, shouldn’t I?  Why doesn’t it work like that? I’ve a big project I want to get my teeth into. I should be refreshed by five weeks up mountains. I should be rising from my bed at sparrowfart and tapping away at the computer as the cocks crow. Oh the best-laid plans. And I’ve been away often enough to know it never works like that. The reality of a long journey, heaps of washing, and an empty fridge means that ordinary self-care must come first. Ah, self-care. I had plenty of time to reflect on that while I was away. I had an apartment in Pokhara, with a sunny balcony and view across rooftops to the hills and mountains. From there I could watch as the women of Nepal worked to meet the basic needs of their families.  Unpicked, that can be reduced to: keeping warm, keeping clean, and keeping well-fed. None of which is too difficult for those of us in the UK with enoug...

When writing is difficult - and I don’t mean those days when we stare at a screen or open our notebooks and there we are, a couple of hours later, with nothing but a few deleted sentences to show for it. We all have days like that - and some of us deal with them better than others. Hey ho, that’s just how it is. Nor am I talking about days when we are so overwhelmed by Life that we need all our creative and emotional energies just to keep the show on the road. We all have those days too - they come and they go again. No, I mean when there are huge physical impediments to writing.  When I arrived in Kathmandu, last week, it was seriously cold - not freezing, but cold enough for poor people without warm clothes or blankets to die. I’ve been here several times, and - though I knew in theory that Kathmandu could get chilly at night in the winter, I’ve not known cold like that here except in the mountains. So I huddled myself in the thermal clothes I’d worn to leave the UK ...

I don't often use this post for blatant marketing. My hope is to entertain, or make you think - if only for a moment. If anyone is inspired to follow the links and buy a book, well that's a bonus. So please bear with me, just this once. You'll see why. You can't have missed the news about recent earthquakes. This time last year is was Nepal. Recently there have been two huge quakes in Japan, followed by a third in Ecuador. Each time there are pictures of collapsed buildings, exhausted men and women digging in the rubble in the hope of pulling one person out alive. Anyone who survives under the stones and the dust for longer than a day or so is celebrated. Do we, from the comfort of our sofas, grow immune to such disasters? Do we see so many that we forget that these are people just like us, with children and dreams. People who work and play and squabble over what to watch on the telly. People who want nothing more than family around them, food to eat - and a r...

As many of you know, I've been to Nepal. It was evident, within a few hours of my arrival, that many tourists have deserted Nepal. Talking with friends there, it seems that cancellations began the day after the earthquake. One big quake, it seems, is enough for most people to believe the country is shaken to the core - and will carry on shaking. While a few backpackers are making their way back, the big tour groups are still staying away. Without tourists - and their foreign money - Nepal cannot earn the income she needs to rebuild. 'It's the journalists' fault,' Ajay told me. 'They were here for two days, took plenty of pictures of the earthquake damage, and then left us to it. No one has come back, seen how things are now.' He's right - anyone who saw those images might think that the whole of Kathmandu was flattened. I took this picture from his balcony, looking over the rooftops of the city: Does this look flattened? Disasters make goo...

What's house-building got to do with writing? Not a lot - at least not right now. I've other things on my mind. For I've just come back from Nepal and witnessed first hand some of the devastation of the earthquake. Too many families have spent the monsoon huddled under tin roofs. Too many schools are still in tents. The big charities are very active in the cities - the temporary shelters are fairly well organised in Kathmandu. But in the villages - often only reachable along narrow tracks - the story is very different. I met a family who were living in the ground floor of their home - the first floor had collapsed but they daren't move the rubble in case it all fell down. Others had homes which were cracked from top to bottom and faced months in tarpaulin shelters. It is easy to retreat into helplessness in the face of such need. We can't rebuild a city. We can't rebuild a town. Even a village is beyond us. But one house - we can rebuild one house. This ...

As you read this, I'm sitting by a lake in Nepal. Water laps gently against stones on the shoreline. Boats chug across to a temple on a tiny island about three hundred metres away. Behind me, the Himalaya are reaching for the sky. But this is not, for me, a 'normal travel-writing trip'. (Though I'm not sure I know what that is.) Instead I have responded to invitations from friends who live here, who have survived the earthquake and are putting their lived back together again, and who have asked for help to boost their tourist industry. I understand the need. The Nepali are independent people and capable of rebuilding their homes and schools and hospitals and temples without the great and the good of the developed world telling them what to do. But they need money - and tourism, which was buried beneath the rubble for a while, is their most obvious, and immediate, source of income. And yet, it seems, many are staying away. I know it's monsoon season, and so num...