Authors Electric

  The Companionship of Books: About Poetry* This chapter is all about poetry+. It begins with my stay in Broad Green Hospital when I was sixteen for an operation on a torn cartilage. I had been attempting a descent from the wall bars during a school gym lesson and had landed awkwardly, so awkwardly in fact that every time I tried to run for the morning bus my knee would lock into a fixed position and necessitate a system of contortions on the ground in order to free it. Mr Almond, who saw me in Rodney Street, just around the corner from The Liverpool Institute, took one examination and immediately booked me into Broad Green for the operation.   I arrived there to find myself in a ward full of men with their legs either covered in bandages or underneath raised frames, which allowed their legs to rest underneath, without the pressure of the bedclothes. On the ward I met Alan who was a trainee teacher. We were in adjacent beds and he talked to me about novels and poetry, particul...

60 Years Ago Today   Memory is notoriously selective. In 1963 in the UK it was the coldest winter anyone could remember and my father had died the previous year. Talking this over with my brother recently, he remembers fondly how we made a fabulous slide from frozen snow in the side passage of our house - and of course1963 was also the year that The Beatles released  Please, Please Me  and began to take over the musical world. As Annie Ernaux says in her memoir, The Years (2017) – ‘Just listening to them you wanted to be happy’.   The Beatles: I have this idea about the circular nature of time and how we are able to revisit ourselves as we get older. This happened again when I caught sight of an article in my Sunday paper, ‘Why lost Beatles school gig tape could be saved for the nation’. It was an article about how The Beatles had played a gig at Stowe School in April 1963 and it featured the story of how 15 year old John Bloomfield had made a tape recording of the s...

 A Meeting with Macca * Hope Street: Paul McCartney '...supplied a real guitar case to be cast by the sculptor. McCartney attended the Liverpool Institute when it was a boys' school. So did George Harrison...'   A long time ago, maybe before some of you were born, I had two American pen-friends obtained through a popular music station named Radio Caroline: the first, Jo, was a leggy fifteen-year-old from New York who liked Bob Dylan and Ayn Rand, although not necessarily in that order; the second, Sandra, was a girl-next-door type from West Virginia who early in our correspondence sent me an intricately arranged wreath of chewing gum wrappers.  As my tale is more concerned with Sandra, we will leave any questions about Jo's liking for  The Fountainhead  to one side for the moment.   Anyway, the story is not really about my pen-friends but about Paul McCartney and how when I was fifteen I met him. I had just completed my paper round and, having grunted...