Authors Electric

  I should have come by boat, of course. The one-way street leading down to the river at Hamble-le-Rice, near Southampton, is as narrow and steep as anyone might expect, who knows the ways of riverside villages. I thought of Pin Mill, I thought of Wivenhoe and Maldon. You can probably think of many more. Then, like all the other riverside towns and villages which you might have in your mind’s eye, I was suddenly there, by the water. The public hard stretched in front of me, a yacht club to the left and an utterly lovely 1960s ocean racing yacht doing an utterly incredible 21 st century 180º pivot in her own length to reverse smoothly into her pontoon slot, just as the sun went over the yardarm. The Yacht Club at the end of the High Street by Janet Bradley I’d come to Hamble to have lunch with Vuyisile Jaca, who was part of the winning Maiden team in the recent Ocean Globe Race – and also the first Black African woman ever to race around the world. I wanted to say goodbye before s...

Looking for Literature, an Autofictional Adventure*  I had come to Hay-on-Wye at the suggestion of a friend. You could say, I suppose that I was looking for love as well as literature, although the two things in my mind were very close together. It was the Whit half-term, and I was eager to fill the space imposed on me by the five-day holiday. For busy parents it was always too full, but for me, who normally had charge of their offspring, it was often empty.   The Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival at the time had been going for about a year and was still very much a work in progress. It had been organised at a number of venues in the centre of a town which was famous for its many second-hand bookshops. The most well-known of these was that of Richard Booth, the King of Hay, and some of the booksellers there were not always too keen on the influx of literary tourists, me being one. I had, however, managed to get a single room in a wonderful hotel called The Seven Stars in the centr...