Authors Electric

There’s an old saying that if you see a flock of crows, they’re rooks, and if you see a solitary rook, it’s a crow. It has been claimed by those who know these things that it isn’t true but it’s true-ish, as many of the old tales are.   Black birds congregating in large numbers in trees are mostly rooks, and crows are more likely to be alone or in pairs.  I remember being fascinated by a book about raven behaviour when a carcass is discovered by scouting birds. They report back to their clan by distinctive cries and then there’s a hierarchy of who feeds first, regulated by patterns of calls. I was enjoying the book very much but it descended into a miseryfest by the writer. He was cold, it was hard to find roadkill, the water ran out, etc. etc... It reminded me of my bête noir, him off the tele who goes off on ‘adventures’ all over the world and then moans into the camera because he’s all covered in boils or he’s left his horse in a field in Mongolia and they’ve all d...

The power of words, eh? I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, partly because of Jo Bell’s ’52 poems’ challenge (I promise to stop banging on about it in about six months). There’s been a lot of struggling to find the most precise and satisfying way to express my response to each challenge – first things, weather, a celebration, a letter, a famous person, and so on. I was moderately happy as I wrote each one, but looking back over them has put a big dent in that. I am managing to say what I want to, but it doesn’t come near the poetry I admire. If poets are born and not made, I’m genetically deficient, but as I’m pig-headed (unofficial motto of Sussex: I wunt be druv) and I also believe that working at something can (sometimes) overcome such deficiency, I plough on. My ‘famous person’ is Nelson Mandela and I’m writing about ballroom dancing on Robben Island, which is an image I’ve always found inspirational. It’s coming slowly! Another recent effort, ‘a letter’   was to Al...

           We had to get home from school pretty quickly in the early 1970s, to catch The Magic Roundabout on TV.           I remember one day I must have lagged behind, because I ended up seated in a little cottage at the edge of the village, amongst the family of my fellow seven-year-old classmate, Suzanne, staring at the small, rectangular black-and-white screen as the Magic Roundabout theme music started and the Merry-Go-Round began to spin…           I should have known I would never be a Dougal, battering my way forward, zooming as if on mad wheels, always in a rush…           I wasn’t going to be an Ermintrude either, a daisy stuck in my teeth, not really minding what happened…           A Zebedee, me, bouncing maniacally Heavenward on a shiny sprin...