Authors Electric

I thought of calling this blog ‘Unusual sexual encounters’ to try to attract a few more punters, but on reflection…  It’s really about trying to capture a time in a particular place/ landscape. The idea was triggered by a recent challenge from the Hedgehog Press. They send out one a month and I usually manage a response, although I’ve never even been shortlisted for publication. Heigh ho. It just helps to have a nudge to my post-covid brain. I’ve written before about being inspired by landscapes, but the challenge gave me a different perspective – not so much inspiration as need to capture something   of the essence of that place, that time. Something to look back on, to invoke the same feelings as were felt then. If I had an ounce of artistic talent, I might have made a sketch – livelier and more personal than a photograph and from my own hand, but I have only words. The image from the Hedgehog Press’s challenge is of a dreary, grubby corridor reminiscent of a disused psych...

When I was a grotty teenager, we moved from our council house to a dilapidated cottage in a couple of acres of its own grounds, on the edge of Ashdown Forest. It was in a hollow, down a quarter-of-a-mile of unmade road across a golf course (on Common Land, but whoever managed to swing it to put a golf course on it is lost in the mists of time). It had typical Sussex tile hanging on the outside, and oak panelling in the downstairs rooms, which we thought incredibly grand, although it was just thin ply. It had no electricity or gas, an outside lav and only two bedrooms, so until Dad built an extension, Mum and I had one room and Dad and my brothers the other – christened the Hennery and the Mennery. Much later, I set a series of stories for children in an imagined version of the place, weaving Sussex legends and folklore into them. They were called The Hob and Miss Minkin, the Hob being a household spirit who lived under the hearthstone and was invisible to the family. Such spirits wer...