Authors Electric

I don’t usually talk about work in progress. The ideas that make stories are such delicate gifts, potentially so fleeting. They must be nurtured in secret and over time. I don’t usually talk about relationships either, not the ones that matter. So how stupid have I been, I wonder, to publish insights from my mother’s recent life – and mine – when our stories are still a work in progress and what is true today may be fool's gold by tomorrow? Relationships change as people change -- well, we all know that -- but there's something about a close relationship with someone who is living with dementia that feels quite frighteningly unstable. You discover how the faculty of memory ballasts the most everyday interactions. You both know, you assume , that the reason you’re both rather achy and therefore grumpy is that you’ve just returned from walking too long in the sun. But, if the fact of the walk has vanished from one mind, only the grumpiness remains and that can be disconce...

"The younger generation found themselves enriched in knowledge not only about old age but about themselves. They were able to look back with happiness and humour to an important part in their own evolution and found it good." Introduction to The Relay by Margery Allingham I’m picking up Margery Allingham’s The Relay at a time of need. There's Mum, there's John's Campaign. There's the shortfall of hours in every day. My deteriorating eyesight frightens me.I'm fed up with time spent bashing up and down the A12. I want to be with Francis, with my children and my grandchildren, who are growing up much-loved but scarcely seen. Peter Duck  will soon be seventy. I yearn to go sailing. Above all, I want to write -- elusive, unnecessary, adventure stories, not letters to Mum’s doctor or Quality Standards for the CQC.  I know this won’t last for ever. “It’s only a phase” – as people say about toddlers and teenagers. But as toddlers and teenagers will un...

Goldenray Here I am writing my blog on board  Goldenray,  again. This wasn’t my plan. I'm spending the day with my mother and I’d had it in mind to settle her on her sofa after lunch and hope she’d doze off whilst I  made a start on this month's AE post.  Almost as soon as I'd arrived I realised this wasn't going  to work.  Mum was stomping around worrying about her youngest grand-daughter: “How can they be teaching Our Baby two languages? I've only just been told. It's an awful thing to do.”  "Our Baby" -- alias my youngest niece Louisa-- is one year old and growing up bi-lingual.   She isn’t being taught two languages: she is  learning  them. It’s a joy to hear her mother talking intimately and privately to her in the fondest German while Louisa is simultaneously absorbing English from the world around her.  Mum loves Louisa and  communicates effortlessly through songs and funny faces and strange gruff...