Authors Electric

  Christmas Day 2017. Joy to all women, children and men in this season of pantomimes and circuses. We seem to be living through a seven-ringed conflation of the two.  Ho, ho, ho ho.  Overseeing it all we have our very own grey Mother Goose and what a gigantic goose she is. Off she goes to church, the Vicar's daughter, in her Dolce and Gabbana shoes costing £600 while her government cheerfully cuts and delays benefits to the disabled and barely-managing across the land. Ho ho ho.   Behind her, the stage is filled with mugging, smirking, prat-falling clowns tumbling from Stage Right and, as ever, these clowns aren't remotely funny... But they are bigly sleazy, scary and sinister. You have to appreciate the sheer audacity of the humour. Shiny, smarmy 'Calm down, dear,' Clown Cameron completely misjudges his referendum, trips over it and falls smack on his face. But up he skips, to announce that he will see the negotiations with the EU throug...

Calling the emergency service, English style. Note the mobile and stand-by bicycle A year ago, I woke up in France to the appalling news that we (the people’s will!) had decided to quit the EU. This year, a few days ago now, I woke in France to the delightful news that May and all her little nuts had backed the wrong hearse (oops; horse), but again it was the people’s will. What is it about democracy? Few of us can understand it fully, but few of us can misunderstand it as spectacularly as them what makes their living by it. Rule one – don’t pretend it’s the people’s will, even if they endorse that which you want them to. Treeza can hardly deny her bloody nose was NOT the people’s will, can she? And anyway, she’s vicar’s daughter, and therefore has INTEGRITY (discuss). If she tells me she called a snap election to make Britain strong and stable, what can I do but believe her? What does she do next? Revive Govey – ‘the demented prune’ – and a ragbag of other halfwit...

I thought I had the subject of this month's blog all sewn up and ready to go but now it will have to wait until October, Today might be very significant in our lives and I think we need to share it with you. It's nothing to do with books or publishing but at the moment it has taken over our thoughts and feelings. So I'm sorry there are only two pictures today. I am too angry to look for any more. As many of you know, Kay and I have been together for seven years - in fact yesterday (Tuesday September 9th) we celebrated the seventh anniversary of the day we met. You may also know that Kay first arrived here from New Zealand in 2006 on an ancestry visa so as to enjoy two summers every year and use the money she earned as a live-in carer to finance European travel. She intended to spend six months a year in the UK and six in New Zealand. Some of you also know how we first met on the towpath of the Oxford Canal and after that events moved quite quickly. We have lived together ...

Authors Electric's Jan Needle ‘Bash a burglar’ is the latest cry from the men and women who run our country, which raises some interesting questions for a man who’s just finished writing a thriller about a   violent robbery at a country house. I can’t imagine that even Theresa May or Christopher Grayling would have encouraged my innocent victims to have fought back against three bloody madmen, but who can tell? Maybe I should go back and do a re-write. At the very least the body count would go up. Hamlet, anyone? It does raise some interesting moral questions, though. In the past I’ve been accused by one MP of insulting his constituents by suggesting a certain sort of murder was even possible in a certain part of Manchester, and generally of making violence seem ‘almost normal’. But Mr Grayling’s exhortation seems far more likely to make things worse than anything I can do. If you indicate that it’s all right to attack people with ‘unreasonable force’ for breaking into...