Authors Electric

  cover by Claudia Myatt The Deben magazine is a modest publication. Just A5 size, 40 pages (unless it bursts its bounds to 44, potentially upsetting both the treasurer and the envelope stuffers), it appears twice a year and is supplied on subscription to members of the River Deben Association. I am its fortunate editor and sometimes like to think of it as the parish magazine of the river. Except that, unlike a parish mag, it doesn’t carry advertising and local event notices are posted by monthly email. So, almost all of those 40 pocket-sized pages are available for contributor articles and photos. As editor I find it endlessly fascinating to read about the different ways people relate to the river – whether they walk by it, sail on it, swim in it, paint it, observe the birds, beasts, plants, fish, creepy-crawlies that live in it. One of my favourite articles was when someone started identifying what might wriggle out when you pull up a mooring rope that hasn’t been used for ...

  last book Next month I publish the final volume in the Strong Winds series. It’s called Voyage North,  It’s number 7 and it’s been a long time coming.  At the end of Pebble , the sixth volume in the series, Donny the  central character took a reckless decision to leave school, abandon his beautiful junk Strong Winds , fail to say goodbye to his mother and head north with a couple of dodgy Russians on a superyacht. Well, that was back in 2018 and, as you can imagine, I’ve been worrying about him ever since.... Why worry? Why not get on and write the next story, you might reasonably ask. What use was lockdown except to get everyone  completing projects that had lain forgotten for decades? What could be more enjoyable than to stow away on the former Soviet spy ship MY (Motor Yacht) Raisa , now a luxury, automated, expedition vessel and discover what’s really going on between the morally suspect oligarch Arkady Ivanov and the carefully un-named Russian Presiden...

Looking down the River Deben towards Felixstowe Ferry It’s grey outside with the hiss of rain. Peter Duck rocks slightly. Why should she care if there are drips on my head, on the cabin table and, occasionally, the laptop? She’s had what she demanded, which was movement; release from the captivity of her mooring. She craved a voyage, however small. She insisted. A boat always on a mooring is like a songbird in a cage. At 0500 the surface of the water was a mirror for the sky above. Not a ruffle of wind. A slow throb of engine gave us steerage way as we moved down river in the early morning light. The ebb tide carried us through Methersgate, Waldringfield, Ramsholt, then continued without us to Felixstowe Ferry and the sea. We picked up the last of the Ramsholt moorings for peace, breakfast and time to think. The quiet was astounding. Apart from the river birds. Nothing silences them. A tern settled on top of the main mast, spreading its sickle wings and forked-fan tail, opening it...

In the latter part of this strange summer my son Bertie and I have been working on a history of Waldringfield. A k a ‘Wunnerf’l’ as the Suffolk pronunciation has it – which the locals are quick to point out is almost indistinguishable from the correct way to say ‘wonderful’. ‘Wunnerf’l Wunnerf’l’ runs to 314 large and glossy pages with somewhere in the region of 618 photographs and is a tremendous achievement by the Waldringfield History Group -- and also by Bertie who was responsible for design and typesetting. At the outset, however, I wondered where we would ever reach our collective goal of publication by Michaelmas (Sept 29th).  The two pages of foreword entitled 'Wonderful Waldringfield' went through a larger number of politely argued re-writes than any other section of the book. Everyone had their view on what precisely constitutes the particular wonderfulness of this Suffolk village. The answer, of course, is the Deben. 'The River Deben means many things to many p...