Authors Electric

  'Sula' in Scotland ‘There’s little point keeping old boats alive if their stories are forgotten,’ said Robert Armstrong, when I apologised for my eagerness in inviting myself to visit him. Robert is a boatbuilder working on the west coast of Scotland. His home is Sula , a 24’ 5-ton Bermudan sloop, built in 1939 by David Hillyard in Littlehampton, Sussex (as Mistrale ). She’s his home, his mobile workshop and his transport.  When I invited Francis and I to visit them, Robert was immediately welcoming though he couldn’t be specific as to where they might be: ‘Everything I do is weather and tide dependant so planning beyond a few days never works out for me […] but wherever Sula is moored you're welcome.’ For me, Sula is Barnacle Goose, ‘Barney’, the yacht my parents owned 1951-1957, in the first years of their marriage.   They’d bought her in Rye, fitted her out in a mud berth, then sailed her home to the River Deben in Suffolk. My father was building up his business ...

  Peter Duck in winter acrylic on board by Anna Mortimer There’s a phrase I like in the C of E communion service when we give thanks for bread ‘which earth has given and human hands have made’.  It’s one of the many phrases that can’t be taken literally. What one actually gets, in most churches, is a tasteless white wafer made of wheat flour and water, then stamped out by machine and packaged hygienically. Minimal intervention by human hands, it would seem (though I’ve now watched a couple of You Tube videos which show labouring nuns, smiling and thinking holy thoughts as they work some basic machinery.) The usual communion wafer is nothing like real, crumbly, hand-made bread. Even if one never makes it oneself (I don’t) homemade bread seems to retain some tactile evidence of fingers mixing; palms and wrists and upper arms kneading; a baker’s bodyweight leaning into the dough, lifting and turning and rolling. No doubt it’s tiring work for people who have to make it all the tim...

  I watched Peter Duck being lowered those final few inches back into the Deben. I heard her sigh with relief as she settled into the water where she belongs. Her own weight, which had been supported by four rigid cradle struts  through the eighteen months she’d spent ashore, was now dispersed across her underwater surface, the river pushing her up as gravity and the weight of her own superstructure pulled her down.  Aaaah… It was like sinking into a sofa at the end of a long day, kicking off tight shoes and letting the shoulders slump. Aaaah… As the thick webbing slings from the crane were loosened, it was like undoing the top button of a too-tight waist band. Aaaah… as I stood deliberately alone on the pontoon, watching that final return to her element, I sighed too. A piece of my soul was back where it belonged. Soul is a difficult word to use here. I experimented with ‘being’, ‘pysche’ and ‘self’ but none of them quite worked. It’s difficult, anyway, to analyse how...

This is a tale of two Matts. Nicci Gerrard and I met the first Matt -- Matt Gaw -- in the authors' room at Felixstowe Book Festival. He was talking about rivers: we were focused on dementia. The two things could have mixed -- I'll never forget the deep comfort that the Deben gave my mother in her most desperate moments, and how she continued to yearn for the river even when I'd taken her far inland. But our session and Matt's were scheduled to be separate so I contented myself with buying his book. Let me commend it to you. The Pull of the River , is an account of two friends in a home-built canoe, setting out to explore the upper (usually non-tidal) reaches of a dozen UK rivers. Their adventures are of a manageable sort -- though drowning is always an option. It's within the fine-writing, psychogeography genre that (for my taste) can too easily capsize into pretentiousness. It doesn't. Matt Gaw is interested in his own capacities (he gets cold and scared, n...