Authors Electric

Recently I tackled the task of My very first tin of buttons rediscovering the floor of the garage (ours is like many - full of 'stuff' that can't be thrown away). During the process I opened a storage box. Laying on the top were two tins (one full of buttons - see right) I'd been given these by my Uncle Albert. You see he'd been given two tins of shortbread biscuits, which he doesn't like. So, he re-gifted to me - I was more than happy with that. Once I'd consumed the contents of both I remembered my nan had had a button tin. I loved to play with the buttons it contained and this in turn brought back loads of fond childhood memories. So I decided it was about time I had my own tin of buttons. So over the next few months, whenever I found a stray button I put it into the tin. I knew I should really be cleaning up the garage but I couldn't help myself, I had to open the tin. When I did memories came flooding back. For example: The zebra button...

Long ago (it must be 25 years – help!), when I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors gave me a piece of advice I will never forget. Not because it was full of timeless wisdom (it may have been, but if so it passed me by) but because I didn’t understand it and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. She advised me to ‘Rewrite Chapter 3 from the inside out’. As though writing Chapter 3 hadn’t been difficult enough, in the conventional ‘start-at-the-beginning-define-your-terms-adduce-your-evidence-express-your-arguments-draw-your-conclusions’ kind of way. But no, apparently that wasn’t good enough, and my much-sweated-over chapter now had to be turned inside out like a grimy t-shirt having to be worn a second day because you lost your luggage. Partly, I feared that the turning inside out would expose all the messy loose ends I hadn’t tied off quite as neatly as I should have. Perhaps that was the idea? Or maybe my supervisor simply thought my chapter needed some restructuring and ...