Authors Electric

In the UK we tend to be very preoccupied with the weather. Which may seem strange, when we are not a country of great extremes. A few snowflakes are a talking point, and rain is a disaster when a cricket match is in jeopardy. The old joke about what to do in a drought; a lot of men in white walk onto a field, the shaman tosses a coin, and it starts to rain. We did have a real heatwave last summer, but we weren’t prepared for it and few houses have air conditioning. It’s just not needed normally – open the window for a bit. Of course, you may well need the central heating on instead for a day or two in August. We get fog, but not that often, we get ice, but not that often either. Which is why it is such a shock when we travel abroad and find out how well they cope with such disasters as a couple of centimetres of snow, or a bit of wind. The public transport elsewhere always seems to function. If a bus is two minutes late in Tromsø , up in the Arctic, people look at their watches, shake ...

I always had trouble with the phrase pathetic fallacy . It seemed like an extremely harsh condemnation of the British obsession with The Weather, and a wagging finger at attributing any sort of malevolence to it. We Brits all know The Weather has a particular delight in ruining Wimbledon fortnight, bank holidays and test matches. So it was with some surprise that I discovered the words have changed their meaning, and when Ruskin first coined the phrase it didn’t mean stupid misconception but simply emotional falseness. What’s wrong with the occasional foray into personification, if it’s deliberate? When I’m writing a fantasy involving a desert it’s quite nice to have a callous sun with a definite mind of its own. Writing has fashions, and the fact that a Greek chorus is as yesterday as a codpiece shouldn’t stop you using one if you feel that’s exactly what your story needs.             All that was just a way of getting me in...