Authors Electric

Tromso, 24th January, 2026 Cloud iridescence The Northern Lights have featured in many children's books, especially Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. I have been fascinated by natural phenomena in the sky, from rainbows to cloud iridescence, which I was fortunate enough to see in Costa Rica. We were white water rafting, so I didn't have my camera with me and had to rely on the cameraman provided by the company. His photo doesn't do it justice, but it does give you some idea of the living rainbow that undulated around a cauliflower-shaped cloud.      As a child, after reading about Ernest Shackleton and looking at drawings of the Antarctic sky, the thought of ever seeing the aurora was an impossible dream. It's only the arrival of cell phones that has made them so accessible, as anyone can record them when, as this year, there has been unusual solar activity and they have been seen a lot further south. Needless to say, I missed every occurrence as living close...

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 once inherited a marmot-fur coat. By one of those weird coincidences, my friend Di inherited a mink one at more or less the same time. Both coats were short and boxy; very 1920s-30s, so the poor little beasts had gone to meet their makers (ho ho) long before either of us was born. What to do with them, though? They were potentially saleable (especially Di’s mink) but that didn’t seem right. In the end, we discovered that Oxfam would take them to send to folk in very cold climates, so we decided to donate them, but we would first wear them once and once only. I can’t remember why we thought this was a good idea, but it was probably a nod to the elderly relatives who had bequeathed them to us. The one-and-only occasion we chose was Midnight Mass in Romsey Abbey, which would be perishing cold. So we went in our outdated finery, a touch of Mammon in the holy place, and shortly after the service began, a couple of noisy drunks staggered in. There was much tutting, some moves to evict...