Authors Electric

 Did you watch the final of Britain's Got Talent on Sunday? If so, you probably noticed the very talented Eva Abley. Just fourteen years old, she performed stand-up comedy. Hard enough for any teenager but even harder when you're disabled. Eva has cerebral palsy and was more than willing to poke fun at her disability. In the semi-final, she joked that people with disabilities can learn to drive at sixteen - she can't even push a shopping trolley straight. She was utterly refreshing and reminded me a lot of Rosie Jones. In fact, the world of entertainment is an area where, hopefully, progress is being made for disabled performers. A few years ago, would we have considered a deaf celebrity winning Strictly Come Dancing? Earlier this year, blind comedian, Chris McCausland, presenting a BAFTA award with Lee Mack,was brilliantly funny with Lee having to tell Chris what to say as he couldn't read the auto-cue himself. And one of my favourite characters in Call the Midwife , i...

Whether or not you are one of the people who can feel them, all living things rely on electrical signals at cellular level. It's how our nerves work, and particularly our brains. Electricity is also in the air all around us, in the form of EMFs (electric and magnetic fields) given off by our modern devices, and it's not too big a leap to see how one might affect the other.  https://www.healthline.com/health/emf#research . Very soon, on top of all our existing EMF producing devices, we will have a new technology: 5G, which promises faster wi-fi connections than 4G and uses microwave frequencies similar to those used in weapons for crowd control . The problem is that digital wi-fi (2G and above) has only been around since the 1990s and so we can't really know the long term effects yet. Also, nobody has actually asked our permission to expose us to this stuff. Following pressure from the public, several places have recently postponed or halted the roll-out of 5G, includ...

First of all, a funny little success story which began several years ago via a venture called UTales, now sadly (or maybe not sadly) no more.  The idea was to pair picture book authors (one of my several writing identities) with illustrators. Well, I'd once dreamed up a surreal and funny little book about a small boy who would eat nothing but chips, and in these days of healthy eating and five-a-day veggies, it did seem like a goer, but it had had no takers, so I thought - why not give it a try? I teamed myself up with an illustrator called Duncan Beedie, still at the beginning of his career, so in the course of our many online discussions, I also offered him some advice (I am old and well-seasoned in this difficult profession). Fast forward to the present. Duncan and I had almost, but not quite, lost touch (when David died, he was hugely sympathetic). Suddenly, hey! He'd written and illustrated his own picture book: THE BEAR WHO STARED, and got it accepted by Templar, so ...

Do you remember those signs that used to crop up on office walls? “You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here / But it Helps.” I always suspected that they were the hallmarks of a rather aggressive sanity. There's a type of person too – happy to announce “Oh we're all quite mad , you know!” – when one knows quite well that they're not; they're just a bit loud and attention-seeking and probably SMUG. I almost lost my sense of humour when I noticed members of a writer's group cheerfully claiming to be “mad”. Mental illness is so un-funny and I've usually assumed that most of us write to remain sane, to make some sense of our experience of life – to try to keep the madness at bay. Dementia is (currently) an incurable mental illness which gradually takes away the ability to read, write and speak. Last year I read Naoki Higashida's autobiographical The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism  and found unexpected insight into aspects of ...

I am one of many people currently reading The Reason I Jump: one boy's voice from the silence of autism by Naoki Higashida, translated by novelist David Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida. It's a unique and beautiful piece of writing from a severely autistic thirteen year old who still (he's now aged sixteen) cannot reliably control his body or hold a spoken conversation. David Mitchell wrote an article in the Guardian   explaining his personal involvement (his son is autistic) and the book was also read on Radio 4. When I mention it to friends they say, “oh yes, I think I heard that” or “I know the one you mean”. The hardback edition stands at #2 in the Amazon top 100 books and is reprinting: the kindle edition is unobtrusively available at #103. I am already thinking of friends to whom I want to give The Reason I Jump . Not because they are parents or teachers of autistic children but because it speaks about the imperfect relationship between body and mind and the i...