Authors Electric

I've been lucky enough to be able to work from home on Wednesdays for the past few weeks as I recover from eye surgery. Work at my day job, that is. I am more used to working at my writing from home, except in emergencies such as having to wait at the garage while my car is being fixed, when I have been known to produce a few hundred words on my Kindle Fire. Thomas - one of the interlopers Doing my day job at home is a little different from writing there, I've found. I feel more of an obligation to carry on for a certain number of hours, regardless of whether I am bored almost to tears or whether my back locks in position due to the unsuitability of the old dining-room chair I use at my laptop. When I'm writing I tend to write until I run out of steam, which can be after a few hundred words or a few thousand, depending on how well things are going, and then I go out to the shops or empty the dish-washer or read for a while or spend some time with the new cats, wh...

And we also have mice, despite keeping a killer cat who stalks foxes and attempts to savage dogs (more on that later) on the premises. Also, according to our next-door neighbour, a squirrel who lives in our attic, but who has left no trace of his presence there and no clue as to how he gets in and out. The carers are a recent development and have arrived to smooth a family member's path on his return from hospital. There are upsides and downsides to this. The upside, of course, is that they carry out care tasks that I either wouldn't manage at all or that I would prefer not to have to think about doing, because as well as being totally unsuited myself to being any kind of carer, I've become aware recently that I have very little spare capacity left in my mind. In case this makes it seem as if I've gone into a senile decline, I must point out that my daughter-in-law, who is a good bit less than half my age, recently posted a graphic on Facebook saying 'I've go...

The NHS belongs to the people.   It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives. It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health. It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.”   Try reading this passage aloud. To my ears the  rhythm  and the  phrasing  achieve an almost prayerful quality:   to stay as well as we can to the ends of our lives . This is the introduction to the most recent revision of the NHS Constitution and, while I’m not advocating the NHS designed-to-be-read-as-literature I’d be glad if you left this blog and went there now. I think we need to remind ourselves of the beauty of the concept.  https://www.gov.uk/government...