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...

A good example of cloud iridescence from the web, July 2023. Don't know where.  How do you write about ghosts when you don’t believe in them? I don’t believe in them because I’ve not had a single supernatural experience. I stopped believing in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy when I was very young, I’m one of those people who require the evidence of my own senses, and none has been forthcoming. I haven’t even had a spooky feeling, and I’ve never felt inexplicably cold or scared or seen objects moving of their own volition. I have a problem when people I respect tell me quite seriously that they have seen/heard/felt or even smelt something. But no one has told me that sort of thing since I was a teenager, probably because they think I’ll laugh at them. I do remember my mother telling me what happened the night her grandmother died though. She was sharing a room with her, and Gra (as she was known) was very elderly. Suddenly she said to my mum, “Ella, Ella, open the door.”...

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 ...

 Every so often one of those situations arises when you’re not quite sure whether you have slipped into an alternative dimension, as there is something not quite right about everything. It can be something to exploit, and extrapolation can lead you down all sorts of weird and wonderful pathways. Yesterday it was Walkies at RHS Wisley day. We were warned as we entered, because dogs are normally strictly forbidden. There were possibly hundreds of dogs there, in different parts of the grounds, all on leads. I have never seen such well-behaved canines in my life. It was uncanny, I never heard a single bark all afternoon. No dog was reprimanded for anything, no legs were lifted, none of them were pulling at their leads or trying it on with other dogs. There was every conceivable breed and every conceivable colour, size or shape. After a while my mind started to drift, and I wondered whether the dogs were, in fact, taking their owners for a walk. That positions had been reversed by some ...

The recent floods in Leatherhead, where I live, brought home to me how much the vagaries of the natural world affect our lives. And because they’re dramatic events, we tend to use them in fiction, both for adults and children. Growing up in England in the nineteen-fifties it was hard to imagine anything momentous ever happening to me, and it led to a real thirst for adventure. My first opportunity came when I was eighteen, in between school and art college. I came into a small amount of money, and signed up for an overland trip to Morocco, which was not a common tourist destination in those days. It was an eventful trip. There were twenty-one of us, and we drove through France and Spain in two long wheelbase Land Rovers, camping on the way. It wasn’t a trip that health and safety would have sanctioned, and two events in particular could have had very different outcomes. The first was when we were travelling in the Atlas Mountains, and looking for a sheltered place to camp. Our tou...