Authors Electric

I've been back from Sri Lanka for two days. This was a very different trip for me - usually I travel alone, and for 4-6 weeks. This time I was with my brother and sister-in-law, for two weeks, and our trip was organised around cricket (England are playing Sri Lanka at the moment.) It's too soon to find the right words to describe these two weeks. We packed a lot in - and I need to digest my notebooks and let the story evolve before I can begin to find coherence in it. Besides which I am mildly jet-lagged, which makes writing in complete sentences something of a challenge. And so here are some pictures. In time I'll find time to describe the sheer weight of an elephant: Or the appeal of a baby monkey (doesn't the mum look tired!): Or the tangy smell of spices: Or the peaceful smile of a Buddha: And then, of course, there was the cricket: By next month I'll be able to manage words. But if you need some now, try my website:  www.jocar...

I'm not around today. I'm at a cricket match. (England v Pakistan, an ODI, at the Ageas Bowl, for anyone who is interested.) Cricket isn't for everyone - so this isn't the space where I bang on about googlies and cow corner. Instead - I recall an interview with Alistair Cook (the England captain) after a particularly quiet day in the field, when he talked about the importance of sport as entertainment. People pay to watch just because they enjoy it. He made me think. For, when you unpick it, you could argue that all sports that open their gates to the paying public are in the entertainment business. Football, snooker, cricket - they are all sustained by people willing to pay for the pleasure of watching. And writers? Surely we, too, are in the entertainment business. We hope that we can give enough people enough pleasure to pay for us to keep writing. Pleasure, of course, is a complicated construct. For some it is enough to be diverted from life's realities...