Authors Electric

 Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British Politician, statesman, army officer and prolific writer. He wrote 33 books in 51 volumes over his lifetime. His fictional output comprised one novel and one short story. His main output however, comprised non-fiction. After he was elected as an an MP,  over 130 speeches and parliamentary answers were published in booklets and pamphlets. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953 for “ his mastery of historical description as well as for oratory in defending human values.” What is more surprising is that Churchill suffered from a manic depressive disorder and could spend long periods of time, sometimes months low on energy and totally unproductive. For years Churchill had avoided standing to close to balconies and train platforms. “ I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand back and get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the sid...

'People lashing out need to take a step back and think about what they would actually say in person rather than when hiding behind a screen.’ It's OK with the barbs, tweeps. We're the good guys . Photo by  Anastasia Zhenina  from  Pexels So wrote a fellow Tweep a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s not a groundbreaking idea; we know that social media – Twitter in particular – have reshaped the whole way subjects are discussed and how people relate to each other. But we don’t seem able to curb our behaviour, to stop pouring hatred down the throats of those who express a different view, or – heaven forbid – use the wrong words by accident. Before this global free for all, irritation and outrage could be vented harmlessly by yelling at the television screen; now the temptation to fire barbs publicly at the writer/politician/newscaster/actor/singer/academic/football manager/poor clumsy twit who’s ventured an opinion they might not even realise is controversial – is ...

The fifth anniversary of the ‘worst day in the worst week of my life’ is rapidly approaching. Next month’s blog will be posted the day after the anniversary, but because I prefer not to mark the date itself, I thought I would write about it now instead. Some sort of advance catharsis perhaps, so by the day itself I can be a little further on the way to ‘moving on’. Moving on is a process that has been accelerating over the past three to four years, thankfully, so now it’s relatively rare that I think, let alone speak, about it all. For the first couple of years my conversation, particularly with my immediate family, but also with good friends, was liberally punctuated with the acronyms BF and AF – ‘before the fire’ and ‘after the fire’. Kolo the Cat in happier times Yes, I’ve lived a pretty charmed life so far. This ‘worst day/week of my life’ was caused by just a fire. A housefire in which no one died or was badly hurt – not even our cat, who was caught up in the suffocating...

If you had the choice, would you like to be someone else? Perhaps yourself in different circumstances, perhaps yourself with a few minor changes (improvements?), or perhaps an entirely different person? We probably can’t do a great deal to change our essential ‘inner’ selves, which are, of course, formed from an intractable mixture of genetics, upbringing and life experience. Many of us have at one time believed that a new start of some form (new home, new job, new partner…) would enable us to become someone different and probably better, and then been disappointed a few months or years down the line to realise that we are, essentially, stuck with ourselves for life. I’m not saying we shouldn’t sometimes try to change and look for healing and new starts, and I’m sure these sometimes work, but the changes aren’t always as profound as we might have hoped. I think I eventually accepted about ten years ago that I was permanently stuck with many of the characteristics that, for bet...