Authors Electric

2022 was not one of my better years. I think I achieved very little in the grand scheme of things and certainly no writing of any importance at all. My dad's health declined rapidly - we moved through in-home carers, hospital and eventually full-time residential dementia care within the space of a few months from spring to summer; meanwhile my mum's planned sale of their bungalow and moving into a sheltered-housing flat continued and she moved in alone in September. It fell to Andy and I to do a lot of the legwork - interviewing home carers, then finding and inspecting care homes, helping mum to pack and move and all the inevitable bits of DIY that follow any house move. I'm also the proud owner/renter of a secure storage unit for all the stuff of mine and my brother's that used to live in mum & dad's loft space! Since Keith is in Australia and my own loft has a small and awkward hatch, a rental unit seemed like the best option. So I'm now visiting my dad ev...

After 19 months of facing the virus in India, I realized that apart from my 'blog posts', even my stray thoughts on social media have somewhere unwittingly added up to a COVID DIARY of sorts. Quite a few are reflections on/about my daughter, who has been my only constant companion through this period. The rest charts the covid-graph in my life & mind.  Thought of collating it for this month's post for AE. 24 March 2020 (immediately after the 1st lockdown was announced) May we all live through the coming 3 weeks with strength, patience & compassion. May good sense prevail. Stay safe!   21 April 2020 After 4 weeks of lockdown, I have nothing but admiration for those who are successfully harnessing their inner strength and resourcefulness & nothing but sympathy for those who are trying but failing. Meanwhile, doffs hat to the resilience of kids (at home for 5 weeks now), most of whom don't have siblings to play with, and are thus - beyond zoom classes a...

I want to share an experience of no apparent import which has, nonetheless, proved to have a lot of personal significance. Many years ago, in a junk/antiques shop in Edinburgh, I bought a bundle of twelve old notebooks. They were some of the personal diaries of a lady called Joanna Hutchison, kept meticulously by her over the years from 1889 to 1921. I was fascinated to get to know whatever they revealed about the writer, so I learned to decipher her tiny writing and read through each one. It took several weeks and the personality they revealed left me with an even greater curiosity about her. Since then, they have sat undisturbed on the top shelf of one of my bookcases. Then, some weeks ago, a chance reference during a regular weekly online meeting with my five siblings reminded me of the diaries and, knowing the impressive research skills of my youngest sister, Lesley Taylor, I asked whether she could shed any further light on the mystery of Ms Hutchison, of whom I had only the f...

One of my Facebook friends is sharing her childhood diary with us, with comments from an adult perspective on the life of a ten year old. It’s fascinating stuff.  I started keeping a diary from the start of 1977, when I was almost 13 (my birthday is in January). I wrote pretty much daily until the end of 1985, by which time I’d left university and home and gone to work in my first job in London. Clearly real life was more exciting then as the entries tail off. My last entry was 1988 as I was about to get engaged to Andy – by husband now of over 30 years!  So 6th April 2021. What was I doing on this day over the years of my childhood …  1977   Went to the cinema today and saw 101 Dalmatians , also saw Ride a Wild Pony . It was ace. The pony was called Taff and was a palomino. I was 13 and in the typical teenage girl pony phase. I can't remember what age I started riding lessons but most of these years were spent obsessing about ponies, reading pony stories and despera...