Authors Electric

An Ixy Selfie As well as provoking an interesting theological exchange between Jan and Enid, my last blog asked what I think is the most important question one can ask in almost every context: Why? It also made me remember another blog I wrote years ago along similar (not to say identical) lines so, since it’s an early expression of a thread of my thinking that hasn’t shifted much over the years, I’m adding it here to reinforce last month’s point. In essence, it’s a quick biology lesson. It’s about something that sounds as if it were a warrior in some ancient battle – Ixodes ricinus . But we know it better as a sheep tick. (By the way, the ricinus part of the name really is a bit sinister. It relates to its other common name, the castor bean tick, and it’s from castor beans that you get that horrible poison, ricin, which, of course, features briefly in my novel The Darkness .) Anyway, Ixy, as we’ll fondly call it, is a very common tick indeed. It can live for anythin...

Mtpaley at English Wikipedia. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Furado., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12143691 We’re all indebted to Sir David Attenborough for continually adding to our knowledge of the natural world over the many years of his broadcasting career. There is, however, one question (perhaps the most important) which I’ve never heard him answer – or, worse still, ask. It was brought home to me again by his BBC series last month,  Dynasties . It was magnificent, enthralling, and all the other adjectives one usually applies to his revelations, but it was the second in the series that provoked these bloggy musings. As a species, we humans (especially the advantaged ones in Europe, the Americas and, for all I know, Australasia) have to tolerate incomprehensible phenomena such as politicians and existential angst, but imagine being an Emperor penguin... To begin with, they all look exactly the same – males, fema...

What’s the earliest birthday of your own that you can remember? For me, along with quite a few other people, I believe, it’s my fourth. 1959, that would have been (no, please don’t bother to work out how old I am). May 1959 in St Eval, an RAF base near Newquay in Cornwall. I have a number of ‘memory glimpses’ that are clearly linked to this day, though nothing of much consequence happened, looking back. My grandmother – ‘Nana’ – came to stay, catching the train from Pontefract in Yorkshire and changing at Bristol… a long day’s journey which I remember making myself a number of times. It was always fun to have Nana to stay – she was different and exciting. And on this birthday she bought me a doll’s pram, a big one, nearly as big as a real baby’s pram, in my memory at least. It was second-hand – I’m not sure why, as we weren’t well-off but neither were we very poor. Not that its second-handedness bothered me – it made it more fun because it was navy blue and a bit shabby, and N...

What happened , the title of Hilary Clinton’s recent book, was not a question. Had it been, I’d have offered the following answer, based on evidence from an article I read quite a long time ago in my newspaper. First, though, when I write the word ‘Neanderthal’ what springs to mind? I know that readers of the AE blog are cultured sophisticates whose only prejudices concern grammatical issues and linguistic niceties but, for at least some of you, I’d guess that, despite your determination to avoid it, there might be some speciesism in your reaction. You’ll see creatures of indeterminate gender with no foreheads who sit in caves grunting monosyllables and tearing raw meat from bones with their prognathous jaws. Perhaps now and then, one will stand, rise to his (this one’s a male) full height of 4 feet 10, club a neighbouring creature (this one will be a female), and drag her off to procreate. The more enlightened among you will probably envision noble savages sitting around a fir...