Authors Electric

I write this in greater haste than usual, having forgotten what day it was for all sorts of reasons, some of them more convincing than others! We had an extremely busy July, which was also very frustrating in some ways, involving as it did some chaos in the garden and a series of phone calls to and from the bank because they had decided someone was trying to do something fraudulent with my current account when actually it was only that I had to pay a small fortune to tree surgeons to get rid of a tree that had well outgrown the space in our garden. You will see from the stump that remains how big it must have been. RIP the big tree The only thing that kept me (relatively) sane during July was writing. Despite all the upheaval, I stuck to my regular writing slot almost every day, between 11 am and 1 pm. Incidentally this coincides with the timing for letting the cats out, although of course I couldn't do that while the tree work was going on. Our current cats are rather wary about b...

I have been walking past this amazing suburban garden for decades, going back to the years when I walked my two children home from school (they have both been serious adults for a very long time!) It's constructed by using very closely packed containers which can be moved around, re-arranged - so simple and so clever. In all that time, I have never encountered the gardener - of such tiny mysteries Alan Bennett monologues are made (if you've never heard of him, do Google him - he's well worth the effort.) Stories, like "A Lady of Letters", narrated in a beautifully crafted stream of consciousness by unremarkable people - people we mightn't want to share time with because they're so conventional and boring, people we'd pass un-noticed in the street - until something suddenly jars, something suddenly shocks. As a recent critic described reading these stories or listening to the monologues, it's like being on a night sleeper which chugs along peacef...

This: is all that remains of my apple tree. It was, once, impressive. Its blossom hung heavy in the spring. I sat in its shade to read in the summer. It kept my neighbour and I in apples through the autumn. Then last year it began to look sorry for itself. My tree-man (everyone should have a tree-man - or woman - someone who knows all about trees and shrubs and comes round every now and then to give them a serious talking-to, and sometimes a serious pruning) frowned, broke off a twig or two and said it had a hint of green, leave it, it might recover. I left it - but, as everything else burst into bloom this spring, my apple tree stayed resolutely bald. It was obviously an ex-apple-tree. It was gone before. Its fruiting days were done. And so it has had to come down. It wasn't fun, taking it down. It involved a lot of noise and lugging logs up and down the garden and general harrumphing because (to be honest) I loved my apple tree and was sad to see it carted about wit...