Authors Electric

  Times have changed. The Story of the Little Mole who Knew it was None of his Business would never have seen the light of day in the 1950s, even though it was a jolly good guide to identifying animal poo. Natural history investigation wasn’t discouraged in the 20 th century, but it was more a case of scoring points over your mates. I-Spy books were actually pretty good, but oh how the order of high and low-scoring birds has changed. Magpies were unusual, and egrets and ring-necked parakeets unknown. Yellowhammers weren’t uncommon at all. The other books I treasured were the Observer books, affordable on a couple of weeks’ pocket money at 5 shillings a go, which tackled everything from Aircraft to Moths, Freshwater Fishes, Birds Eggs and Wild Animals – British, obviously. In those days moles were the villains, who desecrated golf courses and bowling greens, and we even had books in which country types wore moleskin weskits (waistcoats). Foxhunting wasn’t frowned on in pony books...

I've not been too well since I got back from Madagascar (so no change there - I was very ill the first time I went), so forgive me for taking an easy way out and using lots of photos.  We can’t invent something that is beyond our senses to detect, as we don’t have the right vocabulary to describe it. We don’t have infra-red or ultra-violet vision, we can’t hear infra sound or ultrasound, we don’t have whatever sense it is that allows a murmuration of starlings or the synchronisation swim of a shoal of fish. What we do is to recombine bits of existing creatures, and when we’re after something scary it’s the predators that spring to mind. I used a hyena to create my sinistroms in The Divide. Dragons tend to be amalgamations of bats and lizards, and may well have originally been inspired by the bones of dinosaurs. Griffons are eagles and lions. When something was first described a long time ago, either in paint or words or, earliest of all, in stone, it pays to have a think about what...