Authors Electric

I don’t know about you, but life has been pretty serious and worthy of late. Since Christmas, with more month than money, the news full of grim stories and the weather not great, I have been in a cycle of work, a bit more work, sleeping, work, firefighting, work, conflict resolution, work …. you get my drift. With some of my Christmas money, I treated myself to a pair of ear pods. I had to take instruction from the children, who told me what to do with these new toys in loud, clear voices.   “Keep them in the case when you’re not using them, Mum. No, don’t press that. Yes, the blue light is good. That means they’re fully charged. Yes, they are a great invention, aren’t they?”   Before the ear pods came into my life, my way of consuming podcasts and similar was to access BBC Sounds on my mobile, prop it up on the windowsill and listen to it that way while doing the washing up. Now, however, I can pop in the ear pods and enjoy whatever I like in private without requests to t...

 To begin with: a disclaimer. I was mulling over ideas for topics for this contribution and first put finger to keyboard the day that Andrew Crofts’ New Stages of Life appeared here on the 27 th of last month. Serendipitously (or otherwise) while the topic I chose is somewhat related to Andrew’s, my thesis (NB ‘thesis’ = pretentious word for ‘stuff’) and ‘conclusion’ (NB ‘conclusion’ = the point at which it’ll stop) are not. Part of the reason may be that my response to Andrew’s current ‘grandfather to three’ status is simply to note that I am the eldest of 3 sisters and 2 brothers, the youngest of whom is already a great-grandmother of one. Thus dotage permits me to get away with most things and, anyway, there’s no connection whatsoever between our separate contributions. But, partly, like Andrew's, mine is also about age. I’ll start way back and to avoid overly embarrassing anyone, mainly myself, I’ll dress it up in semi-linguistic stuff. First, though, a (marginally relev...

There are plenty of theories about what makes things funny, lots of them stressing the cruel nature of laughter. They suggest it’s an expression of superiority over the person we’re laughing at, but that’s too crude. Laughter’s a shared reaction – and it doesn’t have to be at someone else’s expense. BMK / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) The theory I like best is the one which says that laughter’s actually about thinking. If you like, it’s intellectual, critical. It’s your mind seeing something happening, assuming it’ll pan out in a particular way then having those assumptions undermined when something unexpected happens. At its crudest, it’s the banana skin scenario. e.g. A person (preferably one of rank and substance – a queen, a president, a supermodel, say) is walking along and suddenly becomes a disarticulated mechanism. If the result is a serious injury, the laughter dies at once, which kind of discredits the ‘laughter is cruel’ theory...

If you’re no longer in the first flush of youth but still hanker after picking up that old tennis racket, I can heartily recommend it.  But as you step onto the court for the first time, you may well have a sense of foreboding, especially if, like me, you’ve spent the years in between trying to hit a smaller and harder (but crucially stationary) ball on the boundless fairways of a golf course.  You will discover your legs still work - but not at any speed. You do have a degree of hand-eye coordination - but everything around you happens too fast. When you eventually make contact the ball can go anywhere - but never where you need it to go (a bit like golf, then!) That vital connection between thought and action has gone, leaving you looking very sheepish as you lumber forward when the ball has already bounced twice, or optimistically shouting ‘great shot’ for something cruising past you at moderate speed. Suburban tennis - bliss! However, you’ve had the luc...

Guido Reni - Adoration of the Magi. (Public domain) Various things (such as Man-flu) have been eating up my time so, with profuse apologies, I'm recycling a seasonal post from my own blog back in 2008. It doesn't ask the usual questions, such as ' What is Myrrh, and who the hell brings it as a present?' or 'Where were Health and Safety when that innkeeper got his licence?' No, it’s the actuality of the experience of those concerned that preoccupies me. For a start, there’s no agreement between the two registrars who recorded the birth. You’ve got Matthew’s quick note saying: ‘Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise; When, as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph, her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.’ Fair enough, a reasonable sort of reaction from the bloke. If there’s a bun i...

By Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons This continues the story I began in  last month’s blog . It also benefits from having its reality enhanced by the meteorological authentication of its setting thanks to the recent onslaught of 'the beast from the east'. Leticia’s body was still awash with the desire Roger’s parting kiss had kindled in her. Her time at Wal-Mart had dulled her appreciation of metaphor to such an extent that she was ignorant of the fact that the conflation of ‘kindled’ and ‘awash’ implied a soggy fireplace. For her, the passion was an awakening, a confirmation that her time spent watching those TV movies written by Jane Austen had been the beginning of her education as a Belle Dame sans Merci. She got up, poured herself another glass of the rich red wine and once more stood before the cheval mirror, turning her body to admire the way the satin folded jealously down the curve of her back. She lifted the hem of her dress, admired the leg...

I spent 3 weeks over the Xmas and New Year period in hospital and the (slow) recuperation process is likely to continue for several more weeks. A whingeing 'poor me' blog, however, as well as being boring and unattractive, would win few friends (or readers), especially in the context of this month's excellent and varied posts. So, instead,  I want to put some distance between me and the experience by falling  back on recycling blogs from long ago. This time, I have a sequence of three: numbers 1 & 2 are parodies of a romance (And, before aficionados of the genre complain, please remember that parody is a sincere form of flattery.) Number 3 will contain some observations on the writing process based on 1 & 2. Here, then, is part one of: THE LOVERS OF WENSLEY DALE by Kevin via Wikipedia Commons Leticia's eyes softened as she turned from the window and looked back into the cabin.  Outside, the snow was still deep, the tracks left by Roger’s Black Be...

To counterbalance my seasonal ‘Bah humbug’ stance, I’ve resurrected and updated a piece I wrote nearly 50 years ago. (I even got paid for it when it was used in an educational anthology of some sort.)  Dear sirs, I am writing to you to make certain points about my conditions of employment which I feel are due for renegotiation. 1. Transport Most representatives of my acquaintance drive a company car. I appreciate that an open sleigh has the charm of tradition but, in the northern hemisphere, it is hardly the ideal form of locomotion for late December. Also, while having it propelled by reindeer rather than fossil fuels significantly enhances our environmental credentials, the PR department's campaign to promote the image of my lead reindeer has resulted in unrest amongst the others. He now considers himself to be a superstar, holds an Equity card, and flaunts his celebrity status to such an extent that the others have developed militant tendencies which have led...

On the Halloween that’s just gone, I was fortunate enough to have been granted exclusive access to the normally reclusive Vladimir Poignard, writer of some of the most chilling horror stories to have appeared this century. Poignard is consciously part of a tradition which stretches back to Poe, Wilkie Collins and even encompasses the excrescences penned by the Divine Marquis himself. When I went to meet him, I was surprised to be shown into the parlour of a small terraced house in Wigan by a woman in her seventies. She sat me down, brought through two cups of tea and a plate of shortbread biscuits, settled herself opposite me and said ‘Well, shall we get started?’. In the course of the interview which followed, nothing compared with this revelation that the purveyor of some of the most explicit violence and psyche-shattering episodes in the whole of western literature was, in fact, Ethel Gringe, 78. Her three husbands had all died in mysterious circumstances but left he...

An approximation of more or less any leading UK politico and THE leading US one. By Poliphilo (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons I was sorting through (and chucking out) old notes and files this week and came across a cutting from way back when the appalling Michael Gove was Education Secretary. It concerned a 15-year-old schoolboy, Joe Cotton, who was the first ‘child’ (as the Guardian called him) ever to address the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers. He was speaking about some of Gove’s   cynical, sinister ideas, one of which was to get rid of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) to help with his budget cuts. This is what young Joe was quoted as saying: ‘Well, I don’t know how nifty Michael Gove thinks he can be with a loaf and some fishes, or even a bus pass and some textbooks, but he’d need nothing short of a miracle to replicate the benefits of EMA with that budget’. First, I admire enormously a 15-year-old with the confidence to stan...