Authors Electric

The world is finally united.   I just wish it was for something good instead of the deadly Covid19 virus.   Being isolated at home with my husband is not a hardship. We’ve worked from home for years, but now, I’m cooking a hell of a lot more! We don’t go out for dinner like we used to. We did, however, venture out of the house over a week ago, but that was for essentials.   Okay, I lie.   Wine really isn’t an essential, but it makes life a bit easier.  Physical isolation from the outside world has thrown off my sleep patterns, even more so than usual. The days of the week, normally a marker of tasks and events, are now cluttered in my mind.   Does Monday feel different from Thursday or Friday? Does it even matter? Certainly, the precision of time is now less important. There are fewer (no) appointments or meetings I need to keep. I don’t have to check my schedule because … well, there’s no urgency to be anywhere. Instead, mundane tasks ...

At the time of writing this, “isolation” is gradually morphing from “voluntary” to “compulsory” around the world because the human race is under attack from a clever new virus.  It has set me thinking about the whole business of being a loner in life. Like many people who choose to write for a living, I have always been a solitary soul, a watcher of life rather than an active participant. If I hadn’t had the good fortune to marry someone gregarious and have a great many children I would probably be living up a mountain in a cave by now, (that’s the romantic version, I would more likely have spent my life locked in a bedsit in Brighton, eating ready-made soup amongst stacks of old newspapers).  Maybe it stems from being an only child who was very much left to his own devices most of the time, (always good to make the parents responsible for everything that isn’t quite as glitteringly wonderful about one’s personality as one would like), or maybe I’m just a...