Authors Electric

  I'm writing this listening to a broadcast of one of the BBC Proms. I have very little interest in sports (and I really dislike football, so the world cup, for me, is three weeks of trying to avoid TV) so my yearly fix is musical. As a fan of classical music, the BBC proms fits the bill perfectly. Some old classics, some new, and always something unusual. It's especially nice to see it back in the Royal Albert Hall with an audience. The reason I'm waxing lyrical about music is that it's integral to the writing process for me. I can write just about anywhere and have done so (trains, coffee shops, all the usual suspects apply) but the one thing I struggle to write without is music. It's a conversation I never tire of having with other writers – do you listen to music when you write? The answers are always varied and interesting. For some, it's an absolute no-no – they need silence to work; others need loud music for them to get words down on paper. Some li...

  I was listening to the radio the other day and wondering what to write about for this month's blog when I heard a programme about books, poetry, and literature in general, and it got me thinking. There's a lot of noise being made here in the UK about how children engage (or perhaps don't) with reading, and especially with poetry. Now, I'll be the first to admit I struggle with a lot of poetry. I couldn't see myself going out and buying a book of poetry, not when there are so many unread prose novels to get through. Yet I'll happily listen to poetry when read aloud, and it's rare for me to dislike it. The problem is it rarely manages to evoke much of an emotional response in me. I can admire the language, and the cleverness of rhyme, but that's about as far as it goes, for me. It doesn't make me feel anything. But I am aware that the issue lies with me, and not with poetry per se. See, for me, as an engineer, I like things to have logic, form,...

Now we’re home from holiday, I’ve stopped worrying about my lack of Spanish , but the niceties of how we use our own language are sometimes just as mysterious as a foreign tongue.  Maybe it’s a preoccupation of the elderly, but I’m always aware of the register we use depending on our audience. At the extreme ends of the scale, an application for a job or a pitch to a publisher is always more formal than a thank you note or reply to an invitation, unless we are making a conscious effort to be matey. Informality, after all, is a characteristic of speech rather than writing, or should that be ‘was’?  Still nice to get some things in writing The universal use of email (and all communication via keyboard)   has gradually blurred the lines. It was once the case that a stranger contacting me at work would start with ‘Good morning’ or ‘Dear’. These days I might use ‘Dear’ for a first cautious approach but anything after that would be ‘hello’, gradually giving way to ‘hi’...

The  lovely port of Santander, so much better than a bank Last week on a trip to Cantabria, we visited the museum of Altamira  where a startling range of Neolithic cave paintings were discovered in the nineteenth century, dating from somewhere around 20,000 to 14,000 BCE. Yes – they are roughly 16,000 years old.   In the ‘new’ (replica) cave, visitors can watch reconstructions of daily life  and observe the tools and skills these people are thought to have used in the stone age. But the projected display had no sound-track, and the same thought occurred to myself and a fellow tourist – how did they speak? What language did they have? Language and communication were in fact pressing concerns on this trip. I used to consider myself a bit of a linguist but it appears I came to Spain and Spanish too late in life to ever feel comfortable with it and have to fall back on a dumb tourist act to get through any holiday, something that grieves me for the duration ...