Authors Electric

Back in the late sixties, I lived on a hillside on the Worcestershire border in a cottage without electricity or running water. It was what we now call ‘off the grid’. For two months I never saw a car and the only transportation that passed by was a hot air balloon which one morning flew over the roof. I was there to write. I was very young, and hungry to be published. Seated at a packing-case desk overlooking a damson orchard, I worked on a story involving hot air balloons and sky gypsies. Decorated hot air balloons - not like the one which had flown over me, but ones painted like gypsy caravans or narrow boats. I came up with a sky gypsy called Ben the Balloon Man but, before I could bring him to life, winter was suddenly upon me and I ran out of money and was forced to move and get a job. Fifteen long, non-writing years later, not long after the birth of my fifth child, I read a book called ‘The Flight of Condor I’. It told the story of a balloon flight in Nazca, Peru, by...