Authors Electric

  The Companionship of Books: About Poetry* This chapter is all about poetry+. It begins with my stay in Broad Green Hospital when I was sixteen for an operation on a torn cartilage. I had been attempting a descent from the wall bars during a school gym lesson and had landed awkwardly, so awkwardly in fact that every time I tried to run for the morning bus my knee would lock into a fixed position and necessitate a system of contortions on the ground in order to free it. Mr Almond, who saw me in Rodney Street, just around the corner from The Liverpool Institute, took one examination and immediately booked me into Broad Green for the operation.   I arrived there to find myself in a ward full of men with their legs either covered in bandages or underneath raised frames, which allowed their legs to rest underneath, without the pressure of the bedclothes. On the ward I met Alan who was a trainee teacher. We were in adjacent beds and he talked to me about novels and poetry, particul...

  A Story of Poetry and Song   I recently accompanied my wife, Sue, to Sherington, a local village where a Christmas Market was in full swing. She was part of a choir and they were due to sing a variety of carols. The market was taking place in the grounds of a pub. I bought a drink, took up position and began to listen.   As the singing proceeded, I stood half-shrouded by cream-coloured tents and I helped myself to the free food on offer – sausages, roast potatoes, chicken pieces and the most marvellous pork crackling - while joining in with the carols. It didn’t take me long to realise that most people were passers-by, making their way backwards and forwards to the market and dropping coins into the ready bucket proffered by Santa Claus. I noticed, however, that the charity the choir was supporting was Brain Cancer Research and my thoughts turned to the poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, and his recent and sudden death from a brain tumour. I mentally reviewed what I had known ab...

Blindness in Gaza*   I have been taking The Observer, an English Sunday newspaper, for as long as I can remember, and my story arises from this. When I first began teaching History in Guildford in November 1973 I was asked by my 12-13 year old pupils to explain to them about the Yom Kippur War. This had just broken out when the Egyptians and Syrians had invaded Israel in an attempt to recapture The Golan Heights which they had lost in the 6 Day War of 1967 against the same enemy. I was a recent graduate in English Literature rather than a historian, but to help explain the conflict I spread pages of The Observer, then a broadsheet paper, across the blackboard. I did my best to tell them what I knew.    The Observer was a newspaper which did then and still does favour the liberal arts. I was trusting it then to give both me and my pupils a fair and unbiased view of what was happening in the Middle East. Fifty years later this November in The Observer I read Kenan Malik’s C...

                                                          A Bit of Bibliotherapy   One morning last week, owing to a fault in the town’s water supply, I had to move from  Coffee1  to a new establishment for my morning cup of Americano. I was reading a book called  Our Spoons Came From Woolworths  by Barbara Comyns. The hardships described in the book of living without much money recalled to me my early married life back in the seventies when I lived in Guildford as a young teacher. It also occurred to me that  The Verdetto Lounge  where I was sitting was itself a Woolworths store many years ago. The vagaries of chance and its connections are multiform.   The historian David Olusoga has recently produced an excellent series of BBC programmes called  Union  about the union between England, Scotlan...

                                                                                                 The Elder Statesman    Now if that heading sounds like the title of a play by Henrik Ibsen, well you’re on the right track, and if the first incident I describe sounds a bit like the part in that Jon Fosse novel, The Other Name ,   where he gets lost in the snow with the dog, Bragi, but is rescued by a woman who tells him that she knows him already, then you’re even warmer. Anyway, I’ll start with the first bit, begin at the beginning as the storyteller tells us.    It started with a hold-up at Gatwick, you know, where the plane sits on the tarmac for a couple of hours, interspersed with frequent announcements by the pilot in ...

  I talk to myself in the shower in the mornings – in my head, you understand, out loud would be weird. It’s usually fairly mindless chatter, reminding myself what day it is, etc. but it will be coloured by whatever I’ve been reading during the EMC (early morning cuppa) before I get up. This morning it was in the voice of the Russian narrator of Life's Music, yesterday, suave Italian   Marco from The Hummingbird. If it was poetry, the internal monologue might be in iambic pentameters. It’s not a skill – I just can’t help it. It tends to wear off by the time I'm talking, which is probably just as well, but the mood invoked can last. A couple of blogs ago, I had a brief online conversation with Peter Leyland via the comments section. He mentioned his interest in bibliotherapy and kindly included a link to a paper he had written about it in the magazine   Aeon/Psyche. It contains a fascinating account of his exploration of the impact of reading on mood and wellbeing, wit...