Authors Electric

Me after everyone else in the world has left. You know that thing where you walk out to pat the coalman’s horse, and a speeding Lexus mows you down? That’s called future shock. Technology and culture race by so fast that you’re left stupefied, feeling obsolete. And sometimes the cause of this trauma is already considered old-hat by some. What I’m going to rave about here is apparently ‘sew last decade’. Indeed, it’s considered a classic, so fast do these things move now. I’m sorry, cool young person who just stumbled on this blog by accident, I’d never heard of it before. Okay? Consider me woken up. My tale I wol bigynne. It started when I found a page of pithy quotes from a fictional character, a villain, a truly nightmarish specimen. This character, GLaDOS, is a sentient computer, inspired by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but taking the psychoses up to eleven. She could be HAL’s bloodthirstier, more cake-obsessed little sister, venting sarcasm and passive agg...

I took this photo a few years ago on holiday in Wales. It's a view towards the sea from Harlech Castle - a place I had many adventures as a young teenager (my friend's parents had a holiday cottage in Harlech). We'd invent whole new backgrounds for ourselves - gypsies, run-aways-from-the-circus, princesses-in-hiding, undercover secret agents - and we'd rope in any poor unsuspecting children we could find to see how far we could stretch our lies. I do wonder what the other kids went back to tell their parents. But this is a photo into another world. If you ignore the tiny spec of 21st century Britain at the bottom, then this could be a portal, The Door Into Summer , or gateway to another dimension altogether. In the photo, the arrangement of the trees, hedges and shadows looks almost like a path zig-zagging to the ocean where there'd be a ship sailing to the land on the far horizon - the Lleyn Peninsula in this case. Who knows what adventures you could have in a wo...