Authors Electric

There’s a passage in John Clare's Autobiography when he describes the day he wandered away from his native village of Helpstone to explore the yellow furze heath of Emmonsales. It was a distant, alluring prospect.  He expected that, when he reached the horizon, he would gaze over the edge of the world. ‘So I eagerly wandered on and rambled along the furze the whole day until I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers seemed to forget me and I imagined they were the inhabitants of new countrys the very sun seemed to be a new one and shining in a different quarter of the sky still I felt no fear my wonder-seeking happiness had no room for it I was finding new wonders every minute & was walking in a new world and expecting the worlds end bye and bye but it never came often wondering to myself that I had not found the edge of the old one the sky still touched the ground in the distance & my childish wisdom was puzzled in perplexities night came on before I had time ...

In the latter part of this strange summer my son Bertie and I have been working on a history of Waldringfield. A k a ‘Wunnerf’l’ as the Suffolk pronunciation has it – which the locals are quick to point out is almost indistinguishable from the correct way to say ‘wonderful’. ‘Wunnerf’l Wunnerf’l’ runs to 314 large and glossy pages with somewhere in the region of 618 photographs and is a tremendous achievement by the Waldringfield History Group -- and also by Bertie who was responsible for design and typesetting. At the outset, however, I wondered where we would ever reach our collective goal of publication by Michaelmas (Sept 29th).  The two pages of foreword entitled 'Wonderful Waldringfield' went through a larger number of politely argued re-writes than any other section of the book. Everyone had their view on what precisely constitutes the particular wonderfulness of this Suffolk village. The answer, of course, is the Deben. 'The River Deben means many things to many p...

Master Mariner (Cally & Hetty) As a writer of sailing adventures where the main protagonists are older children and young teenagers (with a seasoning of redoubtable geriatrics) I wonder sometimes whether I’m stretching credulity too far as I put them through the trials and tribulations of my somewhat melodramatic plots. It was immensely reassuring therefore to spend a few days in late July at the Cadet World Championships in Bodstedt, Northern Germany in the company of approximately 242 young sailors in my target age group.           The Cadet is a granddaddy of a dinghy. Commissioned by Yachting World magazine from legendary boat builder Jack Holt in 1947 it was a rapid success in the more family-friendly, less class-divided world of postwar Britain and soon went international. As a 1950s child learning to sail in a classic 12’ clinker-built dinghy with plenty of room for Mum or Dad, I looked with awe and envy at my contempor...

Setting out from Bawdsey 12.7.2016 (Bertie's photo) I was sitting on the train from London battling an absurd desire to cry. I knew that if I started the torrent would be unstoppable and my fellow passengers and I would find ourselves paddling home though a salty pool like the desperate creatures in Alice in Wonderland . My distress was amorphous and unreasonable. How to contain it? I’ve an underhand technique which I use very sparingly for Mum. She only rarely weeps, yet her mind is too often awash with fear and grief. A natural disaster, someone else’s illness, “Abide With Me” all provide her with something definite to be sad about. It turns the emotion into facts and words which, with any luck, she will soon forget. But that strategy wasn’t going to work for me on the train now leaving platform 13. Hurricane Matthew and its human devastation, the children of the Calais Jungle, bombardment of Aleppo – ? Absolutely not. In my bag was my son Bertie’s log of his Peter...

Lovely Leonard in work mode & woolly hat, top left. Sheila Johnston and myself (+ big bump!). Early in the new year, an email dropped into my inbox to tell me the sad news that an old colleague, Leonard White, had died on 2nd January. I hadn’t known just how old he was – he always seemed supremely youthful to me – but it turns out he almost made his century. He was born on 5th November 1916 and died on 2nd January 2016. The first time I met Leonard was when he produced my television serial, Shadow of the Stone , for STV, back in 1986. It was broadcast the following year. Having written many hours of drama for BBC Radio 4, I had embarked on writing stage plays and that, in turn, had led to three short one off plays for Scottish Television, on the encouragement of the head of drama, Robert Love, who liked to promote new writers and new writing. Thereafter I managed to secure a commission for a six part Young Adult serial at a time when YA wasn’t really a thing. Shadow of the S...

I’m not sure how it works, but it’s happened again. The author as Captain Ahab I’ll explain. It’s embarrassing to admit that my WIP has been IP for ages. It used to take me about 6 months to write the first draft of a novel, but this one’s been crawling forward on and off for 2 years, maybe longer. It’s over the 50,000 word mark but grinding through that particular point has been difficult, and I’ve no idea why. It’s a sequel to The Figurehead , which is a historical crime novel that also became a romance. Part of the reason why I’ve been dragging my heels is that I’m still not sure how I’m going to resolve the problems of the relationship between a figurehead carver, John Grant, and Helen Anderson, the daughter of a rich merchant. The novel’s set in 1841, when attitudes to marriage and extra-marital goings-on didn’t leave much scope for … well, anything really. A perfect day But the thing that’s ‘happened again’ has, as usual, come out of the blue. As well as the...

Snow Petrel reaches the Antarctic So, here I am in Boat Harbour, Cape Denison with five shore lines attached and the anchor down with 60 metres of chain. It’s the windiest place on earth but today, miraculously, the sun is out and the water calm. I’m being observed by crowds of Adelie penguins while dark brown Weddell seals lie like slugs on the stained ice. It’s taken two months to get here – six weeks of frantic, relationship-testing preparation and then two weeks sailing south through the most feared waters in the world. Three thousand kilometres through the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties. We’ve survived a knockdown, felt our way through the pack ice as if crossing a minefield and now we’re here and the sky is a hard, bright blue and my two boys are out in the dinghy as if this is a childhood picnic spot. We have reached Antarctica. It is dark and damp in Suffolk and I should be conserving my torch batteries. It’s four in the morning and I ca...

This will be a broken-backed blog, I fear.  There's a radical change of subject half-way through, but there's a segue which I hope you think works. We had a wonderful day out last week.  Like millions of others, we had tried in vain to buy tickets for something - anything - in the Olympics.  Of course, we failed.  When the Games started and tickets were put on sale every morning, we tried again.  But the tickets cost the proverbial arm and leg and we soon realised that we had to get up at 3am to stand a chance.   Yet we still clung on to the idea that we might somehow see the Olympic Park while it was fulfilling its original purpose and also get into at least one of the venues, preferably the main stadium.  And so we tried for what we thought would be just a consolation prize.  We bought tickets for the Paralympics. And all that mighty heart is lying still Just a consolation.  And then I remembered something very pleasing.  Wh...