Authors Electric

What’s the earliest birthday of your own that you can remember? For me, along with quite a few other people, I believe, it’s my fourth. 1959, that would have been (no, please don’t bother to work out how old I am). May 1959 in St Eval, an RAF base near Newquay in Cornwall. I have a number of ‘memory glimpses’ that are clearly linked to this day, though nothing of much consequence happened, looking back. My grandmother – ‘Nana’ – came to stay, catching the train from Pontefract in Yorkshire and changing at Bristol… a long day’s journey which I remember making myself a number of times. It was always fun to have Nana to stay – she was different and exciting. And on this birthday she bought me a doll’s pram, a big one, nearly as big as a real baby’s pram, in my memory at least. It was second-hand – I’m not sure why, as we weren’t well-off but neither were we very poor. Not that its second-handedness bothered me – it made it more fun because it was navy blue and a bit shabby, and N...

'Embarrassed dragon' (Public domain photograph - courtesy of Pixabay) ‘Truth’ is under discussion a great deal at present, for very obvious and necessary reasons. The truth about the external world is one thing, but what about truth in fiction? Why do certain novels irritate me beyond belief, by portraying a world that I do not recognise? Not one that is outside my own experience – I love to read about such worlds – but one that bears little relation to my own observations about myself and other people by presenting as ‘normal’ and ‘desirable’ some kind of ideal person I know I can never be? I appreciate that fiction meets a wide range of needs, not least of which is to escape from the real world and our own lives, but the kind of books I like to read (and try to write) do more than that – they latch on to something that I think can be called truth, whether or not we want to resort to high-sounding terms like ‘the human condition’. ‘Write what you know’ is regarde...