Authors Electric

  If that's the view from the front door, I'm staying in. That Storm Goretti was some storm.    And that's the view from the back door. It weighed down and broke my rose arch.            Still....   The Ghost Drum My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.         In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.      In winters there, the cold is so fierce the frost can be heard crackling and snapping as it travels through the air. The snow is so deep that...

I've been conscious for quite a few years of an instinctive desire to hibernate during those months of hardly any daylight and weather that varies between being too cold to go out and too wet to go out. Here in Edinburgh, however, January 2026 has begun with several days of the blue skies and dazzling brightness that sometimes happens after a heavy fall of snow, only until today we hadn’t had the snow, thank goodness. In fact, as soon as I had drafted this post the clouds rolled in and we had a couple of flurries.  Until this happened, it was almost as if the weather was trying to tempt me to go outside, though I am not up to full strength yet for walking, and there are some frosty patches on the roads and pavements. Still, it's a far cry from the last time we had serious snow, when the 'Beast from the East' arrived some years ago. I well remember being sent home from work in mid-afternoon only to find the buses had stopped running and I had to walk all the way, taking ...

Scary stories read out loud late at night in a big old barn. Yorkshire, middle-of-nowhere, halfway down the valley at the end of a steep lane. It’s late November and the weather forecast is for high winds and snow tonight.  Sounds a bit of a cliché, doesn’t it?  Go to bed after a few glasses of wine. Get woken up by big bangs in the distance somewhere. It’s windy. Get up at 3am for a wee – light switch – nothing. No power. Okaaay…. A few hours later and even the security lighting has failed. Look out of the window and it’s snowing. Even more of a  cliché?  (c) Ariell Cacciola There's no power, no heat, no light. By the morning, I could at least see, so I wander downstairs, wondering which one of the 14 of us will be the first body to be found in this classic set-up for a murder-mystery! Still no power and no gas here either, so can’t even make coffee and we have to wait for somebody who knows about these things to lay and light a wood fire in the sitting room, so we ...

As I write this, we have not quite reached the end of the year, and on this morning of 30th December I've just completed the first draft of the novel I've been working on and also the final version of the family history research write-up I've planned to do for a couple of years. There is something unsettling about having finished both these projects at almost the same time, and I have a terrifying vision of the next year stretching out ahead of me as a blank canvas, or a stretch of fresh snow, just fallen and untrodden by any human foot. This has been a whole year of endings. My mother-in-law died in Februrary at an advanced age after a good deal of illness, and my husband died in November, somewhat more unexpectedly but after eighteen months or so of poor health.  I suppose only a writer could compare the blankness of the end of a project to the blankness of losing someone who had been part of her life for the best part of fifty years, but I've found it rather similar....

Church of England Christmas:  Carols round the Tree So wrote Janette Winterson, making this quote from her adoptive mother  the title of her autobiography (published in 2012). “Fast forward” from Thursday 12th December, and we’ve nearly hit Wednesday 25th December, Christmas Day... As a person who studied social and political science, my involvement with the recent shenanigans in our Parliament has been on alert . For the UK election, the NHS and climate change topped my agenda. And I am unambiguously appalled by the results. On “social media” many of us have shared – not reviled, ranted, or abused, but shared – our distress for our country. We  are not happy. We don’t want to see this as “normal”. Parents of disabled children, people with long-term health problems (like diabetes), people who know through their work the cost in human life and future prospects of child poverty, homelessness, poorly funded education and failing health and mental health ser...

Spring has ... woops, it’s winter again. Is anyone else paralysed by difficult weather? - As I wrote that I struggled for the right adjective. Weather is simply weather; we describe it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ according to our own construct of it. And that construct can change over time. For instance, the recent snow and ice saw me stuck at home. The path from the doorway of my flats to the street was sheet ice and I already have one broken finger - I don’t need a second. But if my grandsons had been here they would have been undeterred by a little ice (they would probably have made it slippier by sliding on it) and I would have clung to the railings beside them so we could reach the park to play snowballs. Snow, for most children, is a playground. For me, it cuts me off.  I know people who are comparably deterred by strong sunshine. The second the sun appears. I’m out there. The slightest glimmer and I’m smiling. But for some the heat is enough to send them to a darkened r...

Once again I have benefitted, quite unfairly, from my lack of organisational prowess, by having left the creation of my March post until the last minute and, because of this, being able to write about the sudden re-arrival of winter just when we thought we could all come out of hibernation. I've spent a few days trapped in the house, but that isn't exactly an enormous hardship, apart from the fact that the IT department at my workplace, in an uncharacteristic display of technical skill, have managed to make it possible for me to log into my work desktop remotely and even to update the main database from the comfort of my writing desk in the conservatory. So I haven't been able to spend all my time on writing-related tasks as I might have done otherwise (though I've worked on my Spanish course a little - more on that later). The cat makes his way cautiously down the garden, treading in his own paw-prints from last time to avoid getting his feet too wet. But wh...

I have a very active Forgettery. We all have one of these - a place where we store idealised images, like an album into which we post nothing disagreeable or upsetting. The perfect summer is always in there - the blue skies, the flowers, the lavish picnic without squabbles, sweat or wasps, the turquoise pool into which perfect children jump and splash quite noiselessly, the perfect affair between a couple of unbelievably beautiful people with sungold skin - remember those two? Thought it would never end, but it did. Endings have no place in the Forgettery, though, so it doesn't show. Most people have lengthy summer sections in their Forgetteries - after all, who wants winter, unless you ski, and even then, things look better when the sun is shining, don't they? I, however, am a winter person. I like a bit of drama in my weather, and I enjoy the cold and seeing my breath clouding in the air, and the pleasure of coming into a warm house afterwards, books, TV, and maybe a whisk...