Authors Electric

 First a greeting for the Solstice:   I’ve been a writer of sorts for as long as memory serves me, but my salaried working life was as a psychologist. Having both things going on was (mostly) good, I think. I was steered towards psychology when to the anguish of some of my schoolteachers, I didn’t want to teach myself or be a nurse. Then a new course in the subject was about to start at Brunel Polytechnic. I’d never heard of it. A promotional leaflet was sent round to schools and when my Headmistress saw it, she thought of me. I don’t know why, but it felt right straight away and my interview with Professor Jahoda confirmed the feeling. Professor Jahoda: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/jahoda-marie  Among very many lucky things in my life was being taught by Marie Jahoda. When I’d flunked my O level maths and couldn’t take up my place at Brunel, she wrote and encouraged me to try again, as Faculty wouldn’t waive the requirement, although she’d asked. I did, and pas...

Sunrise, North Bay, Scarborough, Summer 2015 For me, March 1 st is the first day of Spring. When we lived in Edinburgh, that was the day the sun first used to graze the edge of our kitchen cupboards before setting. Next day, the thin band of golden light would be a little wider, next day wider still, reassuring us that summer was on the way (always assuming, of course, that there were no clouds – but I don’t remember a single year of not seeing the sun fall on our cupboards on that date). Where I live now, we don’t have sunshine-on-the-cupboard day, though we do have something I like to call sunshine-up-the-plughole day, in spite of my other half’s assuring me that the sun is not really shining up the plughole. It certainly looks as though it is, which is what matters to me. It’s not on Mar 1 st either – it’s sometime in April and again in August – so it doesn’t signify Spring in the same way but it’s better than nothing. In Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, wh...