Authors Electric

I’ve always been – shall we say, sensitive? – to jargon. So when I read the following paragraph in an old copy of the Guardian , I thought a good cop-out blog for the jolly (despite the state of the world) post-Christmas season would be to share some of the remarks and writings that I’ve copied down in a book I’ve kept for many years. The Guardian ’s piece was from an organisation called the Local Better Regulation Office , and it read: ‘We are hosting a master class to take local authorities through the process of developing outcomes and impacts dashboards against their developed pathways. The session will focus on local authorities who have gone through the process of developing their logic model, and now require additional expertise on how to develop indicators to measure achievements against outcomes.’ ‘Outcomes and impacts dashboards’, eh? There’s an organisation that knows the power of language. We all love words, the things they can do, the magic they can unlock o...

If you’re no longer in the first flush of youth but still hanker after picking up that old tennis racket, I can heartily recommend it.  But as you step onto the court for the first time, you may well have a sense of foreboding, especially if, like me, you’ve spent the years in between trying to hit a smaller and harder (but crucially stationary) ball on the boundless fairways of a golf course.  You will discover your legs still work - but not at any speed. You do have a degree of hand-eye coordination - but everything around you happens too fast. When you eventually make contact the ball can go anywhere - but never where you need it to go (a bit like golf, then!) That vital connection between thought and action has gone, leaving you looking very sheepish as you lumber forward when the ball has already bounced twice, or optimistically shouting ‘great shot’ for something cruising past you at moderate speed. Suburban tennis - bliss! However, you’ve had the luc...

What does it mean to be ‘in the zone’. You usually hear it from sportsmen such as golfers, who are either grateful that God has taken time out to accompany them on a round and make sure all their putts drop, or have succeeded because they’ve been ‘in the zone’ (hereinafter ITZ). To me, it simply means that you’re focusing on (and presumably enjoying) something so much that you don’t notice the passage of time, you’re unaware of your own self, your identity, your surroundings, or anything other than whatever the activity demands. I’m writing about it because a couple of recent experiences have reminded me of how exhilarating it is. One was a life drawing class. I’m rubbish at it but merely having to focus on minute, specific details and try to reproduce them on paper seems to switch off everything else in the brain. The other was some wood carving. I’m better at that because I’ve been doing it for several years, having started when I was researching The Figurehead , my n...