Authors Electric

  I have a habit of seeing stages of my life in terms of books or films that seemed to reflect everything I was experiencing or feeling at the time. Is this, I wonder, how we make sense of our lives, attempting to give the chaos and serendipities of reality a narrative arc where none really exists? My early years were pure Christopher Robin, an only child in the countryside, whose best friends were pets and toys, entirely unaware that I had arrived at the end of a long line of privilege; white, male, middle class and British. The idylls of “Hundred Acre Wood”, (and “Never-Never Land” for that matter), were then replaced with a mixture of “Jennings Goes to School” and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – culminating in the cathartic anarchy of Lindsay Anderson’s film, “If”, which was released just as I was reaching the end of my patience with educational institutions. “Down and Out in Paris and London”, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “Of Human Bondage” reflected the struggle to surviv...