Authors Electric

You may know I moved house last summer, after 23 years of having my own study – a large room with a view over fields and the river valley, with bookcases and a sofa and a big desk. Peace and quiet. Room to think and write. So we moved. Downsized. Still the same village – less than a mile from the old house. But this house is much smaller and newer. It’s cosy and we are slowing getting it straight; having paid off the mortgage helps too. But I lost my study. There’s a tiny 3 rd  bedroom upstairs – just big enough for a sofa-bed and a small desk, and that’s Andy’s study as he works from home more often than I do and frequently has conference calls.  And now, I have the end of the dining room as my  ’ space ’ . I was hoping to have the conservatory – but it’s really little more than a lean-to with no central heating and I’d be wary of leaving computer kit in there. It’d be fine with a laptop and comfy chair in the summer; I’ll let you know this year, as at the mome...

When I told my dad, years ago, that I’d submitted a novel to a publisher, he gave me a wry smile and said, ‘Well, I hope you have better luck than I ever did.’ I did have some luck – certainly better than my dad did with his writing. He was always rather secretive about it when I was young. I can understand that much better now, though at the time I’d have loved to see what he’d written. The only things he ever showed me were some jokes sent to Reader’s Digest – if I remember rightly, for their feature ‘Humour in Uniform’. I never quite got the jokes, probably because I’d never been in the armed forces myself. Sadly, I don’t think they ever accepted any of Dad’s stories, though to his credit he went on trying for many years. I’m sure he wrote other things too. His favourite author of fiction was P. G. Wodehouse. I have all PGW’s books now, arrayed on my bookshelf, including a number of relatively hard-to-find early works that I managed to track down for Dad in his later life....