Authors Electric

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...

It's sunny as I write this. I can hear my neighbour cutting her grass. Bees hover on the rosemary by my window. All I want to do, if I'm honest, is to finish this and get out there. To sit in a shady corner with a book and allow the afternoon to pass me by. I recognise that I have an ongoing conversation with the weather. It's not simply that I'm British and we can be obsessed by it. It's that the weather can shape my day. Cold has me huddled indoors, hands curled around a mug of hot tea. The rain - especially if it comes with days of endless grey - leaves me struggling to find the motivation to do anything. Wind - ask any teacher of five-year-olds how she copes with children on a windy day. I know just how those children feel - wind seems to blow through my head leaving me reeling from one idea to another without managing to grasp any of them. I know myself well enough to recognise that there are days when I need to go with the flow of the weather, and others w...