Authors Electric

I’ve spent the last year or more waiting for heart surgery, and the last couple of months of this time have been particularly frustrating. This is because I got as far as having a pre-operation assessment at the end of May, and felt fairly confident that I would find myself on the operating table within a few weeks of it. Other family members even made their holiday arrangements around that date prediction, and I’m not really getting any better as I wait either! Still, I’ve managed to finish and publish two (or is it three? I’m starting to lose count) novels in the time since I first saw the cardiac surgeon, and I’m working on two more at this very moment, so it isn’t as if I’ve completely wasted the time, though anyone who sees the state of our house might imagine I have. In some ways this reminds me of the wait I had before giving birth to my first child. I was supposed to be resting in bed during the eight weeks before the due date because of raised blood pressure, but the problem...

  Over the last few weeks I've gradually got the feeling that we have come through the worst of the pandemic. This could well be an illusion, of course, and we certainly have other problems to deal with at the moment, to make up for the loss of the constant worry about catching a potentially fatal illness just by doing something that was previously normal such as boarding a bus. My first glimpse of normality was when my son and I travelled to Llandudno and back by train(s). Even this wasn't entire normal as we wore masks all the way, despite the failure of many other passengers to do the same, and there were seats cordoned off and a lack of refreshments even on the first-class part of the journey (Edinburgh to Manchester). There was more of a sense of adventure than usually accompanies travel within the UK, too.  This more than made up for the hassle of having to change trains three times on the way and three on the way back, and my son didn't grumble at all, not even when ...

It's about the time of year when I start the often lengthy process of planning my holidays. When I was younger this would involve negotiations with others in the family and a fruitless quest to try and please everyone. Nowadays, it turns out that pleasing myself is even more difficult. Or at least, there are too many options and not enough time, and I can't make up my mind what to prioritise. I also now have to accept that the physical limitations mean I will not always enjoy the kind of things I would have wanted to do previously. Oddly enough, though, I still managed to have an excellent time at Alton Towers last year, and was able, more or less, to spend whole days on my feet without too many after-effects. It just shows that it isn't only time that flies when you're enjoying yourself! The options for this year fall neatly into categories, as follows: (a) Places I need to visit for research - including some places I didn't even know existed until I started m...

... the more we know we don't know. You can be just lying in your bed, watching a mindless video and an epiphany finds you. You don't have to go climb mountains or anything. You don't even have to want one, or anything. For example, whilst recuperating from a nasty bug over Christmas - no way to spend the holidays - I was was half watching a You Tube video of what was supposed to be a romantic mountain train journey around Switzerland. I had the sound turned off. Watching trains lulls me to sleep somehow. It takes me back to being a little kid curled up in the swaying, top bunk of my parents' compartment on our annual winter cross-country rail journey from Los Angeles to Boston, Massachusetts back in the 1940s. The top bunks on the old Pullman cars used to have these little oval windows up where the carriage wall curved into the ceiling. I could slide a little plastic shade open and peek out onto a moonlit winter landscape with myriad stars above. It was like the t...

The author then and now When I was seven, it was a very good year – sort of. World War II ended. The Allies won. America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, beginning the nuclear age, which “changed everything except our way of thinking,” as Einstein observed, adding that he “should have become a watchmaker.” During the war, my father, who had worked in his family's food brokerage business back in Boston, took us to Los Angeles and became a welder at a Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, California, building P-38 Lightning fighter bombers. He had wanted to be a doctor, but couldn't afford medical school during the Great Depression. My mother sang with a dance band at a faux Arabian Nights potted-palm night club on the Sunset Strip, the kind you see in old Astaire movies, but with a bit less swank. She had been a promising opera singer in New England, doing lead roles and recitals on stage. My parents saw themselves as thwarted, although they didn't use...