Authors Electric

I’m a big fan of travel writing. There’s nothing I like better than to curl up with an intrepid individual as they scale icy mountains, trek across uncharted wastes and battle with hostile tribes. If you’ve never read him, I’d encourage you to look into the works of Eric Newby (personal favourites of mine being Love and War in the Apennines and A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush).   I myself am not a great traveller. I don’t like flying (lack of control, no leg room, hurtling through the air in a metal tube. Why would you?) and I prefer to get to know several places really well rather than going to lots of different destinations just once. I do love travelling on trains and last Saturday, I made the two-hour journey from rural East Suffolk to the throbbing depths of the capital for the 50 th Anniversary ACW Writers’ Day in Westminster. Dear readers, at no point did I whip out a set of crampons and scramble up an inhospitable slope. Nor did I have to don snowshoes and crunch my way o...

I know, this title reads like a children's story. If only. Life has got a bit serious for many of us: the tribulations of a travel writer are nothing when compared to so many. I'm fortunate. I don't need the income from my travel writing to put food on the table. For those who do - life must have become impossible. Where can they go? What can they write about? We are used taking our safety into account: we generally give serious social unrest a wide berth and don't put ourselves in the path of animals that might eat us. (Well, I did, once - but not deliberately). Speaking for myself: I am fascinated by the minutiae of people's lives - wherever they are and whatever their circumstances. I will oppose poverty tourism (gawping at mud huts or rows of metal beds in orphanages) till the day I die, but will defend anyone who spends hours round a fire listening to singing, and dancing, and telling stories. For me, those stories are the life-blood of travelling. But what...

Ah, travel writers - they can transport us all over the world. But times have changed since Eric Newby wrote about his Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Now we can google anywhere we want. We can watch people terrify themselves with white water rafting or bungee jumping. We can relax to the shush of the waves while we sip wine from the comfort of our own living rooms. Do we need words any more? And, if we do need words (I'm a writer - what is life without words?), what are we hoping for? To find out about a faraway place we might visit some day? To learn about cultures and differences that can widen our horizons? To get vicarious pleasure from someone else's risk-taking? I've written about travel for decades. I think that the focus - even the reason - for travel writing has changed. When I wrote about my round-the-world trip ( Over the Hill and Far Away ) I was in my mid-50s and wanted to show that it was possible for women of any age to take on the world and have advent...

I’m in Ecuador - and writing this in a hammock. Oh lucky me!! However, by putting my good fortune down to luck devalues the privilege that allows me to wander round the world as I do. I am a white woman, from a comfortable background, and graduated from university (a long time ago) with no debt and plenty of dreams. There’s been a lot of Life since then, of course, but that doesn’t take from the fundamental good fortune of my origins. I love it here. I have spent hours watching pelicans dive-bombing the sea: they cruise from about two feet above the waves and then rise, only to plummet like rockets. Sometimes they bob up with a full beak, and sit on the sea gulping for a minute or two before taking to the skies again.  There they joined by the frigatebirds, which wheel above the fishermen in their hundreds. Frigatebirds don’t bother to fish for themselves; they wait for a fisherman to throw away a tiddler, or to turn his back, and steal it. And, if one should be succe...

I've just spent a few days in Madrid. It's one of my favourite cities - and I've spent this morning trying to work out just what I love about it. I can highlight things like way people sit about in cafes for hours, as if they have no work or homes to go to. I can highlight the magnificent art galleries - I could happily drown in art here. I can even wax lyrical about the traffic, which often crawl sat snails' pace but without the cacophony of hooting that besets many other European cities. But it's more than that. Somehow the city gets under my skin, far deeper than the place where words hide. I simply feel at home there. Nevertheless, with this blog post to write, I felt I ought to try to be a bit more specific. And so I looked at my photos - I took very few on this trip, and so maybe this selection can tell me something about why I love this city. I'll begin in Plaza Mayor: The Plaza is vast, with plenty of street cafes and street entertainers and to...

My eldest grandson is twelve today. I'm sure those of us with grandchildren all remember where we were when we heard they had been born. Those nail-biting days beforehand. That overwhelming joy to know that mother and baby were fine ... or more serious nail-biting if all is not as we'd hoped. But this grandson's arrival was a bit different for me. I was over half way through my Grown-up Gap Year. My daughter had told me she was pregnant three weeks before I set off - and a week before she returned to her job in Caracas. The original plan was for her to have the baby in Venezuela and I would go out to help when she went back to work - my travels would be completed by then. But Chavez was already in power and threatening to refuse exit visas to any child born in the country until he or she reached 18. (It was an attempt to stop the trade in beautiful brown babies to childless couples in America). And so she decided to return to the UK for the birth. (As things have turn...

I've been back from Sri Lanka for two days. This was a very different trip for me - usually I travel alone, and for 4-6 weeks. This time I was with my brother and sister-in-law, for two weeks, and our trip was organised around cricket (England are playing Sri Lanka at the moment.) It's too soon to find the right words to describe these two weeks. We packed a lot in - and I need to digest my notebooks and let the story evolve before I can begin to find coherence in it. Besides which I am mildly jet-lagged, which makes writing in complete sentences something of a challenge. And so here are some pictures. In time I'll find time to describe the sheer weight of an elephant: Or the appeal of a baby monkey (doesn't the mum look tired!): Or the tangy smell of spices: Or the peaceful smile of a Buddha: And then, of course, there was the cricket: By next month I'll be able to manage words. But if you need some now, try my website:  www.jocar...

I’m home from my travels. So surely I should be returning to the blank screen with renewed vigour, shouldn’t I?  Why doesn’t it work like that? I’ve a big project I want to get my teeth into. I should be refreshed by five weeks up mountains. I should be rising from my bed at sparrowfart and tapping away at the computer as the cocks crow. Oh the best-laid plans. And I’ve been away often enough to know it never works like that. The reality of a long journey, heaps of washing, and an empty fridge means that ordinary self-care must come first. Ah, self-care. I had plenty of time to reflect on that while I was away. I had an apartment in Pokhara, with a sunny balcony and view across rooftops to the hills and mountains. From there I could watch as the women of Nepal worked to meet the basic needs of their families.  Unpicked, that can be reduced to: keeping warm, keeping clean, and keeping well-fed. None of which is too difficult for those of us in the UK with enoug...

Ginger Torch Lily - totally tropical I’m lucky to be just back from a Caribbean holiday where we were greeted more than once with the words ‘welcome to paradise!’ and it was easy to see the comparison: exotic plants, colourful birds, and the kind of warmth I always associate with the big greenhouses we visited as kids in our local park – except this was everywhere and 24/7 - a joy after a cold December. Add fresh pineapple, melon, papaya and spiced rum punch more or less on tap and you can guess we were happy. Our friend the 'breakfast bird' But paradise? I began to get picky. As we were deposited from our courtesy bus on to a pretty but rather busy beach, I muttered to my companion that I had imagined paradise to be a lot less populated. Then there was the night-time noise. I expect I would eventually have got used to the chirruping crickets and squeaky tree-frogs but   when these were joined by the crash of rain on our homely tin roof I was reaching fo...

Seasonal reads by Debbie Young - some novels, some short stories, but all good fun One of the many reasons I love writing contemporary fiction is that it means I don't have to bother much with research. In this respect, I'm in good company, because as my friend T E Shepherd , who writes compelling magical realism novels, told me over the weekend, Philip Pullman says: One of the pleasures of writing fiction is that you can sit at your desk and just make up what you are too lazy to go and find out. This is especially true for me because my current series of cosy mystery novels is set in a little Cotswold village much like the one I've lived in for over a quarter of a century. During that time, I've been a member of countless clubs, served on various committees, founded an annual fun run and a literary festival, and volunteered in the village community shop. There's not much about daily life in Cotswold villages that has passed me by. Having fun in H...

As I was growing up in middle-of-nowhere western Sweden, I was often told the following story by both my grandmother and my mother: It was 3 o’clock in the morning and my grandparents were fast asleep. The phone rang and my grandmother got up to answer. At the end of the line was a young journalist, who rather bluntly asked if my grandmother was aware that her youngest daughter was trapped on a small cliff ledge in the high mountains of Lapland, presumed to be seriously injured. Would my grandmother care to make a comment for his newspaper? This was the first my grandparents heard about my mother’s accident, while she was away working in the far north of Sweden. Needless to say, I grew up thinking that all journalists were the most insensitive bastards around (and some would still argue I had a point, although I’ve come to appreciate the danger of tarring everyone with the same brush). My mother, who did survive that scary accident, was pretty much of the same opinion. “Jou...

Well, I've finally managed to publish my Malawian travels on kindle (and other e-platforms). This has been a difficult book to write - wherever I went I met people eager to give me their opinions on the aid industry. And I went with First World assumptions about the importance of overseas aid and its role in changing the lives of those living in poverty - views I ended up questioning but finding no answers. And so I've left the reader with my unanswered questions. Should I have plucked solutions, rather than leave a reader uncomfortable? Or is it fine to present the challenges and leave the reader to think about them? This dilemma was part of the reason for choosing my title: Everlasting. 80% of the population of Malawi lives in poverty - and I could see no evidence of a co-ordinated of effort to challenge that. The big organisations don't seem to be trying to work themselves out of a job. At the same time, there are some magnificent, locally-driven projects that a...

The  lovely port of Santander, so much better than a bank Last week on a trip to Cantabria, we visited the museum of Altamira  where a startling range of Neolithic cave paintings were discovered in the nineteenth century, dating from somewhere around 20,000 to 14,000 BCE. Yes – they are roughly 16,000 years old.   In the ‘new’ (replica) cave, visitors can watch reconstructions of daily life  and observe the tools and skills these people are thought to have used in the stone age. But the projected display had no sound-track, and the same thought occurred to myself and a fellow tourist – how did they speak? What language did they have? Language and communication were in fact pressing concerns on this trip. I used to consider myself a bit of a linguist but it appears I came to Spain and Spanish too late in life to ever feel comfortable with it and have to fall back on a dumb tourist act to get through any holiday, something that grieves me for the duration ...