Authors Electric

THANK YOU KAREN BUSH / MADWHIPPET for this extra day's grace and for your brain-blowing alternative alphabet.   Do your whippetties play it with you? They look intelligent enough... I blame my delay on the power of stories, their power to break their bounds and invade our minds and knock our lives hopelessly off course. The John's Campaign logo by Claudia Myatt It was two years to this date (yesterday) that I wrote my first John's Campaign blog post  on this site. My friend Nicci Gerrard had, over that previous summer, been telling me the story of her father's catastrophic decline and eventual death following the period he had spent in hospital, severed, by Visting Hours regulations, from the loving support of his family. I'd also been reading Sally Magnusson's narrative of the night she and her sister were banned from remaining in hospital with their mother when she had broken her hip and I was selfishly determined to ensure that nothing like that was ...

I'm about to order Jan Needle's: RUMP OF RUMP HALL - THE RISE OF RONALD T RUMP.   Having always loathed "THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS" (all the animals seemed to be middle-aged or elderly clubbish gentlemen - not my scene) I love Jan's satires, and know I'm going to enjoy this one. Having said that, I do, accidentally, own a copy of one of  Kenneth Grahame's lesser-known works: THE GOLDEN AGE, first published in 1899, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish ( I believe he went on to p ro duce biscuit tin lids which are now collect ors' items). Here is Graham's lost childhood in idyllic English countryside. I n parts, i t's a funny book, with small boys' fantas y games along with inscrutable aunts and amusing elderly gents, but it's also sad, full of nostalgia for a world that was rapidly vanishing, and as with everything written around that period and later, there's the shadow of the First World War just around the corner ...