Authors Electric

The fifth anniversary of the ‘worst day in the worst week of my life’ is rapidly approaching. Next month’s blog will be posted the day after the anniversary, but because I prefer not to mark the date itself, I thought I would write about it now instead. Some sort of advance catharsis perhaps, so by the day itself I can be a little further on the way to ‘moving on’. Moving on is a process that has been accelerating over the past three to four years, thankfully, so now it’s relatively rare that I think, let alone speak, about it all. For the first couple of years my conversation, particularly with my immediate family, but also with good friends, was liberally punctuated with the acronyms BF and AF – ‘before the fire’ and ‘after the fire’. Kolo the Cat in happier times Yes, I’ve lived a pretty charmed life so far. This ‘worst day/week of my life’ was caused by just a fire. A housefire in which no one died or was badly hurt – not even our cat, who was caught up in the suffocating...

Long ago (it must be 25 years – help!), when I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors gave me a piece of advice I will never forget. Not because it was full of timeless wisdom (it may have been, but if so it passed me by) but because I didn’t understand it and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. She advised me to ‘Rewrite Chapter 3 from the inside out’. As though writing Chapter 3 hadn’t been difficult enough, in the conventional ‘start-at-the-beginning-define-your-terms-adduce-your-evidence-express-your-arguments-draw-your-conclusions’ kind of way. But no, apparently that wasn’t good enough, and my much-sweated-over chapter now had to be turned inside out like a grimy t-shirt having to be worn a second day because you lost your luggage. Partly, I feared that the turning inside out would expose all the messy loose ends I hadn’t tied off quite as neatly as I should have. Perhaps that was the idea? Or maybe my supervisor simply thought my chapter needed some restructuring and ...