Authors Electric

  December Dawn... Some years ago, along with several other authors, I was invited to read a Christmas story on local radio. Any short story or an excerpt from a longer piece of fiction, as long as it was set at Christmas. I chose a few pages from The Labyrinth Year, book two of my family saga set in the mid-1990s, which describes my protagonists, a young couple, Jenny and Max, taking their five year old  daughter Alice to her first Christmas carol service. It’s a super-middle-class story of warm feelings, bright candles, a lovely Tree, and excellent singing from the choir. Alice is spellbound by the Crib, and after staring a while, asks where the baby is? Mum Jenny recalls when she first met Max, in Cambridge at the end of term, and how he insisted on taking her to a carol service at his college. Max is reminded how his rather grim Dad, a Presbyterian Minister, would have disdained the ‘flummery’, as he saw it, of all this glittery nonsense in a church. So, what exactly is C...

We went out for the office Christmas lunch last week, which was quite an exciting thing to do after two years of solo parties at home in front of the festive programmes on TV. The venue was lovely. When we arrived, a large jolly table were already enjoying their lunch, all wearing party hats. When we were shown to our table, I was initially disappointed to see no Christmas crackers on ours, but then realised everyone had a slim paper "e-cracker" as part of their place setting. Upon ripping off the end (along the perforated line), party hats were quickly extracted and used as paper crowns... but where was the snap? And the joke? And the little plastic jumping frog? Turning over our e-crackers, we discovered that to access these other fun parts of the cracker experience you need to scan a QR code. Presumably with a smartphone? Which I do not have. Another member of our party quickly whipped out his phone and zapped the code, peered briefly at his screen, grinned and then rejoin...

My earliest memory of the Narnia stories is watching a cartoon version of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with my little daughter and my mother. I thought it would probably be awful, but in fact it wasn’t. The artwork was delightful and it was well narrated. At the point where the knife is poised above Aslan, my daughter burst into tears and cried out, ‘oh, don’t hurt him!’ ‘Turn it off!’ said my mother, ‘it’s upsetting her!’   I didn’t because it was crucial to see it through to the end, all tears dried.   I found the other books in the series progressively harder going but I know plenty of people who love all of them. Forty years on, I found myself walking through a wardrobe into a snow-covered landscape and that lamp post. It was completely enchanting. This was at Mottisfont House, a local NT property, once a priory and later converted into a manor house. It contains, among other delights, a Rex Whistler room with trompe l’oeil devices. For Christmas, the house was...