Authors Electric

In response to popular demand (thanks, Griselda!) I’ve decided this month’s post will be a sequel to the one published here last month, when I was wrestling with various ideas for presenting something about my suffragette great-aunt, Janet McCallum (‘Auntie Jenny’) at an International Women’s Day event. Extract from a Daily Mirror report (1908) First of all, my session didn’t go entirely as planned. Not that I had planned it exactly, since I wasn’t at all sure how many people would turn up or what the technological facilities might consist of on the day. Or perhaps I might be kinder to myself and claim I had planned for all eventualities! One thing I hadn’t anticipated was that people didn’t really understand the programme for the event, which lasted just over half a day in all. There were some things such as ‘crafts and coffee’ that ran throughout the whole event, and some things that theoretically only lasted half an hour or so. What really happened was that people wandered from on...

Sometimes I get stopped in my tracks when something I am currently reading has an unexpected to connection to something I see on the news, or on TV or in a play. You may remember a couple of months ago I wrote about The Great Divide , a novel I listened to which resonated because the Panama Canal was in the news at the time. A couple of months ago while perusing my to-be-read shelf (I have more than just a pile) I picked out a novel called A Song for Kitty by Angela Cairns . I had bought it at a local author event over a year ago and it is a signed copy. The titular character, Kitty, is a real person - Katherina Maria Schäfer born in Germany in 1871. Her stage name was Kitty Marion and she performed in the Music Halls before the first World War. She was also a prominent suffragette, standing up for women’s rights by participating in civil unrest, including arson. She was arrested and went on hunger strike on more than one occasion for the cause. Kitty Marion She isn’t the main char...

                                               Seventy-Five Years     “TWENTY-FOUR YEARS remind the tears of my eyes.” So wrote Dylan Thomas in 1938. He was, although he didn’t know it, only to live another fifteen years longer, before dying from acute alcohol poisoning in New York during a reading tour of his poems.   I first came to his poetry in 1966 when I was in Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool, recovering from a cartilage operation. There, as chance would have it, I fell in with a fellow patient, Alan, who spoke enthusiastically of Dylan Thomas and recommended that I read his poems. I duly did so, and my edition of his  Collected Poems 1934-1952  which I have beside me now is inscribed Peter Leyland Liverpool. 1967.   Now, as I begin my seventy sixth year it occurs to me reflexively that five of them have passed since the beginning o...

  Giant egg in centre of a roundabout. San Antonio, Ibiza. April being the Easter month, this feels a good time to talk about an egg. A giant egg, in fact. One that appeared in the centre of the main roundabout of San Antonio, Ibiza, around 30 years ago. Now eggs are not something San Antonio is particularly known for. Fish, yes. Sailing boats. A bristling of unattractive high rise concrete hotels and apartments that sprung up in the 1960s, transforming what had been a modest fishing village with a beautiful natural harbour into a popular package holiday spot at the, er, cheaper end of the range. Bristling with hotels: San Antonio Ibiza Skyline By A.Savin - Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141078063 Which itself led to all those deliciously shocking Ibiza-uncovered-style documentaries following hapless lobster-pink young people from bar to bar until they collapse, sozzled, on the beach at 8 am. So back to the egg. What inspired the municipal author...

Last Month I started to write a blog and realised that there was no 29 th  of the month! This March, though, I have been celebrating all things female.    It was my first time being a delegate for the United Nations concerning Women’s issues.       It was an amazing opportunity and I was so proud to be a part of this. Women all over the world came together to see how much progress we have made, and how much further we still have to go. We discussed issues from child marriage to menopause, and I have to say it was incredibly enlightening, and sometimes a little sad to see how, in many areas, we are still rooted in the past. Only two weeks ago, I attended a medical appointment, which I waited four years for. I was greeted by a consultant who firstly held on to my hand far too long to be comfortable, then he complimented me on my smile. Now, I am not immune to compliments, but it seemed to be in appropriate for the situation. It was especially annoying wh...

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien  “Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for. "I was born a long time ago…” That’s the opening of The Third Policeman,   and it contains a psychology of psychopathy. The cool, unemotional account of a violent murder. The ranking of murder as equal in importance to the manufacture of a bicycle-pump, and the instant shifting of blame. Flann O’ Brien is known as a ‘comic w...