This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
When I’m asked who my favourite author is, I also tend to consider who my favourite writers have been at various stages of my life. When I was very young, Roald Dahl could not be beaten. Like many children, I found his sense of mischief combined with superlative storytelling and Quentin Blake’s glorious illustrations irresistible. In my angsty teenage years, I must have re-read JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye about 20 times, dreaming of leaving boarding school and running off to the States with just a rucksack on my back (which I actually did for a year when I was 17. I wasn’t quite as rebellious as Holden Caulfield though. It was all above board.) But the writer who has stood the test of time with me most, and was taken from us far too soon, is Iain Banks. I love the twisty intrigue of Complicity , in which my hometown of Langholm has an early cameo. I adore the assault on the hypocrisies of organised religion that lie at the heart of Whit . In my teens, I was traumatised in a c...