Blogs

As always, some amazing writing on the site this week, and it's been a hard but very pleasurable task choosing the Picks. Story of the Week is from the wonderful celticman. Characters so vivid you can (quite often) smell them, and dialogue most of us would kill to be able to write. 'Sean Happens 3' is another slice of Glasgow life, and if you haven't read any of celtic's stuff before, this is a great place to start: Sean Happens 3 | ABCtales...

Angel Carter’s Nights at the Circus explodes on the page in the form of six-foot-two, eyes of blue, fourteen stone Fevvers, a feminist icon, who has wings and really can fly. Or so it seems, she’s an aerialiste that needs no high wire. The high-flying star of Colonel Kearney’s circus—a fool and his money are easily parted; never give a mug a break—courted by Royalty, The Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse Lautrec. She’s the toast of Paris, of...

My mother’s maiden name was Connolly. As a child, she was sent ‘home’ to Ireland, during the Second World War, with her sister (my Auntie Phyllis) to safeguard them from German bombs and to make their Roman Catholic faith bombproof. She didn’t talk about it, certainly not to me, but there were whispers of predatory paedophilic attempts. And as outcast Irish, they were treated like cow shit. My Auntie Phyllis and my mum had a lifelong-bond based...

(Who UB?) Nourished from the root, through an intricate turn of events; embodiment of that you seek: while denying who you are. Bearing its character, shadow to light: Persona interpretation followed by reputation. A quote by Abraham Lincoln Character is like a tree, and reputation is like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it. The tree is the real thing.

I’d picked this book up and put it down several times. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was nearer Lost than Found. I got it was some kind of travel journal. Cheryl Strayed had walked part of the Pacific Crest Trail that stretches from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border and goes through a lot of places I’ve little or no knowledge but might be vaguely interested in because of the naturalist John Muir (a fellow Scot and honorary American...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001lspj/storyville-blue-bag-life Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s...

I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate . It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12 th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population...

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to...

I'm very pleased to announce that the readers list is now full! It's going to be a wonderful evening with some brilliant readers, new and old. Thank you all so much for registering! There is still room to be in the audience but you will have to register using the link below We have had a slight organisational hiccup and the link to register has now changed. I'll be emailing everyone on our previous list, but you will all need to re-register...