Blogs

Dirt Music is a disappointment. I’ll need to qualify that. I read the whole 461 pages and I wasn’t quite sure, at the end, if the plane crashed, or if Fox had hallucinated such a thing, but he’s blue and Georgie is blowing into his mouth as Jim Buckridge watches on. Dirt Music is a disappointment because it’s not Breath , Winton’s 2008 book. It’s a simple enough plot. Georgie Jutland is forty, a nurse that no longer nurses. She lives at White...

I’m not interested in trains, or cars or the latest gadgets and sadly my Japanese language skills are drawn from Mary Sanderson’s purple hair and 1981 number one hit ‘he’s my Japanese boy; he’s my Japanese boy’. But this interests me because the increasingly fast train—Shinkansen bullet train to Toyko used to take eight hours, it’s under two hours now and that time is shrinking—is a metaphor for our society. Japan’s biggest train crash, 25th...

Tuberculosis is something we don’t really need to worry about here in the West. We used to get inoculated against it at secondary school and it was a rite of passage about how big the needle was how little it hurt (ouch, ouch). There was a little BCG stamp on your shoulder that showed you were a real man, and women could be real men too, with the same little stamp on their shoulder. Tuberculosis was a thing of the past associated with tenement...

The next ABCtales Reading is in just under two weeks - Wednesday, March the 26th at the Wheatsheaf in London - and we've got an excellent roster of readers. If you haven't already, make sure to book the evening off to hear from Stan , Bee , Akanbi, TFH, BarelyBlackFrancis, Rhiannonw, Robert of the Queen Mary University Creative Writing Society, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, Joe and Elsie Katz – it's bound to be an incredible night and we'll look forward...

Anyone that has ever dived into my writing knows I can’t spell and often confuse breath and breathe. Breath is the stuff you breathe. The stuff of life. Bruce— ‘Pikelet’—Pike is the kind of paramedic that you’d want to turn up in an emergency. He misses nothing, the broken collar-bone of the father that has been fractured beating down the door of his boy’s room. The mother trying to concoct a story that it was an accident and her boy didn’t hang...

All Made Up is a play on words. In what can be described as a follow up to This is not about me , which took Galloway to the cusp of adolescence and won her Scottish Book of the Year. For me it was a shocking discovery, somebody that could write and was more gifted than Alice Munro—and was Scottish. Play the bagpipe music and wheel on the shortcake. The ‘villain’ was Cora, Janice’s sister, who is twenty years older than her, and I use that word...

It’s a year of anniversaries. One hundred years since the First World War and thirty years since the miners’ strike. Great Britain, an island nation, built on coal. Remember them, coal miners? Quaint little people that used to black up and work in coal mines. Seems hard to believe they existed. 84 000 of them and they had wives and families. Seventy pits. Arthur Scargill the NUM leader said the government had a hit list. The media proclaimed it...

Something wonderful happens today. At thirty minutes past one this afternoon, a massive spine - tingling roar will be heard throughout the country. Yep, it's the start of the Cheltenham Festival. Now I can hear some of you thinking, it’s just horse racing, it’s just another meeting, what’s so important? In the next few hundred words, I will do my best to explain. Whatever sport you follow, there are always the big events. In Athletics you have...

So, ABCers – as of today I am a published author! My book B is for Breast Cancer is actually in the shops today and it started right here… I wrote the book when I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Five years ago, aged 45, I found myself diagnosed with the disease and my first thought was for my ten-year-old son. Then I worried about how my poor old mother would cope with the news. And then, and I’m not kidding, I thought – what about...

A weekend of unseasonably warm weather is upon us lucky few down in the England's southern portion, and not a moment too soon. I hope you all get a chance to enjoy some of it, to take in a little nature and maybe follow in the footsteps of the romantics (that’s what this week’s IP is about: http://www.abctales.com/inspiration-point-ip ), but even if you’re stuck somewhere that's still obeying traditional seasonal rules, take a moment to breathe...