Blogs

The first letter dated September 1982 is addressed to Dear Vic (that’s Nina’s sister) and she gives her address as 53 Gloucester Crescent London NW1. If you’ve got an NW1 address the Mosaic algorithm which credit companies favour and sorts postcodes into easy to read bundles, which brackets what kind of person you are, by where you live, and determines how much credit you can be pushed, would use terms for NW1ers as Cultural Leaders (or Global...

Prose with added line breaks? Once I got down to a careful read I decided Ruth's poetry has a poetic drive and flow. Often quietly fiery; '.....Fire the best servant and also the most dangerous.' (Fire). Personal and also far ranging poetry. There is a sequence of 19 sibyl poems: Delphic Sibyl, Shinto Sibyl, Blocked Sibyl, Hallucinating Sibyl... Each unit works as a stand-alone and she also captures the weirdness of the job; women kept in a cave...

Northanger Abbey isn’t so much a place as a time. In the introduction to Jane Austen’s (2000) Northanger Abbey the reader is informed it was written in 1897-8, but not in publication until 1803. So it’s a relatively old book, written in English, in a style of indirect free discourse (whatever that means) which Austen patented. It is also steeped in the sensibilities and, in particular, the Gothic literature of the time. The reader is addressed...

I’d this great idea for a film. Get Sir Sean Connery to play a hard-nosed cop, training an elite group to take down Al Capone. They’re set to get him on a technicality. Al Capone fails to pay his taxes. Prime Minister David Cameron phones Sir Sean. ‘We’re ready to cut a deal. We’ve put the frighteners on Al. He’s ready to play ball and cut a deal.’ ‘What’s he offering?’ asks Sir Sean. ‘A quarter bottle of Glenfiddich,’ says our Prime Minister. ‘...

ABCtaler John Giffard ( http://www.abctales.com/user/john-giffard ) has written one of the poems in this new anthology. Heroes, 100 Poems from the New Generation of War Poets. Edited by John Jeffries. This book is exactly as described in the title. It contained 100 poems covering various aspects of war. A large number of submissions were made in response to a call for poems for inclusion. A selection panel of 4, each individually rated all those...

As many of you know by now, Laurie Avadis (better known here as lavadis ) is one of three ABC authors currently crowdfunding the publication of a novel on Unbound. Unbound works by having readers put forward the capital for the books they want to read to fund their publication - and Ex is halfway to publication. But Laurie still needs a few more pledges to put the book he wrote here on ABCtales into bookshops and onto your bookcases - so we'd...

Jon Robson has the kind of job I covet, he meets Noel Edmonds -- and other strange folk doing strange things. Deal or No Deal Jon - you come and live in Dalmuir for a week and I’ll try Seattle? Who can forget the pretext of Bill and the Ufo was that angels disguised themselves as aliens and went to live in Faifley because nobody would bother them when living there? Well, me for starters and I wrote it. Aliens are only aliens when you have to...

The most likeable film I have seen for ages! Boyhood takes six year old Ellar Coltrane through his fictional Texan life until his first day in college. The project took 12 years to make, the actors reunite every few years to grow older and go through their relationship changes and housemoves. Ethan Hawke as the hippy musician divorced dad who grows more serious and settles down with the daughter of Bible bashing farmers is particularly real-...

This is the second year I've stewarded Beautiful Days. It's my local festival, pretty much everyone in East Devon who likes music and partying rocks up here. I steward as an Oxfam volunteer, I get free entry, three meal vouchers and access to the crew party and Oxfam gets paid my minimum wage earnings for three eight hour shifts so it's win-win. Having a waterproof tent matters, last year I had a £10 one from a bargain shop, this year I paid £30...

The Suicide Run has an adjunct: ‘Five Tales of the Marine Corps’. They are autobiographical short stories. In ‘My Father’s House,’ for example, begins ‘One morning in the year after the end of the war (the Good War, that is, the second War to End all Wars) when I returned to my father’s house in Virginia, and had slept long merciful hours...’ Note the world weariness, the sarcasm (the War to End all Wars, was, of course, The First World War) yet...