Blogs

ABC Tales writer Colin Burnett (author of the absorbing and thought-provoking novel 'A Working Class State of Mind') has an article in the upcoming issue of 'The National'. We haven't got a link for you yet, but we will post one as soon as we can. Anyone familiar with Colin's work will know that this is going to be well worth reading. We've had some wonderful stories posted during the last seven days, but after a lot of thought Story of the Week...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001j079/the-shamima-begum-story Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Near the end of The Shamima Begum Story, Josh Baker asked her a question we often hear: ‘What would you tell your fifteen-year-old self?’...

Putin vs The West, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Narrator Caroline Catz, Editor Toby Marter, Director Tim Stirzaker, and Series Producer Norma Percy. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlz7tz/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-1-my-backyard https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzcrb/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-2-back-with-a-vengeance https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzdwr/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-3-a-dangerous-path The Doomsday Clock sits 90...

The dust. The seeing. Ever see blood in dust? The smell. Ever smell the blood in the dust. Ever smell dusty blood? The feel. Had to put my fingertips in it. Put my fingers to my nose and smell it. Smelled old. And it flowed from a man so young. A midwestern kid, really, all of nineteen. Farmer’s son. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, so polite it pissed you off. Called the I-rackies “civilians” or “natives,” indicated them by saying that “gentleman”...

Betty Smith hit a home run with her debut novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , which sold over a million copies. What it’s selling is nostalgia. A version of the American Dream most immigrants would be familiar. For many cold rooms and childish hunger would be within living memory. They’d be reading about versions of themselves. Irish town, Italian town, German town, Jew town were you got Jew bread, rye bread. A place were the narrator, thirteen-...

I turned up on the wrong day for John Wilkie’s funeral and had to come back to the crematorium. No harm done. I saw more of John Wilkie’s work van than I saw of John Wilkie. He worked for the biggest employer in Britain, the NHS, and delivered stuff to disabled folk. It was parked outside my sister’s house and took up two parking bays. Cars double-parked all the way up the horseshoe-shaped avenue. She doesn’t have a car or a driveway. In our day...

Firstly, many thanks to everyone who has been kind enough to follow the stories about Josiah and Archibald (and now Samantha) my Undertakers. Those of you who have been following the stories will know that the plot has been thickening more than somewhat, particularly over the festive season, with Josiah now engaged to Samantha and Archibald under threat of training and development! The latest story 'It is better to have loved, and lost...and...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001hhfc/storyville-three-minutes-a-lengthening I’m a fan of Storyville. There have been lots of documentaries on recently to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 th January. The date is chosen to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. There are two stories here which wind around three minutes of film, but which takes over sixty minutes to tell. The first story...