Blogs

ABC writers have really started the new year with a flourish. There has been some absolutely marvellous poetry, and the prose writers have been exercising their humour muscles to exceptional effect. After a lot of thought, Story of the Week goes to donignacio's 'The God of Mistakes'. It's funny, it's eminently relatable, and it explains a lot! The God of Mistakes | ABCtales Poem of the Week is 'Sealwatching' by HarryC. Deceptively simple, it's...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-killer-nanny-did-she-do-it/on-demand/71550-003 ITV showed a documentary about the trial of Louise Woodward on 11 th November 2021. Channel 4 covers much the same ground. But they tell the viewer they have the untold story. What they have are two jurors in the trial that found Louise Woodward guilty of murder speaking anonymously in this documentary. Both female jurors were fizzing that Judge Zobel had...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m0011cpr Jon Ronson has the kind of job I’d like. He meets interesting people and writes books that are worth reading. Here over eight episodes and around four hours he investigates the culture wars in American where he lives. They’re happening here in Britain too, with the little Trumpet Boris Johnson lying about Brexit to get elected and pretty much lying about everything else. But this is America, where the...

https://www.pbsamerica.co.uk/series/future-of-work/#6571 In this three-part series, The New Industrial Age, Future Proof, Changing Work, Changing Workers , Laurens Grant looks at the Future of Work . If you fell asleep while reading this far you are quite safe, because I’m not artificially intelligent. I’m not even intelligent. My feeble powers of fiction and non-fiction have already been far outstripped. Economics is a better bet. Quite a...

Happy New Year! 2022 has got off to a great start on the site with wonderful writing. Nevertheless our Poem of the Week is marandina's Ynys Wydryn which you can read here: https://www.abctales.com/story/marandina/ynys-wydryn-glastonbury-tor And Story of the Week is Jane Hyphen’s Five Other People Are Looking At This Item which you can read here: https://www.abctales.com/story/jane-hyphen/five-other-people-are-looking-item Our new Inspiration...

Dan Carlin’s book is based on his HardCore History Podcasts. I’ve never listened to them. Books are better. A good apocalypse always gets my attention. Carlin asks the question were men (and women) tougher in ye olde days. The answer, not surprisingly, was probably. Let’s look at the Spartans. No fat kids. No food unless children foraged for it. Stole it from each other. Childhood obesity is no joke, but you know we should try that at Eton, and...

Happy New Year! with a big emphasis on the ‘HAPPY…. For me, the first minutes of the New Year bring optimism and the endings of the previous year bring reflections. What was, what could have been, what should have been…if only… Those seconds before the final strike of midnight are burdened with a mixture of human emotions…sweeping out the clutter of dreams and wishes from our mental closets can be burdensome, or it can be treasure seeking.....

https://www.itv.com/hub/anne/2a5505a0001 Not many programmes can get away with a one-word titular introduction—Anne. I’d have had no idea of who it was referring unless I’d read the pre-publicity for the four-night drama starring Maxine Peake. Anne Williams, an unremarkable woman from Liverpool who worked in a shop, and who died in 2013. That might have been that. But if we throw in another word, Hillsborough, the unremarkable becomes remarkable...

https://www.channel5.com/show/ufos-the-proof-is-out-there/ A screenshot from USS Princeton released by US defence department, April 2020. Stare at the tic-tack long enough and the object will move. “Senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft”, the New York Times...