Blogs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000qt06/hector Peter Mullan always seems to snag the parts of the homeless alkie. Hector McAdam doesn’t even have to be an alkie, just grizzled looking as Peter Mullan in a beanie hat, and as if he’s just stepped out a cardboard box, washed up in a motorway café’s toilet and rustled up a quick snack. He’s left two pals and a dog still sleeping at the side of the building. He nips of the post office to pick...

I hadn’t heard of OxyContin, nor Purdue Pharmacy (Purdue Frederick) that manufactured the opioid drug. Nor had I seen Dopesick , a Disney backed television series based on the manufacture and sale of ‘hillbilly heroin’ that ravaged America, cost 450 000 American lives (and still counting) approximately $2 trillion of collateral damage at a conservative estimate. I hadn’t heard of the Sackler family, or the ‘Cadillac high’ of OxyContin and Valium...

Hoping everyone is safe and snug with mince pies and mulled wine. Our Story of the Week is the Christmas treat of Pad Life: So Here It Is’. https://www.abctales.com/story/airyfairy/pad-life-so-here-it Our Poem of the Week is JupiterMoon’s beautiful poem ‘and when we should have felt like strangers’. https://www.abctales.com/story/jupitermoon/and-when-we-should-have-felt-strangers Many more great things to read from this week - have been loving...

I took Ewan Gault’s novel with me to get my Covid booster and flu jab. An hour-and-half waiting. It’s a pocket-sized book with the print a bit too wee for my liking. But I got stuck in and read most of the short twenty-six chapters in one long wheeze. I kept a few of the pages back to enjoy the denouement when my mind was a little clearer. Crime/Thriller category. Tartan Noir. Ian Rankin, who wrote William McIlvanney’s latest Laidlaw, knew...

I can’t remember very much about Derren Brown’s guide to practicing stoicism in an unhappy world, Happy . This is the follow up. Pretty good fun, more like a chapbook and diary (his father died during Covid). I’ll no doubt forget all the lessons learned here too. Stoics taught us fortitude comes from controlling our thoughts and actions. The common mistake we make is to try and manage things we cannot (serenity prayer). Derren suggests, You are...