Blogs

What a lot of great pieces this week - it's been very hard to choose just two! Big congratulations to Lille Dante for his poem ' my spectre hits the shopping mall of time' which makes me laugh each time I read it, and to love_writing for 'My Mother and I aren't Talking and Other Tales' - a finely drawn picture of a disordered childhood. If you haven't read them yet, please do! https://www.abctales.com/story/lille-dante/my-spectre-haunts-shopping...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08s323v/broken-series-1-episode-1 I watched Episode 1 of Jimmy McGovern’s series Broken . It was meant to be on last Tuesday, but because of the Manchester bombing was held over for a week. I’m a fan of Jimmy McGovern. His dramas are usually about working-class people that are broken, in some way, and have to find a way forward. A sympathetic portrayal, and counterpoint to the propaganda from sources such as...

From the brilliant Noo: After a trickle at the start, we had a near flood of poems for Poetry Monthly by the end! Thanks to everyone who put fingers to keyboards and wrote – there were many interesting and different takes on the theme, but three that particularly stood out for me were: Luigi Pagano’s warm, nostalgic ‘Beautiful Day in San Remo’ https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/beautiful-day-sanremo London Calling’s wispy and wise ‘...

'The Girl in the Book', that's the title of an English Studies Course that a young relative of mine has recently completed at uni. In The Girl, the book by Meridel le Sueur that I recently blogged, the girl, the central character of the book is given no name. In Another Time, Another Place the time is World War Two and the young married woman in the tiny farming community someplace in the north of Scotland is simply 'the young woman'. The young...

Richard Holloway’s Looking in the Distance , predates, his classic autobiographical account, Leaving Alexandria of leaving the Anglican church, where he was a Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Gresham Professor of Divinity, which is quite a mouthful for an agnostic. This is a short volume. A working out of ideas, a companion piece to Godless Morality , which I’ve not read and not likely to read. It reminds me a bit...

I'm going to read one of my recent pieces at the Housemill in East London on Friday June 23rd along with fellow ABCtaler Peter Kennedy and others in the Dark Arts Circus . It should be a fun evening of dark and interesting fiction in a beautiful, atmospheric setting. I hope to see some of you there. Alex

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rp0ld/jago-a-life-underwater?suggid=b08rp0ld If a documentary can be poetic, a meditation on life and death and the sea, then this is it. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea springs to mind. Rohani was different from the other kids, swimming underwater and hunting fish. He could hold his breath longer and as an adult his eardrums burst as he got to depths of twenty fathoms on mouthfuls of air. I had...

Edited and designed by one of my favourite poets on ABCTales, Rosa Cruz/Annest Gwylim, a new e-book/anthology for the Poetry Kit called 'Flowers in the Machine' has just been launched today, It's free to download, and contains some very good work by published authors (including Rosa) that you won't find elsewhere. It's at: https://www.poetrykit.org/pkp/flowers.pdf

Big congratulations this week to Sim for a long awaited return to Ribbentrop's Chair - some of the best life writing I've read on ABCTales, and to longrunningspatula for 'Promenade Diary' which reminded me of how much I miss the sea - especially at times like this. https://www.abctales.com/story/sim/jean-ribbentrops-chair https://www.abctales.com/story/longrunningspatula/promenade-diary I'd like to add a recommendation this week - the blogposts...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rg0bd/glasgow-1967-the-lisbon-lions?suggid=b08rg0bd Narrator Rory McCann had an easy job, everybody knows the score. Celtic were the first British team to win the European cup. Inter Milan had scored from the penalty spot in seven minutes, cancelled by an equalising second-half goal by Tommy Gemmell and a late winner from Stevie Chalmers. ‘You’re a legend John. You’re a legend.’ Bill Shankly famously said...