Blogs

It’s incredibly difficult to resist scrolling. The first weeks of planned abstinence, have been mid-scroll before realising it. News break is easy; just don’t click on the news webpage and look at the weather instead – which they haven’t been right about for weeks. Nothing worse than looking forward to a nice rainy day at home reading and lighting candles and instead washing two airers-worth of linens because the balmy drying air outside is too...

Pierre Lemaitre’s prior work Blood Wedding (translated by Frank Wynne) contains many of the themes and plots used in later novels. Blood Wedding is not one novel, but two. A rewriting of what the reader believes to be the narrative truth. The serial murderer often appears in the early pages of Lemaitre’s stories. Sophie Duguet keeps losing things and losing herself in blocks of time she can’t account for, but she found a job that suits her if...

Have reached the age of invitations, flu jabs, mammograms, and when playing ‘poo sticks’ means a bowel test. Am delighted to be invited, although they tend to lack champagne and never have enough balloons. Remembering the party season when I was a teenager, there seemed to be an invitation every weekend. Mostly Venture Scout discos. Cold, starry nights. Wearing jeans that hadn’t quite dried properly, your mum screaming after you about getting...

The dumb supper is older than the version most people meet today, and its original purpose was almost the opposite. "Dumb" here means mute. In the British Isles and rural America, Halloween was once prime time for love divination, and the dumb supper was the most elaborate of those rituals -- a meal conducted in complete silence by young women hoping to glimpse the man they would marry. The folklorist Wayland D. Hand traced it back to an English...

70 UP, STV iPlayer, ITV iPlayer, Directed by Asif Kapadia. https://www.stv.tv/entertainment/series/70-up/ (stv.tv in Bing) ITVX (ITV Hub) — 70 Up https://www.itv.com/watch/70-up/2a1234 (itv.com in Bing) I watched the penultimate episode of 70 UP. I’ve watched every other episode apart from 63 UP as I couldn’t access it. So it was great to catch up. The Jesuits borrowed the idea: ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.’ 7...

I’m smart enough to know I don’t know anything much worth knowing about poetry in particular. In ‘Introduction to Poetry’ in Amnest Gwilym’s latest collection, she offers some sage advice that had me thinking back to all those creative writing tutors inviting you—ever so nicely—to interrogate your work: ‘But all you want to do is place my poem in a birdcage, force it to sing its song, You start by starving it to find out what it means.’ I’m...

If I hadn’t stopped scrolling, would not have discovered ‘Olive Ketteridge’; character in Elizabeth Strout’s eponymous book. Am late to the party; it won the Pulitzer 2009. Doubt I would have ‘got’ it back then as was still working and in spiral of cortisol, fatigue and shopping. Would have found it unbearable. Didn’t have the psychological wherewithal to cope with a book about getting old, the clarity and messiness of late-life’s joys, fears...

Went to Sainsbury’s mid-week instead of Saturday. Not sure why was going on a Saturday, there must have been a reason, anyway, went on Wednesday instead; it was a lot emptier. Except the shelves which were fully stacked. Lesson learned. On the way, decided to pay the £3.60 for ‘up to two hours’ extortion in Aberdeen city car park to make a stop at ‘the sisters’ shop’ and see if there was a cheap, yet charming, laptop cover. ‘The sisters’ shop’...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent A reader named Katharine wrote to ask me two things. The first was whether I would go and see a fishing captain named Ellery Thompson, out of Stonington, Connecticut, a draggerman who paints. The second was whether I am a vampire. I will take them in order, and I will do a better job with the first, because the first has an answer. I went up to Stonington to find the captain, and found instead...