Blogs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0004gpl/miriams-dead-good-adventure-series-1-episode-1 There’s a simple rule in life, don’t get old and don’t get fat, which becomes a commandment on television. Presenter Miriam Margolyes is the exception to the rule. She looks a bit like Grotbags, the witch, but without the green hair. Margolyes has become something of the flavour of the month on BBC, a kind of low-rent-a-gob, fat and Jewish and a lesbian...

Reposted here in case you miss it in the main site... The second result from this online epic book is that the research on my family - on spinal bifida which I have, and which was resolved for me by surgery, is now done, and around the world unborn babies are being saved from lives trapped in wheelchairs - locked into a silence - in a world that leaves them there. The only thing I found wrong with all of this, is the refusal of the medics...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate-change-the-facts The facts are global warming is taking place now and the concerted action to limit it 1.5 degrees centigrade by reducing fossil fuel emissions, which was agreed by the Paris Accord, 2015, looks highly unlikely to happen. ‘What we do now will profoundly affect the next thousand years,’ David Attenborough tells us. Fossil fuel companies have already been working hard to smear...

It's the most beautiful day where I live - the first really warm one of the year, so it's been a great pleasure to sit here by the open door into the garden catching up on some of the wonderful writing that's been posted this week. Poem of the Week was particularly hard as there's been so much good stuff, and I would like to give a very honourable mention to Philip Sidney for 'Misogyny in the 70s' which has been pipped to the post by a hair's...

Cuckoo Song is the second Frances Hardinge novel I’ve read. The other was The Lie Tree . Their target audience is Young Adults and Children. I’ve not been that for fifty years, but I guess we’re all children at heart. And Hardinage is a terrific and must-read author. The question of who we are becomes what we are? Doppelgangers and memory is spliced with folklore, fairy tales and warped visions of reality. Violet, Sebastian’s left-behind fiancée...

I’ve just come back from Benidorm. There, I’ve told the world and I don’t care who knows it! Benidorm has a particular place in the national psyche, it tends to be a useful shorthand for everything that it wrong about package holidays and, especially, the British holidaymaker. It occupies the same place that Torremolinos used to hold in the 1960s. I don’t suppose the T.V. series of the same name has done much to change its image, either,...

Josh Ireland’s The Traitors was an Observer Book of the year and it’s terrific. A history book written like a novel and takes the reader from the hungry thirties to the post-war triumph of the new-world order. For those that backed the Axis powers and the Nazis, but were born in Britain, traitors to a man, there could be no redemption, but not all faced the hangman’s rope. There are parallels now with the nineteen thirties with the growth in...

Really difficult to make choices this week, with lots of splendid stuff on the site. In the end though, Story of the Week had to be alexislebarouder's 'The Misery of Flight' for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that it is simply, as one commenter said, great storytelling: https://www.abctales.com/story/alexislebaroudeur/misery-flight A different kind of misery in our funny and heartfelt Poem of the Week, Scorpio88's 'Misophonia'. Turns...