Blogs

Elton John (2019) Me Not many folk get to call their book, Me, and expect you to know who they’re talking about. The Glasgow imperative applies here: Who the fuck dae yeh think yeh are? If the answer is Elton John, you go, oh, aye, that’s alright then. Elton John seems to be everywhere at the moment, BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 4, Radio Four, Channel 4, but I can’t find him on ITV, which is a bit disappointing. He’s an institution. I thought I’d have a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bqt9/the-man-who-saw-too-much The story of 106-year-old Boris Pahor is a eulogy to the twentieth century. The man who saw too much and experienced too much is a testament to man’s inhumanity to man. He wrote a memoir, Necrropolis- City of the Dead about his incarceration in a little-know Nazi concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthhof in the mountainous regions of Alsace, France. He was also sent to Bergen...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bpkm/storyville-murder-in-the-bush-cold-case-hammarskjold Mads Brügger and private investigator Göran Björkdahl try to solve the cold case, the death of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. His plane crashed in the Congo killing the Secretary-General and all passengers. Brügger plays the role of amiable fool as he guides the viewer through a number of conspiracy theories of...

As you get older the spring of optimism gives way to the winter of pessimism. You know that no matter how hard you try you will never play for Celtic, especially given the fact that you couldn’t get a game for your pub team. Surplus to requirements. Your bullshit detector, however, gets more refined with age. The charlatan that is Boris Johnson gets short-shrift for everything he says and everything he stands for, for being Boris Johnson,...

I’m well-disposed to liking this book, as Pat McDaid will tell you. The judge said I was ‘an educated man’ but a ‘danger to society’. I’d never been called educated before. I was pretty chuffed and my mind jumped to that Tobias Wolff short story when the guy laughs at the bank robbers with guns because they keep talking in clichés. Snobbish, I know. I admitted I was a danger because I kept losing my sobriety and finding my car keys. The judge...

Once again a big thank-you this week to all those who came to the Reading Event last Saturday. It was splendid, there was so much good stuff to listen to, and some highly enjoyable socialising afterwards. Here's to the next one! Our Poem of the Week was one of the pieces that was read out, 'Mars' by lavadis. It was a treat to hear the author read it, and it's as much of a treat to see it on the page: https://www.abctales.com/story/lavadis/mars...

Photo by Jeremy Avery on Unsplash The networker, John Naughton, Observer, Artificial Intelligence is making literary leaps. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/02/ai-artificial-intelligence-language-openai-cpt2-release I write stuff nobody much reads. Think of a number below ten and don’t multiply it. There’s a large hole in my idea of normality. I imagine someday, someone, somewhere will pay for my writing and I’ll be in the...