Blogs

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/true-horror/on-demand/62853-003 This is my guilty secret, takes me right back to my childhood. I’m a BBC 4 kinda guy. The kinda guy that sneers at people that watch soap operas like River City, Coronation Street, Emmerdale or Question Time . Yet, here it is, factual stories based on a recipe borrowed from Hammer House of Horror. Remember the rule. Vampires. Scary Christopher Lee. Wrap the blankets around your...

Do you buy supermarket food? Salad, cheese, rolls, vegetables - perhaps meat and fish when they are bargained off because they are on their sell-by dates? I do. This book is none too cheerful but it is important. I don't quite buy 'you are what you eat' - last time I looked in the mirror I did not resemble my breakfast boiled egg on toast, spread with Flora but I feel that what goes into my bod is essential fuel and I like to believe that it is...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0pwgl Richard Feynman was part of the team that designed the atomic bomb. He was the opposite of a Yes man. Despite being one of the youngest physicists, he was head of calculations in the computation division (remember no computers in those days; calculations were done in the head). If a physicist had a problem at Los Alamos Feynman was the guy you’d ask. He also saved lives. The storage of fission material...

Kirsty Logan is appearing in Dalmuir Library as part of West Dunbartonshire Libraries’s Festival of Words. Her novel The Gracekeepers is currently novel of the month. I usually have a crack at novel of the month, having been nominated myself, but also because my reading tends to be predictable and sometimes it’s good to shake it up and try something new. I wouldn’t usually have picked the The Gracekeepers and I certainly wouldn’t have finished...

Poetry Monthly – May Hello everyone, Hope all’s good with you and you’re getting a whisper of spring where you are! April’s poetry focus was Mamihlapinatapai (a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire, but which neither wants to begin}. As usual, there was some impressive writing to have a read of. Here are three poems to discover for the first time, or to go back to: https://www...

On the eve of President Trump’s ‘working visit’ to the United Kingdom this is a handy book to read. President Trump features more than Putin, or other twenty-first century despots. I guess this short book is a riposte to that shock election result, which wasn’t a shock to Snyder. Depots don’t read books. And Trump doesn’t read. His library consists of stored Tweets. Snyder’s lessons On Tyranny shifted through the sands of the mass killings of...

Our Story of the Week is a two-parter, Kilb50's marvellous 'Something Hard Inside Him'. Beautifully observed and written and, despite my own wish to know what happened next, with a perfectly judged ending. Part One: https://www.abctales.com/story/kilb50/something-hard-inside-him-part-1 Part Two: https://www.abctales.com/story/kilb50/something-hard-inside-him-part-2 Poem of the Week is another of our Inspiration Point entries - the prompts have...

LEGGINGS - A CHANGEABLE DAY The weather is changeable. I wonder if that’s specific or not. It worries me this startling non-statement of the barometer. It’s quite warm today, and I’m not sure what to wear, and I have tasks to do written in my mind. First take down the bed frame, get rid of the extra linen, and really hoover up. I decide I must be conservative about how I dress, given the list. I mean how can you unscrew a double bed frame in a...

I’ve read Morvern Caller, The Sopranos, The Stars in the Bright Sky, and The Deadman’s Pedal . I liked them all, or I wouldn’t have finished reading them. Life’s too short to mess about reading shite. The Deadman’s Pedal , when we take the foot off the gas the train comes to a halt. There’s a metaphor there somewhere. The Deadman’s Pedal is my favourite Warner book of this collection. The other books involved gaggles of young girl narrators from...

I’ve been watching a TV programme with David Attenborough and the Queen talking about trees, because I would watch David Attenborough talking about toilet cleaners or earwax, given the chance. The Queen, meh. I’m not a monarchist and I don’t go for the Nation’s Granny nonsense, but it’s nothing personal. It’s good that she’s interested in preserving trees throughout the Commonwealth and wants to see a ‘Queen’s Canopy’ of forests, second only to...