Blogs

Go on, I dare you. You will not feel out of place if you go on your own. I saw it yesterday and most of the audience were my age or older. Only a few had rounded up a child or grandchild. Good inventive slap-bear-stick. A varied set of real and imaginary views of London, Paddington Station, the Shard and showground with a mystery object that leads our innocent marmalade-head to aargh! prison. Don't want to give away any more but it's...

Nobody that's a nobody ever asks what are you writing? There’s no reason to think I’m writing anything. But if that nobody ever did ask I’ve got a ready-mix answer. I’m writing about us, and I’m trying to get it right. Elena Ferrante writes again and again about Naples. Its crude dialect and its even cruder people who are not to be trusted, even among themselves, especially by themselves. Here are some crude notes about this novel and its place...

http://www.chrisleslie.com/portfolios/red-road-underground/ As part of Book Scotland I went to talk Chris Leslie gave in Clydebank library. He overran a wee bit but I could have listened to him all night. Disappearing Glasgow is about us. Glasgow’s full of ghosts, one of the punters in his book says. And they’ve all got the same refrain – that used to be my house. I always presumed the Red Road flats would last forever, but when you see it now...

Leggings; New Early Morning Deliveries. For about a week now someone has been ghosting the building late on, asking for Ecstasy. Always turned away, no one here has the stuff. Luckily I've not been asked. I think she's sticking to those she knows, no matter how slightly. Today I'm rudely awoken again, the first time here – the loudest man is shouting my first name... continuously. It jolts me out of sleep and half here, I hear him shout it again...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04thmv7/blue-planet-ii-series-1-1... The Golden Record carried by the Voyager I spacecraft by NASA on the infinitesimally small chance that it would bump into an alien lifeform that would be able to understand it missed a trick. They should have just sent David Attenborough. He would have told them we live in a wee blue planet, seventy percent water that we’re heating up like an egg. Then David could whip...

First heard this on Radio 4 a few years back, now re-reading it.I love stories that give me something new and since I have never lived in a big posh Parisian apartment block... The narrators take turns. Renee the concierge was a poor farm girl. She married a local lad and they moved to town. He died young, she continued working and living in her tied flat and at 54 she has a long-term prickly view of the residents who take her for granted as a...

I’m one of the few that reads short stories. They don’t sell. There are exceptions such as Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahari and George Saunders. Poets sell even less of their work than short-story writers, but usually make the best writers. I like Jackie Kay’s autobiographical writing and I admire her parents, who I’ve met on the page. They’re the kind of people that make the world a better place. But for all her awards and glitz and glamour I found...

Big congratulations to London_calling79 for 'Compassion Fatigue' which is our Poem of the Week, with a very honourable mention to PoetonaHill for 'Tribes', and to Celticman for his extremely funny and completely surreal 'the weather forecast' which is our Story of the Week. https://www.abctales.com/story/londoncalling79/compassion-fatigue https://www.abctales.com/story/celticman/weather-forecast https://www.abctales.com/story/poetonahill/tribes...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09hzrvg/blitz-the-bombs-that-changed-britain-series-1-episode-3 The focus of this episode is the Clydebank Blitz which took place on 13 th March 1941. Only twelve houses in Clydebank were left undamaged. Over three-quarters of the sixty-thousand Bannkie trekked away from the bomb sites into the surrounding areas. John Brown’s shipyard with upwards of 5000 workers and Singers’ Factory with 40 000 workers...

Denise Mina’s The Long Drop won Bloody Scotland's William McIlvanney Prize for crime fiction. You expect it to be good. The first-year philosophy student in me, or indeed William McIlvanney’s, Detective Laidlaw, would be the first to ask, what do you mean by good? I mean I did like it. But if I hadn’t read it that wouldn’t bother me that much. I wouldn’t be pressing a copy of the book on acquaintances and saying you must read this. There’s good...