Blogs

I do hope you're not paddling in flood water but if you're dry inside - stay there and curl up with ABCtales to take your mind of the unncertain weather. There's so much to enjoy this week. A feast of poetry which made it very difficult to choose one to be poem of the week - but I've gone with Agnosticnun's stunning take on the IP: The Language of Dead Flowers https://www.abctales.com/story/agnosticnun/language-dead-flowers Prose is just as...

There are countless wildlife programmes harkening back to the mists of time, but there’s only one David Attenborough. He’s the gold standard of natural history and been doing it a very long time. There he is onscreen, popping up in Borneo in 1964, when it was mostly jungle, now it’s not. There are wildlife sanctuaries, as soon as you say that you know something has gone drastically wrong. Here we have it, Seven Worlds, One Planet, has a didactic...

Situated along the River Liffey, past the Temple Bar area of Dublin stands Smock Alley Theatre. Founded in 1662 as a Theatre Royal (the only one ever built outside of London) under Charles II, it has assumed many guises including a reconsecrated Church in the Victorian era. Falling into ruin after the 1916 rising and independence from England it was recently restored to its full glory including an impressive theatre space in 2012. For the next...

Storyville: Inside Lehman Brothers, BB4, BBC IPlayer, Director Jennifer Deschamps. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0009tpx/storyville-inside-lehman-brothers-the-whistleblowers Lehman Brothers was one of the first dominoes to fall in the 2008 crash which brought down the world’s financial systems. Debts for Lehman Brothers were around $630 billion. Take a little time to think about that. It’s like the idea of infinity. Your mind shies away...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/for-sama/on-demand/66428-001 When you get personal, you get real. Waad al-Kateab, using phone and camcorder gives voice and sound and fury to what was once her home, Aleppo, before it was levelled and she, her husband and daughter, Sama, were forced into exile. There’s echoes of other diarists such as James Baldwin’s, A Letter to My Nephew, which argues ‘it’s the innocence which constitutes the crime’. Waad al...

In November, 1988, a crowd of around 20 000 cheered as the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, met Lech Walesa. He was a shipyard worker from the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk and leader of Solidarity, the independent Polish trade union movement. Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski had Thatcher’s car stopped before she reached the airport to board a Royal Airforce jet to London and presented her with a bouquet of flowers. ‘I came to see and to have a long talk with...