Blogs

Stephen Dunn Sweetness: Staying Alive Just when it seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend walking with a tumour, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except for the way I stumbled through it for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size hand-size and never seeming small. I acknowledge there’s no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain,...

I watched this on BBC iPlayer. It was shown over three consecutive nights and was based on the Rochdale child sex scandal. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8pvh/three-girls-series-1-episode-1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8s12/three-girls-series-1-episode-2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8vp5/three-girls-series-1-episode-3 There is institutional cover up, issues of class and racial bias. A blackness of themes that...

Posted by Philip Sidney on Fri, 19 May 2017 There's been a flurry of wonderful peices inspired by May's Poetry Monthly theme - out of the blue, I've even written one myself...but it's Parson Thru's touching poem that takes to the skies this week as Poem of the Week. https://www.abctales.com/story/parson-thru/4-group-raf-bomber-command Noo chose the Poetry Monthly theme, and wrote a prose piece on a similar theme - I dare you not to get teary...

There's been a flurry of wonderful peices inspired by May's Poetry Monthly theme - out of the blue, I've even written one myself...but it's Parson Thru's touching poem that takes to the skies this week as Poem of the Week. https://www.abctales.com/story/parson-thru/4-group-raf-bomber-command Noo chose the Poetry Monthly theme, and wrote a prose piece on a similar theme - I dare you not to get teary when you read it. It's our story of the week...

Finally managed to create a shiny new YouTube channel for ABCTales, and to upload some video from last week's London Reading Night. Big thanks to Judith for the filming. We only managed to get a few readers, but I hope it'll give you all a taste of how brilliant everyone was, and next time I promise we will film the whole thing! I hope you enjoy them: https://youtu.be/iQjjUst0fwc https://youtu.be/-_X29RN_K-I https://youtu.be/-qRAG5YW9bI

This book has not been officially release yet. I was lucky enough to buy a copy at West Dunbartonshire Festival of Words at Parkhall library on Monday night. Gail Honeyman was doing her first gig. Ahhhh, that’s nice. She seemed very nice and self-assured. It was the usual format of someone asking her questions about the book and Gail reading two short excerpts from the book. And later questions from the audience. She read, first page, first...

This is the penultimate book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It picks up where it left off in the second book, with ‘Middle Time’ and Elena Greco narrating what happened to her and her brilliant friend Lila Cerrulo after her disappearance in the winter of 2005. As the storyteller Elena has access to Lila’s motives and actions because her friend had given her diaries to her –asking her not to read them. She did, of course. There’s no...

It takes a war, a Great War, a Second World War to teach us values. It’s crude but effective. Thatcher before the Falkland’s War, behind in the polls, goes on to win in a landslide. The problem with the dead is they don’t stay dead. The Somme, six-million Jews, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The dead stay frozen, when homes fit for heroes remain unmade, and resurface minutes, hours, days, years, decades later as a soundbite to be counted off, or a source...

Mother's day and August month is certainly a month in which woman plays a vital role it's the one month where we as woman are being celebrated and past transgressions remembered. Are woman being valued for who they are sadly when measured towards standards we have failed once again. As usual the argument would be a lot is being done. Now to those people I'd like to say come out of your perfect houses with your perfect circumstances and you'll...

This Boy is a prequel to Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman , set before he started his working life spent, mostly, in the Post Office and via his union involvement access to the Labour Party, becoming an MP and becoming Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s government. Our current Prime Minster Teresa May, was, of course, a former Home Secretary. Her father was a vicar. Alan Johnson’s father was an arsehole. In the prologue we’re shown a black and white...