Blogs

'You picked a Fine Time to leave me Lucille' - but where's Lucille's song? That's how I feel about Hillbilly Elegy, it's one-sided. JD Vance is an escaped hillbilly. He left Mamaw, Papaw and Ma to their drinking, drug addiction and fighting and escaped to Harvard Law School and wrote Hillbilly Elegy when 31. Well done JD - but he assumes everyone in Appalachia has the same family life that he did. There must be some hillbillies out there who get...

I went shopping for clothes for the grandchildren in the Debenhams, the department store on St. Stephens, it’s a place of old memories. I see myself, small, clutching at Grandfather’s hand walking through the store as we ventured down to the outside world. We’d stop by the doors to the shop, take a moment to brace ourselves, it was a moment before immersion. It was after I’d been known as Leah in America, a name I’d help choose after being...

Big thanks to Simon Whitworth/fatboy74 for this month's picks: 'I've thoroughly enjoyed reading through April's offerings on ABCtales and choosing just one pick has been particularly difficult, but here they are: Story of the month was a devil to choose, but in the end I plumped for kilb50's brilliant two part story Something Hard Inside Him. There is a convenient link to part two, at the bottom of the part one. https://www.abctales.com/story/...

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...