Blogs

This last week of March has been a colourful one - thanks to a great inspiration point. It's been like sifting though a tin of chocolates to choose two delectable pieces - but - our poem of the week is a gorgeous evocation of the season from Rhiannon: https://www.abctales.com/story/rhiannonw/wild-daffodils-field-and-meadow Our story of the week is an irreverent and humorous piece from Mikesize1: https://www.abctales.com/story/mikesize1/christ-...

This one is personal for a few of us on ABCTales. Julia (Overthetop1) was one of our much loved users as is her mother Coral (seashore). Two of our most talented poets very kindly agreed to provide reviews which you can read below, and then I've copied Cerasus Poetry's post which contains a link to buy the book. I've read it. You should too. It's extraordinary: Julia MacPherson’s Waiting For Another Velvet Morning by Maggy Van Eijk (maggyvaneijk...

A record came on, maybe around 4.00am: ‘Some Velvet Morning’, the singer intoned. We looked at each other, listened. It had captured our mood so accurately. After it ended, we all said we would not forget this night. It was one of those sunlit, spider-web moments that cannot be swept away.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003m0l/the-yorkshire-ripper-files-a-very-british-crime-story-series-1-episode-3 Episode 1, Chapeltown. We all know what happened to Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed in the late seventies the Yorkshire Ripper, he was arrested in January 1981 and sent to Broadmoor the high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, for thirteen murders and seven other attacks on women. Although we sometimes hear in the press of him...

A bit of feelgood, with real sea shanties and some good views of Port Isaac in Cornwall. It's 'based on a true story', well the band is real and I'm not sure about the predictable love story. Daniel Mays, who plays the London smoothie music producer who finds his loyalties turned upside down is 'yummy' and you sort of put up with the cliches about Cornwall and London being worlds apart because there's just enough truth and then there's the...

Heads or Tails?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003f2f/storyville-the-internets-dirtiest-secrets-the-cleaners I’m a big fan of Storyville and BBC 4, in general. That tells you a lot about the type of person I am. Big data companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter (Amazon and Apple) mine data points for personal information the same way Archimedes used mathematics and mechanics (Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall...

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