Blogs

Well where to begin with this tale of my life for the last five months. I guess I should start by saying I am safe and happy most of the time when I don't have to communicate with a certain person. But sharing a child means I have to communicate with him. Lets start with the weekend of November 22nd. I went to a friends house as she lives on her own, her cat looked like he was on his way to kitty heaven. My husband (who I am still married to but...

The Singer Story: Made in Clydebank (2019), BBC Scotland, Directors Barthelemy Francis Corbelet, Yoann Fabrice Le Dantec, Narrator Marc Jennings. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00051z7/the-singer-story-made-in-clydebank I’m old enough to remember Singers. All that’s left is some red brickwork and the original staircase that leads up to Kilbowie Road. All of my partner’s aunts worked in the factory and her sister and her brother-in-law...

Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence It’s been over two decades since the publication of Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence , which coincided with a spike in populism and hatred of others centred around the divisive figure of Donald J. Trump around a decade ago. Emotional Intelligence is empathy at work, which has never worked for Trump. Emotional self-awareness is a misnomer. At the memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, whom...

Edna O’Brien claimed The Country Girls wrote itself. The best books often do. Indeed it’s a marvel and she is a marvellous writer. It’s easy to make the mistake of confusing her with Caithleen (Cait) Brady. The teenage protagonist growing into womanhood in rural, 1950s Tuamgraney, East Clare, and later Dublin, with a little help from her frenemy Baba Brennan. Write what you know. O’Brien/Cait knows the in and outs of every field and path through...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I have, over the course of my career, failed to obtain interviews with some of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway refused to acknowledge I existed. Christie pretended to be someone else. But William Faulkner is the only author who ever lost my mail. I first wrote to Faulkner in the spring of 1923 at the University of Mississippi post office in Oxford, where he served as...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-unlikely-pilgrimage-of-harold-fry Jim Broadbent usually plays somebody’s dad. Here he’s Harold Fry. Solid. Dependable. Middle-class and retired. In one of those long-standing relationships. Husband and his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) have signed a grief-fire. Both are retired, standoffish and stuck in their middle-class home getting further and further from each other and fading into the wallpaper. A...

BBC Radio Wales, BBC Sounds, Secrets of the Salt Path. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0n5p4w5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0n7b8j7 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj32vx61x6lo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80p2pzgpmgo In films and television drama writers are one dimensional. Invariably, they are portrayed as some tortured soul that knocks off an international bestseller. It happens. Irvine Welsh is the poster boy...

I’d bought this book for 20 pence. I’d read the first page and thought this iit pretty good, which was a mistake, because it’s great. I read the start of the book during a hospital appointment and finished 410 pages later. I liked the Social Realism. Ben Creed is actually two writers: Chris Rickaby and Barry Thompson. I’m not sure how that works, but it does. I’m going to read their follow up books set in the same milieu, which is the USSR, one...