Blogs

Water features in our two picks of the week. Our poem of the week is from Rosa Cruz - another brilliant piece from her pamphlet, Surfacing. Beach Mosaic, is both a fitting metaphor and a practical therapy; it's clever, beautiful and healing. https://www.abctales.com/story/rosa-cruz/beach-pottery-mosaic-0 Death is haunting me this week, so Noo's story, Occupation, with its drifting body, bartender, death midwfe, and cleaner (of the gangster...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p06g8bcy/trust-series-1-1-the-house-of-getty Donald Sutherland is the eponymous John Paul Getty senior in BBC’s big-budget drama. My knowledge of Getty was negligible. I knew he was one of the richest men in the world and I knew he had a pay phone in his house, so unpaying guests wouldn’t chisel him and make long-distance phone calls at his expense. Yep, tick that one off; it happens in this drama, which...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/married-to-a-paedophile Married to a Paedophile was, ironically, on at the same time as another outstanding piece of drama, Mother’s Day . The latter is conventional drama in that we start with tragedy and end in triumph – The Good Friday Agreement. The argument is implicit, cause and effect. Married to a Paedophile is more of a Greek tragedy in which, for example, solving a riddle Oedipus on the way to Thebes...

We think we know the bare bones of the history of the holocaust. Hitler as bogey man and the German nation following him to the abyss, where around six million Jews perished and many more minorities. That was my take on it. Not bad, around a D grade. But Snyder does more than root in the history of the past. He drags us into the present and the lessons are illuminating. For the German nation the war was portrayed as necessary, a colonial war to...

I watched The Reluctant Fundamentalist on BBC 2 recently. Mohsin Hamid was screenwriter and author, and the role of the narrator in the book Change[z] is much the same, but the plotting is slightly different. In particular, Changez's exotic girlfriend, Erica, in the book is given a backstory. Changez, in his doomed love affair, mirrors her doomed love affair. It's a short novel. Very few films are better than the book. Ben Hur is an example...

A studio Flat shouts Me! This little place is for me alone. It also tells me how to behave. 'Be clean. Be tidy. Be organised. Don't clutter. Don't you dare!' I think it will be a good influence. I'm in West Cliff. My tree-lined street is a long terrace of blocks of studio flats book-ended by hotels. The blocks have green awnings. Did they used to be small hotels? I feel like I'm living in a hotel. One with leafy views, now that I've pulled the...

Story and Poem for the month of August very kindly chosen by Rhona Miller (love_writing): Attempting to choose two pieces this month has left me with literally no nails left! There has been an overwhelmingly amazing amount of talent in both poetry and prose. I’ve finally selected two pieces which have continued to linger in my head, both for their skill and the emotive responses they’ve provoked. First up is Brooklyn Heart by Michael Valentine...

“Plus, babies meant husbands. Husbands meant boyfriends. Boyfriends meant dating. Dating meant sex. She shuddered.” I can't decide if I really enjoyed this or I was really happy to get to the end, but if I'm contemplating it's probably the latter, right? The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang is one of those romance novels where you know immediately that no matter what happens the protagonists will be together in the end. So if you don't like one of...

Both of the picks this week explore life experience, dreams lost, consequences faced. Story of the Week goes to johnshade's utterly believable and beautifully written two-parter 'Ariadne'. Both parts will grip you from beginning to end and then you'll want to start all over again: https://www.abctales.com/story/johnshade/ariadne-part-1 https://www.abctales.com/story/johnshade/ariadne-part-2 Poem of the Week is Jane Hyphen's wonderful 'The Dirt...

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