Blogs

A confused elderly lady thinks her old buddy has gone missing and suspects foul play. In the words of Vicky Pollard 'yeh but no but yeh' and I'm not going to give away what surfaces from the buried wreckage of World War II, from Maud's mind as she drifts through 'the foggy ruins of time' (Dylan quote), from a back garden, oops slight spoiler there. Elizabeth is Missing does a lot of things really well, Maud's first person narrative is real-...

Pain became a central part of my life to the extent it became unrecognisable.Subconsciously I built a defense mechanism that was on auto pilot 24/7. It made it easier for me to disconnect with what I had unknowningly chosen to forget.Empathy,Sympathy,Pain! I felt this was a rational perrogative to adopt for ME! One less person to add to the thousands that broke me. No sooner I realised, I was being selfish because in feeling this way I became...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04yn2yq/the-superrich-and-us-episode-2 This is the second episode of Peretti’s investigation into the relationship between the super-rich and us – the other 99% of the population. He begins with a sobering statistic, but only if you’re drunk, eighty-five people own the equivalent of half the world’s population. I quite like that statistic. But it’s unfathomable by its sheer immensity. Sure you can divide...

Two wonderful autobiographical pieces take the honours this week: Cannonette's Slip One, a slice of life about knitting and a nan who can do everything all at once, and Scorpio88's The Mechanic, a fleeting moment of a childhood summer. They are both brilliant - do read them! http://www.abctales.com/story/canonette/slip-one http://www.abctales.com/story/scorpio88/mechanic-0 For this week's Inspiration Point I give you a phrase that's been in the...

Love is complex,it doesn't have to be. I sat one evening in my study and I thought, but why do we make it that way?Why can't we all accept our skeletons and work through it instead of walking way. Walking away is dramatic,walking away makes the problem bigger than it actually is.There is good and bad in some of us,if not all of us.It's better to acknowledge it than try to ignore it, but it's better to never let the grey dictate the way.The way...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/angry-white-and-proud Jamie Roberts spent a year of his life making this documentary. I’d guess at a cost to Channel 4 of about £250 000. Compare that to estimated £1 million ‘kettling operation’ in which police officers flung a cordon of men, woman and horses around far-right-splinter groups, (‘Engl-i-and, England, England till I die’) protesting about Muslim Pakis abusing white girls in Rochdale. Protesting...

To call Les Murray the Aussie Seumas Heaney is selling them both short though both are the Big Countrymen of their land. Les does land, place, people seeing and feeling the land, people working the smalltown sawmills of his beginnings, creatures, Nature all done par excellence. Also a sense of the era, a working class son of the 50's going to uni, travelling previously unheard of distances to barroom debates of books and politics, a real feel of...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perhaps best known for his creation of the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. Keen Sherlock Holmes aficionados suggest a link between Holmes and nineteen-century Edinburgh medical school lecturer, Joseph Bell, grandson of forensic surgeon and pathologist, Benjamin. Keen observation and deductive reasoning were the hallmarks of Bell and Holmes’s observations. Joseph Bell, for example, would demonstrate this ability to...

Pete and I have been reading and rereading like mad for the past few weeks - all the stunning poetry and prose that makes ABC such a wonderful community to be a part of, and I think it would be fair to say that nailing the very best is the hardest thing we’ve collectively done. Here are our Picks of the Year for 2014 - we hope you like them as much as we did! For the Story of the Year it’s a tie: both very different but equally wonderful...

Well if this first week of the New Year is a portent then we are in for a fantastic twelve months of creative writing! Deciding what should be promoted to picks of the week is never easy and this week was no different. But decisions have been made and this week's story is a wonderful piece of flash fiction that its author does so well: http://www.abctales.com/story/markbrown/reparations and the poem of the week is: http://www.abctales.com/story/...