Blogs

New things come like a changeling wind. You never quite know what they carry, they could bring in their wake a poisonus fume that will infect and kill everything or a sweet summer breeze that will remind you in a moment of complete clarity how blessed you are to still be breathing at all. My changeling wind found me in a place of transition. I had begun to move after many years of stagnaton. There was very little development, physically or...

Last week, Blinding Books (run by ABC's very own Richard Penny, aka Blighter's Rock ) published an anthology by ten excellent women writers, many of them from ABC, called My Baby Shot Me Down . It's quite easily the ABC publishing event of the year. No breakfast nook, den or garden is worth sitting in without a copy in your hands. You'll find a lot of familiar names inside - the book features Clarissa Angus, Katherine Black, Maggy van Eijk,...

Frances Murdoch died two days ago. You don’t know her. She wasn’t a celebrity, born in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. She would have been too young to know anything about depression and she was always a cheery soul. She would become a teenager during the Second World War. Postwar-prosperity, full employment and the creation of the Welfare State would mark the beginnings of her working life. I don’t know what she worked as, or what...

'What this country wants is nostalgia, they want to look back even if it's only as far as last week..looking to the closest thing we can find to John Wayne..show me a time when heroes weren't zeroes...selective amnesia. America, the Reagan era. Gil's smart words orchestrated to take the mood down lower jazz, his cool dude stage presence gets to the point. The point being the wholesale trickery of politicians, the way they pitch an image...

Here Elena describes her mother: ‘Born three years before Russia turned into the Soviet Union, my mother became the mirror image of my motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave…A survivor of the famine, Stalin’s terror and the Great Patriotic War…’. Food features heavily in the account. They have a Dacha thirty miles from Leningrad. A property owner in a property-less state with no such thing as privacy. Her father had a chauffeur...

Excursion Down under April 2014 Wed. Mar. 26th, 2014- Bonita Springs, Florida We were up at 3:30 A.M to make final preparations for leaving. Our 4 A.M. taxi arrived promptly and we were off for the Southwest Florida International Airport. It was only 5 A.M. but there were already a goodly amount of people walking the airport concourses. We checked our bags into the U.S. Air counter and walked through the security gates without incident. A brief...

For a moment there it looked like spring had sprung, but today the famed English weather has returned to London. Is it harder or easier to write when the sun is in? I am torn between the inspiration of the solitary, introverted winter's morning, seeing the cold dawn in with a steaming cup of coffee and my notebook before setting off for the office - and that totally different sort of pleasure when the mind is freed to dream up narratives while...

I was a strange kid, there was nothing I liked more than The World at War . I even liked the music. There is no greater compliment than this ten-part series was just as good, if not better. Last night’s episode, ‘War Without End’ was another stonker. It started where it left off last time. Four-long years of war and no end in sight. The Germans had been on the offensive. They had broken the trench stalemate on the Western front and gained ground...

Doris Lessing is one of those authors I kept meaning to read. Her father was an officer wounded in the Great War and her mother the nurse that nursed him, rather a romantic ideal, but reality often knocks spots off those kinds of notions. Her great love was killed before she could marry him and he’d lost a leg, well, they had each other. Then they’d a loan from the land bank and a failing farm in Southern Rhodesia. She was upwardly mobile,...

Drink addiction does the working class no good. As true now as in the 19th Century when Zola wrote his tragi-comic epic, the title has sometimes been translated as The Pub or Dram Shop. Posh folks can also sometimes suffer from liver failure and permanent damage to the brain and motor system however they may be more able to get up in the afternoon without getting sacked. At the start of the story Gervaise and Coupeau are in love and have their...