Blogs

I didn’t see any bonfires. They’re all caged in now. Full page advertisements in the newspapers and ads on the telly—I’m not sure who they are aimed at—featuring quite a pretty girl dressed as a firewoman tell us they are dangerous and take fire-fighters away from essential services. Wow. I never knew that. Kids must be thinking firemen should be sitting with their feet up sipping latte on Bonfire night. I may be wrong, but I don’t think kids...

In the good old days when a gentleman was not too busy bear-baiting or slaughtering foxes, he would sometimes take his young lady to Bethlem Royal Hospital, or the colloquially know Bedlam, to observe the performance of mad people. The Maudsley in South London is the old Bedlam. This is Jeremy Kyle lite. Here the cameras followed four patients who suffered from a variety of anxiety disorders. Helen, aged 33, had been stuck in her house for two...

Produced, written and directed by Sarah McCarthy, love is all around her and so the feeling go-oh-ohs. Sorry, I was thinking of that Wet Wet Wet hit that was a number one hit forever. This is a documentary and not a song. Though there are bits of science, like currants in a bun thrown in to spice things up, in the guise of a professor of psychology and relationship advisors talking about childhood bonding experiences. The narrative is quite...

Nowhere Else to Go . This is the first of a two part documentary about Britain’s lack of care for poor and disabled children and focusses on the decades following The Second World War. I told my girlfriend’s son, who works in a suitably remote area with children such as these, to watch this programme. It is a distillation of thousands of textbooks of containment and control in an easy to view format. Erving Goffman’s characteristics of a total...

Just One of Those Days is a gorgeous new picture book written by ABC’s own Richard Penny and illustrated by the very talented Harmke Wijbenga. Though it’s written for 4-9 year olds, it’ll appeal to any child (or adult) with a love for imaginative images. The book tells the story of a father’s day out with his daughter. Though everything they decide to do seems to lead to one disappointment after another – a pony-ride gets rained out, the other...

I don’t usually go to galleries. I’ve nothing against them, but I’m lazy, set in my ways and swallowed all the clichés so I'm fat with knowing. You might be asking why I made this exception. The answer might be that Ally Allan is about the same age as me, went to the same Secondary school—St Andrew’s—and we played football as a kid, but not together. I played for the Goston Swifts and the Dalmuir Stankcleaners. She played professionally in New...

This book is worth reading for Fowels’s foreword written in 1976. He describes it as ‘a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent’. But he makes no apology and neither should he. This is a magical book that keeps shape shifting. The narrator Nicholas Ufte is the kind of public school dolt that makes me want to bolt, but here he holds me spellbound. There’s lots of Shakespeare and classical allusions. Cochis is a Prospero like figure...

Nobody believed me when I said I’d a hole in my denim pocket and lost £10 million last week. It’s quite a nice number. It’s not eleven million which sounds pretentious or nine million which has that mingy, could do better, feel about it. Ten million is spot on. Billionaires are like Nazis always wanting to bring order out of chaos. But they are never unreasonable about it. It’s all about EFFICIENCY. I’ve used capitals to show it’s a big word...

Ajax has the better of the chances, hit the outside of the post in the opening spell, they had more of the ball and a big Lasse scored their goal with twenty seconds to go. Yet Celtic won 2-1, a massive result in terms of keeping their interest in progressing in the tournament or even getting a Europa league parachute spot for third place. De Boar, the ex-Ranger’s player and Ajax manager was particularly scathing. ‘Eight out of ten times the...

Paul Chappell (FTSE100/Footsie), a long-standing member of ABC, very sadly took his own life this past July. UKA Press will be publishing a collection of his work in paperback next month, and they are hoping the publication will help raise awareness of mental health issues in the UK. Please take the time to read this review of the collection by David Gardiner of Gold Dust Magazine: This is a very unusual book in that it was written by a man who...