Blogs

I hope you've had a lovely break over the holiday season. I certainly have - and it's been much enhanced by the good writing on the site. Stroy of the week was tough but I've gone fo a value busting 4 for the price of 1 fom Airyfairy with her delightful modern fable https://www.abctales.com/story/airyfairy/tower-strength-ip-part-4-4 Poem of the week was rivetting and gave me the shivers, well done seafret for your spine tingling piece https://...

I’ve been thinking about Cyril quite a bit over the past few days. I should, at this point, make clear that I do not usually spend my days thinking about Cyril. In fact, it must be quite a while since he last crossed my mind. What brought him to the fore this time was that I have been mowing the lawn. This is the sum total of my efforts in the garden, apart from occasionally hacking some innocent tree to within an inch of its life. This is not...

I bought this book when it first came out. I’ve picked it up and put it down a few times. It’s got an impressive list of broadsheets such as The Guardian wo proclaim it ‘a big, page turning, globe-trotting thriller’ and a leading author of a dystopian future, A Handmaid’s Tale , Margaret Atwood, calling it ‘Electrifying’. I read most of the 339 pages, missing out chapters, here and there, and scooting to the end, which I knew was going to be...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0004gpl/miriams-dead-good-adventure-series-1-episode-1 There’s a simple rule in life, don’t get old and don’t get fat, which becomes a commandment on television. Presenter Miriam Margolyes is the exception to the rule. She looks a bit like Grotbags, the witch, but without the green hair. Margolyes has become something of the flavour of the month on BBC, a kind of low-rent-a-gob, fat and Jewish and a lesbian...

Reposted here in case you miss it in the main site... The second result from this online epic book is that the research on my family - on spinal bifida which I have, and which was resolved for me by surgery, is now done, and around the world unborn babies are being saved from lives trapped in wheelchairs - locked into a silence - in a world that leaves them there. The only thing I found wrong with all of this, is the refusal of the medics...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate-change-the-facts The facts are global warming is taking place now and the concerted action to limit it 1.5 degrees centigrade by reducing fossil fuel emissions, which was agreed by the Paris Accord, 2015, looks highly unlikely to happen. ‘What we do now will profoundly affect the next thousand years,’ David Attenborough tells us. Fossil fuel companies have already been working hard to smear...

Cuckoo Song is the second Frances Hardinge novel I’ve read. The other was The Lie Tree . Their target audience is Young Adults and Children. I’ve not been that for fifty years, but I guess we’re all children at heart. And Hardinage is a terrific and must-read author. The question of who we are becomes what we are? Doppelgangers and memory is spliced with folklore, fairy tales and warped visions of reality. Violet, Sebastian’s left-behind fiancée...

I’ve just come back from Benidorm. There, I’ve told the world and I don’t care who knows it! Benidorm has a particular place in the national psyche, it tends to be a useful shorthand for everything that it wrong about package holidays and, especially, the British holidaymaker. It occupies the same place that Torremolinos used to hold in the 1960s. I don’t suppose the T.V. series of the same name has done much to change its image, either,...