Blogs

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was Barrack Obama’s Pick for Book of the Year. You’d expect that. Much of the book is set in the years of the Great Depression, 1936. At the very bottom of the heap were the black man and woman. Standing beside them, but slightly above them were the immigrant whites, the Jews, whom the world could burn for all they cared. Top of the heap of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania those with some education like Doc Roberts...

Tracy King is the exception to the rule, rule. She’s working class. She got educated. She got a book published by one of the big five (or four) publishers. And, oh yeh, her dad got murdered. I’d read about what happened next in The Observer. She starts but not at the beginning. Setting the scene: I was born to working-class parents. Mum, Jackie was tiny. She worked part-time as a secretary but really was a full-time mum. Dad worked abroad He was...

Three Fires is a short book, based on an audio script Denise Mina wrote for Radio 4. The logline reads something like she reimagines the life of Girolamo Savonarola. Like me, you might not know who that is. By the end of the book you should know. What are the three fires? Mina offers a definition before getting down to the wordy business of relating them to Girolamo Savonarola. In his Fire Sermon, the Buddha identified three poisons or three...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00263cs/wolf-hall-the-mirror-and-the-light-6-light?seriesId=m0024ywj I missed The Mirror and the Light on Sunday night because I was drunk as a Lord. Last episode, ‘Light’ takes us into the darkness. We all know that the commoner Thomas Cromwell, the power behind the throne of Henry VIII, will reach a dastardly end. He’s seen too much and knows too much. And there can only be one king. It’s in the title...

Donna No, none that I can think of. Alyss Hallmark Romance movies, Romance novels – from Jane Austen to Nora Roberts, Facebook where the highlight reels are friends and their children and loved ones. I used to happily go to restaurants on my own, but I can’t manage that anymore. Sadly, I was given a restaurant voucher as a gift, but I have no-one who visits me, or who I could use it with, and I don’t want to sit there on my own anymore… so that...

Adam Kay (2022) Undoctored. The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients. Adam Kay jokes he’s the 13 th best-known ex-doctor in Britain. He’s also a comedian. Or ex-comedian, author of the multi-million bestseller This Is Going to Hurt . We therefore already know about his painful, disillusionment with medicine, the only world he knew. The post-traumatic-stress-disorder after too many things went wrong and a baby under his care died. I’m not...

This is the 2024 version, which is remarkably similar to the 2023 version etc. A couple of years ago, having finished dressing the Christmas Tree, in a bout of whimsy I wrote a story about the supposed conversation between some of the perennial characters on the tree. I rather enjoyed this process but the story itself, although it appeared here on ABCtales, rather slipped under the radar, possibly because it was one of three that I uploaded at...

Donna I trust in God to give me the strength to carry on. Alyss, Oh, this is a tough one. There are more low days now than there have ever been. I do not recommend living far away from family and friends. My motivation has completely angled itself into Bible reading and studying. Loads of online sermons and Instagram sermon clips/motivational clips. I do feel like this lonely, low time has a purpose though, in a very strange, yet sensible way,...

I tell lies every day. I call it writing fiction. I followed with interest a great country drowning under the weight of its own stupidity. "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mentiri." "It is sweet and fitting to lie for one's country." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/05/tulsi-gabbard-national-intelligence-community-fears Shibboleth. Biblical Origin: The term originates from the Book of Judges 12:5–6 in the Hebrew Bible. The Gileadites...