Blogs

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Fri, 18 Dec 2020

Selected for us this week by Ewan Story of the Week Congratulations to Celticman, his ‘A Pile Up of Boys’ is a powerful piece of writing, delivered with a narrative voice that is as real as it is vital. Hard to believe such things happened well within living memory. https://www.abctales.com/story/celticman/pile-boys Poem of the Week This week’s choice is something slightly different from Onemorething. Certain Memories is an exploration of how we...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by Ewan on Fri, 18 Dec 2020

Story of the Week Congratulations to Celticman, his ‘A Pile Up of Boys’ is a powerful piece of writing, delivered with a narrative voice that is as real as it is vital. Hard to believe such things happened well within living memory. https://www.abctales.com/story/celticman/pile-boys Poem of the Week This week’s choice is something slightly different from Onemorething. Certain Memories is an exploration of how we let some memories fade. https://...

THE SOUL OF THE ANT

Posted by jacques on Fri, 18 Dec 2020

'VIVA DEMOCRACY'

Stieg Larsson (2010) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland.

Posted by celticman on Tue, 15 Dec 2020

When Mikael Blomkvist is holed up in cottage in the Vanger estate and can’t think he reads detective novels. I do that too. Hence The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (and the first 100 pages of The Girl Who Kicks the Hornets’ Nest ). Blomkvist namechecks Val McDermid The Mermaids Singing and some other—to me—obscure Scandinavian detective novels. In short, Blomkvist was behaving like a real person. He was behaving like me, which might have been you...

The Mercy, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, director James Marsh.

Posted by celticman on Sun, 13 Dec 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5z3/the-mercy Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds star in the story of serial British bungler Boris Johnson’s attempt to circumnavigate EEC regulation, buoyed by jingoistic support at home, while sending out false reports of his typical British derring-do, circling the globe far quicker than his competitors from his sinking ship anchored near the Portuguese coast. Based on a true story.

Lauren Groff (2008) the Monsters of Templeton.

Posted by celticman on Fri, 11 Dec 2020

I was surprised a panegyric to the Monsters of Templetown by Stephen King was on the back cover and not the front. I’d describe that as bad marketing, but perhaps this was not to confuse the reader, because despite the title there are no real monsters. Lorrie Moore describes the Monsters of Templeton on the front cover as, ‘A bold hybrid of a book’. What she means by that is the stories are factional, and it’s a love story of place as much as...

Will you take the Covid-19 vaccine(s)?

Posted by celticman on Tue, 08 Dec 2020

Will you take the Covid-19 vaccine(s)? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/06/the-vaccine-miracle-how-scientists-waged-the-battle-against-covid-19 Around 20% of us are unlikely to take the Covid-19 vaccine (there are more than one type of vaccine, but it is highly unlikely you’ll get a choice—unless you’re rich—which propriety brand you will get inoculated with). These are a vocal minority, let’s call them I’d-rather- smear-my-face-with-...

An Early Christmas Present

Posted by philwhiteland on Tue, 08 Dec 2020

FREE TODAY (Tuesday, 8th December) my e-book collection of Christmas stories, including a number originally published on this site such as The Undertakers at Christmas and my alternative version of the Nativity. Get it here: A Christmas Cracker

Flint, BBC Scotland, BBC iPlayer, narrator Alec Baldwin, writer Richard Phinney, director and editor Anthony Baxter.

Posted by celticman on Mon, 07 Dec 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q1km/flint I fiound it strange that a crew from BBC Scotland led by Anthony Baxter should spend five years from 2014 filming a documentary about water pollution in Flint Michigan, the former home of General Motors, and the narrator is Alec Baldwin. We’re far from home. Remember around 25 years ago when John Gummer, the then Tory agricultural minister, fed his four-year-old daughter a burgher to prove the...

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