Blogs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0535lq5/billy-connolly-portrait-of-a-lifetime Billy Connolly might well be Scotland’s greatest export after whisky. Both ITV and BBC are competing to squeeze the last dregs of life out of The Big Yin. I’ve checked, he’s not dead yet. But he does have motor- neurone disease and he’s coming up for seventy-five. He said it himself, other people’s success tend to form an inverted U-shaped curve. His success is...

Goes To Prove Character

Ready or not, we're on Amazon. Yup, Full Filler by Ice Rivers is on the market. 95% of the writing has appeared on ABCtales. Pretty sure this first volume would not exist without ABCtales. It's a weird feeling. I thought that I'd be jumpiong around and going crazy...telling everyone about the publication....marketing...checking sales results but that's not the way it's happening. First off, I'm tired again nearly fatigue tired, nearly post natal...

January has certainly felt a lot less bleak with all the brilliant stuff currently being posted on ABC Tales. Lots of splendid writing to enjoy, which makes it even harder to make the week's choices. Story of the Week goes to the first chapter of Talo Segura's series about Milo. I was instantly drawn into the story and completely absorbed by the setting and the characters. Please do go on and read the other parts as well. You definitely won't be...

Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secret, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Director Ben Steele. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbq7/exposed-the-churchs-darkest-secret-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbjd/exposed-the-churchs-darkest-secret-series-1-episode-2 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbcf/louis-theroux-selling-sex Louis Theroux is repeating himself. He’s done this before, tackling the sex industry, but now he’s looking the British model. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, in a Carry On kinda way. Sex sells even if it’s documentary sex and Theroux has pretty much a free hand with the BBC who buy any old muck he wants to sell. Selling sex is legal in Britain as long as it doesn’t involve...

I’m a bit stupid. I wasn’t sure if this was fact of fiction or fictionalised fact. I’m still not sure. This short book had me thinking, which is often a good thing. But I don’t really get it, which is a bad thing – right? I’ve been to a few funerals this year and I wrote in memorial that ‘Grief was too small a word’. Setting the tone in Max Porter’s book, split into three short chapters –beginning, middle and end—is not so much a prologue as an...

I read with sadness this morning that Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of RUSH has died. He was 67. He and his bandmates, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were a soundtrack and voice to my teenage years. Peart was a hugely accomplished drummer and undertook writing the band's lyrics when no-one else wanted to and drove the band's direction. For anyone who grew up in Ireland or the UK in the 1980's, the time was bleak, the weather seemed bleak, the...