Blogs

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

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...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5vv/dirty-god I expected this to begin with the acid attack. Instead Jade (Vicky Knight) is returning home, but still wearing a see-through face mask until her face settles. Her hopes are pinned on a miracle, that reconstructive facial surgery can return her to the fresh-faced girl she was before the attack. And not this ‘dog’s dinner,’ as she calls it. Hospital staff are supportive but warn her that...

After reading War and Peace I felt that someone should gallop up and hang a medal around my neck. I’m easily confused and Russian names are Russian to me. Childhood is a much easier beast. Short pen-portraits of, for example, ‘The Tutor, Karl Ivanitch,’ ‘Mama,’ ‘Papa,’ ‘Lessons,’ ‘The Idiot’. His is a very structured life. Papa is a little god, all bow before him. He runs the estate with an iron grip. No rouble unaccounted for. Yet, he can lose...

It's so great, as we celebrate our twentieth birthday, to see that the quality of work on ABC is as brilliant and varied as ever. Story of the Week goes to Peter Bennett's 'A Hauf an a Hauf'. It takes skill and courage to use dialect as your narrative voice, and Peter manages it brilliantly with characters that leap off the page with warmth, humour and pathos: A Hauf an a Hauf | ABCtales No doubt at all in my mind about the Poem of the Week -...

Thank you so much to all the ABC Talers (and friends!) who participated in our Zoom Reading Event last Saturday. It was an absolutely brilliant evening. Special thanks to Mark Burrow for all the organisation and the compering. It will be on our YouTube channel in the New Year, so keep an eye out for it there! Also lots and lots of thanks to those who have sent donations to ABC. If your donation had a name on it you should have had a reply by now...

Big congratulations to Drew Gummerson for the publication of Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. Available here: https://www.beardedbadgerpublishing.com/ Review by Mark Burrow Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel by Drew Gummerson is a fast-paced, funny and filthy novel. It follows the adventures of the hotel’s hapless dishwasher and his search for love and recognition, which repeatedly ends in varying kinds of humiliation, estrangement and oodles...