Blogs

No difficulty at all in choosing our Story of the Week this time - an episode of jeand's brave and absorbing account of her experiences of what started out as Bell's Palsy and has now taken an even more complicated turn. Please do read this, and the other parts of Jean's story. I know everyone on the site will want to send her all the very best: Janus Look 4 | ABCtales Poem of the Week goes to smokejack's 'Undertow'. It's a swirling, hypnotic...

The story so far: Got up with the intention of attending a Body Balance class at the Leisure Centre. Arrived and found no parking spaces and vast numbers of cars arriving and disgorging children. (Many children.) Undaunted, I finally found a parking space and went in to join the class, around five minutes late. Turns out it's a 'bring your own yoga mat' class. I have no yoga mat. Undaunted, I find a space and start to take part. The reaching and...

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel about a magical underground railroad that took slaves from the South not to safety, but not to slavery either. Harlem Shuffle has no such tropes. Ray Carney is trying to get by selling furniture on 125 th Street. 1959, America is on the up and up. Not that you’d know if you were a black man. He needs to walk the line of being crooked enough to be straight. Everyone is on the take from the cop...

Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments , ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never very good at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. Rosie ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09lk76z/rosie ). How letting the market sort things out is darkest doublethink, whilst helping take a hammer to poor people’s lives. What I’m building up to saying is aye, Roddy Doyle, but...

As per usual, the stream of good material flows ever on. It cheers me up no end to know that – every day – there is something to read that is brilliant, beguiling, or brave,. Sometimes a piece is all three. Story of the W eek was a tough choice again this week. Rosalie Kempthorne produced several of her off-kilter, disturbing, yet believable pieces. Part one of the first of them is here Jack O’ Donnell (Celticman’s) fishermen’s tale ‘The Ten...

Not Writing : Read, that’s all. The more you read the better your writing will be. Read a (very) few books generally acknowledged to be bad writing. Work out why people say this about them. Read the books your parents and grandparents had to read at school and books by their writers’ contemporaries. (You may be offended, that’s fine. Learn to read with detachment, it’s a good skill to have). Make notes about what you read, or what has inspired...

Oscar Wilde: ‘Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has ever read history, is a man’s original value.’ A writer’s job is to remember. The better the writer, the better we remember. I’d a day out at The Golden Friendship Club on Saturday. Jim McLaren performed two miracles—and perhaps there’ll be a play about that one day—buying the old Masonic Club and finding the money to renovate it. If he wants to hang a picture of his mum, Agnes, and...