Situated along the River Liffey, past the Temple Bar area of Dublin stands Smock Alley Theatre. Founded in 1662 as a Theatre Royal (the only one ever built outside of London) under Charles II, it has assumed many guises including a reconsecrated Church in the Victorian era. Falling into ruin after the 1916 rising and independence from England it was recently restored to its full glory including an impressive theatre space in 2012. For the next...

Storyville: Inside Lehman Brothers, BB4, BBC IPlayer, Director Jennifer Deschamps. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0009tpx/storyville-inside-lehman-brothers-the-whistleblowers Lehman Brothers was one of the first dominoes to fall in the 2008 crash which brought down the world’s financial systems. Debts for Lehman Brothers were around $630 billion. Take a little time to think about that. It’s like the idea of infinity. Your mind shies away...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/for-sama/on-demand/66428-001 When you get personal, you get real. Waad al-Kateab, using phone and camcorder gives voice and sound and fury to what was once her home, Aleppo, before it was levelled and she, her husband and daughter, Sama, were forced into exile. There’s echoes of other diarists such as James Baldwin’s, A Letter to My Nephew, which argues ‘it’s the innocence which constitutes the crime’. Waad al...

In November, 1988, a crowd of around 20 000 cheered as the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, met Lech Walesa. He was a shipyard worker from the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk and leader of Solidarity, the independent Polish trade union movement. Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski had Thatcher’s car stopped before she reached the airport to board a Royal Airforce jet to London and presented her with a bouquet of flowers. ‘I came to see and to have a long talk with...

Celtic 2—1 Lazio. Celtic got lucky last night and I got unlucky, with my three quid bet on Christopher Julien to score the first goal, odds 40/1. Julien popped up with the winner on the last minute of the ninety. But there was still time for the Italians to fling players forward. Celtic held out. Prior to the nail-biting finale, with some stout defending, but for two wonder saves by Fraser Forster victory could and perhaps should have went to...

'...we made tea. Moth found a hairy wine gum in his pocket so we cut that in half.' The South West Coast Path stretches from Minehead in Somerset down to Lands End and back to Poole. 630 miles, a lot of steep paths.. I've only done teeny bits and taken the bus back home or gone to a Youth Hostel. (I love Tintagel Youth Hostel.) Raynor and Moth have are homeless. They are fifty and the farmhouse they've built from a ruined shell which is also...

I like Derren Brown which makes everything easier. As Billy Connolly said when people approach him they are usually smiling. Derren Brown doesn’t make me happy. You can only do that yourself and he’s not really sure that happiness exists, except as a transitory experience, a bi-product of something else. Derren Brown’s book reminds me of chap-books heroines in nineteenth-century novel, written by Jane Austen, who were, for example, always...

The weather and news may be bleak but ABCtales is full of life and energy! Another week of fabulous writing - thank you to all who have posted. Our picks this week both draw on the hidden depths of the domestic world. Story of the week goes to Noo with her two captivating portraits of loneliness and quiet lives behind closed doors. https://www.abctales.com/story/noo/involuntary Poem of the week goes to a wonderful autumnal concoction from Ed...