A bit of feelgood, with real sea shanties and some good views of Port Isaac in Cornwall. It's 'based on a true story', well the band is real and I'm not sure about the predictable love story. Daniel Mays, who plays the London smoothie music producer who finds his loyalties turned upside down is 'yummy' and you sort of put up with the cliches about Cornwall and London being worlds apart because there's just enough truth and then there's the...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003f2f/storyville-the-internets-dirtiest-secrets-the-cleaners I’m a big fan of Storyville and BBC 4, in general. That tells you a lot about the type of person I am. Big data companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter (Amazon and Apple) mine data points for personal information the same way Archimedes used mathematics and mechanics (Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall...

Our Story of the Week is proudwing's mysterious and witty 'The Paperweight'. Works wonderfully as a standalone, but we are promised more, and hopefully soon! https://www.abctales.com/story/proudwing/paperweight-part-1 Poem of the Week is Alfie Shoyger's bonkers and brilliantly funny 'Squirrel Quarrel, North Hackney'. A real treat that brightened up my week: https://www.abctales.com/story/alfie-shoyger/squirrel-quarrel-north-hackney This week's...

The scans illustrate typical behaviour of graphs, the equations in themselves are not important just the shapes. The sketches are not accurate one needs only to understand the characteristic properties. With this blog I am trying to explain some concepts to a layman. page 1 These two sketches illustrate some types of long term behavior of curves such as bounded or unbounded graphs, singularity, limits and asymptotes. page 2 A sequence of...

Sal , Mick Kitson’s debut novel is set in Scotland. It’s a first-person narrative about Sal, a thirteen-year-old kid trying to take care of her sister Peppa, who’s only ten. When I picked it up, it reminded me a bit of Sylvia Hehir’s, soon to be released, debut novel Sea Change/ Safe Ground . I’d read a few bits and very early drafts of Dr Hehir’s novel and I look forward to reading more. Sal’s story is quite simple to explain. She kills her mum...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/leaving-neverland-michael-jackson-and-me/on-demand/63905-001 It’s easy to condemn now that we know that Michael Jackson was a serial paedophile. Money and fame kept him safe. I remember reading something and it went along the lines of one of Michael Jackson’s advisors warned him not to have young boys in his bed. To stop having sex with them. And Michael Jackson said, ‘No’. There’s a line here that rings out...

Books are holy relics and none more so than this love letter to the lost. The Great Patriotic War as it is sold to the Russian people by the capitalist oligarchs is something to which they can hold on to. Something to which they can be proud. Forget the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin’s deal with Hitler and the division of Eastern European countries such as Poland. Forget the millions killed in countries such as the Ukraine by Stalin’s policy...

I got to page 35 of this book and gave up. The tale of Ignatius J. Reilly who has a high opinion of himself and a low opinion of humanity and his poor, put-upon mother whom he lives with, and is dependent on, could be described as farce. Anthony Burgess on the cover describes it as ‘A Fine Funny Novel. This is the kind of book one wants to keep quoting from.’ I don’t feel any great need to do that. The story of how I and so many others came to...

Our Story and Poem for the month of February very kindly chosen by Jolono: It never gets any easier. Choosing the winners for February gave me a few headaches, and no it wasn’t the three glasses of Red wine that I had whilst going through all of them! But winners have to be picked and here they are... This month’s winner for SOTM is TFH with La Femme d’argent. https://www.abctales.com/story/tfh/la-femme-dargent A moving tale of a romantic visit...

With a bushel of cherries to choose from this week deciding on the story and poem of the week was quite a task. There were two pieces that reached out to me though - so: story of the week goes to Linda Wigzell's intriguing and compelling piece of life writing: https://www.abctales.com/story/linda-wigzell-cress/family-connections Poem of the week goes to Jane Hyphen's evocative piece: https://www.abctales.com/story/jane-hyphen/thats-not-way-i-go...