I usually vote SNP, but will vote Labour. The first-past-the-post system means that my vote is meaningless, but if everybody thought the same thing the Tory party would win by a landslide. Teresa May obviously thought that way. Her Damascene moment came while walking the dales. It had nothing to do with local government elections, where historically the party in government gets trashed, but the Conservative Party gained seats, even in places...

Writing is the easy part. That’s what I tell folk. That’s when I learn what I think. And others think about me. Reading is the engine of writing. I’ve had a long love affair with books, with bouts of promiscuity. As I get older I find time not reading is time wasted. Selling yourself, well, that’s the hard part. Not many folk know about Scottish Book Trust. It’s a national charity. Until I started writing a few years ago I hadn’t heard of it...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08tj1kx/bill-cosby-fall-of-an-american-icon Today, 5 th June 2017, Bill Cosby faces four charges of first-degree aggravated sexual assault against Andrea Constand. A possible ten-year prison sentence hangs in the balance. He has pled not guilty. In many ways this is the reverse of the OJ Simpson trial. When Constand made the allegations against Cosby that he had drugged and sexually assaulted her in summer...

Picks for the month of May very kindly chosen by Sean McNulty: Story: The Green and White Dress by rosaliekempthorne https://www.abctales.com/ story/rosaliekempthorne/green- and-white-dress The Green and White Dress is a wonderful piece of writing. It feels like a timeless, classic satire – the characters and the setting could exist at any time in history. It feels so real, yet plays out like images twinkling in some fantastic magic lantern...

Horrible news again. I often feel that terrorists hold lefty-liberals like myself in even worse contempt than the hard right. When we say 'have what religion or non-belief you like and we don't care who owns the land provided we all have food and water and have whatever views you like provide you stick to words only' I am sure we are seen as being human toilet paper because they don't understand us. My thoughts are with the relatives of the 10...

The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante’s fourth and final novel, is largely set in a working-class district of Naples. The narrator in each novel has been Elena Grecco, born the reader is told in August 1944 and this narrative takes us up to 2005 and almost the present day, when she’s an old woman in her late sixties, sitting on her balcony, looking over the Po, a view of Vesuvius and the semicircle of Naples. She is content, a writer, in...

What a lot of great pieces this week - it's been very hard to choose just two! Big congratulations to Lille Dante for his poem ' my spectre hits the shopping mall of time' which makes me laugh each time I read it, and to love_writing for 'My Mother and I aren't Talking and Other Tales' - a finely drawn picture of a disordered childhood. If you haven't read them yet, please do! https://www.abctales.com/story/lille-dante/my-spectre-haunts-shopping...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08s323v/broken-series-1-episode-1 I watched Episode 1 of Jimmy McGovern’s series Broken . It was meant to be on last Tuesday, but because of the Manchester bombing was held over for a week. I’m a fan of Jimmy McGovern. His dramas are usually about working-class people that are broken, in some way, and have to find a way forward. A sympathetic portrayal, and counterpoint to the propaganda from sources such as...

From the brilliant Noo: After a trickle at the start, we had a near flood of poems for Poetry Monthly by the end! Thanks to everyone who put fingers to keyboards and wrote – there were many interesting and different takes on the theme, but three that particularly stood out for me were: Luigi Pagano’s warm, nostalgic ‘Beautiful Day in San Remo’ https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/beautiful-day-sanremo London Calling’s wispy and wise ‘...

'The Girl in the Book', that's the title of an English Studies Course that a young relative of mine has recently completed at uni. In The Girl, the book by Meridel le Sueur that I recently blogged, the girl, the central character of the book is given no name. In Another Time, Another Place the time is World War Two and the young married woman in the tiny farming community someplace in the north of Scotland is simply 'the young woman'. The young...