https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0011f0c/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire French with English subtitles. Writer and Director Celine Sciamma creates a beautiful vision. I struggle to speak English, and growl at anybody that suggests I’m not working class. Yet the channels I watch most are BBC 4 and BBC 2. Academics in the late 1960s tried to cobble together a theory that showed an erosion of working-class values with a more affluent class of car...

I'm delighted to be able to tell you that the stories I've featured here on ABCtales about Rohan and India, the two dogs at TURN Education, have now been collected together into a book in time for Christmas. The collection also includes two brand new stories, not previously published, which round off their first year together. Here's the blurb: A year in the life of the dogs (and other animals) at TURN Education. Beginning with the first...

https://www.itv.com/hub/the-trial-of-louise-woodward/10a1090a0001 Matthew Eappen would be around twenty-five now, had he lived. Nineteen-year-old nanny, Louise Woodward was accused and found guilty of shaking the eight-month-old baby in her care so hard it caused subdural hematoma and killed him. Her trial, soon after the death of Princess Diana in 1987, was a media event—I don’t remember it, but watching footage Woodward’s pasty face was...

5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,419.92 ) Week - 39 The Dying Breed! ------------- What is Compassion..? --------------------------------- My wife suffers the effects of arthritis. She receives a drug infusion at a nearby clinic every few weeks. In her most recent treatment this past week, she had an unusual encounter which she then related to me. A somewhat elderly woman had also been there for a similar reason...

‘My name is Aidan and I am an addict.’ So what, you might say. You probably know the trajectory that follows. You’ve got Damian Barr, who grew up near Ravenscraig steelworks, a solid working-class town. Him being gay wasn’t his fault—or even a fault—but being a fucking Tory, Maggie & Me , was just a step too far. Deborah Orr, Motherwell: A Girlhood , which just about sums it up. You’ve got Kerry Hudson’s whimsical, Tony Hogan Bought Me an...

5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,462.34 ) Week - 37/38 The Yin and Yang of Ageing! ------------- The Circle of life giveth, and sometimes taketh away.. --------------------------------- I work for a company which supplies fire alarm equipment to large commercial and healthcare institutions. Been in the business for something like 40, maybe 45 years. I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go, so to speak! On...

I find reading Acknowledgements instructive. Writing is a singular process, but a team game. When you write, or try to write, you look at books differently. You look at the cover and artwork [tick]. You look at the publisher: Faber [tick]. Fiona Scarlett has got the backing of the one of the major league publishers for her debut novel. You look at the blurbs on the back. What famous writers have been hooked in to add for added publicity,...

Samuel Shem (1978) The House of God. You might have read, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor , or Jed Mercurio’s Bodies (before he became a multimillionaire screenwriter). You know what to expect an insider account of naïve young men and women moving outside the world of books and into a cult into which they will work day and night, with little sleep and little idea what they are doing, while wearing a white coat...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00116dq/the-exorcist I was around ten, big for my age, but not big enough to sneak into the La Scala and watch The Exorcist . The media warned us—don’t go. Rather than see it, there was talk of church boycotts and a spate of suicides. And those that did see it fainted, spewed up, or went insane. But my sister was made of stronger stuff. Jo even smoked and drank vodka. She wasn’t eighteen, but there was a...

Halloween is here with ghosts and goblins and squeals of freight. Every child’s imagination soars as they put on a costume and become their imagined fantasy. It is fun and freeing and for the very young, the best holiday of the year. Scary movies or humorous, spine tingling, TV shows light up the screens of many homes. Cauldron bowls are filled to brimming with candy treats and homes are decorated to fright or delight depending on the decorator'...