BPL was not amused. The whole point of having a Bus Pass was to avoid hiking anywhere. But a goal is a goal and while BPL could procrastinate for Scotland, she was also a stickler for a goal. It was in this stickleback frame of mind that BPL picked up Bus Pass, (who was moved to tears), donned stout walking shoes, and set off to find the shortest hike possible, preferably with a coffee shop somewhere en route. Thomas Hardy hike* seemed to fit...

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) was a political novel in much the same way as George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ray Bradbury’s most well-known novel was incendiary. Brave even, when all around were losing their heads over the perceived threat of the red menace and McCarthyism stoked the flames in the mass media, and was rewarded by even more attention and status in the media McCarthyites fed stories to. You wonder what either writer would have made of the...

Is it possible that swapping the places of two basket chairs in the kitchen, much like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world, could cause bigger changes than solely the aesthetic? Chair move started a ripple effect. Recycling jam jars out of a cupboard, making space for items that were plonked on the kitchen counter, has had a similar renewing effect. Am all organised. That’s a lie. The kitchen counters are cleared...

Found myself choked with tears mid-chat in the local gorgeous crap-you-don’t-need shop; smells so good, reminds me of happy hippy teen-days. That’s not why I was choked with tears, or perhaps it was; the aromatherapeutic scent reminding me of younger, dafter, more hope-filled times. Anyway, the lovely owner gave me a hug and mentioned she had a new herbal capsule which was good for overwhelm, anxiety and general not wanting to leave the...

https://murderone.ie/ This October, I will be joining fellow authors for " READINGS IN THE STUDIO (to book see the Murder one website) Acclaimed authors Bryan J. Mason (There Are No Happy Endings) , James Murphy (Farset Investigations Belfast) and Karen Fitzgibbon (Tell the Truth) take to the stage to share readings from their latest work— whether it’s sharp dialogue, lyrical prose, or unforgettable characters, each writer brings a unique...

Holy Ghost is ‘A Virgil Flowers Novel’. That may be meaningless. As it was to me. Although being brought up a Catholic, I know who the Holy Ghost is, or was, or ever will be. And I know who Stephen King is. When the cover gives a Stephen King blurb: ‘One of the greatest novelists of all time’, you’ve got to look, even though you know hokum when you hear it. I know now who Virgil Flowers is. John Sandford has written around 30 books. Many with...

Six weeks of give-up-a-carb per week are now over and surprising newness has happened. Perhaps the heartbreak of all too real problems in the rest of the world has put first world carboholic problems into perspective. If you have a lovely life and know it, how best to deal with the fact that so many others don’t? Guilt changes nothing but your own mental health. Being stuck in sadness won’t stop mudslides. For the moment, all I can think of is...

Those crazy zeitgeist mavens have coined a curious word; ‘Summerween’. I enjoy the occasional newordish moment myself; so long as it adheres to the rules of language and the meaning is understood. But enough of gramatirritations. ‘Summerween’ originally meant [weirdos] celebrating Hallowe’en in summer. Now, it signifies that darker green, breezy time of year when, fed up with high summer, you long for clocks falling back, dark nights, snuggling...

In June of 2024, Bus Pass Lady (BPL), in her wisdom, decided to take every Enid Blyton ‘Famous Five’ book title and write 300 words of Blytonesque Bus Pass adventures, usually bastardising said title in order to fit the purpose of said 300-word adventure. Ironically, there are five remaining titles, of the original twenty-one. However, Bus Pass and BPL have hit a spot of trouble. Following a grand Bus Adventure all the way to Glasgow and back, a...

Ray Bradbury kept two IBM Wheelwriters in the basement of a yellow house in Cheviot Hills. Around them were masks, tin robots, dinosaur models, Disney cels, comic strips signed for him in the 1940s, before he was anyone the cartoonists had heard of, a model of the Nautilus built for him by Disney Imagineers, a small wooden desk he had used in the forties and kept after he stopped using it, thirty-one filing cabinets, and about four thousand...