Catherine Simpson is around the same age as me. We’ve both received a little largesse from Scottish Book Trust. Her story is in the title. Most readers understand intuitively with the use of the past tense that her wee sister, Tricia, has passed over. In plainer terms, she’s dead. She died in December 2013, aged 46. My brother died around 1995. My partner’s brother died around the same time. They were both in their mid-thirties. Mother and...

Jose Saramago won The Nobel Prize for Literature, but his writing wasn’t widely published or read until the Portuguese writer was in his sixties. That gives some of us hope. His translator died before finishing revisions. The publisher acknowledged the help of Margaret Jill Costa. That’s the kind of blurb you can pick up from any book trailer. Those are his credentials. I didn’t like the writing (maybe it was the translation). It was the story...

morning early morning the bus yes here is the bus there are serveral of us on this cheerful chirpy morning bus cheers driver cheers bus builders Here's to US the co-op is almost open her's the cashier and the shop assistant they go in first because they are working I am a loyal customer in I go and I have a lovely hot drink and a croissant Down the beach I go One lady and a dog ahead of me DAWN good place and on my way back to an old factory...

I’ve been following Danny Robins’ The Witch Farm on BBC Sounds. But I jumped ahead by reading Mark Chadbourn’s Testimony on which much of the Podcast is based. A small publisher, I’m guessing sales were dead. Now it’s jumped to Number 2 in Amazon’s Supernatural category. Resurrection of a different kind. Most funerals I go to now are humanist. No overt religious input. No hymns. But sometimes a floating jokey reference to him or her being...

barbican guest house 235 east citadel road plymouth drakes drum band the drum dreaming yada yada... im a barbie i wear my lippie guys and dolls and us lot yay plymouth fishy neptuna squad we went to southlands notherly southerly yada blow the winds of Change pete seeger ewan mcoll kirsty peggy music politics she's an angry man gotta truck on with the mowing mule train chain and faith hope charity pie in the sky when we can But good Politica is a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f89c/imagine-2022-douglas-stuart-love-hope-and-grit Shuggie Bain , the 2020 Booker prize winner, was Douglas Stuart’s debut novel. It has sold around 1.5 million copies worldwide. His follow-up novel, Young Mungo , is also set in the Glasgow of Stuart’s birth and follows a gay son trying to hang on to the coattails of a mum that is lost to drink, but sometimes finds her way home. https://www.bbc.co.uk/...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7wn/here-before Reincarnation isn’t such a big deal if you’re the Dalai Lama, Buddhist, or many other religions that believe the afterlife comes back to haunt you, but for ten-year-old Megan (Niamh Dornanin) in contemporary Northern Ireland it could be problematic. Her parents, a young couple, Chris (Martin McCann) Marie (Eileen O’Higgins) have moved next door to Laura (Andrea Riseborough), Brendan (...

nighttime i listen to the beats on the radio 6 tv trance falls into place ta tatate tatate tatate ta tatatate tatate taataa repeat repeat and the words not always quite the same they seem the same but listen close and smallchange changes change changing upstairs in my bed i beat out trance with right han and keft hand (i am righthanded) I beat out the beats of trance and my words come up likea printout of my mind upon the beating drum the...

He was born in the summer of his 27th year Coming home to a place he'd never been before He left yesterday behind him you might say he was born again You might say he found a key for every door He climbed cathedral mountains he saw silver clouds below He saw everything as far as you can see I know you'd be a poor man if you never saw an eagle fly I've seen it raining fire in the sky The shadow from the starlight is softer than a lullaby ~ ~ o...

1.1 Bank Card. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f1td/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-1-bank-card My dad never owned a bank card. I’m taking it for granted if he didn’t, my mum didn’t either. He got paid in cash, a brown envelope (not so) full of notes and coins. A slip of paper inside with the amount paid and tax deducted. The bank card seen off hard cash. With many banks closing, used mainly by elderly customers, elegies to...