When you are asked to review books, a number of prompts are translated into numbers. For example, you are asked to award a mark out of ten for literary merit. I often cheat here. If I like a book, it gets nearer ten than one. After all, even the ingredients on the label of a brown sauce bottle have enough literary merit to get five. Ingenious Pain gets a ten, because his sentences sing and you can get your teeth into them. His characters have a...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,366.54 ) Week - 30 & 31 Go Birds! ------------- E-A-G-L-E-S… EAGLES!!!!!! --------------------------------- That’s right, football is back, life is good and all is as it should be in the world. Big impressive win for the Eagles as they soundly dispatched the hapless, hopeless Falcons. Sadly however, the market missed the memo and did not follow suit. Ah well, this weekend’s...

Difficult as always to choose just one of each. Story of the Week. I really enjoyed Mitzi 44’s ‘ Busmar Astral ’ which was tender, funny and ultimately uplifting. Equally good, but very different was houghtonrick83’s Isolated . However, this week's story of the week is Marandina’s moving With or Without You. Poem of the Week Di_Hard’s ‘ preserving time ’ was as sweet and lovely as no doubt the jam was and I enjoyed that the title might be taken...

To further explain the genesis of The Man In The Bar' idea. It dawned on me that, as a new State Pensioner, this might be a suitable new profession. Similar to a court jester or writer in residence. As mentioned yesterday, the U.K. government's decision to do away with proper experts meant that the role might now be more onerous than I at first calculated. I certainly can not explain the 'Benefits of Brexit' and related topics. If you can,...

Apologies. This is really not much of a blog. I'm in Morocco at the moment celebrating the first anniversary of a corrective operation which brought to an end 3.5 years of medical cock-ups. The aftermath of which was kidney stones, in May. I came out here as a retreat, a place to recoup my energies and to write whatever came my way. A story I'd been scoping was the idea of 'The Man in The Pub'. in the days when we could afford to go to pubs...

Everybody has a cat or dog story. I’ve also read one about horses. Cathy Rentzenbrink is a reader like me, well, probably better than me. She read a book a day, sometimes two, after her brother died. She did a lot of boozing. Went a little mad, finished her degree and got married to a man she loved. Then she got divorced, but, hey, nobody’s perfect. Her brother, Matthew, was perfect, but never lived long enough to unperfect himself. He was born...

An easy read. Like picking a magazine from a rack. Fling in a bit of philosophy. Sprinkle with maxims. Challenge yourself to live the best reading life you can. Jean-Paul Sartre: Life begins on the other side of despair. ‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to other variations.’ Aristotle...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000zhk8/the-keeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Trautmann I usually check out late-night films to see if there are any worth watching. I wasn’t sure of The Keeper . Advertised as a biopic of Bert Trautmann, my first thoughts were it was something to do with music, and I probably wouldn’t like it. Before I pulled up the preview, I realised it might have something to do with goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000z8p5/911-inside-the-presidents... Hagiography (Literary & Literary Critical Terms) any biography that idealizes or idolizes its subject Around 3000 United States citizens were killed in what has become known as 9/11. This is A Day in the Life of President George W. Bush. A ticking clock. The rest is a history of good guys and bad guys, when 9/11 became shorthand for President George W. Bush can-do...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,290.30 ) Week - 29 September! ------------- In like a hurricane! Out like a... --------------------------------- Can’t wait to find out! We watched tv until the power failed then stood outside on the front porch with the neighbors on tornado watch. Exciting stuff! At least two sizable twisters passed closer than I feel comfortable with. They both passed us by several miles while...