Richard Holloway’s Looking in the Distance , predates, his classic autobiographical account, Leaving Alexandria of leaving the Anglican church, where he was a Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Gresham Professor of Divinity, which is quite a mouthful for an agnostic. This is a short volume. A working out of ideas, a companion piece to Godless Morality , which I’ve not read and not likely to read. It reminds me a bit...

I'm going to read one of my recent pieces at the Housemill in East London on Friday June 23rd along with fellow ABCtaler Peter Kennedy and others in the Dark Arts Circus . It should be a fun evening of dark and interesting fiction in a beautiful, atmospheric setting. I hope to see some of you there. Alex

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rp0ld/jago-a-life-underwater?suggid=b08rp0ld If a documentary can be poetic, a meditation on life and death and the sea, then this is it. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea springs to mind. Rohani was different from the other kids, swimming underwater and hunting fish. He could hold his breath longer and as an adult his eardrums burst as he got to depths of twenty fathoms on mouthfuls of air. I had...

Edited and designed by one of my favourite poets on ABCTales, Rosa Cruz/Annest Gwylim, a new e-book/anthology for the Poetry Kit called 'Flowers in the Machine' has just been launched today, It's free to download, and contains some very good work by published authors (including Rosa) that you won't find elsewhere. It's at: https://www.poetrykit.org/pkp/flowers.pdf

Big congratulations this week to Sim for a long awaited return to Ribbentrop's Chair - some of the best life writing I've read on ABCTales, and to longrunningspatula for 'Promenade Diary' which reminded me of how much I miss the sea - especially at times like this. https://www.abctales.com/story/sim/jean-ribbentrops-chair https://www.abctales.com/story/longrunningspatula/promenade-diary I'd like to add a recommendation this week - the blogposts...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rg0bd/glasgow-1967-the-lisbon-lions?suggid=b08rg0bd Narrator Rory McCann had an easy job, everybody knows the score. Celtic were the first British team to win the European cup. Inter Milan had scored from the penalty spot in seven minutes, cancelled by an equalising second-half goal by Tommy Gemmell and a late winner from Stevie Chalmers. ‘You’re a legend John. You’re a legend.’ Bill Shankly famously said...

Meridel attempted to get The Girl published in 1939, six years after the end of Prohibition in the USA. The Girl is a girl from a Midwestern farm which is falling to bits who gets a job in St Paul, Minnesota serving booze and Booya in a speakeasy. The Booya is legal and sounds yum, it is 'an elegant stew of chicken and veal and beef and every kind of vegetable and you cook it all night and day very, very slow and it gets to smelling even out on...

Winner of the 2017 Academy Award for best documentary this five-part series is an investment of time. The premium dividend is it shows how America is polarised around issues of class and race. Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce is apt. OJ is the poster boy. A black all American boy that went to a white college, became the All American hero used by Hertz to sell their cars. ‘Go OJ,’...

Stephen Dunn Sweetness: Staying Alive Just when it seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend walking with a tumour, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except for the way I stumbled through it for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size hand-size and never seeming small. I acknowledge there’s no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain,...

I watched this on BBC iPlayer. It was shown over three consecutive nights and was based on the Rochdale child sex scandal. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8pvh/three-girls-series-1-episode-1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8s12/three-girls-series-1-episode-2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8vp5/three-girls-series-1-episode-3 There is institutional cover up, issues of class and racial bias. A blackness of themes that...