I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate . It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12 th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population...

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to...

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It's been a lousy day, weather-wise, and there's nothing I like doing more than messing about with a spreadsheet (I know, I know, I really should get a life!), so I thought you might be interested in some of the statistics concerning the recent ' Bring Out Your Dead' series of stories: The story, in its current form, appeared as a series of 54 weekly episodes, published on ABCTales commencing in January, 2023. The story had originally commenced...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/gagarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagarine When time and place merge in this way, usually, you’ve got something special. The idea is quite simple. Youri (Alséni Bathily) has been abandoned by his mum. He’s a precocious, a 16-year-old boy living in Cité Gagarine, a housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, who dreams of becoming an astronaut. But he channels his gift for fixing things into trying to fix the...

In which my Undertakers take a two week respite

I heard about Lorraine Adair’s death in a convoluted way. I sometimes pass her sister on the canal embankment on my bike. Teresa is usually walked by a Rottweiler. I hang an arm out and wave as I pass. Teresa is married to Tam Henry. Lorraine was the youngest of the eight Adair’s. There are more Henrys than cement in Clydeside brickwork. So she’s related to most Catholics in Clydebank and many Protestants, too. I’d passed her twice in three days...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bront%C3%ABs-Inferno-Ewan-Lawrie/dp/B0CYSZJZ7N/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr = Writers create versions of themselves on the page. Ewan Lawrie is a better version of myself on ABCtales. I read Bronte’s Inferno in one go. I couldn’t decide whether Bronte’s Inferno with a veiled reference to the Bronte sisters and the mystical worlds they created with their brother was also a satirical play on the...

REBLOG TO MARK 2Ist. When Davie McCallum, aged 31, went missing on 28 th March 2003, his son David (junior) was aged five and about to start school. Now he’ll be twenty-four or twenty-five, he’ll be approaching the same age when his dad started a family. His wee brother, Robbie, was a one-year-old baby. Now he’ll have left Clydebank High School, the same school as his dad and older brother. The mother of his sons, Margaret McDowell, waiting for...

Hi all, hope your all ok, still creating brillinat work. missed my ABC family and hope soon more work from me. Take care all and have a fun, peaceful Easter x