Let’s start at the end: In the morning and I was still alive. Maybe, I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. The largely autobiographical novel Charles Bukowski wrote in 1969 was a short book, Post Office, which sold over one million copies and gives all us other fifty-year-old bums that do a bit of writing a bit of hope. Somebody took a chance on Bukowski and it’s the classic rags-to-riches story, which is so fucking depressing, because...

Oh it's been hard to choose! There's so much good writing on the site this week. In the end I've gone with my heart. Story of the week is Jane Hyphen's Brooksy; a low-key piece of heartbreak that echoes with the thrum of those classic chords from Dire Straits. https://www.abctales.com/story/jane-hyphen/brooksy JupiterMoon's, imbolc, is Poem of the week. Jack Frost and the Green Man meet in this quiet medative piece. https://www.abctales.com/...

There’s an old joke I tell about Brian when we get talking about fitba, and it’s Wilma was a better player than him. What I don’t tell anybody was that she once gave me a dunt and doing for being cheeky. A few of us were playing near the Gilmore’s that day. We rolled about for a bit, on the slope of grass, near the wall on Shakespeare Avenue. I let her win, of course, because I didn’t hit girls. She wasn't a better player than me. But I did let...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00029kr/son-of-saul Son of Saul BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, directed by László Nemes and written by Clara Royer. This is a straightforward narrative. A Hungarian man finds the body of a young boy, he thinks is his son and he wants to give him a proper Jewish burial. To do so he needs to find a Rabbi willing to perform Mourner’s Kaddish. Transpose that scene to an unnamed Nazi death camp, (Auschwitz), running at...

The latest release by Cerasus Press - ' I Dreamt I Wrote Another Me' by Alex Smith has just been published. You can order your copy here: https://cerasuspoetry.com/i-dreamt-i-wrote-another-me/ or from Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/yb5gy6m4 'Alex Smith grew up a Catholic boy in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, under the threat of the bomb and the gun and sectarian violence, beside a hard border and even harder men. His poetry takes...

Some days are like climbing a tree on a windy day. The branches shake, the world below trembles, your limbs refuse to co-operate. You know it's the experience of a life time, only... why don't you enjoy it? I live my life in "Interesting Times" as a passerby on the bus informed me this morning. That phrase has always fascinated me, from my earliest years here in Norfolk. Why interesting particularly, this phrase means sudden death, or starvation...

Letting Go A really hard thing as a human and as a teacher, for me personally, is “letting go”. I am finding more and more that social media is absolutely horrible at helping me with this problem. A WatsApp group with my matric learners, for example, and when the year ends, they leave the group. It guts me. It really does. But, the time is done, the short interaction I had with them is over and, as a very different generation, they are not ones...

Well, in my efforts to post more blogs once more in 2019 ... I can cover a variety of topics... so why not post my morning musing writings... Here goes ... Lord? How do I get that joy, the joy of being with YOU to explode from me? IT ALREADY DOES MY ANGEL – IT ALREADY DOES – YOU COULDN’T FAKE TEETH PHOTO SMILE IF YOU TRIED ;) Heh heh, thanks Lord, wish I could come to terms with it all inside of me too… how does a lighthouse realise and know its...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000264s/the-commune Nudity, whoopty whoo. This film was alright. It was kinda you get what you deserve. It began with a man and women, Erik and Anna moving into a big house in the 1970s, the end of the hippy era, with their adolescent daughter, Freja. It’s her idea to set up a commune in Copenhagen. He’s more pragmatic. The house is too expensive, his childhood home, but they can’t even afford to heat it,...

A carved wooden statue of Merlin in Carmarthen town centre. He’s a mysterious Celtic shaman who constantly popped up in British culture and folklore between the 5th and 15th centuries. There were reports of him in various guises up and down the west coast from Cornwall to Wales to Cumbria to Scotland. Strongest evidence suggests he originated from Carmarthenshire in Wales in the 5th century, where he was probably driven insane by war. Today, we...