Had a wonderful, bittersweet weekend away at the Findhorn Bay Festival. Sublime concert by ‘The Allt Project’ on Saturday evening. Music to melt your pride. Bizarre and beguiling musical theatre ‘The Sailmaker’s Palm’ by ‘Oceanallover’ on Sunday afternoon, and some beautiful pier-side-theatre, ‘Miss Mary’, who got us all up dancing, then left us to it. Stayed at Cullerne House, overlooking Cullerne Garden, which, full of memories of love,...

Am very much enjoying slow mornings reading fascinating stories about semi-precious stones, rather than reading the news. Don’t read anything until I’ve lit a candle, (for ambiance, not night blindness), and made whatever breakfast dish have decided upon. On rainy mornings, as the parents trot up the hill taking their kids to school, admit to mildly Schadenfreudelistic thoughts, such as; no commute, no reason to rush, tra la la la lah. This...

Our Story and Poem for September, very kindly chosen by hudsonmoon

I’ve never met Ian Rankin. Not even on the page. He announced to the world he’s thinking of retiring from writing. I don’t need to make such pronouncements. He’s ‘the iconic number one bestseller.’ ‘A genius’ according to Lee Child. ‘A Master,’ according to the Guardian. Midnight and Blue you’d expect to be a knockout. ‘The new John Rebus thriller’ (well, since adding to his back catalogue of 24 Rebus novels and two short-story collections and a...

Sebastian Mallaby (2026) The Infinity Machine. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for SuperIntelligence. I thought this almost 400 page book would be a bit of slog. But it reads like a thriller. I loved it. Bill Gates recommends you read it too. Demis Hassabis. You know the type. Genius son of poor immigrants (boat people) who sets out to change the world… Notes . https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm5y5nynl75ko Open AI scraps new model...

A big thank you to everyone who's posted their stories, poems and blogs on ABCTales this week - it's been a real pleasure to read them.

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent My editor called me into his office in the summer of 1948 and told me to find a town in New England that held a lottery every June. I asked him what sort of lottery. He said the sort where the whole town comes out to the square on a fine morning and draws slips of paper from an old black box, and the family that draws the marked slip, somebody in that family is chosen, and the town does something...

If ever I feel lonely, or sad about being single, or am daydreaming about having a husband to nag about the utility room ceiling not being painted, nothing salves that ‘road-not-taken’ longing better than watching two or three episodes of ‘The Ramsey Show’. The financial infidelities people suffer are heart-stopping. Men taking not just their own pension fund, but their wife’s fund too, and losing the lot, day-trading on the stock market...

September gone already. Time to seek out ‘The Great Pumpkin’ and snaffle all the orange creams from the Hallowe’en Quality Street. But first, a review of the various experiments. This last month, since stopping reading the news, and semi-stopping scrolling, and because those tormentors, AppleTV, are only drip-feeding one episode a week of ‘Slow Horses’, have read several books. None of them coursework. Alice Hoffman’s latest, ‘The Witches of...

Integration and Differentiation Differentiation and Tangent Slope dy/dx Straight line and slope m Area and Integral of f