Apple’s quarterly returns $18 billion (around £12 billion) in three months from October to December 2014, selling 34 000 iPhones an hour, is pretty impressive especially when factoring in I don’t even have one. Nor do I have an iPad, AppleMac or neither will I purchase the much hyped Apple watch. So what took Apple to the top of the tree without me? Quite simply they make beautiful toys, but that is not enough. They market them as the must-have...

Boxes of treats! The Arts Council started this annual competition in 1992 publishing the top entries There is serious prize money for best collection, best first collection and best first poem.Usually around 140 pages of solid quality,and illustrates true diversity of style and topic. There appears to be no length limit either min or max to the entries. Quirky poems by names unknown to me stand out The last Cafe in the West by Stephen Plaice in...

I stood up and cheered when we got drawn with Rangers in the League Cup. We’ve not played them for three years. We want to rub their noses in it. We’ve missed it (but only if we win). Chris Sutton is getting some stick for saying what many Rangers’ fans believe: Celtic could win playing with their men blindfolded. That’s true. We’ve got the best young players in Scotland. And in Liam Henderson we have the most exciting talent since Ian Durrant (...

Finding a poem this week was quite hard because the quality of submissions was even more outstanding than usual. I think maggyvaneijck is the rightful winner though, with the multi-layered Blue. Definitely one to read again and again. For the Story of the Week you're getting three for the price of one! Noo's trio of wonderful shorts, each with an unlikely ending - and they were so good, I am nicking the title and theme for this week's...

This book is outdated. It was published before the crash and unravelling of high finance in 2008, but the bounce back of the increasingly wealthy has been so spectacular and complete it’s as if that event never happened. A more major shortcoming is Frank’s believe in the benefits of trickle-down economics. It’s worth repeating wealth flows at an increasing speed upwards and if the rising tide has lifted fewer boats during the Obama years, as one...

Make sure you visit ABCtales on Saturday when we'll be announcing the details of our fantastic new competition!

I’ve never heard of William Kowalski and I’m pretty sure he’ll never have heard of me. I followed this link http://williamkowalski.com/wp-content/themes/shoelace/ebooks/Writing_For... He gives advice for first-time novelists. You should follow it too. If something can make you laugh then its half way to being genius. Here it’s when his mentor, Jack Kunickzak, explained to a young Kowalski that while his shipmates went shipside to watch the...

The BBC commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz, 70 years ago, the site of almost one million murdered, but also a symbol of the six million other Jews killed and hundreds of thousands others killed in a genocidal purge of the pure Aryan-Nazi race that took place in a ring of hundreds of other camps. As a Catholic the service itself was one I was familiar with. The solemn intonation, readings from extracts of Primo Levi, If This is a Man ...

How many times have you been told NO just to go back umpteens times to work and perfect that YES! Umpteen times?Anyway, as much as the "never give up speech" is all inspiring and crucial, if we're being honest with ourselves ,it's a further dissappointment to hear! Am I right? I'll speak for myself then,it is. It reminds me of the long long longggg journey ahead of me. I know it. I understand it. I just don't want to hear you say it...,maybe...

'They're just a bunch of trees.' Wrong! Woods can tip us topsy-turvey, grannies become wolves, witches jump out at us stealing babies to imprison for life because they can't let go, giants quake the ground. There are love-rat princes, weird magic beans and worst of all we can lose the path. Lost in the woods! Stephen Sondheim's clever musical travels well to the screen.Several fairy tales are meshed together in a singing, running, suspenseful...