A KIND OF DROWNING The man standing at the funeral in bubble-gum pink hair is P.J. Crowe. His career as a detective is in tatters - he's facing dismissal, vilified by the press, and his wife's about to leave. Lying low in a small seaside town he spots a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in the kitchen of a local café. It offers him an escape from the public and his spiraling mental health - and it's where Thea Farrell worked – until she was found dead at sea...

I didn’t know Andrew O’Hagan had Scottish roots and writes about Scotland. That puts him in the fast-lane of must-read books. The plot for The Illuminations is simple. Anne, aged 82, is losing her marbles. She’s in a sheltered-housing complex in Saltcoats. Her neighbour Maureen, aged 68, keeps an eye out for her. They’re friends, but even Jackie, the warden admits there’s only so much they can do. They’ve taped off Anne’s cooker so she can’t use...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,095.63 ) Week - 10 Oh Huzzah! Up 92 and a qawrter… Say it with me now, and a Qawwwterrrr! An actual gain this week, not much but welcome. Driven mostly by nice gains in a couple of tickers I had as favorites to do well at the start. OZSC & MMEDF are both positions I hold IRL (in real life). I’m happy to hear that MIND MEDICINE is uplisting from the OTC market to the far more...

Two very differently styled pieces for our Picks this week. What they share is passion, conviction and, of course, brilliant writing. Story of the Week is TJW's 'Lap Dance'. This writer puts his heart, soul and pretty much all the rest of him into everything he writes. This is about someone trying to build a life after experiences that refuse to let him go: Lap Dance | ABCtales Poem of the Week is Di_Hard's 'just deserts'. The frustration of...

When people talk about literary merit, I wander away to the pub to have a pint. Since the pubs are closed, and I get smashed by a snifter of poitin , or indeed three pints, perhaps slightly more (when I’m watching Celtic) I’ll hang about. Literary merit is just a fancy way of asking if you liked the book. I don’t finish books I don’t like. Cold Is the Dawn is 427 pages. So you do the maths of how much I liked it. If like me, you have a...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,187.88 ) Week - 9 One is the Loneliest Number! Only one lonely positive symbol left… The only one to show a gain from last week too! 9 weeks into the game and rapidly approaching the half value loss mark. What’s going on? I should be picking out Italian marble for my villa in France by now. I tell you, this patience thing may turn out to be wildly overrated! Let’s just leave this...

CERASUS Magazine is now established as a regular quarterly publication.

I’ve been reading about the Irish Famine 1845-51. I’m in the privileged position of never knowing life-threatening hunger. Under the Hawthorn Tree is a children’s book and international bestseller set in 1845—200 000 copies sold in Ireland alone. A book of 150 pages, its simple sentences and style meant I could digest the book in one sitting. I’m looking for markers that make it a success where other fail, something I could make use of. The...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$1,640.35 ) Week - 8 Coming Into London From Over the Pole! F lying in a big airliner Chickens flyin' everywhere around the plane Could we ever feel much finer? Well represented and diverse in form, dripping with potential is the pot stock sector. You know for a plant that is still illegal, there sure is a bunch of above board economic activity going on. Probably be more if the...

Watch False Confessions | Prime Video (amazon.co.uk) What makes this interesting is we see footage of people who have been accused of heinous crimes—they were later proved to be innocent. We see, for example, police officers interviewing Lorenzo Montoya. He was fourteen-years-old when he walked into the police station 10 th January 2000. He was convicted of the murder of Emily Johnson, a 29-year-old teacher at Skinner Middle School, and...