‘You are the loneliest girl I’ve ever met,’ Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) tells (Saint) Maud (Morfydd Clark). Amanda is on end-of-life care at her beach home in run down Scarborough. Maud is her live-in nurse. She takes care of her. A servant in the old fashioned sense in that she cooks her meals, feeds her, puts her to bed and gets her up in the morning. Administers (from the word minister) her medication. Maud is a trained nurse, an angel, but she’s...

The publication date is important here, 2008. Let’s say Sylvia Browne wrote the book in 2007. That gives us a baseline to work out how accurate her prophesies are in May 2022. Confirmation bias tends to confirm what we already know, or think we know. Sylvia Browne cannot see a human race beyond the end of this century. With global warming that seems possible, if not probable. ‘…we’ve got a planet that’s slowly warmed to the point of cataclysmic...

opp is it just me or has anyone on here ever done what i just did. done some lovely writing and hit a key and opp it all gone and you can't remember it lol hint to myself and to all copy and paste and save it before you lose it like I just it . i don't know how the rest of you are but when I write, it comes from somewhere don't know where. so once i write it i won't remember it unless it's down on text somewhere lol i always call writing a craft...

There’s a quote from some writer, and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember her name (you might). It goes something like this. ‘Tick, Tick, Boom… That what it is to be a writer. You just keep throwing yourself against the wall and hope something sticks.’ James Robertson’s books usually stick with me. This one doesn’t. It slides down the wall. It’s probably his most autobiographical. The commentator and narrator, well, mostly, is Douglas Findhorn...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000df09/being-gail-porter ‘I’m no longer a pretty girl,’ Gail Porter says in a conversation she’s having with an old friend, but she’s also speaking to the viewer. We judge so much by appearance. And she’s right. She’s no longer young and she’s no longer pretty. Alopecia has robbed her of her trademark blonde hair. In 1999, she was one of the most well-known presenters on telly. Her naked image was...

https://www.abctales.com/story/marandina/final-message-moscow To anyone that has read my recent story about my son’s homecoming from Moscow my genuine thanks. In the story I referred to an unpublished allegory of sorts. This is the piece I wrote on 28 th February 2022. Having read it back, it’s still appears to be mostly current which is a reflection of how the conflict has become bogged down in attrition. Again, I hope sense prevails soon and...

Fergal Keane: Living with PTSD, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, presenter Fergal Keane, Director Mike Connolly. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0017795/fergal-keane-living-with-ptsd There’s a contradiction Fergal Keane suffers from Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD) but he’s in Ukraine. He’s on the frontline. He’s been there before. Cutting his teeth in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He’s been in South Africa and Rwanda. The British...

A lot of big hitters in this movie. I wasn’t sure about it, but I gave it five minutes and watched to the end. It jumps between 1973 and 1986. Daniel Raneri (with very long eyelashes) plays J.R. Maguire, a kid returning to his grandad’s house in Long Island. Tye Sheridan plays an older J.R. His mum, Dorothy Maguire (Lily Rabe) has a mattress attached to the roof of their car and all her worldly belongings. She’s going home, but carries with her...

Many people overseas would already be informed but still this may be interesting. We have real trouble you might know of it unfortunately the first part of this blog entry is bad news. Our main challenges are of an internal social nature. Going into winter available electricity is the immediate and pressing problem the network already cannot cope there are regular interruptions then there is a 5th Corona wave, in effect just after lifting the...

The longer days and warmer weather has definitely brought something out in ABC Talers - there's been some cracking stuff on the site this week. That being said, one poem in particular stood out for me. Our Poem of the Week is 'Stories I won't tell you' by london_calling79. It is a visceral piece, digging down into the realities of a particular kind of grief. It pulled me into its narrative, and although I immediately wanted to read it again, it...