https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0004gpl/miriams-dead-good-adventure-series-1-episode-1 There’s a simple rule in life, don’t get old and don’t get fat, which becomes a commandment on television. Presenter Miriam Margolyes is the exception to the rule. She looks a bit like Grotbags, the witch, but without the green hair. Margolyes has become something of the flavour of the month on BBC, a kind of low-rent-a-gob, fat and Jewish and a lesbian...

Reposted here in case you miss it in the main site... The second result from this online epic book is that the research on my family - on spinal bifida which I have, and which was resolved for me by surgery, is now done, and around the world unborn babies are being saved from lives trapped in wheelchairs - locked into a silence - in a world that leaves them there. The only thing I found wrong with all of this, is the refusal of the medics...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate-change-the-facts The facts are global warming is taking place now and the concerted action to limit it 1.5 degrees centigrade by reducing fossil fuel emissions, which was agreed by the Paris Accord, 2015, looks highly unlikely to happen. ‘What we do now will profoundly affect the next thousand years,’ David Attenborough tells us. Fossil fuel companies have already been working hard to smear...

Cuckoo Song is the second Frances Hardinge novel I’ve read. The other was The Lie Tree . Their target audience is Young Adults and Children. I’ve not been that for fifty years, but I guess we’re all children at heart. And Hardinage is a terrific and must-read author. The question of who we are becomes what we are? Doppelgangers and memory is spliced with folklore, fairy tales and warped visions of reality. Violet, Sebastian’s left-behind fiancée...

I’ve just come back from Benidorm. There, I’ve told the world and I don’t care who knows it! Benidorm has a particular place in the national psyche, it tends to be a useful shorthand for everything that it wrong about package holidays and, especially, the British holidaymaker. It occupies the same place that Torremolinos used to hold in the 1960s. I don’t suppose the T.V. series of the same name has done much to change its image, either,...

Josh Ireland’s The Traitors was an Observer Book of the year and it’s terrific. A history book written like a novel and takes the reader from the hungry thirties to the post-war triumph of the new-world order. For those that backed the Axis powers and the Nazis, but were born in Britain, traitors to a man, there could be no redemption, but not all faced the hangman’s rope. There are parallels now with the nineteen thirties with the growth in...

Really difficult to make choices this week, with lots of splendid stuff on the site. In the end though, Story of the Week had to be alexislebarouder's 'The Misery of Flight' for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that it is simply, as one commenter said, great storytelling: https://www.abctales.com/story/alexislebaroudeur/misery-flight A different kind of misery in our funny and heartfelt Poem of the Week, Scorpio88's 'Misophonia'. Turns...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00039vv/next-big-thing-series-1-7-my-loneliness-is-killing-me This short film won a Scottish BAFTA, which pleased me because I’d met the writer, Michael Richardson, a few times on a writing course I got turfed out of for not being able to write. Fair enough. I often go off in tangents that have no relevance. It’s not Dennis Nilsen, killing for company, and blocking the drains with body parts, or, bottle...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003w40/the-murder-of-jill-dando There seems to be a plethora of anniversaries and murder reconstructions on all of the main channels. We’ve had the Bulger, The Yorkshire Ripper and Jack the Ripper recently and before that Fred and Rose West. The list goes on. Partly, I’d guess to the world-wide success of The Making of a Murderer. BBC couldn’t let the twentieth anniversary, 26 th April 1999, of one of its...

My son told me the other day about someone getting in trouble with a knife in the playground. I was worried, but thought, well, the school will be on it, it won't happen again. Then he explained he'd only mentioned it because it was someone he knew, who had been threatend and there was a knife incident of some kind every week. At his previous school the main topics of conversation were suicide or porn, and the children at this new school are...