https://www.channel4.com/programmes/anais-in-love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%AFs_in_Love Anaïs in Love is to Paris, what Frances Ha is to New York. Annais (Anaïs Demoustier) is the eternal student, with a half-finished doctorate whose subject matter of French passion in the distant past puts herself at the centre of her non-studying universe. Each moment, each day, each missed deadline, uncovers new material waiting for her. Her mum’s...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05569p9/good-vibrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Hooley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Vibrations_(film) I was between books and wondering what shite to watch. I was going to say on the telly, but that’s as odd as admitting to owning a Singers Sewing Machine. Films and documentaries. Stuff that makes you think without really having to think. Good Vibrations was a bit of both and simply...

Christmas! Wonder of Wonders & Miracle of Miracles God bless us all, each one!

The Big Nowhere comes at the end of James Ellroy’s take on 1950s Los Angeles. Angels in The City of Angels are in short supply. Every crummy cop is on the take and it works all the way up the ladder to the city bosses and studio heads such as Howard Hughes. In walkies and talkies only money matters. Hughes can fill his studios with starlets and have apartment’s at ready to be filled with the fifteen-year-old farm girls with big knockers that he...

Does God have a plan for our lives? What about times of disaster? If there is a God and he has a perfect plan for our lives, why do things sometimes go horribly wrong? God is still there pulling the threads together into what will eventually be a beautiful pattern, even though everything is entangled and it may seem like a complete mess. God looked after Elijah during a famine. Elijah declared to King Ahab that there would be no rain for 3 years...

One of the more unexpected joys (& Unknown pleasures) of writing a series is discovering the small quiks and traits that stay with a character — the details that aren’t about plot or bodies or evidence, but about who they are when no one’s watching; how they spend their downtime. For P.J. Crowe, that detail is music. Across the three books, Crowe’s musical tastes surface in fragments — in the background of scenes, in late-night moments, in...

William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives is Holy. ‘Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking we have done enough killing’. Mass murder, displacement, famine. Blake was wrong. We can never get enough killing. W.H. Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant , got it. ‘When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.’ It’s personal for Mohammed Moussa. His mother, his sisters their...

Cogito ergo sum . The starting point of a million essays on philosophy. The duality of mind-body. Professor Guy Leschziner suggests it’s more complex, with what we think and who we are based on our sense of self is fallible and inconsistent based on a reality that isn’t really real, but a projection based on our internalised perceptions. Phew. Take a breather. He’s a neurologist—he gets angry at ‘these morons, those who are anti-vaxxers and anti...

Who are you? What are you? For a memoir a bit of backstory is needed. Try and fit ‘patriot’ into a single sentence in as many forms as you can manage. It’s on the book cover. The man who resigned because of a government cover-up. A smearing campaign against a patriotic whistle blower. I made notes and watched a documentary on Prime. If the world has a cancerous growth called global warming, wouldn’t it want to know? Eh, nope. Many of the tactics...

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a reader who writes. You can’t be a writer who doesn’t read. Writing is secondary and often unnecessary, but I claim it as a calling of sorts. ‘I know no one wants to hear me say how hard writing is—quit while you can’. I liked Goldberg telling me that. Reminding me that. I’m pretty good at making starts. The equivalent of joining the gym on the New Year and promising to go swimming and sauna once a week too. I’...