(Who UB?) Nourished from the root, through an intricate turn of events; embodiment of that you seek: while denying who you are. Bearing its character, shadow to light: Persona interpretation followed by reputation. A quote by Abraham Lincoln Character is like a tree, and reputation is like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it. The tree is the real thing.

I’d picked this book up and put it down several times. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was nearer Lost than Found. I got it was some kind of travel journal. Cheryl Strayed had walked part of the Pacific Crest Trail that stretches from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border and goes through a lot of places I’ve little or no knowledge but might be vaguely interested in because of the naturalist John Muir (a fellow Scot and honorary American...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001lspj/storyville-blue-bag-life Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s...

I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate . It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12 th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population...

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to...

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It's been a lousy day, weather-wise, and there's nothing I like doing more than messing about with a spreadsheet (I know, I know, I really should get a life!), so I thought you might be interested in some of the statistics concerning the recent ' Bring Out Your Dead' series of stories: The story, in its current form, appeared as a series of 54 weekly episodes, published on ABCTales commencing in January, 2023. The story had originally commenced...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/gagarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagarine When time and place merge in this way, usually, you’ve got something special. The idea is quite simple. Youri (Alséni Bathily) has been abandoned by his mum. He’s a precocious, a 16-year-old boy living in Cité Gagarine, a housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, who dreams of becoming an astronaut. But he channels his gift for fixing things into trying to fix the...

In which my Undertakers take a two week respite

I heard about Lorraine Adair’s death in a convoluted way. I sometimes pass her sister on the canal embankment on my bike. Teresa is usually walked by a Rottweiler. I hang an arm out and wave as I pass. Teresa is married to Tam Henry. Lorraine was the youngest of the eight Adair’s. There are more Henrys than cement in Clydeside brickwork. So she’s related to most Catholics in Clydebank and many Protestants, too. I’d passed her twice in three days...