Quite difficult to choose again this week. Do keep up the good work, everyone. Poem of the week There were many contenders for the poem of the week. Lenchenelf’s powerful and topical piece Identity was particularly good, as was marandina’s Blagdon Lake in Winter This weeks POW award goes to MJG’s Mother-tongue -a really moving elegy for her mother. Story of the Week The continuing stories were much in evidence this week and I continued to enjoy...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/another-round https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Round_(film) Another Round won an Oscar for The Best International Film 2021. Like most great stories the plot can be summed up in one line. Four teachers at the same school agree to get pissed every day. They call it an experiment. An aid to creativity and the better life they feel they’re missing out on. Psychiatrist Finn Skårderud’s theory — humans are...

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noted that this week's Bring Out Your Dead episode - 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You ' , has appeared a day earlier than normal. This is because, due to circumstances beyond my control (as they always say) there will now be a slight hiatus in the regular weekly provision of insights into Josiah and Archibald's travails, getting the body of Sir Lewisham Carnock back to the U.K. However, nil desperandum and all that...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/a-fantastic-woman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fantastic_Woman Marina (Daniela Vega) is A Fantastic Woman or if you’re being picky, a fantastic transgender woman. Sebastián Lelio’s Oscar-winning drama is in many ways a revenge movie. Marina is a singer and part-time waiter who lives with her boyfriend, Orlando (Gonzalo Maza) in a smart apartment in Santiago. They have a dog, and he’s the type of older man...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/on-demand/75517-001 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-65588273 Symeon Brown investigates how Pastor Paul Mackenzie, a former taxi driver and preacher of the coming apocalypse (who is in police custody) led to the mass murder or suicide of over 600 men, women and children and babies as young as two-months old. Pathologist Dr Goya reports that many of the victims of the exhumed bodies in...

Delighted to say that although it didn't win, my piece "Last Night I Fell in Love with My Dead Enemy" (still on ABC) was long-listed for this year's King Lear Short Story Prize . I haven't mentioned it before, but in 2021 I was one of five winners of the Time To Reflect competition held by the RIBA, and as a result in May 1922 was delighted to be artist/writer in residence at The Shard for a week.

For any of you unfamiliar with Glasgow dialect, The Old Haunts are the place you used to hang about when you were younger. Alan Radcliffe has pretty much nailed it in his debut novel. Part of the Fairlight (his publisher’s) Moderns. I’m not sure what that mean but it sounds like a good marketing gimmick. The Old Haunts speaks for itself. I’m tempted to give Alan Radcliffe the Great Scottish Writers tag I give to authors such as William...

Brian Reilly came to the door on Saturday to tell us his mum, Bel, had died. He likes to call Mary, Auntie Mary. She’s not really his aunt. But Mary’s son Alan and Robert washed through their house in Trafalgar Street, when the world was young, much the same as they washed through this house. Bel wasn’t their Auntie either. Mums knew better than God these things didn’t matter. The more Auntie Mary persisted in asking if he wanted anything, the...

“Tag, bag and bury the bastard, Garda Inspector Crowe…” Genre: Crime Fiction August - December, present day, one year after ‘A Kind of Drowning’ . The synopsis: Robert Craven's Malign Intent, is a contemporary crime thriller set in Ireland with a slow burning neo-noir atmosphere: Crowe has seen enough dead bodies in his time to suspect that Aonghus Hanafin wasn’t the hanging kind. August bank holidays should be about relaxation, taking time out...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rjvp/us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peele If you’ve a spare two hours and don’t mind watching a zombie movie, batter in. I was intrigued. I misread the premise was something to do with doppelgangers. Strictly speaking that’s true. A black and upper-middle-class family of dad, mom and their two children go on holiday to the beach. They meet their demonic doppelgangers who come from a hole in the...