I wrote a short story in a few lines. I recognised it as the For Sale, Baby shoes, unused variety. I’d picked up and started several books by Scottish crime writers. I didn’t finish them. Pierre Lemaitre’s (2018) Three Days and a Life has generic recommendations, but one is from Stephen King. It’s an unusual book in that the reader’s sympathy is with the killer of a six-year-old boy. Antoine was twelve-years old in 1999 when he killed the little...

A few days ago, we decided to take a city break to Hamburg. My wife, Fiona, suggested we take a day trip to Lubeck, so armed with train tickets we took the S-Bahn to Hamburg central and then an hours train journey to Lubeck. It's a bustling city, full of tourists, steeped in medieval history, easy to walk around and on a cobbled side street; Glockengieserstrasse we came upon The Gunther Grass Museum. I always associate Grass with my secondary...

Have reached the stage of summer when I’m looking forward to the autumn. The wheat is almost over-ripe. It smells sweet and heady when you drive alongside the fields. The weather has changed; sunshine gone and a north-westerly wind arrived. Too cool for a haar to rise. Some leaves have blown off trees already, but more from drought than autumnal processes. Meanwhile, the hedge needs trimmed again and there are weedy dandelion-family type flowers...

Lately, angry memories had popped up regarding bullies during my work life. Thinking about those situations through the context of hood-winking monsters on a personal ‘Odyssey’ is helping to see the whole truth. I couldn’t understand why I had never named these situations as bullying at the time. Now I think I didn’t call it bullying because I didn’t see myself as a victim. I saw them for what they were, incompetent, malignant malcontents. I was...

Seven Years in Tibet is a boy-own adventure with Brad Pitt playing Heinrich Harrer (I wasn’t available). Having being brought up with Escape from Colditz and Steve McQueen on a motorbike jumping over barbed wire in The Great Escape (on every Christmas) I had to keep reminding myself Harrer wasn’t British. He was a national champion Austrian skier and mountain climber who scaled the North face of the Eiger. One of the few members of the SA and SS...

Over the next three days, the road outside, and all the way around the block, is being dug up. Don’t know what for, but as a consequence, we have all had to move our cars from preferred spots as there is no parking. Walking home from the free car park, a routine is broken, and a new path appears. One of the signs you’re recovering nicely from whatever has ailed you, is that boredom sets in. Boredom and a mild panic about wasted hours and years...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I was in Jackson, Mississippi, in June of 1963 to write a soft piece about the libraries of the New South for a quarterly that folded before it could run it, and I have never been able to make that errand seem like anything at all next to what the city became while I was in it. Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he stepped out of his car at his home a little after midnight on the twelfth. He was...

Went to see Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ this afternoon. It is colossal. It may just be cinematic genius. The Moray dolphins make a cameo appearance, what more proof is needed? Just the sound of it. Not a soundtrack; it is too unique and all-encompassing. Apparently, the musicians recreated ancient instruments, used metals, and panels of bronze to emulate bronze age sounds. The music races your heart and mind along with it, something...

I haven't really been following the World Cup to be honest. I'm glad England did well, because I'm English and I see no shame in coming third out of 48. I haven't been watching any actual football, but I have been keeping up with the reporting on the BBC website. I find the readers' comments very interesting, it's people watching at one remove. And I like people watchng. There was one comment which contained a phrase which is going to be my...

Samuel Beckett, Chekov, and Alan Shearer, were prone to muse about the particular being in the universal ball into the box. God preserve us from the waffle of Alan Shearer telling us—again—how it is and how it will be. Which makes us want to jump from a high window, or even a low one to avoid England’s favourite son. His English chums chortle and parrot the same 1966 spirit and all that shite, when and then and now. Roy Keane brought in to add a...