Darren McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us. How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain. I met Darren McGarvey a few years ago in Dalmuir Library. I’d passed him on the way in. He was having a fag outside. The library still exists, but in shortened form as part of the C.E.Centre as part of local-authority cutbacks. I bought the book he was selling, Poverty Safari . Out of sight, out of mind. I can’t remember much about it, even though it won...

OOOH! Lots of lovely spooky stuff on the site this week! Hard choices for the Picks, but here they are. Story of the Week is rask_balavoine's 'Wobbling between this and that'. I loved this for its humour, its surreal atmosphere, and its genuine creepiness: Wobbling between this and that. | ABCtales Poem of the Week is Turlough's 'Early Lateness'. Very few people could successfully combine hard boiled eggs with the creeping onset of darkness, but...

Third-time lucky? Maybe not. I have a new collection of poems. Available in all formats, [Shouldn't that be all three-mats?] from today. It's a nice looking book, the cover almost looks professional [It isn't, I did it]. The Paper Over The Cracks is here . Anyway, have a look, looking costs nothing. If poetry's not your thing, I have other books . Some of them are even quite good.

Watching football. First games ending, second games starting. Get a phone call in between from a female who's askin me a shit ton of questions. Listen, females. When you ask a man a question he is not thinking about the best answer, he ain't even thinking about an answer to the question. He's thinking about what to say to shut this shit down. And when you're with him and you're taking off your clothes and you're thinking Does he think my breasts...

Write what you know and a story within a story about a writer that doesn’t yet know she’s a writer and all that stuff nobody ever listens to because it’s all bollocks. I’ve an Irish writing friend Turlough who’s back in the auld country. He might even be following his ancient ancestor’s teapot trail from County to County and be near Tipperary ( https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/concept-rain-jaunty-angle ). Turlough’s blog, is 100 words a...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/piggy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggy_%282022_film%29 Fat is no longer just a feminist issue. My mate, Laughing Boy, is a baldy fat fuck. He’s got one of those prescriptions from the chemist for a weight-loss drug (I’ve no idea which one). I said he should give it to me. And we’d sell it with his Viagra for a few quid. Both markets are on the up and up. ( Cerdita) Piggy, is the name other adolescent girls...

Roz Chast (2023 ) I Must Be Dreaming . Roz Chast draws cartoons and writes for the New Yorker . You know where I’m going with this. Award-winning. Bestseller. It’s predictable as every Scandinavian citizen (including illegal refugees in the interest of parity) have written at least one bestselling novel. And Sigmund *Fraud, The Interpretation of Dreams . Dreams, of course, are never predictable. Perhaps that’s what makes them so fascinating. (*...

Scotland and surfing is an oxymoron like sunbathing on Mars. I’m with Billy Connolly on that one. The North Sea can wait. You go in feeling blue and you come out bluer. If the cold doesn’t get you, the midges or clegs will as I know from experience. Rodger Cox is made of sterner stuff than Jaws . He’s been writing about surfing in The Scotsman since 2005. The View From the Shoulder is apparently when you’re up on your board, riding that wave...

There are only two ways people can try and get to Heaven. One is to obey all of God's commands without breaking a single one of them. The other is to trust in Jesus. If we were capable of obeying all of God's commands the Bible would be different. In the book of Acts some people had become Christians who weren't Jews. A group of Jews wanted these gentile believes to be circumcised and to obey the laws of Moses. Acts 15:1-12. The Apostle Paul...