I bore myself with my obsessive compulsion to endlessly create word puns in the worst dad joke way that leaves me groaning before I have even shared them, and yet they keep coming. This morning for instance I was considering grandiose titles of books and with a few letter changes diminishing their power. Tern of the Sentry - An old guard officer who had tamed a sea bird, and together, they would defend the gates of the palace. The Gapes of Roth...

Chapter Five – If you don’t have children, do you feel like it has impacted you emotionally &/ psychologically? If so, how? These are the stories of some respondents to a questionnaire around being single over the age of 40 as a woman. Donna, Not sure how to answer this one. I've been a preschool teacher most of my life, and hear all about the struggles with children, especially the financial implications. So, in my circumstances, I don't...

Samantha Harvey’s 136 pages novella, Orbital , won the Booker Prize 2024. It was whittled down from 150 books. I’d picked it up before her fifth novel sold millions and started reading it. But then put it down, largely unread. Hmmm, I thought, pop. David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust has already covered this, Starman , circa 1969 and the moon landing. ‘Hear I am floating in a tin can. Far above the sea. Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do...

Politics in about power. Economics is about money. As Bill Clinton said in 1992/93: ‘It’s about the economy, stupid!’ Politics and money are indivisible. The cover has a picture of a top hat with a rabbit in it. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Get it? Our knowledge of our world is limited. Economics offers the illusion that we’re in control and smarter than we are. As Douglas Adams puts it: ‘The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity...

I’d always hoped to use a sentence telling folk that Einstein and yours truly struggled with quantum physics. I’m reminded of Richard Feynman's remark -he had great comic timing, but was also a Nobel winning theoretical physicist - ‘nobody understands quanta’. I’m pretty good at writing books with no beginning, no middle and no end. Not so good at the actual maths. I’ve leaned on Carlo Revelli for this. Heligoland seems a good place to start...

Ruth Ozeki, on the book’s cover, describes, There are Rivers in the Sky as ‘A Masterpiece’. Elif Shafak’s novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. She is a wonderful writer who imparts words of wisdom, and I’ll be reading more of her work. Shafak plays on words. She tells the reader ‘this is the work of a junior scribe’. Her theme is the interconnectedness of being. Water remembers. Water has consciousness. It is involved in the life...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0024z1n/wolf-hall-the-mirror-and-the-light-1-wreckage Reading is what I do. Strange as it seems, I couldn’t get into Hilary Mantel’s trilogies about the Tudor dynasty. No surprise there. I’m no royalist. Henry VIII is distant to me as the current monarch, King Charles. I can’t bear to watch programmes such as Downton Abbey , which I refer to as ‘the parasites’. Yet, I binge-watched all six episodes of Wolf...

Chapter Four – If you don’t have children, how has your single status affected you socially? Respondent 1: Donna, Except for the mentioned “episode”, I have not really been affected as I have single friends. (Response to Q3 was: Yes, I had a hysterectomy at 36, and got a bit emotional at a church camp when I saw all the kids with their families.) Respondent 2: Alyss, I find myself in the social circles of friends and their children’s birthday...

Atypical Love is an anthology. Nine writers. Nine stories from Alice Riley, Echo Darling, Carole Kenrick, Miriam Lohr, Kevin Marman, Zara Relphman, Elinor Rowlands, Lennie Varvarides, Emma Robdale. What makes it different or atypical is the nine writers identify as neurodivergent. I’m not sure what that means. ‘We use the term neurodivergent + (ND+) to encompass neurodvelopemental variations such autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, but add the...

Hex is a novella. To be read comfortably in one sitting. The premise is history that resonates. Jenni Fagin chose the North Berwick Witch trials. She has twin narrators in different centuries meeting in a cell three levels below the current city of Edinburgh on the 4 th December 1591. Gellis Duncan, a fifteen-year-old girl, is to be executed that morning for being a witch. Iris, via a séance, comes to offer comfort. Iris: ‘I was out in the Null...