Brene Brown is a Licensed Master Social Worker. She gained her Ph.D working with women and researching Shame. We’ve all got our own ideas of what shame is and what is shameful. The most toxic kind is when we identify with the shameful labels others give us. Brown suggests her lightbulb moment came when was working in residential care. A clinical director said: ‘You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviour’. Bree’s working...

I take it Gordon Brown added an initial J. (middle-name) to his name, so he doesn’t get confused with the dour Raith Rover supporter and former Prime Minister (author of a 1999 Blairite victory, economic policy from Number 11 Downing Street). Gordon J. Brown’s debut novel takes the reader back to the 1974. There’s a picture of miner’s leader Joe Gormley in the Daily Record that year, facing down Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath that epitomises...

For the Love of Libraries One of my fondest memories from childhood is of my local library. It’s the one in Kingstanding, Birmingham. I fell in love with reading through the first book I tackled on my own: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Despite the personal flaws of the author himself, his stories transported me to another place and another time. I will forever be a fan of his work. I can still see the book shelves loaded with...

Just fyi, I'm more than a bit disgusted with X (Twitter as was). I know that, when you post a new story on ABCTales, you are automatically prompted to post about it on FB and 'Twitter' but I'm seriously thinking about coming off X as a platform (I only ever use it to promote my ABCTales stories), so I'm experimenting by not promoting this week's Undertakers story on there but on Blue Sky instead. We'll see if that makes any difference (although...

Tam Donnichie was always a welcoming presence. There’s a great photo of him and a couple of the lads in the Drop Inn. Swiggy (2001? RIP) with a moustache. Barry Brennan (2020, RIP). Tam (2024, RIP) his curly black hair retreating to baldness and he wore specs. The sensible one in and out of the photo. Turning to stare at the camera, And the youngish, black-haired Charlie Mac, the insensible one. Eon Brennan, Barry’s older brother, with his arm...

For the next three days (Wednesday, 31st July to Friday, 2nd August) the Kindle version of the very first collection of short stories, featuring the odd pairing of Josiah Oakshott and Archibald Thurble, will be completely FREE . If you've been following the 'Dead Reckoning' series and have been wondering where these characters came from (and what their back story is) then you could do a lot worse than diip into 'A Dubious Undertaking and other...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001z8wc/better-off-dead I’m for assisted dying. What I fear is dementia. I agree with much of what Liz Carr argues. The slippery-slope argument. We live in separate worlds. But we all die. The disabled, like her, in a capitalist economy are costly and don’t die quickly enough for some. Boris Johnson’s comments, while Prime Minister, during Covid-19, ‘Let the bodies pile high,’ related to those older and in...

Follow the Money – How Much Does Britain Cost? (2023) By Paul Johnson The truth is, I like money. Before you raise pitchforks and burning torches in the air and chase me through the village, the reason I like moolah is because I had next to none growing up. Things were so tight as a teenager, I used to buy cigarettes in singles from the corner shop over the road. Life has been better to me since those days of deprivation but, the point is, most...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001zby4/janey Janey is of course Jane Godley. The assumption here is many folk will know who you are. Trump, for example. Or ‘Trump is a cunt’. Archive footage shows Janey holding that banner, protesting the moron’s moron when he visited Scotland in 2016 after being elected President. I certainly wasn’t disagreeing with her, then or now. I also thought Thatcher was a cunt. But that didn’t stop Janey and her...

The Zone of Interest was re-published posthumously after the success of the film of the same name. I wrote notes for both. But I’m not sure what I’ve done with them, which is of no interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film) The film version of the book, directed by Jonathan Glazier is an account of family life. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) is proud of her family home. She and her five children have everything they need,...