Two very different, and very thoughtful, pieces this week. Story of the Week is jxmartin's 'Ian - the aftermath', about the devastation of a hurricane. One commenter on ABC has likened this author's beautifully written diaries of American life to the BBC broadcasts by the late, great Alistair Cooke, and I would certainly agree. The same warmth and friendliness, accompanied by acute observation: Ian- the aftermath | ABCtales Poem of the Week is...

Not long ago I got a ride in Kirkcaldy from my old pal Brian who I have known since uni days. Brian is now a senior paramedic. He harked backed to the old days where as a rookie cabbie he was learning 'the knowledge' on the busy streets of Ayr. In those days all the drivers gave lifts to hitchers. We used our savvy and went for it. Then we heard the horrible story of aileen wournos. Aileen was American she was a mad murdering bitch who took out...

The formless nought. That was my thinking when I heard Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng mentioning ‘the people,’ ‘the people’ he talked to, ‘the people’ he listened to, ‘the people’— Not my people. Not me. Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, friend of Queen Victoria, leader of the Conservative Party and twice Prime Minister but also a writer. Sybil (1845), for example, brought the two nations argument into dining rooms. The...

Where have all my imaginative thoughts gone to? I ask myself this as I try to conjure up words...to bring my story back to life...to continue where I’ve left it off and take it through the middle, and on to the ending. It's not often I’m lost for words; in fact, I usually carry too many around and toss them out of my thinking bag a bit over zealously…then I have to comb through the mess of words I’ve tossed about and kick out the useless, over...

The title struck me. I was glad my mum died too, but for different reasons. She had Alzheimer’s and her life wasn’t a life. The front cover has two quotes from famous people saying nice things about Jennette McCurdy’s autobiography. Jerrod Carmichael ‘Impressively funny’. I didn’t think so and I don’t know who that is. But before reading this book, which I did mostly in one sitting, leaving the last few chapters until the next day, I didn’t know...

The cover is a give-away: ‘A Father Behind Bars/A Daughter Determined to Free Him.’ Obviously I hadn’t been paying attention. I thought the narrator was a young black man. In the Author’s Note, Dick Lehr tells the reader the facts. ‘Nothing But the Truth has its origins in one of Boston’s most notorious murders—the shooting of twelve-year-old Tiffany Moore on a hot summer night in 1988. Tiffany was seated on a blue mailbox in Roxbury, swinging...

We're living in a strange old world at the moment, one way and another, and our Story of the Week reflects this perfectly. Jane Hyphen's 'It's the year...' is sharply funny and surreal, and yet somehow all too believable. If you happen to know an Orca, now might be the time to start getting on the right side of it. It's the year. . . | ABCtales Our Poem of the Week takes the autumn equinox as its theme. Jennifer Skinner's haunting 'Lucid Dreams...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0cgqlv1/big-oil-v-the-world-series-1-1-denial https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0cgqlv7/big-oil-v-the-world-series-1-2-doubt https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0cgqlvk/big-oil-v-the-world-series-1-3-delay Your children are going to die. Here’s why. ‘We must not only go to zero emissions , we must actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere ’ (italics around text are Peter Wadhams (2016) A...

1785, before the emptying of The Bastille, The Great Terror and La Guillotine will separate the heads of the aristocracy from their bodies Jean-Baptiste Baratte is given a simple task by a Minister to empty a cemetery, Les Innocents. It lies in the centre of Paris. The putrefying dead are causing such a stink it might even affect the health of the Sun King, Louis XIV at his palace in Versailles. ‘The palace is full of mirrors. Living here it...

The Washington Post called Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel ‘a classic of war fiction’. The New York Times a ‘tour de force’. Yes and Yes. The narrator has written a confession. Looked out at the shore of himself. And decided there was nothing to see. What fuelled him wasn’t nihilism, but idealism. But that too was a lie. Something he was adept at. Being the bastard son of a priest. At fourteen, his Vietnamese peasant mother became the French father’s...