I find this ABC Tales website a warm and welcoming community where writers of all abilities can share their work in the knowledge that it will be appreciated and encouraged. But what makes the site particularly special for me is that a close friend from long ago was a popular member here, regularly posting poetry and prose years before I joined. Julia Macpherson (ABC username Overthetop1 ) left this world far too soon, and at a point where too few had recognised the high standard of her writing talent. Following her death in 2016, her mother Coral (ABC’s seashore ) and her sister Sarah worked with Cerasus Poetry, and with the support of ABC members and the MIND mental health charity, to publish a compilation of her work. I lost touch with Julia in the mid-1980s, but found her again through ABC Tales and the pages of her book, Waiting For Another Velvet Morning .
Hurt
Posted on Fri, 27 Jun 2025
These are brilliant words so filled with sadness. I'm very sorry that it's been necessary for you to write them and I sincerely hope the hurt subsides.
Read full commentPosted in This Sad Blister
Fighting fit
Posted on Fri, 27 Jun 2025
Yes Di, I'm absolutely tip top now. Many thanks for asking.
And I hope you're fit and well yourself.
Read full commentPosted in The Sad Demise of the Plastic Triceratops
Palestine
Posted on Sun, 22 Jun 2025
History twists and turns but I doubt there's ever been a reversal of circumstances quite like what we're seeing now. And we are seeing it now. We've no choice. It's everywhere we look.
I've tried to look away but I can't. I've read books...
Read full commentPosted in Fifty-One Empty Places at the Dinner Table
Glasto
Posted on Tue, 24 Jun 2025
There's little that can beat the atmosphere of a good music festival. I've been to a few but never Glastonbury. I used to go to the WOMAD festival every year near Malmsbury near where you live. It was all what they call 'World Music' which I love...
Read full commentPosted in Let Me Go Back
The Goddess of Death
Posted on Tue, 24 Jun 2025
I'm delighted to see how quickly you've acclimatised to life in Somerset Paul. I vaguely remember there being a pub in Taunton called the Goddess of Death. Their hemlock flavoured crisps are to die for.
Excellent writing! I eagerly await...
Read full commentPosted in Prophesy: The Immortal Witch (1)
Home á loam
Posted on Tue, 17 Jun 2025
Sitting in my shed and writing, I find, are the two great healers in life. I wish there was a light in my shed so that I could go there to write, thereby killing two earwigs with one stone.
I once read somewhere on the internet that...
Read full commentPosted in When Time Has Elapsed
Sleep
Posted on Sun, 22 Jun 2025
Thanks very much for your words Kilb50.
The good thing about not being able to sleep is that I don't have the nightmares.
Read full commentPosted in Fifty-One Empty Places at the Dinner Table
Hoover hysteria!
Posted on Wed, 11 Jun 2025
Ah, thank you for that. I'm glad it made you smile.
I've always thought that a person could never have too many hoovers. And I've always felt terribly sorry for No-vac Djokovic.
Posted in Aura Urziceanu’s Lullaby Effect
June
Posted on Wed, 11 Jun 2025
I have indeed Coral and, at this point, that journal's exactly one-third written.
All will be revealed. Well maybe not all, but certainly a lot.
Tx
Read full commentPosted in Aura Urziceanu’s Lullaby Effect
Disenchantment
Posted on Thu, 05 Jun 2025
I see where you're coming from Jenny. I feel exactly the same. It depresses me to think about the state of the world today. Sometimes I tell myself to close my eyes to it but that's what people did in Europe in the 1930s with horrific...
Read full commentPosted in Perverse Future
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