No ordinary woman

Hannah Mitchell describes herself as a "very ordinary woman" in her autobiography The Hard Way Up. The fact that she's managed to write a fascinating account of working-class life in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries belies that description. Her story is incredibly uplifting and an example of what one can achieve with determination.

The democratisation of poetry

Last year I reviewed John Cooper Clarke's Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt. I supposed that working class poets from the North West would mine the gritty reality of their industrial environment for their work rather than the romantic foppery of daffodils. How wrong I was. In The Mersey Sound, a collection first published in 1967, Adrian Henri has a poem called The New, Fast Automatic Daffodils(1).

Michael Collins - Mission Accomplished

I woke up to the sad news that Michael Collins had died. Five years ago the Apollo 11 astronaut inspired the first story I wrote that I was pleased with. I don't remember watching the Apollo 11 mission on TV, but there's plenty of information online which I used as research: Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, and Glamour: Would you go to Mars? Meet the four women astronauts who can't wait to go, and most importantly, the EP-72 Log of Apollo 11. Here's my story. Hope you enjoy it.

Mission Accomplished

“What are you doing there?”

Static crackled through the radio receiver.

The everyday as exceptional

I studied Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at school and even forty years on I can recall, probably inaccurately, some of the wonderful language. The teacher had to explain what it was that would have made Queen Elizabeth 1 and her court laugh, although as a teenager it was enough to know that one of the characters is called Sir Toby Belch. The thing was tho', the play was rather dry and stolid on the page, and it was only when a group of us went to the theatre to see it performed that it came alive.

And so, I was wary of expecting too much from Alan Bennett's "The Complete Talking Heads",

Too many books, not enough time

There are things that happened to you when you were a teenager, things you had no control over at the time, things that changed the course of your life. For example, that time when the headmaster told you your choice of A-Levels didn't fit with his timetable, so you had to choose different subjects. You made the most of it of course, changed your expectations, reassessed your career options, and achieved success nonetheless.

Years later you find the time to do that thing you wanted to do aged sixteen and you discover David Lodge's book, The Art of Fiction

A Marxist and a monarchist

The British royal family is an anachronism. Don't you find it odd in the 21st century that one family's wealth, prestige and standing is based on its claim to be descended from a French bastard who invaded England nearly 1000 years ago? Geneticists tell us that pretty much everyone with English ancestry is related to William the Conqueror, including Danny Dyer, who's traced his roots back to King Edward III. So why should Queen Elizabeth and her extended family be the exception and hang on to all the loot?

A daft story with a philosophical theme

Imagine the scenario; climate change and ecological destruction has reached the point where a great catastrophe is about to unfold unless world leaders agree to "Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars." What would you do? If you're a member of the Sumners family in Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, you decide to build your own hospital and research centre, and start cloning yourselves to save the human race.