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Playing Games (Cecilia Peartree)

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This post was inspired by the discovery that there’s an apparently endless supply of videos on YouTube which focus on a number of players fighting each other and various enemies on Minecraft (don’t ask me how I know this). Before I watched some of the Minecraft videos, I was tempted to write about the great Kit-Kat heist,  with the illustration below.  Glad to have my Kit Kat stash at the moment I had a difficult history with computer games even before Minecraft. That history, I’ve just worked out, goes back around fifty years, which was when some of my work colleagues discovered they could access a game I think was called ‘Space Wars’ on the mainframe computer at our place of work. Once the senior staff found out about it, they ruled that it wasn’t to be played during working hours but playing after hours was all right. This was a workplace that had very few other rules even compared with others of the time. I never quite understood the attraction of Space Wars, if that was r...
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In Isfahan

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  In Isfahan                                                                                Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing.   Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad:   “Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done.   “This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no hist...
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A Mostly Delightful Farming Memoir... with a Chilling Sting in the Tail by Griselda Heppel

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I’ve been reading a number of memoirs recently, thanks to Slightly Foxed Editions, the publishing wing of Slightly Foxed magazine. Mostly this has been a sheer delight. While the writing quality may vary, what doesn’t is the fascinating glimpses of detail of peoples' lives in the past .  To War with Whitaker by Hermione Ranfurly My Grandmothers and I by  Diana Holman Hunt I was going to write ‘ordinary peoples' lives’ but that would hardly fit My Grandmothers and I , Diana Holman Hunt’s hilarious account of being brought up by her two grandmothers, one of whom was almost dangerously eccentric (guess which one). Or Countess Ranfurly’s determination to follow her husband into battle during World War 2 ( To War with Whitaker ). Other volumes in this series don’t have quite the same glamour but provide invaluable accounts of growing up in wartime London, for instance (V S Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door ). Or learning traditional farming, complete with horse-drawn implements such...
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Tell Me, Where Is The Place That Men Call Hell? -- Susan Price

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  Faustus (to Mephistophilis): First will I question with thee about hell. Tell me where is the place that men call hell?   -- <*> -- IRAN ATTACK ISRAEL LAUNCHES MISSILES AT HEZBOLLAH THE HOLOCAUST   -- <*> -- Mephistophilis:   Under the heavens. Faustus: Ay, but whereabouts?  -- <*> -- TRUMP: ATTACKS ON IRAN TO CONTINUE... NOT EVERYONE BORN IN BRITAIN IS BRITISH, SAYS REFORM CANDIDATE   UK ALLOWS BRITISH BASES FOR STRIKES AGAINST IRAN -- <*> -- Mephistophilis: Within the bowels of these elements Where we are tortured and remain forever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place: for where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must we ever be...   Faustus:  Come, I think hell's a fable.  -- <*> -- TRUMP PROMISES: "I'M NOT GOING TO START WARS, I'M GOING TO STOP WARS." [OCT 2025]   TRUMP SAYS MORE DEATHS OF US TROOPS LIKELY RESCUERS DESPERATELY SEARCH THROUGH RUBBLE OF SCHOOL ...
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A Year of Horse Books: The Horse Dancer and Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes - reviewed by Katherine Roberts

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This month we have adult fiction with two novels featuring horses by best-selling 'Me Before You' author Jojo Moyes. The Horse Dancer Part romance, part adventure,  The Horse Dancer  takes its characters on a journey of heart and hoof from the back streets of London to a chateau deep in the French countryside. The story revolves around a beautiful horse called “Boo”, one of the Selle Francais breed used in an exclusive French riding school called the Cadre Noir (rather like the Spanish riding school of Vienna, except the horses are not the more famous white Lipizzaners). The horse belongs to Sarah, granddaughter of dedicated horseman Henri Lachapelle, who used to ride for the Cadre Noir but left France to marry an English girl and move to London. There, his life collapsed. His beloved wife died, and their daughter vanished from their lives shortly after giving birth, leaving Henri in charge of the baby girl. At the start of the book they share a tiny flat in the East End...
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Special Years by Allison Symes

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Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos  Every year is special in some way to us all but I hope 2026 will prove to stand out for all of the right reasons.  I reach a milestone birthday in a few days time after this blog goes out - the big 60 - but it also reminds me of another anniversary.  This year will mark thirty years since I took up the pen seriously. It did take a milestone birthday and another life changing event (the birth of my son later in 1996) to make me realise if I wanted to get stories written and out there somehow, I ought to get on with it!  Despite setbacks, and the proverbial rejections (more than enough to cover several walls and possible The Great Wall of China itself), I’ve kept writing since. This year is also due to see the publication of my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side too. I hope to have physical book launches as well as online ones for this.  When my last book, Tripping The Flash ...
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Chasing the Northern Lights, by Elizabeth Kay

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Tromso, 24th January, 2026 Cloud iridescence The Northern Lights have featured in many children's books, especially Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. I have been fascinated by natural phenomena in the sky, from rainbows to cloud iridescence, which I was fortunate enough to see in Costa Rica. We were white water rafting, so I didn't have my camera with me and had to rely on the cameraman provided by the company. His photo doesn't do it justice, but it does give you some idea of the living rainbow that undulated around a cauliflower-shaped cloud.      As a child, after reading about Ernest Shackleton and looking at drawings of the Antarctic sky, the thought of ever seeing the aurora was an impossible dream. It's only the arrival of cell phones that has made them so accessible, as anyone can record them when, as this year, there has been unusual solar activity and they have been seen a lot further south. Needless to say, I missed every occurrence as living close...
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