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  • Aditus

    Talk Talk

    By Aditus

    Conversations. Sometimes it’s too much, sometimes too little, formal, informal, clumsy, artificial, with another word: difficult. Let’s practice, Shall we? #253 Someone is on the bus. The guy beside them fidgets the whole time with an irritating tinkling bangle while telling them, it seems, their entire life story, including very personal things. It’s time to pop in the earbuds. When it’s time to get off the bus, the talker has disappeared and the strange bangle is now on th
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Book review

Book Review: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

“A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.” So reads the announcement in the Chipping Cleghorn Gazette that morning. That evening, the local neighbours all dutifully turn up at Little Paddocks, all with their different excuses for being there. At 6.30 p.m., without warning, all the lights go out and… This is the beginning of one of Agatha Christie’s most intriguing novels that is firmly rooted in post-war Britain. She chose to set
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: The AIDS Pandemic by James Chin

There have been many different theories about the spread of AIDS, some of them bizarre, but here James Chin returns to a very old one; AIDS is not a threat to the heterosexual population. Chin is an epidemiologist and bases all his arguments on a narrow reading of the HIV/AIDS statistics. He seems to want to turn back the clock to when we talked only of “risk groups”.  There are no political, cultural, social or psychological elements in Chin’s arguments, which leaves this book very one-sided.
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust #1) by Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials was a groundbreaking trilogy of fantasy novels. They were breathtaking in their scope and originality; the concept of a person having the personification of their soul in the form of an animal called their daemon was both simple and a stroke of genius. It was also a wonderful writing device; characters could literally talk to themselves. For a long time, Pullman hinted that he was writing a second trilogy, The Book of Dust, following on from His Dark Materials. Finally, i
Drew Payne

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Writing

Book Review: Minority Report – Volume Four of the Collected Stories by Philip K Dick

Before reading this collection of stories, put out of your mind any memory of the Tom Cruise/Stephen Spielberg film of the same name. The Cruise/Spielberg film was very loosely based on Philip K Dick’s story, taking only a few elements out of the story. The original story is far superior to the brightly coloured adventure film that bears the same name. In his best fiction, and this collection certainly contains some of that, Philip K Dick was a visionary—a dark visionary with a downbeat but
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Book review

Book Review: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” This is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s greatest novel, but it is far more than that. As a middle-aged man, Billy Pilgrim is a successful optometrist, dully married to his wife with two children. As an elderly man, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadores, and kept as an exhibit in their zoo on their home world. There he meets and starts a relationship with Montana Wildhack, a beautiful model who is abducted to be his companion. As
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

This novella has a simple but enjoyable premise, which Alan Bennett exploits with his sharp and intelligent wit. The queen, unusually for her, is at a loose end in Buckingham Palace and goes for walk. Around a corner she doesn’t usually walk around she discovers a mobile library. Thinking it rude not to, she borrows a book from it. This first book sets her off on an odyssey of reading. She reads for pleasure, but also her reading educates her and opens her mind. And all this reading leads t
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Three Nick Nowak Mysteries (Boystown #1) by Marshall Thornton

The hard-bitten American PI, working on his own to solve a murder, has become such a staple of crime fiction that it is now a cliché and has been parodied more times than I can even begin to count. There has to be something original to one to even make me think about reading it, and Marshall Thornton has found that something original with his Nick Nowak mystery series. Nowak is working as a one man PI, in 1981 Chicago, when these stories start, but he enters these three novellas with his ow
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was the queen of the literary three-card trick. She would create a mystery, lead you down a path thinking a certain character was the murderer and then at the end pull the rug from under your feet with the murderer as a totally different character—the last character you would suspect or the first one you’d discounted. Reading one of her books is like playing a game against her, can you spot the murderer before she reveals them? It can be said, and not unfairly, that many of
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: HIV (Third Edition)

Treatment and survival of people with HIV has improved greatly over the years. No longer is HIV an automatic terminal condition. Now treatment opinions are varied and complex so treatment manuals are a required resource, but a resource is only as good as the information in it. The editors here, Libman and Mackadon (both doctors), appear to have put a lot of work into this volume. The authors of each section are qualified for the area they are writing on. It felt refreshing that the editors
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Book review

Book Review: Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter Wimsey has fallen in love with the crime novelist Harriet Vane. Unfortunately, she is on trial for her life, accused of poisoning her former lover. Lord Peter, to demonstrate his love for her, sets about to prove Harriet is innocent before she faces a retrial. Dorothy L. Sayers has often been called the best writer of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but I have never found this. Her descriptive style is certainly better than Agatha Christie’s and Ngaio Marsh’s, but I find her
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt

David Leavitt’s strength has always been the drama he finds in ordinary people’s lives. Not for him the lives of the extraordinary, but his characters can so often feel like the most ordinary of people, yet the lives he finds behind their ordinariness are fascinating. This, his first novel, revolves around a cast of characters who are in flux in their lives, small changes that led to far greater ones. It is 1980s New York and Philip, a gay man in his early twenties, has fallen in love for t
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett has become inextricably linked with the life of Miss Shepherd, the tramp (by her behaviour and attitudes she could never be called anything else) who lived in a derelict van on his driveway for nearly twenty years, but this book is where it all began. Though this is a slim volume it still carries so much pathos. It is constructed from entries from Bennett’s diary that chronicle his relationship with Miss Shepherd. It began when he allowed her to park her van, in which she live
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Though this is a classic dystopian novel, the world it portrays is still strikingly original, even though it was first published in 1932. There is an oppressive, totalitarian regime ruling the world, here they are ruling it by creating a hedonistic society where everyone’s sexual and pleasurable desires are fulfilled. This is also the ultimate classist society, here people are genetically engineered for the class they will live out their lives in. Even now this is still a very original dyst
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Faggots by Larry Kramer

“2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.” So begins Larry Kramer’s infamous novel. It is a strange opening for a novel but, in some way, is indicative of this one. It is the late 1970s and this novel is an odyssey through gay New York life. The main protagonist is Fred Lemish, almost a gay everyman, who is just short of forty. He is searching for love, especially the love of the gay hunk Dinky Adams, but all he can find is promiscuous sex, recreational drug use and almost constant disa
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Living Confidently with HIV, A Self-Help Book for People Living with HIV by Liz Shaw

Self-help books have become a modern publishing phenomenon, bookshops have whole sections dedicated to them and a large number of them are of questionable value, often being written by people who have little or no experience of the subject. Fortunately, this book doesn’t fall into that category. The authors are four clinical psychologists, all with extensive experience working with people who are HIV positive. The book has been designed as a guide for people newly diagnosed with HIV and cov
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

This is Carrie Fisher’s insider novel about the ups and many downs of surviving and living in Hollywood. Suzanne Vale, the central character here and Carrie Fisher’s obvious alter ego, is a Hollywood actress, but not an A list one, trying to survive through a year in her life. The novel begins with Suzanne admitted to rehab following a drug overdose, drugs that she liked too much. The novel then charts the events of the following year as Suzanne navigates a relationship with a film producer
Drew Payne

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My Story

A Fire Escape Out of Hell but with Too Many Steps

Winter 1984 It was a cold and grey winter’s day. The grey sky seemed to hang heavy over everything, stripping away what little colour was left in that winter landscape. I had travelled across Merseyside, on my own, that morning to make this appointment. I’d needed to change trains in the centre of Liverpool, changing from one metro train onto another one in one of the few underground stations in the city. That second train took me under the River Mersey and out into the suburban area of the
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: From the Windrush to Wapping by Jeff Jones

Jeff Jones has certainly lived enough to fill six ordinary lives. Since growing up in Wapping, East London, he’s been in trouble with the police, been sent to prison, been homeless and been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But he has also been to university, been a manager in mental health and youth work, met Prince Charles and even passed The Knowledge, the exam for London black cab drivers. This book charts his life in a clear and very readable style, sometimes also at break-neck sp
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My Story

No Daemons on My Back

Spring 1986   The carpet was patterned, a swirling blue-and-purple paisley pattern of looped tear-drop shapes curled around each other, and I stared down intensely at it. I thought if I focused on it then I could ignore what was happening around me, but that didn’t work. It was impossible to block it all out. I could feel the weight of all their hands pressing down on me, the weight of them on my head, the back of my neck and my shoulders. Those hands made me hold my head forwards
Drew Payne

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writing tips

Part 4

Pile the bricks without the mortar Let me tell you this very exciting story real quick. You know what? I just tell you the payoff, so you don’t have to wait for it. Of course, this is exaggerated. We all know, that suspension is important, but this is not, what I want to talk about in this section. It’s about an often overlooked or badly handled element of storytelling: The filler scene. Filler scenes are boring, and you skip them as a reader, wondering why the author was such a fool t
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Book review

Book Review: Dying to Be Men by Will Courtenay

“Women have more illness but men die younger,” this simplistic old saying does have a grain of truth in it. Men still have a shorter life expectancy than women, but why? Will Courtenay has twenty years’ experience in men’s health and has seen it go from an “oxymoron” to a subject that is now taken seriously. He has the expertise to write this book and the evidence is here in the book’s pages. The book takes an in-depth look at its subject. It examines the different social and environme
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Santiago Nasar is to die, to pay with his life for his crime, and the twin brothers of Angela Vicario will make him pay. The whole town knows this will happen and why, but no one steps forward to prevent it. Why? This book has a fascinating premise but just fails to follow through with it. The problem lies at the heart of this novel; its structure makes for a cold and distant storytelling. It is narrated by a nameless narrator who has returned to the area twenty-seven years after the murder
Drew Payne

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Mental Health

Seeing some light at the end of the tunnel

This is about mental health, it's something that many of us find hard to talk about, especially us men. Not talking about it only tends to make things worse and for those of us experiencing difficulties it slows and can prevent recovery. This is just a small part of my experience, yes it's the better part I don't want to depress or bring anyone down with the bad parts. Today I'm feeling good about myself and that is a feeling that I'm experiencing more often lately, the days of feeling anxi
Mancunian

Mancunian in Mental Health

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