Daedalus

Sometimes definitely control! E.g. ‘Suffering a tyrant may be bad but tyrannicide leads to civil war, which is worse’ – see Plutarch via Shakespeare via this morning’s ‘In Our Time’ 😉

As Orwell wrote ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ – and to my mind, the past = the historical narrative =…[Read more]

In the Shadow of the City
The City in Time’s Shadow
?

I like that way of putting it. Helpful.

I haven’t seen ‘Downsizing’ but it sounds like a film that is a bit overloaded with ideas and ends up getting lost among them.

Interesting one. Titles can be hard. Sometimes a really perfect one will just present itself. Other times…

I was looking, as I’m sure you have, at a thesaurus to see if it was possible to simply replace ‘abduction’. The best I could do was ‘Here Ends the Absence’, or possibly ‘Here Ends the Departure’ which I’m not sure really does it.

Another possibility is that the waves were so big that in a trough the Solomon Brown literally hit the seabed. If I’m ever up Whitby way I’ll definitely see about a ride on their Watson lifeboat.

There’s a decent collection of historic lifeboats at the dockyard at Chatham. I’ve a feeling they have a couple of Watson-type boats there but it seems…[Read more]

Superb blog tinged with tragedy, and, as always told with clarity and sympathy. For all the improvements in hardware and technology, RNLI operations can still be phenomenally dangerous. Operating in those conditions, that close to shore… Reading the account reminded me of The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (great book, but don’t bother with…[Read more]

Aargh, spoiler!

@Stevie – definitely sounds worth a shot

@alanr – no idea but thought it might warrant further exploration (and we may even have some US based people here anyway)

Thanks John. Mostly I meant that you make us feel what it was like so well, the few places where you just tell us something directly stood out – e.g. ‘but the loss of his attendance bonus would have been intolerable’ – I would have preferred a sense of what intolerable meant to them. But it’s a seriously picky point for such a short word count…[Read more]

Absolutely delighted for you Janette -thoroughly deserved of course

I just amended the post to tag people, which I’d forgotten to do before. I hope people get notifications of tags when it’s an edited post? Oh well, we’ll find out

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the first Den of Writers monthly competition. We now have a whole new section of the forum just for the monthly comp, so all future versions will be held there. Here’s the link: https://www.denofwriters.com/forums/forum/den-of-writers/monthly-competition/

For those not familiar with the monthly c…[Read more]

That seems short-sighted, to put it mildly! It’s good practice for any personnel in public-facing roles to have some kind of conflict resolution training, IMO. I’ve had a quick look online and found some courses (no idea how good they are, I’m afraid) that are as little as two hours and as inexpensive as £25 per person. You’re doing the right…[Read more]

Last day to enter this, if anyone fancies a go. 400 words, theme of ‘new beginnings’