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TPQ
Dr John Coulter ✍ Bring back the Royal Shah and rename Iran as Persia to signal the death knell for Islamic radicalism in the region - these should be the military objectives of the coalition attacks on modern day Iran by the United States and Israel.

The last Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had ruled the country since 1941, was deposed by an Islamic fundamentalist revolution in 1979. He died the following year in Egypt aged only 60.

The war which has broken out this month with an air bombardment of Iran by US and Israeli planes is the only way to free the Iranian people of the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime enforced by the fanatical Revolutionary Guard.

It is rather hypocritical of Sinn Fein to condemn the war against Iran given how the republican movement’s military wing, PIRA, murdered innocent civilians during the era of the Troubles.

The bitter reality is that in all wars, innocent civilians will be killed. We think of the Zeppelin airship and Gotha bomber raids by the Germans on mainland Britain during the Great War.

In the Second World War, there were civilian tolls during the Blitz on London and Belfast; the number of German civilians who died in the Allied bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne, and of course, the civilian death toll in the atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So let’s not forget that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are as fanatical in their beliefs as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Indeed, the Revolutionary Guard are probably the best trained and armed of these three Islamic radical terror groups. Put bluntly, the Revolutionary Guard are the Waffen SS of fundamentalist Islam and they will fight to the death.

The ultimate outcome of the war in Iran for the coalition forces should be the restoration of the Persian Monarchy and democratic elections for the people, who will not be dictated to by extremist Islamic clerics.

A situation must be created at the war’s end, whereby a new Shah declares free elections for the people of Iran so that moderate, democratic Muslims as well as Iran’s Christian minority can once again have an open voice and gain control of the nation.

And to show this embracing of new millennium democracy, Iran should not only have a new flag, but also be renamed Persia.

There’s no doubt that the remaining leadership of the fanatic Revolutionary Guard is trying to scare off its Arab neighbours and is trying to expand the conflict into a global war by lashing out with its missiles and drones at anyone who is helping the US and other allies.

The woke Left is chanting out its usual verbal diarrhoea that this is an illegal war. But the US and Israel have got to be aware of the Russians and Chinese watching from the wings.

Could the Russians and Chinese be supplying the Revolutionary Guard with intelligence on the movements and plans of the US and Israel? If this is the case, why would the coalition tip off the Russians or Chinese with their desires in Iran?

Another reality checked is needed by the global community. The Revolutionary Guard leadership does not want nuclear power to fuel homes and businesses. It wants nuclear power to build atomic weapons to attack Israel - and indeed, any other nation which does not adhere to its fanatical interpretation of the Koran.

Given the fanaticism of the Revolutionary Guard leadership, many on the Right-wing politically in the UK are asking why British PM Keir Starmer seems to be adopting a pussy footing approach to supporting the US/Israel air attacks?

While the logical military response would be to commit 100 per cent the British Armed Forces - especially the RAF and Royal Navy - into the war to liberate the Iranian people, we need to remember that Starmer is no Maggie Thatcher as she did in 1982 when the Argentinian junta ordered the invasion of the Falklands.

Militarily, an air and naval campaign can only achieve so much. This Iranian conflict may require boots on the ground, but the Americans and British don’t want the quagmire they faced in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

In the Seventies, in spite of all the military might of the United States, America still had to crawl away from Vietnam after being humiliated by the communist North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong terrorists.

As for Afghanistan, in spite of all the coalition deployments in that nation, the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban are now back in control of the country. The Allies basically learned nothing from the fact that the Russians were also forced to withdraw from Afghanistan years earlier.

American justification for the atomic attacks on two Japanese cities in 1945 was to bomb the fanatical leadership into submission given the number of Allied lives it would cost to capture Japan by conventional warfare means.

So the key question President Trump must now address is; has he the weaponry to force the surrender of the Revolutionary Guard leadership using air power alone? Then again, given the complete theological fascism to which the Revolutionary Guard adheres to, does the word ‘surrender’ form part of their vocabulary.

Will it be a case that to restore the Persian Monarchy, create democratic elections and bring stability to the Middle East, the Allies will have to ‘bomb the Revolutionary Guard off the face of the earth’ to coin a phrase?

As for Starmer’s pussy footing militarily, he must know that because of Labour’s virtual ‘open sea border’ regarding the volume of migrants and asylum seekers entering the UK especially via the small boats armada, could militant Iranians be slowly but surely sneaking terrorists into the UK to unleash a bombing campaign in the same way the PIRA conducted a bombing campaign on mainland Britain during the Troubles?

Could Starmer be forced to bite the bullet politically and order the British security forces to begin a round-up of suspected Islamic terrorists living in the UK through selective internment in the same way that fascist and Nazi sympathisers were rounded up during World War Two.

The bitter medicine which Trump and Israel have already swallowed, and which Starmer still has to digest, is that if moderate Muslims and Christians are to regain control of modern Iran, the cancer of radical Islamic fundamentalism cannot be treated with a military sticking plaster; it will require the severe amputation of the Revolutionary Guard at its very core.

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Restoring Iranian Monarchy Holds Key To Lasting Peace

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Five

 

A Morning Thought @ 3081

Anthony McIntyre ðŸ”– Harry Hole is no longer a cop.


Domiciled in Hong Kong after his previous defence of the Oslo thin blue line, his return to Norway three years after his departure is not welcomed by the force he once served with. It had long grown tired of Harry's do it my way loner approach. The hierarchy, while basking in the glory of his successes, was never too eager to give him credit for his accomplishments, preferring instead to keep him at bottle's length. Something they could then use to flag up his unreliability due to a fondness for the bottle.

What sends him home, three years dry, and pushes him into another investigation is the predicament of Oleg, the son of his erstwhile partner, Rakel. Oleg has been accused of murder, and Harry despite his cynicism returns to the Norwegian capital to prove his innocence or at least satisfy himself that Oleg is guilty after all. With Oleg, both a junkie and pusher, having confessed his guilt, the defence is up against it to evade the bang of the gavel followed by the words take him down. Without police backing Harry assumes the hybrid persona of a private detective-cum-vigilante. Nor is he subject to normal police constraints.

In The Phantom Jo Nesbo has Harry switching lanes. In The Leopard, he was son to a dying dad, Now he has to assume the role of father to Oleg. A character broadening endeavour that adds flavour by creating more roles for Harry than the one dimensional nemesis of serial killers.

While Harry is the mainstay, other characters compete for the reader's attention, which helps ward off any staleness gaining a foothold on the ninth outing. Gusto Hanssen, the drug dealer Oleg stands accused of murdering, is one of the more captivating figures in the book. From shagging his foster mother to selling the most dangerous drug on the streets of Oslo, Gusto lived life on the edge, took a lot of risks and made enemies of the wrong people, including Dubai, the Russian gangster responsible for the distribution of Violin, which was essentially heroin on stilts: the higher up it takes the user, is reciprocated in the fall back down. The street sellers for some reason wear Arsenal shirts. Even if it is a convenient way for the customer to find a supplier, it must be just as easy for the cops to identify the entire network of street level pushers. Nesbo was a promising soccer player on the Norwegian circuit before an injury forced him to retire, so the thought just arises that there was something about the Gunners which he found objectionable!

Then there is the pilot who smuggles the drugs on his flights and the cops who pull strings to have the guilty deemed innocent. There is a lot going on in The Phantom.

For this book Nesbo did more research than for any other in the series. He sought to drill down into the dark underground of Oslo, its drug scene and crime gangs. He described it as the darkest, grimmest book in the Harry Hole series. Opening up with a rat trying to access her den to feed her noisy young only to find the entrance to her abode blocked by the not quite dead yet body of Gusto, the heartbeat of which she can sense. The rat makes a number of appearances throughout, serving to underscore the subterranean grime of the city.

The ninth book by Nesbo in the Harry Hole series, Harry fatigue has not shown its head. There is a magnetism to his character. Harry Bosch, the creation of Michael Connelly, has a similar draw. For me, the trick is not to binge read the series, leave a gap of maybe a year between each. Whatever reading strategy is employed, Nesbo is onto a winner with the Hole genre, having sold millions of books across the globe.

Joe Nesbo, 2012, The Phantom. Vintage Digital. ISBN-13: 978-1446484869

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The Phantom

National Secular Society ★ Alliance MLA submits amendment to Justice Bill which would repeal common law offences of 'blasphemy' and 'blasphemous libel.'

The National Secular Society has said a move to abolish Northern Ireland's blasphemy laws would send a "powerful signal" of support for free speech.

Alliance Party MLA Connie Egan has today submitted an amendment to the Justice Bill which would repeal the common law offences of 'blasphemy' and 'blasphemous libel' in NI.

The move follows campaigning from the NSS, which last year called for the Minister of Justice to repeal the blasphemy laws as part of the bill.

NI is the only part of the UK that still has blasphemy laws. They were abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021. The Republic of Ireland abolished its blasphemy laws in 2020.

The Alliance Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and Sinn Féin are all understood to endorse the repeal of blasphemy laws.

The NSS has argued blasphemy laws are incompatible with fundamental human rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief, and can be invoked to silence criticism or ridicule of religion in Northern Ireland.

Continue @ NSS

NSS Welcomes Move To Abolish Northern Ireland’s Blasphemy Laws

The Guardian ★ Written by Matthew Weaver.

A Christian camp leader who sexually abused young boys after lacing sweets with tranquillisers has been jailed for 23 years and 10 months.

Jon Ruben, 76, a retired vet and church youth volunteer, used the “cloak of Christianity” to carry out sexual assaults on vulnerable children, Leicester crown court heard.

As he was sentencing Ruben, Judge Spencer told him he would serve a further period on licence, bringing his total sentence to 31 years and eight months.

Ruben, from Ruddington in Nottinghamshire, previously pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a child under 13, assault of a child under 13 by penetration, eight counts of child cruelty, three counts of making indecent images of children and four drugs charges.

Leicester police said they were continuing to investigate Ruben’s involvement with children across more than 20 years.

The judge told him:

Ultimately, this case is about you achieving sexual gratification by carrying out your sexual fantasies focused upon young boys through careful, cynical, chilling preparation and by manipulation.

Before abusing the boys Ruben laced sweets with tranquilising drugs in “a sweet game” at a summer camp, Stathern Lodge, that he ran in Stathern, Leicestershire.

Continue @ Guardian

Camp Leader Who Drugged And Sexually Abused Boys Jailed For More Than 23 Years

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Kyle Mantyla.

When Israel launched an attack on Iran in June of 2025, religious-right activists celebrated, excited by the prospect that it could precipitate the End Times and the return of Jesus Christ.

Predictably, these same religious-right activists are once again overjoyed after the United States and Israel began jointly bombing Iran over the weekend, killing the nation's supreme leader and dozens of top military commanders.

While the attack has generated retaliatory strikes and fears of a wider Middle East war, evangelical Trump supporters are gushing over President Donald Trump's action, with megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs declaring that "for such a time as this, this man is being led by God."

During a special sermon on Sunday, Hibbs absurdly declared that "this is not regime change, this is removing the obstacle so that the people [of Iran] can pick their leadership," before marveling that the attack was carried out on 9/11 of the Islamic calendar.

"Who planned this?" he asked. "I think God planned it.

On Sunday, pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, delivered a special "prophetic sermon" in response to the attacks to explain "what God's plan of fury is for Iran."

Continue @ RWW. 

'The Return Of Jesus Is Back On The Menu' 🪶 MAGA Evangelicals Celebrate The Attack On Iran

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Four

 

Pastords @ 34

 

A Morning Thought @ 3080

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Weekly, at the same time each Saturday, the activists of Drogheda Stands With Palestine gather at the steps of the cathedral in West Street. 

They do so in the hope of a turnaround in fortunes for the Palestinians who for the past two and half years have been subjected to the ferocious intensity of Israeli genocide. As we follow the news from the Middle East the cherished hope that Israel's bellicose bloodlust might be stymied can seem forlorn. 

Not sick of wars, Israel has started yet another. It is the primary source of instability in the Middle East. As Iranian leaders gathered last week to discuss the talks with US officials, Mossad, through its intelligence operations, acquired knowledge of the meeting. It then alerted the CIA and suggested that an attack on the Tehran compound while the meeting was taking place would result in Iran's key leaders being killed. Trump gave the green light for the war which US officials, borrowing from Vladimir Putin's war manual, are now denying is a war. Instead they insist it is some form of special military operation

Like an earlier Israeli attack in Qatar aimed at the Hamas peace delegation, this was not an action designed to prevent war. Its aim was to prevent a negotiated peace emerging.

Donald Trump, the fascist-leaning President of the US, offered the following justification for what the New York Times and Time Magazine both claim is the eighth military intervention of his second term in the Oval Office.

This is the duty and the burden of a free people. These actions are right and they are necessary to ensure that Americans will never have to face a radical, bloodthirsty terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons.

That seems a very apt description of the Israeli state - bloodthirsty, terrorist and in possession of nukes.

The mass murder of around 150 Iranian schoolgirls is very much a ploy from the Israeli terror textbook - the terroristic intimidation of a people through murdering its children. Israel and the United States proceed with the lawlessness of Mexican drug cartels and are every bit as contemptuous of human rights. Any claim that an intelligence operation can identity the location of a top level Iranian meeting but not distinguish between a girl's school, and a military facility rings spurious.

Israel officials have been briefing media outlets that there are three objectives in the war on Iran:

  • destroy nuclear capacity
  • destroy ballistic missile capacity
  • give Iranians the opportunity to implement regime change

Trump too has called on the Iranian people to seize this supposedly once in a generation opportunity to rise up and overthrow the regime. Those of us old enough to remember the first war on Iraq can recall President George Bush senior at the end of Operation Desert Storm proclaiming to Iraqis:

There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and this is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.

Iraqis took him seriously, uprose and received no help from the US. Their reward for listening to a blow hard US president was merciless massacres. Iranian citizens would be very foolish to rush to the streets in their eagerness to topple a repressive regime in response to fake promises from Donald Trump.

On day two of the current war on Iran, Netanyahu said that the US involvement “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years – to deliver a crushing blow to the terror regime.”

Alon Pinkas, who served as Israel's consul general in New York two decades ago, had this to say about Netanyahu's hopes. 

The man responsible for the worst catastrophe and calamity in Israel’s history, October 7, 2023, the man who marketed himself as “Mr. Security” and a world expert on combating terrorism, was at the helm and accountable for the worst debacle since Israel was established.

The only way to redeem himself was to turn that calamity into a region-altering strategic triumph. For that he crucially needed the U.S. But if he was wrong on Iraq, wrong on the original Iran nuclear deal, wrong on urging Trump to withdraw from it, wrong on his Gaza policy—relying on Hamas to avoid negotiations with the Palestinian Authority—and profoundly wrong on the Palestinian issue writ large, is it possible that he is right here? Whatever he whispered to Trump, the template is more likely Iraq 2003 than Venezuela 2026.

What seems clear is that this is an Israeli-driven war. That the Zionist state continues to wield such malign influence and perfidious power over the foremost military on the planet, despite being globally lambasted because of genocide, could easily cause us to despair, resign ourselves to swimming against the deadly currents churned up by massive military might financed by the super rich.

Our efforts might appear small but as the eighteenth century Conservative thinker Edmond Burke observed: 'Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.'

Despite the setbacks, the ongoing Israeli wars, the massacre of school children, the continuing genocide in Gaza, Drogheda Stands with Palestine will not make the mistake identified by Burke of doing nothing. 


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The Mistake Of Doing Nothing

Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

 “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

How gender ideology, billionaire dark money, and authoritarian groupthink are tearing the Green Party apart…

Is it possible for a political party to claim it is saving the planet while simultaneously denying the most fundamental biological reality of the species that inhabits it?

The Green Party was once, however briefly, a genuine refuge for people who believed that politics ought to be grounded in material reality: in the physical world, in measurable consequences, in science. It believed in ecosystems and feedback loops; in the hard logic of cause and effect. It understood that you cannot simply wish away inconvenient truths, whether those truths concern carbon emissions or the biological distinction between male and female human beings. That, at least, is what many of its founding members believed they had joined.

What they discovered instead is something altogether more alarming: a party leadership so in thrall to a well-funded ideological orthodoxy that it is prepared to break its own rules, exhaust its own finances, and silence its own women rather than acknowledge what a unanimous Supreme Court has since confirmed in law. 

The Green Party’s War On Reality 🪶 Why Biology Is Not A ‘Fantasy’

Cat Boyd-Foley🔖 answers thirteen questions in Booker's Dozen. 

 Reading Aloud And Allowed


TPQ: What are you currently reading? 

CBF: I’ve just finished Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. 10/10 recommend. “Our favourite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.”

TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?

CBF: I once tried to read The DaVinci Code. Unbearable, although quite a good laugh for that very reason. Best? Unable to say!

TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?

CBF: My daddy read to me every night when I was a child. My most tender memory of this time is him reading the Winnie the Pooh books to me and I remember him crying at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, the one called In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There. It begins with these lines: “Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going…But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last” and towards the end there’s a truly bittersweet exchange between Pooh and Christopher Robin about his going away and growing up, not being able to play anymore. Or as AA Milne puts it not being able to “do Nothing anymore”. I didn’t really understand why my father was so upset at the time. But now I have my own daughter, I realise how powerful an evocation it is of the end of childhood and how fleeting the years are where we get to play and live in imaginary worlds with our imaginary pals, without any desire to become “grown up”. Thanks to Bella, I get to live again in a world of imagination and play even when the pressures of reality and daily grind threaten to get in the way.

Around 7, I was totally in thrall to a book called The Suitcase Kid by Jaqueline Wilson. It’s about a lonely girl who lives between houses when her parents split up. I was hooked on it, although my family unit was completely intact, because Andy, the wee girl, finds that she does not fit into these new, strange adult worlds and instead finds most connection and comfort in her cuddly toy rabbit called Radish.

I read Tender Is The Night when I was about 15 and it had a huge impact on my aesthetic and cultural tastes; the quiet ruin and fragile glamour, decaying beauty and nervous breakdown. I have a lifetime obsession with trying to give form to people (mostly women) who are simultaneously there and not there, poking at the thin veil between presence and absence, sanity and madness, the real and the imagined.

TPQ: Favourite Childhood author?

CBF:  I read a lot of fairytales, myths and fables as a kid and still do. I think they are very revealing and I always want to know which one you remember most vividly so I can do some armchair psychoanalysis.

But as to favourite author, I have to admit, it was Enid Blyton. Specifically, her Amelia Jane stories. They’re about a naughty doll who comes to life in the nursery and wreaks havoc on the other toys. She always ends up getting punished and having to say sorry. I can’t imagine what this says about my own psyche . . .

TPQ: First book to really own you?

CBF: Ariel by Sylvia Plath. It was the first collection of poetry I read and remains the most influential. I can recite Daddy by rote, although it doesn’t make for a very good party piece at Christmas.

I think the first novel to really reach out and throttle me was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. In my early teenage years I was driven by an all-consuming obsession with the Velvet Underground, so I even read the non-fiction book the band got their name from (not age appropriate!) And it sent me on a path to read everything I could about the darkness that lies beneath the presentable or “desirable” American post-war normalcy. Similarly, this twist also propelled me into reading a lot of the Beat Generation. I’ve always loved Diane Di Prima: her poetry, the purportedly sexed-up Memoirs of a Beatnik and recently got my hands on a long-wanted copy of Recollections of my Life as a Woman. But Revolutionary Road did that thing that extraordinary books do - it lurched out from the page and into my Real Life. So, in predictable fashion, I broke up with my boyfriend and decided to change how i was living my life - at the time I read it and the age I was, it changed how I thought about normativity and social values, freedom, authenticity etc. And now, just as predictably, I live in the suburbs with my husband, haha.

TPQ: Favourite male and female author?

CBF: Very hard to pick one favourite! Women are a very long list; Sylvia Plath (particularly her diaries, or what remains of them), Elizabeth Wurtzel, Anais Nin, Mary Gaitskill, Lisa Taddeo, Joan Didion. There are lines from Play It As It Lays that loop through my brain on repeat: “I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird” and "Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” Although I like both male and female authors, when I rack it up in my mind, I generally read a lot more women than men. I made a list in my head and my favourite writers are those who create worlds at the extremes of both feminine and masculine archetypes. For example, I love Ernest Hemingway - I especially adore The Old Man and the Sea. But even Death in the Afternoon undoes me. I moved to the Basque Country when I was 20 and always had a preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War, which gave me my introduction to Hemingway and other writers like Orwell. I’m not a fan of bullfighting at all. In Bilbao, I lived close to a bullring for a long time, but I never once went there. How Hemingway could take something I found morally and politically objectionable and make it seem so beautiful, heroic, almost romantic continues to fascinate me.

I would count Alasdair Gray in my favourite male authors. I think Lanark is a true masterpiece and bends so many genres - so dirty and glamourous and violent and beautiful. All the things I love in one crazy package. It contains one of my favourite lines ever, when Lanark reaches the depths of his complete social and emotional alienation and says: “I ought to have more love before I die, I haven’t had enough” I also really like J.G Ballard for his landscapes and atmosphere. I always think of him when I’m navigating motorways and underpasses.

TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?

CBF:  I’ve read a lot of political non-fiction, but it’s probably not my preference. I do enjoy political history, like The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, Fanon and so on. I also like reading depth psychology, these days I’m drawn towards Jung, Erich Fromm etc. There were a few years when I was very involved in socialist politics that I barely read any fiction. It’s a huge shortcoming in left-wing politics. Someone once told me that a particular French anti-capitalist group had abandoned the practice of educating new recruits using texts like Capital or Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and instead pushed non-Marxist classic fiction like A Tale of Two Cities instead. I don’t know if this is actually true but I always loved the idea that fiction can speak louder truths about the world and force us to see the aspects of grey in between more black-and-white narratives about justice and how society functions. 

I get absorbed in reading a lot of poetry; the last collection I read was Tove Ditlevsen’s There Lives Inside Me a Young Girl Who Will Not Die, which I got from a friend for Christmas. It hits on all my favourite themes; childhood, motherhood, love, addiction, sadness and it’s genuinely, surprisingly funny. I am taken with women who write or make art as a way to survive. I find non-fiction that falls into exploring this category quite compelling. After my daughter was born, I had a huge personal and creative awakening. Reading Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Philips was a big part of this. It’s a fairly provocative cultural critique of the invisibility of women’s creative and internal lives, and how social expectations place a huge burden upon them.

TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?

CBF: A very recent read, but This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright probably knocks previous favourites off the top spot. Until I read this, I’d have said Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, maybe Prozac Nation (I love Elizabeth Wurtzel and will defend her and all her complexities forever!) or Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three/Bad Seeds fame) But this memoir felt really special. I’ve read a lot of ‘addiction fiction’ type stuff, but this was different. It’s about Octavia Bright’s recovery from alcoholism intertwined with her father’s spiralling illness after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It quotes Simone Weil, Louise Bourgeois, Jose Luis Borges and other very cool people from art and writing that I love. The threads running through touch on memory and forgetting and hunger and loss - it's the first book I've read in a while where I went mental with a biro, underlining bits and folding down corners of pages to come back to. This bit is underlined and highlighted in my copy:

I could build a whole castle out of my desire to be loved and I also wanted to be left alone. Sometimes it felt like there were no limits to my wanting, as if it were a devouring and insatiable force.

TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?

CBF: I am nervous to admit this! But I have a general (but not absolute!) rule of refusing to read fiction over 600 pages! I think that’s partly just preference - I really love novellas, short stories, flash fiction. Having said that, I do like long-form poetry. I read The Long Take by Robin Robertson recently and it really got under my skin, it's in my top ten favourites now. But in terms of those giant tomes, embarrassingly, I just don’t have the stamina. I don’t know whether my attention span just gives out or I just really want to get to the end. Even objectively “good” books like A Little Life or The Goldfinch made me really sluggish by the end. I just want to know what happens! I also will not read Harry Potter. I hate its contribution to the Disneyfication of Edinburgh!

TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?

CBF: Rumplestiltskin.


TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?

CBF: I gave some books to my brother-and-sister-in-law for Christmas. Dan has been writing a lot of his own stories and getting published too - he's got a real gift for dark and unsettling tales so we got him The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers and my sister-in-law got a book about Irish history and language. Someone is about to get a copy of Abandon Me by Melissa Febos for their birthday too!

TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?

CBF: Laidlaw by William McIlvaney. I am completely intoxicated by all of McIlvaney’s work and wish I could've met him. I love that he went from writing this critically acclaimed literary fiction masterpiece in Docherty and then followed it up with a novel in the so-called ‘pulp’ genre of crime fiction. Laidlaw is a magnificent book and contains the best line about Glasgow and all its contradictions: 

Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat.

I read a while back that it would be made into a TV series, but I’ve always fancied having a go at adapting it into a neo-noir, Lynchian style screenplay!
 
TPQ: The just must - select one book you simply have to read before you close the final page on life.

CBF: Getting over my fear of long texts and reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of things Past) by Proust.

🕮 Cat Boyd-Foley is a writer, poet and artist working in the trade union movement in Scotland. She is interested in suburban foxes, domestic banalities, childhood fantasies, feral women and coal mining
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Cat Boyd-Foley @ Booker's Dozen

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