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As the evening draws to a close And the bubble of excitement finally bursts, Drowsy youngsters, deprived of sleep, Clinging carelessly to parents like limpets All stifling yawns, bleary-eyed, cushioned in sleep, Stumbling outside in the oppressive heat of night. Murmurs of farewells, adieu, barely audible as The curtain of darkness cloaks the world. A sombre parade as families escape to their sanctuaries A peaceful accolade to mark the end of prize-giving!! 2011, Tabuk, KSA. Copyright 2013. Permission must be obtained from the author before this poem is reproduced.

When I imagine living the social life of someone like Charmaine, it's all Champagne parties, Michelin restaurants and five-star hotels. The reality is somewhat more pedestrian. Superficial. Talentless. These are the super egos who can manipulate the individual. Like Charmaine they are territorial and highly competitive. They may have an enviable lifestyle but behind all the glitz and glamour we have superficial characters, without real friends or genuine happiness. They trade off their good looks and media image, over-hyped, of course, pandering to the whims of their management teams and their bank balances and floating on the cloud of ambition at any price. Then there's Ryan, every girls' dream of male perfection and desire. He might be play-acting as Prince Charming, physically toned to make every girl squirm and squeal with delight and lust but is he true to his name? Of course not. He uses Lucy, who swoons whenever she sees him as a way to make Cinderella jealou

  Dark shadows clouded my dreams of the sunny farm bright with geraniums and orange blossom. A valley teeming with murderous snakes guarding the entrance to a place of stones and scorpions.   Most of us can empathise with Chris and Ana for deciding to move to an idyllic but challenging life in the mountains of Andalucia. Isn't it everyone's dream perhaps? Or perhaps that should read nightmare. Chris found his paradise early on in his house-hunting days. La Herradura would have been his first choice but he was discouraged from purchasing it because of complications in multiple owners not wishing to sell. His second choice was El Valero set amongst orange and lemon trees, olives and blossoming almonds. What could be more Spanish or delightful to the eye? A mountain farm, just what he desired. My head was whirling with excitement; wild ideas and dreams pouring in. Once the excitement levelled, he then realised why Pedro Romero was so keen to sell-a dam was going to

Sun-warmed in this late season's grace under the autumn's gentlest sky we walked, and froze half-through a pace. The great black snake went reeling by. Head-down, tongue flickering on the trail he quested through the parting grass; sun glazed his curves of diamond scale, and we lost breath to watch him pass. What track he followed, what small food fled living from his fierce intent, we scarecly thought; still as we stood our eyes went with him as he went. Cold, dark and splendid he was gone into the grass that hid his prey. We took a deeper breath of day, looked at each other, and went on. In Australia there are 140 species of land snakes, some equipped with venom more toxic than any other snakes in the world. Bites, however, are quite rare. Fatalities are low: between 4-6 deaths a year. It is interesting to note that 21 out of 25 of the world's most venomous snakes live in Australia. The fierce snake is the inland taipan which is the most poison

Here you'll find 11 varied but intense stories about emotional struggles of ordinary people trying to get to grips with life. For some unfortunates, the adjustment is too great and tragedy is inevitable, something very characteristic of Hill's writing as many of you will already know. A Bit of Singing and Dancing is less dramatic and not quite so tragic. I can stay out here just as long as I like, I can do anything I choose, anything at all, for now I am answerable only to myself. Esme is still coming to terms with her mother's death and her new-found freedom. She is over 50 years of age and has reluctantly been forced into caring for her forthright and domineering bedridden mother for 11 years prior to her death. She had been half-alive satisfying her mother's needs and repressing her own needs and desires. Her mother's death had given her a new lease of life, an unexpected freedom which also attracted fear and bewilderment to someone who had been so sheltered

The saddest thing I think I can imagine is passing through life without  some kind of impact, without leaving a legacy in one form of another. We all contribute. We enrich the lives of others in so many ways. We spend our lives trying to make sense of the world, searching for answers in striving to achieve wisdom but the only certainty in life is that one day, sooner or later, we will die. Murning's novel explores the fear and isolation of dying in a sensitive but powerful way. It is extremely moving and based on realism. Tobias Lovelost, the lemon who day after day, week after week, month after month survived on his own even after encountering disappointment after disappointment. Like the song says, you still haven't found what you're looking for. He was destined to be the man who didn't say anything, the man who wouldn't speak up for himself until he met Lorna. She instilled in him the confidence to speak his mind. His personal life, his marriage to Lorna

He promised to take care of me and yet I feel afraid. I don't feel like Nick's wife. I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock...tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river. I don't feel real anymore. I feel I could disappear. Every picture tells a story. Whether pictorially depicted or intimately written such as a diary kept by our female protagonist, there are always (at least) two sides to every story and truths to unravel from the dishonesty and deceit. In a dysfunctional marriage, with mismatched relationships the faults lie with both parties. Nick and Amy's marriage might initially seem blissful with Amy swooning over Nick's socks fat with love on their first wedding anniversary before it turns pear-shaped and oppressive shortly afterwards. Amy was from an affluent background, the "product" of her parents' wealth based on the Amazing Amy series. Her childhood in fact, every part of her growing up had be

With his bloated belly, matchstick legs and tangled punk-rocker style fur, he looked like a child's drawing come to life and he also looked pregnant. Woodcock overemphasises the message through the plot which has so many twists and turns that you wonder if you are on a rollercoaster which is about to crash: don't be deceived by first impressions. True nature will out. Things aren't always what they seem. Fortunately the bad guys are caught and everything turns out satisfactory after chaos and mayhem dominate the lives of the Bennetts. And this is NOT Pride and Prejudice or the Waltons. As one might say: never a dull moment in the Bennett household. The Bennetts have more than the average number of skeletons in the closet even for a dysfunctional family at constant war with each other and the world at large, with the occasional truce. The story cleverly satirises a working class family at its worst being battered from pillar to post with drug scams, surrogacy, infidelit

My breath spirals skyward, steam rings inflating and slowly dissipating like some magic trick performed with a cigarette and a balloon................. A number of local writers living in Spain have contributed to this selection of short stories covering different genres, extremely readable for autumnal evenings, relaxing as the sun sets. Just the tonic. Say no more! The One That Got Away by Michael Barton can be read on a number of levels. It shows Jack's resilience and maturation in dealing with his parents' divorce, his journey from laggard to leader. Dad was labelled as an absent parent and blamed for his son's spiral into anti-social and unacceptable behaviour at school. The idea of togetherness in separation isn't anything like the ideal situation that Jack's father envisages. He wants to be reunited with his wife, however, she has made other plans: sleeping with the boss, Dave, has paid off and she has been promoted. So, the togetherness is an oppor

The painting which I am currently working on will be called Guernica. By means of it, I express my abhorrence of the race that has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.                                                                                                                     Pablo Picasso Like the great artist, Boling painted his sprawling mural as a fictional piece, emphasising how closely-knit and struggling Basque families were irrevocably disfigured but not completely destroyed by the Spanish civil war. The story inevitably shows un-necessary human suffering and loss coupled with acts of heroism and amazing fortitude of the nobler characters who miraculously survive the atrocities during the destruction of Guernica in 1937. Even before 1937 Picasso wanted to shatter art and reshape it. Sadly, the opportunity came and in his rage he created his famous painting. He appears in the story and expresses his anger verbally to German soldiers as well as through his pai

  They stood close, smiling into each other's eyes, drowning in the pleasure of seeing each other again. For a few brief minutes they were oblivious to where they were and their reasons for being in these anonymous surroundings that could have been anywhere in the world. Victoria Hislop became an instant success with her debut novel The Island. You may have also read The Thread or The Return? If you are looking for the same quality but in smaller doses I can recommend this short story collection inspired by her love of Greece, giving us some insight into typical Greek customs and traditions, the reality not the fantasy. The Last Dance is full of life's ironies and sad. The setting is Athens for the lavish wedding of Theodoris and Nefeli. Ironically, businesses had closed because of the recession although weddings were as extravagant as ever. No expense spared. Everyone seemed to be getting married and Hislop writes about nuptial gridlock which destroys the whole romant

Flailing arms disappeared as the flames from the burning gasoline shot even higher  and engulfed the few heads that bobbed on the surface. He could hear the screams of men as their flesh melted in the heat. We start with a prologue, set in Germany towards the end of the second world war with an insignificant man, Gerhard Schneider, witnessing cargo being unloaded from a U-boat, overseen by Doenitz. The military convoy left with Doenitz before the submarine exploded. No survivors. About the same time a raid on Selsey, south England went horribly wrong. The German fast boat went down. Again, no survivors. The story then begins in Kent, England and moves to the present day. What a dramatic opening with the planned assassination of Jack Hudson, Secretary of State-a high profile figure. The Assassin is utterly wicked, a typically Machiavellian character who was addicted to killing and found it pleasurable. To him, it was much better than any snort of cocaine or a puff of weed. The

No way was optimism ever going to be allowed to shape the future. Even to suggest there was a glimmer of hope was met with a sharp rebuff. This is an interesting collection of 6 short stories recounting actual events on various visits to either European countries or within the U.K. The commonality is a touch of philosophical resonance mixed with an element of humour, notably sarcasm and wit. Even a search for wisdom, insight and enlightenment can produce, along its path, moments of hilarity. This is Walker's first collection and hopefully, not his last. Why Are Pessimists So Vocal? touches upon these infuriatingly annoying but spontaneous and unavoidable encounters with one of those oddballs suffering from verbal diarrhoea which I am sure we can all relate to and detest?! It doesn't really matter whether it was Portugal, Spain or the moon. It can happen anywhere. The writer was at peace with the world, walking through a pine forest remarking on the beauty of nature'

The dead are sacred. Impartial. Unbiased. So Franco runs his tours on the strength of them. And just being able to run them shows that the Nationalists are legitimate. Winning. It is hard to imagine going on a tour of northern Spain during the Spanish civil war in 1938 and being guaranteed a safe passage? Was that possible when the war was still raging? On the one hand there was plenty of evidence of the abject poverty and devastation although the tourists generally had lavish accommodation, experiencing the wonderful Spanish cuisine whilst others starved. Living in this luxury inoculates us from the horrors of it all. The tours had been organised by Franco and boasted of witnessing atrocities in defeating and annihilating the Reds. A one-sided lesson. It's even harder to imagine being taken hostage and used as a pawn in a deadly political game. Seeing history in the making or being a part of the history where your life is endangered. This is what makes the book riveting f