Chilli Sweet Potato Fishcakes

The great thing about fishcakes is that their integral recipe and cooking is the same, but one can experiment with different fish and different spices or veg to get completely different flavours and a dish to suit many palates. Because sweet potato is a warm, flavoursome starch anyway, it pairs well with medium-heat chillies that …

Body Positivity At The Beach [UV Swimsuit]

Absolutely love this blog post by pinup Miss Amy May about body positivity. Body negativity can be very psychological, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that looking good is about being confident, whatever shape or size.

Steampunk…. Seriously?

At the Airship Ambassador blog: Prof Elemental talks about dispelling the seriousness and negative stereotypes abounding in the Steampunk community. Definitely worth a read if your interests lie alt-history.

Airship Ambassador

by Professor Elemental

Being a grown up is hard. Mortgages, illnesses, car payments, credit card bills, parenting and politics; these are not activities for the faint hearted. So it’s no wonder that all of us seek some kind of escape from time to time. There’s the telly and the computer, sports and video games, a cornucopia of exciting drugs and new sexual combinations- all there to help ease the pressure of modern life. Still, some of us like to go that extra mile; for some of us, it’s not enough, to watch science fiction- we want to be science fiction. Why sit around imagining an outlandish fantasy when you could actually go out and live it for a while, or at least a fair approximation of it?

That, to me, is the joy of Steampunk. To don a metal arm, squeeze into an impossible corset or even just pop on…

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Lent: A Time for Giving, Not Taking

  Someone asked me at dinner today what I was giving up for Lent. This took me by surprise. For starters, I thought only teenagers partook in the ritual of giving up foodstuffs for 40 days and night. There is also the point I will make that choosing to give up something can actually have …

Creative Writing at University

Interested in what creative writing is like as a society project in a larger UK university? Below is my short interview with Emily Upson, the president and organiser of Reading’s creative writing society, Scribblers, originally published in Reading Uni’s The New Frontier magazine. What inspired you to revive Scribblers? At a poetry reading where Conor …

Facts about Tabata

Today, I'm opening the floor up to a guest post about an unusual, innovative style of fitness training called Tabata. Enjoy! If you thought an hour or even half an hour of aerobic exercise was a good way to lose weight and to stay fit, then here’s some four-minute news. Tabata. Tabata is a four …

(WTCB September) On Journeys

We are winding down the WTCB September posts now. I’ve had so much fun this month delving further into my novel and its characters, symbolism, et cetera, but, unfortunately, September can’t last forever. To add to that, tomorrow I’m moving into my hall at Reading University, so I have to unscrew my literary blogger hat …

In Praise of RCIA

Transformed in Christ

I’m noticing something really interesting in comments surrounding RCIA (on this blog and in other conversations). What I’m noticing is a big gap between the American and the British perspective. I’ll try to summarise this general trend (and be warned – ‘I’m-going-to-be-blunt’ alert – this is generalised):

In the UK, on the whole, I think we’ve had a bad experience of RCIA over the last few decades. Many faithful Catholics in this country rename it ‘Roman Catholics In Agony’ and associate it with watery doctrine, lectionary-based “catechesis”, faith-sharing therapy-style sessions, and lots of para-liturgical actions that don’t mean too much to the participants (or – probably – to God) and make you want to squirm.

OK. I hate all of this just as much as the next person. If it results in people giving up (I know some people who have attempted RCIA three times and more), we have…

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Writers: Are You Living Under a Paper Moon?

Writers or not, we’ve all been there, to that place where our imaginations take precedent and where they create a world inside our own, above and beyond what must fall to the rules of our concrete Earth. I’m building a place/something amazing/just for the sake of saving us. I am an escapist artist. I write to …

Yummy Cake: Photography

It may seem it, but I promise you that I am not a cake fanatic. Maybe a junk-food crazie at times, but not a cake fanatic. I can think of a couple of people (myself not included) who would defend my consumption of cakes.And, actually, as I recently tweeted, I'm getting into the peace of …