Irish Fire-starter Michael Fitzalan

Abens Roucent

This is an excerpt form my latest book that blasts business practices from the 80s still used today and this Blog from Michael Fitzalan Books: ‘The Accountant and his comeuppance’ is an extract from a book that does to accounting what Animal Farm did for Communism.

Image

Fall by Michael Fitzalan

As she is abducted and taken across the border, a scientist reflects on how she ended up in such a precarious position. Working at one of the world’s leading biological research institutes seemed like a dream job. Her mentor, Professor Akshay Gupta has discovered a secret that in the wrong hands could result in millions of deaths. Someone wants the secret and he has to be protected. When those going after him realise that she knows the secret, too, her life is turned upside down and she has to use all her wit and intelligence to keep one step ahead of the others. Andy, Hardeep and Linda help her to prevent the secret falling into the wrong hands. Interest becomes a flood of unwanted attention and she has to use every ounce of initiative to escape and preserve humankind.

Michael Fitzalan Head and shoulder shot.

Meet Me Later by Michael Fitzalan – the author tries to stop a crime by his younger self.

Everyone works from home, so we do not hang around after the session, chatting. We just thank Martha, promise to see each other next week and put away the equipment. Cycling back to the house, I shower and prepare for the evening sessions of tutoring English for entrance examinations, eleven-plus and thirteen-plus as well as GCSE. I have at least one tutee at their home, and I try to cycle there even if in a cloudburst. Eating a late lunch of avocado and brown bread, I mark, send emails and choose comprehensions for us to examine, explore and answer or come up with story titles for us to write. My favourite is ‘The Fence’. I have been sitting on it all my life.

It is my day off so I work on my other play for the rest of the day.

I am writing a play dedicated to Niko Louvros who was a shining beacon of humanity and humility.

ELIZABETH, EXTINCTION REBELLION, REGINA

It’s about an immigrant family who have made good in the UK, I have not decided whether they are Bangladeshi, Ghanian Indian, Jamaican, Kenyan, Malay, Nigerian, Hong Kong Chinese or Irish.

Anyway, the daughter is somewhere between Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. However, she wants the government and the civil servants replaced by a citizen’s assembly made up or representatives from the 133 councils in England, supplemented by representatives from each of the professions and all the services, such as postal, rail and maritime, farming, fishing and technology.

It’s a screenplay.

Bonfire of the Vanities Michael Fitzalan

Book Number 10 – Ghost Storey by Michael Fitzalan

The ghosts in Ghost Storey are real and they haunted Michael Fitzalan’s life.

If you have never been to the west coast of Ireland, perhaps, you may not be able to appreciate the glorious green of the perfect pastures. From the verdant verges to the gently rolling undulations of the hills, the country looks like it was blanketed in the colour that gives the republic its name, the Emerald Isle. Around the place, there are the dry-stone walls, feats of amazing engineering, rocks of tremendous size piled high one upon another in such a skilful pattern that they stay upright, a boulder barrier between fields.

Every silver lining has a cloud and Ireland’s gloomy, grey skies put off many settlers. Then, there’s the rain, the rain, the rain; you need an awful lot of water to get green as vivid as the colour of the landscape and does it pour; it pours, drumming on the roof; it pours, sluicing along the gutters; it pours, gurgling down the drainpipe. You do not visit Ireland for the weather.

Opportunities lie in the successful cities: Dublin, Cork, and Galway to name a few. New offices for tech and services have replaced the old timber and linen mills, ghosts from the past.

So, what does Ireland have in spades? Its history and its beauty. Is it enough, though in a country bled of its population, in the famine and, by subsequent emigration to busier places? They say that Ireland is a great place to visit, and the education is very good indeed but to live there takes a certain fortitude and a love of water: streams, lakes, rivers, and rainwater, running down your neck, soaking your cuffs and leaking into your boots.

Our story is not about the place, as such, but a building within that setting. There are cutesy cottages and fine rambling mansions like the Guinness’s old place, Ashford Castle, though those are few and far between. On the west coast of Ireland, where our story takes place, many have been preserved, others rot as the ground around them claims the brick back to its birthplace, deep within the clay soil.

Our story concerns one such glebe. The only glebe with a ghost.

A ghost that lives in the room on the half landing, a mirror image of the room on the other side but through generations its presence has made itself known. If you feel that ghosts do not exist, read on. If you have ever suffered some of the exceptional experiences that fill my story, you will know, now, that you are not alone.

Ghosts exists.

They are not just in your head.

My ghosts stack up like the storeys of a building, one floor after another. Some of them I have inherited from my mother, the ghost in the bedroom, her survival, my grandfather’s ghosts, the ghosts of friends who helped me when they lived, the ghosts who helped from beyond the grave. Moreover, however, haunting feelings that my life should have been better or that I could have given back more swirl in my mind.

All these storeys have a moral, which you can easily discover. Do you tell stories to teach your young and learn from your old? What ghost stories stack up in your life and are there more storeys than you can count in the haunted house that is your mind?

Here I share mine.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Storey-Hauntings-Life-My/dp/B0B72MXGDH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=TSBSUPJG5NRP&keywords=Ghost+storey&qid=1679999433&s=books&sprefix=ghost+story%2Cstripbooks%2C120&sr=1-1

1 2 … 5