celticman's blog

Bobby White: seven marathons, seven continents in seven days. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c75e3dny5ygo I’ve been following Bobby White’s story. It helps that I know him. He’d walk past me in the street, but we played in the same team for a wee while. I also played against his dad, Bobby White. He was a great football player as well. And they’d a younger nephew and cousin. Bobby White, naturally. They all played centre forward for some...

You’re probably wondering why I’d want to be part of the audience in a case-study session with playwright and screenwriter, Stef Smith, since I’m neither playwright nor do I know who Stef Smith is or was. Yeh, well, writing is writing is my answer. I might learn something. I’m a Catholic. So it would be no great surprise to me if Jesus was sleeping off another resurrection in bed upstairs. While the Virgin Mary was poking around in the kitchen...

Unexpected death Sometimes, disappointment feels like embracing the unavoidable death you anticipated would come crashing through the roof of your room, only to find it had slipped in through the door. W.H. Auden (1907-73) Epitaph On A Tyrant Perfection of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And he was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he...

You know this story which is part of the attraction. You get hurt and you get hard. Poet, Seamus Heaney pairs the theme. Pains become armour walking hand in hand with history. Rocky chases chickens and punches cold slabs of meat in a freezer while chasing his dream of becoming heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Djokovic after winning one of the most brutal Grand Slam finals in tennis history celebrates with a square of chocolate. I must...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/harvey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(1950_film) Our parents would have known who and what Harvey was. But don’t expect anybody under fifty. They might be vaguely familiar with James Stewart. He was the Tom Hanks of yesteryear and resident good guy. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1944) is a regular at Christmas. James Stewart is such a perfect match to the ever-so amiable Elwood P. Dowd it’s...

The Big Issue is a fiver (£5) now. I can remember the shock and disbelieve it was £2. Then £2.50…and so on. My sister gave me this copy. She bought it from an Eastern European women from outside Asda. Like most folk that catch her eye and don’t look away, I usually just slip her £2 and say I don’t want the magazine. Win-win. But not for the magazine. There’s a guy on the bridge at the shopping centre. He’s there every day and plays some musical...

David Szalay (2025) Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. That puts David Szalay into the stratosphere of book sellers. Last year’s winner, Orbit , Samantha Harvey’s quote on the cover is ‘Brilliance on every page’. ‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making new friends. After a while...

‘Can we enter heaven with one leg?’ The little girl named Saja in Jabela, who lost her leg in an Israeli airstrike on her house before entering an eternal sleep due to the destruction of all hospital in Gaza had asked I think she entered with two.

Leonardo Da Vinci (2024), BBC iPlayer, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, narrator Keith David, Director Ken Burns. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m00264cj/leonardo-da-vinci https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0026ch9/leonardo-da-vinci-series-1-2-part-two-paintergod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(2024_film) Ken Burns that heavyweight of public service films and whose documentary films have attempted to explain...

I had to check Allan Bennett is still alive. He’s 91 now. Books don’t have to be new to be read. His diary entries and moral outrage with Tony Blair as he cosied up to George Bush (junior) over the invasion of Iraq over dumbed up files that never existed…well, with the moron’s moron Trump treating the Doomsday Clock as a pinball machine that spits out Nobel Peace Prizes we’re beyond satire, but not common sense. Bennett has got more than a wee...