celticman's blog

William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives is Holy. ‘Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking we have done enough killing’. Mass murder, displacement, famine. Blake was wrong. We can never get enough killing. W.H. Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant , got it. ‘When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.’ It’s personal for Mohammed Moussa. His mother, his sisters their...

Cogito ergo sum . The starting point of a million essays on philosophy. The duality of mind-body. Professor Guy Leschziner suggests it’s more complex, with what we think and who we are based on our sense of self is fallible and inconsistent based on a reality that isn’t really real, but a projection based on our internalised perceptions. Phew. Take a breather. He’s a neurologist—he gets angry at ‘these morons, those who are anti-vaxxers and anti...

Who are you? What are you? For a memoir a bit of backstory is needed. Try and fit ‘patriot’ into a single sentence in as many forms as you can manage. It’s on the book cover. The man who resigned because of a government cover-up. A smearing campaign against a patriotic whistle blower. I made notes and watched a documentary on Prime. If the world has a cancerous growth called global warming, wouldn’t it want to know? Eh, nope. Many of the tactics...

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a reader who writes. You can’t be a writer who doesn’t read. Writing is secondary and often unnecessary, but I claim it as a calling of sorts. ‘I know no one wants to hear me say how hard writing is—quit while you can’. I liked Goldberg telling me that. Reminding me that. I’m pretty good at making starts. The equivalent of joining the gym on the New Year and promising to go swimming and sauna once a week too. I’...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mrgq/the-idea-of-you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_of_You Straightforward rom-com. What’s the hook? Solène Marchand uses the wrong toilet. I used to do it quite a lot. Pee up closes and against the side of the bus at football matches. But it has to be a lot classier. Cause Solene is really Anne Hathaway. It needs to be something better than that. You can’t just have Anne Hathaway peeing outside...

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot , before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those...

‘Drill baby drill’. That’s been the response of the moron’s moron Trump and his followers. It makes meetings of heads of states COP 25, COP 26…meaningless. Short-term thinking. Extinction Rebellion has lost its lustre. All around the world, eco activists have been reclassified as terrorists. Chief Seattle, ‘The Earth is our mother. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself’...

Most of us know who Kathy Burke is. She’s kinda famous. Famous enough to have a major publisher publish her autobiography, A Mind of My Own . I like her because she always comes across as that rarest of breeds, a working-class actress made good. Working-class actor if we’re being politically correct. I loved her retort to Helena Bonham Carter when she opined that there weren’t enough roles for her because she was too pretty. Let me remind you...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct6stl People I know have started voting with their body. I attended a Catholic funeral on Friday. A girl I used to know. Bernie Porter that’s no longer a girl. No longer anything. Her mum was my godmother. Both are dead. Both received Roman Catholic funeral rites. Mass and the bit at the end, where her coffin is carried out of the church, by her ex-husband and son. Her coffin is put in the ground. Ashes to...

You come away after reading Ewan Lawrie’s third poetry collection as if you actually know him. Multilingual. He can even write about himself in the third person. Smartass. He wrote a trilogy of books with a lead character—Moffat—and four other novels and two short-story collections. Fuck sake. Gie it a break. Worse of all, he’s got really great hair. Hunners of it. Mair than a brown bear. I’m no jealous. Honest. The thinks I know about poetry...