celticman's blog

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "A House Divided." http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05n2922/life-after-suicide Angela Samarta’s husband Mark committed suicide. Childhood sweethearts, fifth and sixth formers at the same school, she had a child at eighteen and another boy ten years later at twenty-eight. They had a temporary separation which became permanent. She wonders if she ever knew Mark. Here she comes to terms with it...

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "Roaring Laughter." Patrick and Henry Cockburn (2011 ) Henry’s Demons. Living with Schizophrenia. A Father and Son’s Story. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas , cousin to Patrick and uncle to Henry writes a blur on the cover: ‘A truly remarkable book, and a brave one’. That’s clichéd. Clichés are quite common in mental illness. If you shot everyone that mouthed a cliché you’d have quite a few...

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "We Can Be Taught!." William Keegan (2014 ) Mr Osborne’s Economic Experiment. Austerity 1945-51 and 2010 – The first question when purchasing a book about economics is it worth the money? Let’s look at the evidence. The book costs £10 or thereabouts. This includes delivery. Not bad. But it is very short—or concise—depending on your definition. Large borders on the page. Empty spaces. Empty pages to...

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "In Loving Memory." My brother phoned me today. He works in Fife, Longannet Power station, been there about twenty years. Longannet is one of the few coal-fired power stations that is still on grid. It was opened in 1972 and has a capacity of 2400 MW. Most of the other coal-fired power stations in Scotland are closed. That’s not a bad thing. With global warming mankind is on life support and we...

I was vaguely aware of Jackie Kay and had read an extract of this book a few years ago. Heard her speak about her novel Trumpet and knew she was a poet. Poets make the best prose writers. What stuck in my memory was her parents. Two white working class people that adopt two kids that happen to be black or coloured, or whatever term you’re comfortable with, because this is not about race, or about class, although both her adoptive parents are...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/citizenfour I missed the beginning of this programme, ironically because I was online. I spend too much time online. I’ve nothing to hide. Well, nothing much to hide. Here you have it. Everybody has something to hide. We can laugh now at the old-fashioned-spy networks of neighbours spying upon neighbours. You keep expecting Michael Caine to pop up in a John Le Carre thriller. It’s funny. An Orwellian world...

Apocalypse. Apocalypses echo what we know. The world will end. Three score years and ten. Well I’m looking at the tens. I’m not thumbing my nose and saying ‘Har, Har,’ because I’ll be dead. Let’s face it that kills any argument. Nuclear Holocaust We all know what this mean. Helen Macdonald was a wee lassie in the nineteen-sixties. She was instructed by her teacher how to make a nuclear fallout shelter in the cupboard beneath the stairs with old...

'Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b051wkry/storyville-20142015-11-the-internets-own-boy You have 19 days left to watch this. I suggest you do. It says a lot about where we are. Aaron Schwarz committed suicide 11 th January 2013 in Brooklyn, New York. He was aged 26. Aaron’s girlfriend, Tarren Stinebrinckner-Kauffman, claimed that he wasn’t depressed, rather his suicide was the direct result of a vindictive prosecution and prosecutor out to...

About thirty-years ago some girl (although I I thought of her as a woman then – the bee’s knees in fact) was lecturing me about the evils of gender inequality, but I was more interested in the evils of her breasts. In other words I was an arsehole. I’m still an arsehole, but perhaps less fixated and more ready to listen to coherent argument. The first question I would ask is who is Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche? I’d say she is one of the best writers...