celticman's blog

Scratch’s ‘Daniel’ series of stories on ABCtales is coming to a conclusion. I’ve been having flashbacks, images of long black frocks and oversized crucifixes, the parish priest Canon Mallon and my teacher Mrs Boyle standing next to him, but with a slightly smaller crucifix. Little did I know that I was involved in a cruel experiment and like many others I’m ready to sue and seek therapeutic help by getting it down on paper. There are others like...

Lots of folk ask me how Unbound Works. (Well, one person, thanks for that Eddie.) The answer is quite simple. I've no idea But then I thought back to my gilded youth when everything was quite simply complicated so that even a kid could understand it. Unbound is like Blue Peter without -down Shep! In those days John, Peter and Val stood in front of a big hollow tower, made out of polystyrene, with banded numbers on it. They'd look quite glum...

The Men Who Made Us Spend . BBC 2, 9.10pm. This is a three-part series directed, written and presented by investigative journalist Jacques Peretti. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01zxmrv/the-men-who-made-us-spend-episode-1 In the first episode he looked at how monopoly capital makes it’s own rules. He gave the example of electric bulb makers in pre-Hitler Germany which sounded like an elder of Zion conspiracy theory only for the paperwork...

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847 because women don’t write books, only they do. Heathcliffe is the hero, or should I say anti-hero. He’s got a hint of gypsy in him, a man’s man that marries Isabella Linton to spite his childhood sweetheart Catherine Earnshaw (hints of incest here) hangs Isabella’s dog from a gatepost to show what kind of man she’s marrying and beats his head against the branch...

It’s a catchy title that titillates. You know when you open the pages it won’t be like wading through text book squiggles of grey snails lining up to teach you something meaningful about the author’s life that you don’t want to know. It won’t try and regress you or teach you that God is on your side if you can just [well, fill in your own bit here]. To begin with Hudson’s book disappointed me. It has been described as autobiographical. Here, the...

It’s not everyday one gets a publicist. It’s a bit like a bald man going to the barbers. People just snigger behind your back (not that I’m bald, I just lack hair on selected parts of my head). I’d a meeting scheduled for 2 p.m. I’m notorious for forgetting people’s names. Last night, for example, I was talking for a couple of minutes with a guy at the bar. Usual sort of football chatter. Then he came out with it. ‘You don’t know who I am? Do...

Visibility is a trick of the light. Invisibility is a lack of publicity. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith suggested in the Preface to The Great Crash 1929 : ‘No author can be fully trusted when describing the quality of his own work’. I am not allowed to say buy Lily Poole because it is a really good book, or a really bad book - negative reviews also increase sales - but no reviews means stasis. It means invisibility and equilibrium...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047zl98 I meant to watch this when it was recently on BBC 3, but the World Cup was on. There’s a joke there about some folk finding that murder, but we’ll skate over that. I won’t be giving any plots points away if I tell you Reece (played by Royce Pierreson) ends up killing Ashley (Georgina Campbell) and it’s based on a true story. I doubt the couple were so glamourous looking and well-heeled, but that’s...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049n0js The story of Agnessa Murselja (played here by Olivia Popica) a fifteen-year old refugee and pupil at Drumchapel High School that was taken with her family to be deported, in a dawn raid, and returned home to Kosovo. At home whisperings of fields unsown/ Maybe the kind old sun will know. Home is the key word here. The Home Office suggest her home was somewhere else. The Glasgow Girls, as the name suggests...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0499fb1/alan-hansen-player-and-pundit On the eve of the World Cup finals this is a hagiography of a football player and pundit. The latter is easy to deal with. He talks shite for a living. There wasn’t an aha moment. He’d been offered the Liverpool manager’s job after his mate Kenny Dalglish had left and he didn’t take it. With a wife and two kids, he contacted Sky(BSport) about commentary work and ‘fell...