celticman's blog

Blue Nights, for Joan Didion, are that special time of year during the summer solstice and longest days between April and May where the wold is lit up by an eerie beauty. But she reminds the reader where she comes from, subtropical California, the Golden State, does not get Blue Light. It’s not Dylan Thomas’s refrain about not going gently into the night, nor rage, rage against the dying of the light, but a meditation on what it means to have...

Scotland are the team of glorious failure, epitomised by Archie Gemmill’s glorious goal against the Dutch in the World Cup in 1978. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=archie+gemmill+goal&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dq8K9MpSJ40U We were on the march with Ally’s army. England hadn’t qualified for either the 1974 or 1978 World Cups. These were the years when we were a match for England. Now it’s one-way...

Joan Didion sounds French but was, of course, from California. End of ‘a memoir’. Where I Was From is an interrogation of self and American society. It’s not so much as nature versus nurture. More a realisation of something universal. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or when Rabbie Burns turns over mouse’s nest with his plough in a field in Ayr in November 1785. He penned a poem To A Mouse . Reality is sometimes too much and too tragic...

Ken Smith was born 28 th October 1947 in a small village in Derbyshire. He tells us he’s an ordinary bloke. No special powers. Offers no great spiritual insights. No great secrets of how to survive in the wilderness beyond being prepared. He describes himself as The Tramp of Treig. He follows a long tradition of wanting to live alone in an isolated spot of great natural beauty in the Scottish Highlands. He quotes Henry Thoreau: ‘Not till we have...

I like books like this. Hidden history doesn’t follow the kings and queens route. I’m biased in that way because those are not my people. Have little to do with what I know. James Crawford suggests we look and see. ‘Just how much of the past still lives with in the present. An invitation to explore the unexplored and make pilgrimage to the lost and overlooked. An invitation to ‘use the country itself, as its own map’ Our mind doesn’t need to put...

I’ve read bits of Joan Didion’s writing and decided to read more. South And West translates into two sections on ‘Notes on the South’ and ‘California Notes’. She explains: ‘John and I were living in Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. I had wanted to revisit the South, so we flew there for a month in 1970. The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan…I seem to remember John drove.’ Her autobiographical impressions resurfaced in...

Tom Wright & Bradley Hope (2019) Billion Dollar Whale. Few economics books top the New York Times Bestseller list. Billion Dollar Whale fits into another category of True Crime. Twenty-seven-year-old Jho Low stole around seven billion dollars—give or take tens of million—with the aid of a Malaysian investment fund. Nobody was really accounting. Low had supermodels on tap and celebrity parties included the A-list of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie...

We all know who James Patterson is. A reminder is on the flyleaf on the inside back cover. He’s ‘one of the best-known and biggest selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 400 million copies.’ You’re probably wondering what that’s got to do with American cops. Do a little detective work. You might not know (like me) who Matt Eversmann and Chris Mooney are, but it doesn’t really matter, their association with James Patterson...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy_HG_76 We know Britain wins the war. In the same way we can’t know that Ukraine will win its war. Hindsight blinds us. Angus Constam takes the reader back to a period in winter 1941 when it was all bad news. Nazi Germany had occupied most of Europe and Channel Islands. Britain was next on the Hitler’s list. The Royal Navy had been brought home to defend British shores. Despite Germany’s mass investment in a...

Vintage Classics has republished Babi Yar. A.Anotoli (Kuznetsov) describes Babi Yar as ‘a document in the form of a novel’. What the author means by that is in the first line of the first chapter, Ashes (after the Preface): ‘This book contains nothing but the truth.’ Kuznetzov was born in 1929 in Kyiv. His mother was Ukrainian. His father a Soviet who was relocated when the Germans invaded, 21 st September 1941. As a twelve-year old, he lived in...