celticman's blog

I’d an online meeting yesterday with The Psychic Fairy Queen , Jan Murphy. We share the same publishers. I suppose in a world in which there are synchronicities, Spellbound would publish The Psychic Fairy Queen . I’m just the smelly mate that tagged alone by coincidence, even though there is no such thing as coincidences. If by coincidence you’re reading this then you’ve probably read my book Beastie . That’s a gently nudge. Yes, I’ve read a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001w9pm/aftersun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftersun We’re all ghosts in someone else’s dream. Here eleven-year old Sophie (Frankie Corio) travels to a Turkish holiday resort with her young father Calum (Paul Mescal). It’s just the two of them. We find out that Calum has split up from Sophie’s mum. This is one of those make and break holidays. She’s becoming a woman and he’s becoming an ex-dad. Sophie...

Kerry Hudson makes the personal universal. She’s forty and having a baby in a maternity hospital in Prague, while the country, indeed the world has shut down due to the Covid 19 virus. She has a section and a wee boy who is perfect in every way. Her partner, Peter is waiting for her and they take their baby back to their rented apartment in the city centre. End of story. That’s the newborn part. Kerry Hudson doesn’t usually do happy endings...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Ha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNFSfTZy3os Frances Ha is truly uplifting. I leave black-and-white-American movies to the likes of Woody Allen telling me some faux-funny thing I’ve no interest in hearing or seeing. Greta Gerwig as Frances Halladay as Frances Ha carries all before her as a 27-year-old dancer struggling to survive in New York and pursue her dream. She just wants to dance, although she’s not...

I don’t know if I’d read Gordon Smith’s Spirit Messenger before. I guess there’s a message there somewhere. It doesn’t matter. I picked it up and read it for the first (and last) time again. The Foreword is by Professor E Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. In other words, he adds a bit of gravitas. He’s telling us this Glasgow hairdresser is to be trusted. He lists other famous men, among them Arthur Conan Doyle,...

I promised myself I’d read Promise . I’ve always a stack of books waiting to be read. This fell to the bottom of the pile and I had to keep starting it again and again and again. I got the set-up. Two black families on the edge of the sea, Salt Lake and a dirt-poor white family, living beside them in a kind of Eden. Jim Crow laws are being challenged and then (as now) there’s a backlash. Cinthy Kindred is two years younger than her sister, Ezra...

Reading is what I do. Writing, not so much. But for most folk, that’s already too much. There’s a book in everyone. They’ve got one and they’re sticking with it. So I’m in a minority. I’ve also been thinking about class. I should probably use a capital C here, Class. I was reading yesterday that less than twenty-percent of youngsters (if you’re on Facebook sorry, you’re not young) didn’t know what a ‘scab’ was. I’m the kinda guy that laughs at...

The Year of Magical Thinking has been an international bestseller, been reprinted over twenty times and is perhaps the best-known of her books. The subject she specialises in is death, which we’re all familiar with, but nobody seems to want to talk or write about it. In Duncan Williamson’s short story Death in a Nut , Jack (no relation) lived with his mother in a cottage by the shoreside (Williamson was born in a tent on the shores of Loch Fyne...

Amy Cuddy (2016) Presence Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. I usually give books like Amy Cuddy’s Presence short-shrift. Fake it till you make it seems to me like pebbledash. Yet it works and she shows her workings. How and why it works. She traces her ideas back to polymath William James, who helped to develop psychology as a subject of study outside philosophy, or perhaps inside? ‘Begin to be now what you will be hereafter...

John Vaillant moves from the taiga of The Tiger to ‘thinking like a fire’ in the boreal forests surrounding Fort McMurray (Fort Money) in Alberta, Canada and the evacuation of its almost 100 000 residents in May, 2016. His argument is that these fires can no longer be considered the exception to the rule, but the rule itself in an Anthropocene warming world we have created by our increasing use of fossil fuels which destroys our planet. A...