celticman's blog

I read. That’s what I do. I’ve got books in the toilet. In the kitchen and hall. Down the side of my chair and in my van, stashed behind the passenger seat. I no longer keep a book in the glove compartment. I’m not therefore an addict. Before deaths and Amens, there’s a line that goes something like this: lead us not into temptation and out of our boozers and strip clubs, or away from offers of half-priced drugs because it’s Black Friday on a...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/david-baddiel-jews-dont-count A quote attributed to Mark Twain, but perhaps not said by Mark Twain, the great American writer and humourist goes something like this: ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.’ David Baddiel shows footage of the moron’s moron supporters of the 45 th American President chanting, ‘We will not be replaced by the Jews.’ It...

Catherine Simpson is around the same age as me. We’ve both received a little largesse from Scottish Book Trust. Her story is in the title. Most readers understand intuitively with the use of the past tense that her wee sister, Tricia, has passed over. In plainer terms, she’s dead. She died in December 2013, aged 46. My brother died around 1995. My partner’s brother died around the same time. They were both in their mid-thirties. Mother and...

Jose Saramago won The Nobel Prize for Literature, but his writing wasn’t widely published or read until the Portuguese writer was in his sixties. That gives some of us hope. His translator died before finishing revisions. The publisher acknowledged the help of Margaret Jill Costa. That’s the kind of blurb you can pick up from any book trailer. Those are his credentials. I didn’t like the writing (maybe it was the translation). It was the story...

I’ve been following Danny Robins’ The Witch Farm on BBC Sounds. But I jumped ahead by reading Mark Chadbourn’s Testimony on which much of the Podcast is based. A small publisher, I’m guessing sales were dead. Now it’s jumped to Number 2 in Amazon’s Supernatural category. Resurrection of a different kind. Most funerals I go to now are humanist. No overt religious input. No hymns. But sometimes a floating jokey reference to him or her being...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f89c/imagine-2022-douglas-stuart-love-hope-and-grit Shuggie Bain , the 2020 Booker prize winner, was Douglas Stuart’s debut novel. It has sold around 1.5 million copies worldwide. His follow-up novel, Young Mungo , is also set in the Glasgow of Stuart’s birth and follows a gay son trying to hang on to the coattails of a mum that is lost to drink, but sometimes finds her way home. https://www.bbc.co.uk/...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7wn/here-before Reincarnation isn’t such a big deal if you’re the Dalai Lama, Buddhist, or many other religions that believe the afterlife comes back to haunt you, but for ten-year-old Megan (Niamh Dornanin) in contemporary Northern Ireland it could be problematic. Her parents, a young couple, Chris (Martin McCann) Marie (Eileen O’Higgins) have moved next door to Laura (Andrea Riseborough), Brendan (...

1.1 Bank Card. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f1td/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-1-bank-card My dad never owned a bank card. I’m taking it for granted if he didn’t, my mum didn’t either. He got paid in cash, a brown envelope (not so) full of notes and coins. A slip of paper inside with the amount paid and tax deducted. The bank card seen off hard cash. With many banks closing, used mainly by elderly customers, elegies to...

I’m not a big fan of Billy Connolly, but I do know how to spell the Big Yin’s name. The funny thing is never that funny. I think I’ve already told you the tale of a pal of mine, a taxi driver, she could be quite opinionated. She was driving him to Drymen and he was talking some pish about Scotland and she left him at the side of the road. He’d the last laugh by becoming a national icon like the Queen Mother but with a beard and Parkinsonism. She...

What do you think about when you hear: The Faithful Couple ? I think of an old couple being physically separated as they entered The Poor House. That was a last century thing, but we’re bringing it back step by step. Faithful Couple isn’t to me a guy thing. That old joke that your mates are whoever your wife’s pal’s husbands or partners is too near the bone. A.D. Miller twists this idea as he takes the reader through the lives of a faithful...