celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0012y9d/judy The use of the singular name implies the universal. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Judy Garland arrives in swinging London for a number of sell-out performances in The Talk of the Town in the winter of 1968. Six months later she was dead at the age of 47. Renee Zellweger is Judy, with a long chin, white butterfly masquerade mask of a face with bright red lips. Get the spiky black...

I loved Meg Henderson’s memoir, Finding Peggy, which gave her a reading audience hoping for more, hoping for better. Ask me about the story and I wouldn’t be able to tell you very much. The leading character in The Holy City, Marion McLeod, around which much of the story of Clydebank winds is Finding Peggy feisty I’d tackled The Holy City before, but lost the plot with it and put it down. I picked it up again and put it down. I’m not sure why I...

Scotland last played in the World Cup in France, 1998. The qualification campaign wasn’t a matter of life and death. It was just a game of football, which Ukraine won quite comfortably. They play Wales on Sunday to decide who goes to Qatar in November. When there’s no football on Scotland are playing. Lyndon Dykes elbows Stepanenko on the back of the head as they go for a punted high ball, and gets a booking, sums up the first-half. Dykes doesn’...

The American Dream and Angela’s Ashes combined. Now a major motion picture (I haven’t seen it). Short chapters on life in rust-bucket America and California and what it means to be poor and smelly. Treated as an outcast. Yet throughout the reader knows Jeannette will rise. ‘One day I was walking down Broadway with another student named Carol when I gave some change to a young homeless guy. ‘You shouldn’t that,’ Carol said. ‘Why!’ ‘It only...

‘You are the loneliest girl I’ve ever met,’ Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) tells (Saint) Maud (Morfydd Clark). Amanda is on end-of-life care at her beach home in run down Scarborough. Maud is her live-in nurse. She takes care of her. A servant in the old fashioned sense in that she cooks her meals, feeds her, puts her to bed and gets her up in the morning. Administers (from the word minister) her medication. Maud is a trained nurse, an angel, but she’s...

The publication date is important here, 2008. Let’s say Sylvia Browne wrote the book in 2007. That gives us a baseline to work out how accurate her prophesies are in May 2022. Confirmation bias tends to confirm what we already know, or think we know. Sylvia Browne cannot see a human race beyond the end of this century. With global warming that seems possible, if not probable. ‘…we’ve got a planet that’s slowly warmed to the point of cataclysmic...

There’s a quote from some writer, and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember her name (you might). It goes something like this. ‘Tick, Tick, Boom… That what it is to be a writer. You just keep throwing yourself against the wall and hope something sticks.’ James Robertson’s books usually stick with me. This one doesn’t. It slides down the wall. It’s probably his most autobiographical. The commentator and narrator, well, mostly, is Douglas Findhorn...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000df09/being-gail-porter ‘I’m no longer a pretty girl,’ Gail Porter says in a conversation she’s having with an old friend, but she’s also speaking to the viewer. We judge so much by appearance. And she’s right. She’s no longer young and she’s no longer pretty. Alopecia has robbed her of her trademark blonde hair. In 1999, she was one of the most well-known presenters on telly. Her naked image was...

Fergal Keane: Living with PTSD, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, presenter Fergal Keane, Director Mike Connolly. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0017795/fergal-keane-living-with-ptsd There’s a contradiction Fergal Keane suffers from Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD) but he’s in Ukraine. He’s on the frontline. He’s been there before. Cutting his teeth in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He’s been in South Africa and Rwanda. The British...

A lot of big hitters in this movie. I wasn’t sure about it, but I gave it five minutes and watched to the end. It jumps between 1973 and 1986. Daniel Raneri (with very long eyelashes) plays J.R. Maguire, a kid returning to his grandad’s house in Long Island. Tye Sheridan plays an older J.R. His mum, Dorothy Maguire (Lily Rabe) has a mattress attached to the roof of their car and all her worldly belongings. She’s going home, but carries with her...