celticman's blog

Will you take the Covid-19 vaccine(s)? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/06/the-vaccine-miracle-how-scientists-waged-the-battle-against-covid-19 Around 20% of us are unlikely to take the Covid-19 vaccine (there are more than one type of vaccine, but it is highly unlikely you’ll get a choice—unless you’re rich—which propriety brand you will get inoculated with). These are a vocal minority, let’s call them I’d-rather- smear-my-face-with-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q1km/flint I fiound it strange that a crew from BBC Scotland led by Anthony Baxter should spend five years from 2014 filming a documentary about water pollution in Flint Michigan, the former home of General Motors, and the narrator is Alec Baldwin. We’re far from home. Remember around 25 years ago when John Gummer, the then Tory agricultural minister, fed his four-year-old daughter a burgher to prove the...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5vv/dirty-god I expected this to begin with the acid attack. Instead Jade (Vicky Knight) is returning home, but still wearing a see-through face mask until her face settles. Her hopes are pinned on a miracle, that reconstructive facial surgery can return her to the fresh-faced girl she was before the attack. And not this ‘dog’s dinner,’ as she calls it. Hospital staff are supportive but warn her that...

After reading War and Peace I felt that someone should gallop up and hang a medal around my neck. I’m easily confused and Russian names are Russian to me. Childhood is a much easier beast. Short pen-portraits of, for example, ‘The Tutor, Karl Ivanitch,’ ‘Mama,’ ‘Papa,’ ‘Lessons,’ ‘The Idiot’. His is a very structured life. Papa is a little god, all bow before him. He runs the estate with an iron grip. No rouble unaccounted for. Yet, he can lose...

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a book worth reading more than once—I won’t, of course, too many other books to discover and read, but sometimes we need to pause. The mark of a wonderful book is you can open it any page and learn something. Here’s the start, which is so important (as us writers know), for setting the tone. ‘Let me begin again. Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word put down is one word further away from where...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pz1w/storyville-locked-in-breaking-the-silence I once told the doctor there was nothing much wrong with me, apart from bits falling off. I’m hitting sixty and that’s the kind of thing you expect. My biggest fear is dementia. When you talk to others, often you hear, ‘My mum, or my da… had it’. Director and cameraman Xavier Alford, aged 42, is a father of two and he suffers from a rare neurological disease...

I’d already read Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha . Perhaps I didn’t appreciate in the way I should the first time. A few things I remembered: it was set in Japan, and it was seemingly a memoir about a Geisha. The sort of information that even the outgoing President of the United States would be able to pick up from flashcards, or the cover of the novel when prompted. Perhaps he would recognise that Japan wasn’t on his list of ‘shitty...

Who will speak for us? —is sometimes as simple as who speaks like us. We all might be Jock Tamson’s bairns, but in the real world debut novelists those using Scottish dialect don’t win prizes. How Late it Was, How Late , well it was 1985 when something like this happened. James Kelman caused a kerfuffle. Rabbi Julia Neuberger saying the book was ‘crap’. I prefer Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing , or Janice Galloway’s memoir that’s not a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08vy19b/small-axe-series-1-mangrove In my day Steve McQueen was the go-to guy if you wanted ride a motorcycle over barbed wire to escape the Germans, or rescue screaming women and children from a building skyscraper. We’re still waiting for the enquiry into Grenfell Tower, but we all know the score. Nothing much will be done, while the issues of class and race hatred will be quietly shunted into a side-line...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tw1jz/play-for-today-series-10-... Most people my age fondly remember Boys from The Black Stuff shown in the early 1980s. Yosser Hughes’s (Bernard Hill) catchphrase: ‘I can do that, gie’s a job!’ The Black Stuff was a prequel to Boys from The Black Stuff . It had the kind of audience figures—I’d guess around 15-20 million—that had cultural resonance in its depiction of working-class life in rundown...