celticman's blog

David Gange (2019) The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel. Historian David Gange travels by kayak around the coast of Scotland facing the Atlantic in winter sounds like madness. Takes in Ireland in spring time and crosses the channel to the less ragged coast of Bardsey in Wales and Bristol and Cornwall in the summer. He offers a low-down view from the sea that mimics E.P. Thompson’s bottom-up view of history...

The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea, BBC iPlayer, writer and director Mads Brügger. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nr85/the-mole-infiltrating-north-korea-series-1-part-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nr87/the-mole-infiltrating-north-korea-series-1-part-2 A cautionary tale. Otto Warmbier, a student of the University of Michigan was freed by North Korean officials after being detained and sentenced to 15 years for allegedly...

I’m delighted. I kept checking the US election results in the same way I usually check the football results to see how my team, Celtic, are doing. I get it. I really do. I’m not American. I was not going to influence the almost 75 million polled votes for Joe Biden, nor the just over 70 million votes for Donald J Trump. For the last five years I’ve called him the moron’s moron. He is no more. When the 45 th United States President was elected, I...

Al Gore, of course, won the 2000-1 election, but an unfamiliar word entered the lexicon – chad. An appeal to the Supreme Court called for a recount of the votes in Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore Palast shows that following the 2000-1 Presidential election stories of African American voters being targeted, racial profiling, that excluded voters from the electoral roll weren’t fake news, but fact. He had a copy of two CD-Rom...

River of Fire is a book about before and after The Clydebank Blitz . Those who died in the aftermath of Luftwaffe bombing of Clydebank on Thursday 13 th March 1941 and the following night. Those who survived the bombing and fled the town. Those who stayed. Others that came through a sense of duty and solidarity to help the victims of the bombing. John MacLeod looks at the aftermath, the thousands, who did not return to Clydebank after March 1941...

I sometimes wonder if books are like bananas, after a certain time they go off and are sold at bargain-basement prices. This book was a clearance - 50p. That’s around the price you pay for books in charity shops. I got it for nothing. And no, I didn’t steal it. I just read it before the person was putting it into the charity shop dumped it. I read a good idea today about books you dislike, rather than giving it the one-star treatment and writing...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p032kjg0/play-for-today-series-10-1-just-a-boys-game ‘You’re getttin’ it McQuillan’. I’m old enough to remember this when it was first broadcast 8 th November 1979. Peter McDougall’s portrayal of working class life hit a nerve. It helped that large chunks of it were filmed in Clydebank and Drumchapel. Marathon shipyards featured. Or it might have been John Browns. We’re on the nostalgia trail. By day Jake...

Kathleen Jamie (2019) Surfacing. ‘Please, are you worker, or student?’ the girl asked in polite English with Chinese accent. Kathleen Jamie, in an earlier incarnation, was asked that question. She was in eastern Amdo province, designated by China, ‘Autonomous Region of Tibet’, which means it was regarded as China. I’d heard of Amdo because of Peter Matthiessen’s classic, The Snow Leopard . I guess that makes me a student of literature. In the...

Ali Smith (2019) Spring. Ali Smith is the same age as me and was born in Inverness, Scotland (for those of you that don’t know Inverness is in Scotland—yeh, that happens). She’s an international star whose writing is lauded. The Guardian , for example, called Autumn , ‘The novel of the year’. I stuck with Spring and read it from start to finish. I found bits of it a chore and probably wouldn’t have read beyond the first ten pages, but for her...

Goalkeeper is an easy pick. Celtic hired a private jet to bring Vasilos Barkas back from a recent international. He was on the bench for Greece. He’s not really done anything that Scott Bain, or Conor Hazard, or you’d expect any other bog-standard goalie to do. He’s certainly not won us matches the way—may he rot in reserve-team-football hell the Southampton keeper we got on loan last season did. Hope we don’t need him, but time for Barkas to...