celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000gx8n/jawbone Writer Johnny Harris takes the central role of Jimmy McCabe in this smashing film with a boxing background. We’re all familiar with the Rocky theme tune playing in the background and the stereotypical rags to riches story. We know there’ll be a fight and our hero will win. Johnny Harris gives it a bit of twist, his fight is with the booze. He can still shift, but his better days are gone. He...

Boris Pahor (2020) Necroplis. Translated by Michael Biggins, introduction by Alan Yentob. With most of the world in lockdown now is perhaps a good time to spend reading about Boris Pahor in the land of the crematoria. Spare a thought for those in refugee camps and prisons. Necropolis is a story not about them, but about us, common humanity. Pahor writes about his life not in the past, but in the present and also the future, when he’ll be like so...

https://www.facebook.com/mary.boyle.9/videos/10159825153012228/?t=0 Piety, as we all know, is a quality of being reverent. We usually associate it with religion. Etymologically, it comes from Latin and is related to dutifulness. It’s not often I’ve seen ideology in action. People coming to their front doors and clapping their hands and supporting the NHS. Our NHS and the support workers. Care workers and what we used to call auxiliaries. Only to...

A guy told me that a guy he knew said the coronavirus has been engineered. It has, of course, left-wing, radical badgers in their labs far below the earth when they were mixing a batch of bovine TB in the 1970s also created the coronavirus and passed the secret onto their friends the right-wing bats. Because bats knew they’d be ate by some human in the Huanan seafood market in January 2020. Revenge of the bats – COVID-19 is the name of the...

Natural justice isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Years ago when I was working on the roofs with Kenny Smith he got paid more money than me. Let’s say he got £65 and I got £50 per week. He was a roofer and time-served, could measure the roof out and bang down tiles quicker than a labourer. I accepted he should get more than me, which isn’t the same as liking it. We travelled together on the train and came home together, but...

At over a thousand pages Robert A.Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson is a hefty wedge of American history. We know power corrupts, but Caro also argues ‘power reveals’. We’re aware of that iconic picture of Jackie Kennedy standing with the former Vice President of the United States and now President, Lyndon Johnson. Power reveals. (But that was later, volume 4, the new Senator John F. Kennedy only makes a brief appearance, in volume 3, his...

Gilead was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I’m sure I’ve read it before. And I keep picking it up and re-reading bits because I don’t know where I left off reading. It’s a story in which nothing much happens but life. A dying man writing a letter to his young son, who’s is young enough to be his great-grandson. It’s 1956 and the narrator is pondering whether he should vote for Eisenhower. And in recalling how his life didn’t amount to...

When we talk about the coronavirus it’s the virus part we need to pay attention to. Corona, from the Latin, means crown and is associated with the aurora that surrounds the sun, moon and stars. We also get the word coronary from corona, a constriction of the arteries around the heart. But here Covid-19, coronavirus, is a simple nametag to differentiate it from other viruses, in the same way that ship number 736 in John Brown’s yard was later...

Miriam’s Big Fat Adventure, BBC 2, 9pm, BBC IPlayer, producer and director Simon Draper. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000g6qt/miriams-big-fat-adventure-series-1-episode-1 Miriam Margoyles is elderly (78-years old), she’s fat, she’s Jewish, she’s gay-ish and she used to be an actress. I remember her painted green as Grotbags in a witch’s cap. She’s invisibility squared. But she’s BBC’s documentary crew’s go-to-pensioner. The female...

Elizabeth Strout (2016) Olive Kitteridge Having read (and reviewed) Olive, Again , Anything is Possible and My Name is Lucy Barton in the last few months, Olive Kitteridge is the best Elizabeth Strout novel I’ve read. Some authors, most authors—myself included—tend to write the same story again and again. Different haircuts, shiny shoes, but the same characters appearing again, renewed. From writer to reader there needs to be an emotional...