celticman's blog

Graeme Armstrong (2020) The Young Team Gore Vidal is attributed with the quote, ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’. Graeme Armstrong is not a friend of mine. But the title of his book, The Young Team needs no detailed sociological explanation. I don’t need to go searching for definitions in The Urban Dictionary . I’m proud to be working class, less proud to have a chib mark on my face and knocked guys out and been a baw hair away...

‘Witches Sail in Eggshells’ is a quote from Meg, a character in a story of the same name, but also a playful aside from Keiza, the bewitcher of the unnamed protagonist. It bookends a collection of seventeen short stories of around 150 pages. I think the first story in the collection, ‘Hagstone,’ is the best short-story in the collection, and the last, ‘Witches Sail in Eggshells’, next best—you may think differently. Short-stories bewitch in...

Mrs America, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, written by Dahvi Waller and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08ggl84/mrs-america-series-1-1-phyllis https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08gglyp/mrs-america-series-1-2-gloria It’s 1971, American troops are still fighting in Vietnam. Richard Nixon is President and is engaged in ongoing peace talks with his USSR counterpart, President Brezhnev. Phyllis Schlafly (Cate...

Storyville, Welcome to Chechnya: The Gay Purge, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, director David France. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000kjnt/storyville-welcome-to-chechnya-the-gay-purge Here we have Claud Cockburn’s maxim as a rule of thumb, ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’. Director David France’s documentary shows clearly that gay lives don’t matter in Chechnya, or in Russia, generally. Imagine George Michael had went...

Diana Wilson got allocated one of the new builds in Trafalgar Street, 2003-4. She was much the same age as Ricky Ross, Deacon Blue, and Dignity has become a bit of a naff-classic. In those days of the late 1950s a Daily Record cost 2d, now it cost 85p. You could buy a bungalow in Great Western Road and have change from £125. Black-and-white telly, but not for all. Most couldn’t afford it, even with Radio Rentals. Crowds flocked to new X-Ray...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/blue-is-the-warmest-colour Wow, Mary Whitehouse, this was a sizzler. To think back in the 1970s I used to get red faced watching The Sweeney , when they showed a bit of tit. This would have been a swift case of spontaneous combustion and my charred remains found glued to the false leather settee. Whoopee, finally, a blue movie on the telly, but I’m too old for it now! But if you cut away the nudity, which I...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08dqp3w/the-salisbury-poisonings-... Before Covid-19, the coronavirus, Salisbury was briefly in lockdown in the winter of 2018 after two Russian agents poisoned former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal (Wayne Swann) who worked for MI6 (allegedly) and his daughter, Yulia Skripal (Jill Winternitz) with polonium, a highly toxic and deadly nerve agent. This might have been a hard sell. Now we’re au...

fiona and kenny (keemo) bannatyne Shakespeare’s Caesar : The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves… I briefly thought about Keemo when lockdown began. Needing, in effect, new lungs, he was the highest-risk category. Then I forgot about him. Life gets in the way. Now I’ve found out he’s dead. I’ll remember him for his kindness. After Robert’s death he brought Mary flowers. He attended the funeral with his wife and we had a...

Annest Gwilym (2020) What the Owl Taught Me. I don’t usually review poetry. I’ll tackle pretty much anything else—fiction, factual biography, drama, documentaries, comedy, by which I mean politics and economics— with an insouciant swagger and the hope nobody will ask too many searching questions. Poetry leaves me too exposed as a fuck-wit. No-nothing. One of those dreams where you running around your old school naked and everyone else is...

Grace Notes was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. Reading this book, over twenty years later and it’s easy to see why. Quality rings true. The narrator is easy to describe. Bernard Mac Laverty does all the heavy lifting for us, when we look over his shoulder and read the programme for her performance of Vernicle , a first performance, just up the road from me, Wood Road, Partick. 'Catherine Anne McKenna was born in Co. Derry, and studied...