celticman's blog

The Australian Dream, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, writer Stan Grant, director Daniel Gordon. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000lpv7/the-australian-dream I’d never heard of Adam Goodes. Let me put this into context he plays Australian Football League. A sport I don’t know the rules, or follow the game. The easy part is telling who Adam Goodes was, by making a comparison with David Beckham. He was the David Beckham of Aussie Rules Football. He...

A whirligig is a spinning top, a small predatory beetle, and a way of describing, for example, coming and goings. I quickly ripped through Andrew James Greig’s short, breakout, novel. Glen Mhor (Inverness) provides a Highland setting for skulduggery in this whodunnit. Four murders and a former top policeman forced to commit suicide, run in tandem with eight children that went missing from a home run by the Sisters of Mercy. Five shallow graves...

Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young was listed as Sunday Times Book of the Year, Guardian Book of the Year , Spectator Book of the year, all in 2017. Since I’ve just read it, it’s also my book of the year for 2020. When I say it’s Shakespearian in scope, I mean that as a compliment. I’m not really into Shakespeare and find his plays boring. The usual response I get is along the lines of I don’t really understand his work, which is true. I also don’...

As a reader it sticks in my craw that sometimes the film is better than the book (e.g. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ben Hur and Spartacus are examples of the former) but here I think it’s a honourable draw. If you want to save several hours of your life, and don’t fancy reading over 500 pages, watch the film and save several hours of your life. Leonardo DiCaprio is great as the twenty-odd-year old Jordan Belfort beginning his meteoric rise...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000lb9c/anthony I’m a fan of writer Jimmy McGovern's work rooted in Merseyside and working-class life. His production company can pretty much sell what he produces to the BBC. His focus here is the murder of eighteen-year-old Anthony Walker. A black kid murdered by an ice-pick through his head in a Liverpool park, in an unprovoked racist attack in 30 th July 2005. His two assailants received life sentences...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000l9rg/the-last-wave-series-1-1-five-hours https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000l9rl/the-last-wave-series-1-2-the-return I’m a bit of telly snob. If it’s on BBC 4 and its got subtitles I’m usually watching it. Part of my hangover from bingeing on Wallander . The Last Wave is a French drama with subtitles, therefore it ticks one of the boxes. Unfortunately, there’s no introspective morbid detective...

Miriam Margolyes has done England, she’s done Trump’s United States and now she’s been sent on another two month road trip to see how Australia works (or doesn’t). Honeyed days indeed for an 82-year-old ‘fat, Jewish, lesbian’ (her words). Same old faces, popping up everywhere. I like the idea of Miriam Margolyes being unshakeable and having shock value, but this just seems like more jobs for the boys, although of course she’s not and it’s some...

I picked up this book and put it down a few times. I doubt if I’d have read it, but for one thing—it was Bob’s book. He carried it around like a lucky rabbit paw in his rucksack (not so lucky for the rabbit). Mostly in the first 150 pages of the book, around the middle of the book, Bob scribbled messages to himself in biro. He underlined words like Urbie and wrote things like ‘Visible From Space So We r Told’. Adding a tick mark to quote from...

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...