celticman's blog

I was shocked—well, that’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of the right one—that Deborah Orr was dead. She’s the same age as me, or would have been— Motherwell: A Girlhood was a message from beyond the grave. She died in 2019. She came from Motherwell. The title is a dead giveaway. And there’s a whole stack of her achievements listed on flyleaf with a picture of her, a haunting picture, in retrospect. Look at the cover image and, in contrast,...

I’m reading the last bit of Deborah Orr's , autobiography, Motherwell: A Girlhood . In many ways John Wilks, should read, According To The Dandelions : A Boyhood. I trade in the nostalgia game so recognise the junk and faux gold that some writers sell. I can sift through the rubbish (lots of it written by yours-never-truely). But poetry scares me a bit, to paraphrase Stephen Mulrine’s The Coming of the wee Malkies . ‘Haw missis, whit’ll ye dae...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8mtV4kTAPU ‘You’d be late for your own funeral’—I plan to be on holiday, somewhere nice when it takes place—anyway, here I was, struggling up Mountblow hill when the hearse and cortege passed. Flowers in the back that spelled out the word ‘DAD’. Jimmy was the father of seven kids, countless numbers of grandkids and three great-grand kids and I couldn’t even remember his second name. Me and names are a car crash...

I’m a hypocrite, in the week that Britain formally leaves the European Economic Union, an act of economic mutilation the equivalent of, for example, California seceding from the United States of America, I want Scotland to opt out of Britain. My fealty is not to Nicola Sturgeon or the Scottish National Party, but to the commonwealth of the Scottish people. Put simply, the future is green and will be built on interdependence not independence...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p081z4hg Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, tells the story of how he went from spike to spike and from town to town. The hungry and downtrodden were given a few slices of bread and some sweet tea. A bed for the night. Moved onto to anther town. They were not allowed to settle. Moved on to another town, a circuit of homeless, hungry men and women moving in an ever-expanding circuit of misery. This...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d2cw/murder-trial-the-disappearance-of-margaret-fleming-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d2fq/murder-trial-the-disappearance-of-margaret-fleming-series-1-episode-2 In 2019, Edward Cairney and Avril Jones are jointly charged with the murder of Margaret Fleming and brought to trial. The accused lived in Inverkip on the coast of the Firth of Clyde, a backwater (near where my...

In November 2018, reports suggested that scientist in China had altered the DNA of twin girls using CRISPR CAS 9 bio-technology. It would be the first time in history that humans edited the genetic code of future generations. DNA is usually referred to as the building blocks of life. RNA is DNA’s close cousin. If DNA is god’s handwriting on the world, RNA is god’s signature. CRISPR CAS 9 is a counterfeit RNA of god’s signature. A tweet from...

I remember when John Ferguson slipped me twenty-quid and I went to the Oasis with the cash. My older brother Stephen—or SEV, as pre-Banksie, he liked to artistically daub on walls or doors— married his daughter Emily. Or wee Emily. I didn’t remember how small she was until I saw her today. Platform shoes of the kind that Elton John wore to play the part of Tommy, and sing Pinball Wizard , took Emily up to the glorious height of about five-foot (...

Elizabeth Strout is an internationally and critically acclaimed bestselling author of My Name is Lucy Barton. Lucy Barton, as a stock character, is also an author who writes mostly about farm life in Angash, Illinois. How her family were so desperately poor they ate scraps out of dump trucks and were shunned. The first chance she got to get away she took it. Later she became a successful writer in New York. The maxim ‘write what you know’ seems...

On page 402, towards the end of this second volume of the rise and rise of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A.Caro offers an insight into the former President’s personality. 'For a President to preserve as a personal memento a photograph showing the notorious Box 13 in the possession of his political allies—a photograph which by implication provides that someone was indeed in a positon to stuff it—is startling in itself. For him to display the photograph...