celticman's blog

The Crying Book doesn’t really have a beginning or end. Heather Christle explains: ‘This book began five years ago with an idle idea about what it might look like to make a map of every place I’d ever cried…’ So it’s an ongoing conversation like making a rug of your experiences, tagging it onto another strip. Crying with friends. Crying alone. Crying for god’s sake. ‘I suppose some people can weep softly and become more beautiful, but after a...

20 Jan 2020 - USA has first confirmed imported case - From China. 20 Jan 2020 - COVID-19 included in Statutory Report of Class B Infectious Diseases and Border Health Quarantine Infectious Diseases in China - Measures to Curtail: Temperature Checks, Health Care Declarations, Quarantines - Instituted at Transportation Depots - Laws of China - Wildlife Markets Closed - Captive-Breeding Facilities Cordoned Off. 22/23 Jan 2020 - WHO decides not to...

Graham Greene’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory doesn’t drink whisky, but damnation. Author, Nicky Nicholls also drunk of damnation. She drunk so much she found it her only salvation. ‘Needing to drink like I needed to breathe air. A craving so total that there’s no space around it.’ Nicky Nicholls (aided by Elizabeth Sheppard) has all the elements needed to create a successful misery memoir or a work of fiction. In my unpublished novel...

Author Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere was published in 2017 to critical acclaim and is still a number one bestseller in Amazon in 2020. It terms of book sales, the author has produced the literary equivalent of Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell . Being a writer that never writes much now, I thought I’d take a look. It’s a page turner were the end begins at the beginning. I liked it. The review should end here with recognition of that neat trick...

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...