celticman's blog

We’re all aware that with great power comes great responsibility, after all these were the lines mouthed by Batman with the pointy ears before he jumped off a tall building. The moron’s moron, who anybody with any sense would like to see jumping from a tall building, reaches new lows in grasping one and abdicating the other. But that’s another story unless the moron’s moron stumbles into an Armageddon strategy to remain power, a historical aside...

In these six short stories Kevin Crowe favours the fallen and the vulnerable. I like that he takes on difficult themes. Involuntary incest. Involuntary and false imprisonment. Deported gay refugee, who can’t prove who he is or what he is. A Mary and Martha story, a soldier that loses his wife and gives up on life, but finds another partner. Historical romp and misunderstanding of the slave trade. And gay, coming-of-age in the age of AIDs,...

Matt Gaw’s son mused that we spend 26 years of our life asleep, or if you’re my sister who is apt to like her long lies, 50 or her 60 years asleep. Gaw gives us a wake-up call in six chapters that begins in moonlight and ends in darkness. His family remain largely, unimpressed by his journey that takes him from his home in Bury St Edmonds, Thetford, the bright lights of London, Oban, and Isle of Coll, which is designated a Dark Sky Community. I...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00071xr/inside-the-bruderhof The end of the world is nigh. That’s not religious dogma, but the science of global warming. Hundreds of millions will die. Perhaps billions. The mass extinction of non-human species on land and sea has already begun. But Inside the Bruderhof is a joyous look at communal living in a religious community. But then again, I’m a big fan of utopia. The flip- side of Brave New World...

I’m not sure when George was born, late ‘67, the year Celtic won the European Cup, or early ’68 when a storm lashed Scotland, taking many roofs off tenement buildings, 20 people were killed and many left homeless. I think there was a bit of both the glory and destruction in George. He’d once volunteered to play for the Dropp Inn when we were short of players and looking for bodies. I knew well he could play, having come up against him when he...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lwld Droit du seigneur #MeToo in the Middle-Ages – A supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding night (or whenever). #MeToo in the twenty-first century, Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond, March 2020, at the High Court in Edinburgh, was found not guilty of thirteen charges of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape in...

This book is a bit of set-up for a debut thriller writer. The tag on the front cover tells the would-be reader, ‘Six Victims, One Brutal Killer, No Rhyme, No Reason, No Mercy’. The hard-sell for crime fans. And in smaller font it tells you this guy is like Mark Billingham and Val McDermid. Wow, I say, I’ll need to read this, it’s been lying on my shelf, getting dusty for two years and when I read the first chapter it might have been another ten...

Young Stalin was winner of the 2007 Costa Biography Award. You can imagine historian Simon Sebag Montefiore after his acclaimed biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar , wondering what he would write next. Then hitting on the wheeze, I’ll write the same thing, but younger. It depends what you mean by young, of course. As Montefiore declares workers in the Baku oilfields, died around thirty-years old, on average. Young Stalin is around 39-...

Xan Brooks takes as his starting point something grotesque and twists it. Four men, ‘the funny men’ with such grotesque physical and mental injuries after the First World War that they have been marked down as dead, a telegram sent to their nearest and dearest to inform them of this—fake news—while they shelter in a cottage in the grounds of the aristocratic Grantwood House. Four children, three girls and a boy taken in a covered lorry to meet...

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...