celticman's blog

I got to page 35 of this book and gave up. The tale of Ignatius J. Reilly who has a high opinion of himself and a low opinion of humanity and his poor, put-upon mother whom he lives with, and is dependent on, could be described as farce. Anthony Burgess on the cover describes it as ‘A Fine Funny Novel. This is the kind of book one wants to keep quoting from.’ I don’t feel any great need to do that. The story of how I and so many others came to...

Think only of yourself. Think of your family. Martin O’Neil famously said he was leaving Celtic because his wife was ill. Fair enough. Personally, I think he knew, we all knew, Henrik had departed, Celtic needed a major revamp, the money for players was no longer available and a bloated squad –anyway- a mess he didn’t want to deal with. Maurice Johnston, the Partick Thistle striker, famously signed for Celtic, but then signed for Rangers...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000309g/la-la-land Only in LaLa land at the Oscars could LaLa Land best picture announced, could it turn out to be LaLa Land winner and LaLa Land loser, all within five minutes. It wasn’t Best Picture. But was it a good picture? Not bad. I’m not really into music. Put it this way, the director of Singin’ in the Rain Stanley Donen died and tributes poured in. Singin’ in the Rain in 1952 was a classic of the...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0002k62/storyville-under-the-wire Unhappy is the land that needs heroes Bertolt Brecht. A Private War directed by Matthew Heinemann and staring Rosamund Pike as the heroic shambles that was Marie Colvin is in cinemas now. I see no need to see it. It’s all here in Under the Wire . Based on a book by Paul Conroy and his experience in the massacres at Homs. Here we are at the last stand. 13 th February 2012,...

I read the review of Bloody February in The Observer and it’s like deja-fuck-you, somebody had wrote the song that you wrote and sings it better. Set in Glasgow, in the 1970s. My turf and my time and my subject matter. This book fucking scared me big time. I was scared this book would be everything I was not. Leading writers of Scottish noir praise Bloody January on the cover. Ian Rankin, Alex Gray, Peter May and Louise Welsh, ‘Bloody and...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0002j52 This four-part Australian drama is a big budget production. A morality play, a kind of J.B. Priestly An Inspector Calls set in Brisbane and the Timor Sea. There’s lots of angst and gnashing of teeth. In An Inspector Calls class is the card played. Here it’s class and race, and religion in a toxic mix, as wealthy westerners in a yacht meet immigrants in a sinking ship on the Timor sea. Safe Harbour...

Let’s start at the end: In the morning and I was still alive. Maybe, I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. The largely autobiographical novel Charles Bukowski wrote in 1969 was a short book, Post Office, which sold over one million copies and gives all us other fifty-year-old bums that do a bit of writing a bit of hope. Somebody took a chance on Bukowski and it’s the classic rags-to-riches story, which is so fucking depressing, because...

There’s an old joke I tell about Brian when we get talking about fitba, and it’s Wilma was a better player than him. What I don’t tell anybody was that she once gave me a dunt and doing for being cheeky. A few of us were playing near the Gilmore’s that day. We rolled about for a bit, on the slope of grass, near the wall on Shakespeare Avenue. I let her win, of course, because I didn’t hit girls. She wasn't a better player than me. But I did let...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00029kr/son-of-saul Son of Saul BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, directed by László Nemes and written by Clara Royer. This is a straightforward narrative. A Hungarian man finds the body of a young boy, he thinks is his son and he wants to give him a proper Jewish burial. To do so he needs to find a Rabbi willing to perform Mourner’s Kaddish. Transpose that scene to an unnamed Nazi death camp, (Auschwitz), running at...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000264s/the-commune Nudity, whoopty whoo. This film was alright. It was kinda you get what you deserve. It began with a man and women, Erik and Anna moving into a big house in the 1970s, the end of the hippy era, with their adolescent daughter, Freja. It’s her idea to set up a commune in Copenhagen. He’s more pragmatic. The house is too expensive, his childhood home, but they can’t even afford to heat it,...