celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09xptp8/reggie-yates-searching-for-grenfells-lost-lives?ns_mchannel=email&ns_source=pan_newsletter&ns_campaign=PANUK_NLT_13_SCO_HospitalComeHome&ns_linkname=bbctwo_reggieyatesgrenfellsearchingforlostlives_FactualCurrentaffairs_reggieyatesgrenfellsearchingforlostlives&ns_fee=0 I write stuff, which nobody much reads, but I’ve got a roof over my head and I’m not hungry or cold and need to queue...

I rattled through this book in no time. A simple story told in the first person voice of Tom Hazard who was born on the 3 rd March 1581 and is now—I’m crap at arithmetic, so I’ll jump from page 1 to page 316, near the end of the book—and say Tom is around 439 years old. He’s done a lot of living. And his daughter, Marion, who is also over 400 years old, calls the American President ‘a motherfucker’. Wisdom comes with age. Only it doesn’t. Look...

The Sopranos is a cumming-of-age novel. Let’s start at the beginning. Page 1. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls. Fionnula tells us the school motto, ‘Noses up…knickers DOWN!’ Warning, this novel contains a rape scene, but it’s wee Orla that’s doing the raping. The Sopranos are the elite of the ‘Hoors of the Sacred Heart’. These are the girls in the fifth-year school choir that can hit the highest notes. There’s Fionnula, Orla, (Ra)...

I loved this book. It should really be read in conjunction with Jed Mercurio’s debut novel Bodies . Yeh, that Jed Mercurio that writes scripts for the BBC, Bodies and Line of Duty . Adam Kay is following a similar trajectory, half way between the drama of Jed Mercurio and the upbeat chortleness of Harry Hill. You’re probably thinking why should the tax payer should spend all that money training junior doctors, indirectly subsidising the...

I don’t know Maggy van Eijk, but I’ve read her poetry on ABCtales. It’s memorable because it’s amazing. But don’t ask me to tell you the names of any of her poems. Often I can’t remember my own name. What stands out is her loopy ability to juxtapose two images that makes sense. I’d like to give you an example, but I can’t be arsed looking. I had her down at one of those exotic younger women that had pretty much everything and jam on top. ‘...

Usually, I know what I’m going to say, although I’m not quite sure how I’m going to say it. I guess I’ll start with the author, George Saunders. He’s won a stack of awards and a litany of writers—Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Thomas Pynchon, Jennifer Egan, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Hairi Kunzru and Tobias Wolff—are stacked like library cards to testify to his originality and brilliance. I find Saunders hard work. And I don’t like reading to be...

In my smug way I thought I’d read Morvern Caller before and been unimpressed. I vaguely remembered a film of Alan Warner's book starring Ewan McGregor. I was reading an interview director Lynne Ramsay gave to The Observer. I had another look at the book and realised I hadn’t read it, there was no film with Ewan or any other McGregor and I loved it’s in your face style. It’s the kind of people I know. Quite simply, Morvern Caller talks like us...

This is quite a simple book to read. There is no unreliable narrator to worry about. Time behaves predictably in a linear fashion and begins in 1945 with Mrs Goggins and ends with Mrs Goggins in a ‘New Ireland’ in 2015 getting married for the first time. In between the reader follows Cyril Avery’s life in seven year chunks for 588 pages that takes him into exile in Amsterdam and later New York. Ah, you might think, how can Mrs Goggins be Mrs...

I’m sure I’ve got a Scottish identity. You might have one too. I wasn’t looking for mine, but here it is. We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns. It doesn’t lie in that ear squeal we hear on every channel when counting down to New Year. Or the cheuctering twirling plaid and stripping the willow. Or the Scottish and Rye of The Still Game. These to me are fanny water. Listen instead to Anton Chekhov in A Dreary Story which sounds to me very Scottish, and...

Carl MacDougall’s grandfather was a head waiter in a hotel before the Second World War. What’s that got to dae with anything? you might be asking. Well, it changes the nature of time and the ordinary working day. When other workers are knocking off service staffs are going to work. They have a different sense of time. Andy Paterson was a waiter before he was fitted up on a drugs charge and sent to prison. Prison also changes a man’s sense of...