celticman's blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rg0bd/glasgow-1967-the-lisbon-lions?suggid=b08rg0bd Narrator Rory McCann had an easy job, everybody knows the score. Celtic were the first British team to win the European cup. Inter Milan had scored from the penalty spot in seven minutes, cancelled by an equalising second-half goal by Tommy Gemmell and a late winner from Stevie Chalmers. ‘You’re a legend John. You’re a legend.’ Bill Shankly famously said...

Winner of the 2017 Academy Award for best documentary this five-part series is an investment of time. The premium dividend is it shows how America is polarised around issues of class and race. Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce is apt. OJ is the poster boy. A black all American boy that went to a white college, became the All American hero used by Hertz to sell their cars. ‘Go OJ,’...

Stephen Dunn Sweetness: Staying Alive Just when it seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend walking with a tumour, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except for the way I stumbled through it for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size hand-size and never seeming small. I acknowledge there’s no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain,...

I watched this on BBC iPlayer. It was shown over three consecutive nights and was based on the Rochdale child sex scandal. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8pvh/three-girls-series-1-episode-1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8s12/three-girls-series-1-episode-2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r8vp5/three-girls-series-1-episode-3 There is institutional cover up, issues of class and racial bias. A blackness of themes that...

This book has not been officially release yet. I was lucky enough to buy a copy at West Dunbartonshire Festival of Words at Parkhall library on Monday night. Gail Honeyman was doing her first gig. Ahhhh, that’s nice. She seemed very nice and self-assured. It was the usual format of someone asking her questions about the book and Gail reading two short excerpts from the book. And later questions from the audience. She read, first page, first...

This is the penultimate book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It picks up where it left off in the second book, with ‘Middle Time’ and Elena Greco narrating what happened to her and her brilliant friend Lila Cerrulo after her disappearance in the winter of 2005. As the storyteller Elena has access to Lila’s motives and actions because her friend had given her diaries to her –asking her not to read them. She did, of course. There’s no...

It takes a war, a Great War, a Second World War to teach us values. It’s crude but effective. Thatcher before the Falkland’s War, behind in the polls, goes on to win in a landslide. The problem with the dead is they don’t stay dead. The Somme, six-million Jews, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The dead stay frozen, when homes fit for heroes remain unmade, and resurface minutes, hours, days, years, decades later as a soundbite to be counted off, or a source...

This Boy is a prequel to Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman , set before he started his working life spent, mostly, in the Post Office and via his union involvement access to the Labour Party, becoming an MP and becoming Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s government. Our current Prime Minster Teresa May, was, of course, a former Home Secretary. Her father was a vicar. Alan Johnson’s father was an arsehole. In the prologue we’re shown a black and white...

I think this was the first William McIlvanney novel I read. It won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. When McIlvanney was writing the book there were still such a thing as a coalminer. There’s probably a picture of one in the Daily Mail hate archives, the equivalent of a Lascaux cave drawing to remind them what these men that held the country to ransom, the aristocracy of the working-class, trade-union movement, looked like. Coal powered the...

The Celtic players went to the away end of a largely empty fortress Ibrox and celebrated as if they’d won the league. Leigh Griffiths who scored the second of Celtic’s goals, with a typical thunderbolt strike into the top corner, and was very unlucky not to have scored a third with a wonderful strike against the bar after a robust Jozo Simunovitch tackle on veteran Kenny Miller and a typical breakaway from one box to another. Griffith’s claimed...