celticman's blog

I got to page 41 of this book, Chapter 6. You might get further. I had a quick look because the author Laura Lam is coming to do a reading in Duntocher Library soon. Shattered Minds is a dystopian novel set in the near future. The setting is San Francisco, California, Pacifica. I guess that’s the place Laura Lam grew up, but there’s no such place as Pacifica. That’s a hint. The world is not as it seems. Near the Pacific, but no longer in broken...

I heard about this book in a kind of roundabout way. Richard Holloway had given a reading at Dalmuir Library and this was one of the books he said he re-read every few years. Well, that was good enough for me. I finally got around to reading The Last of the Just and was not disappointed. Where is God? That is the question this book asks. In the final chapter, the narrator of the biography of Ernie Levy, the last of the just men, is in a sealed...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b096k8wz/the-vietnam-war-series-1-1-deja-vu-18581961 Déjà vu 1858-1961 The Vietnam War, in ten parts, is the best thing on television. Déjà vu seems quite apt, with the United States divided in a way not seen since those for and against the War and those that voted for the moron’s moron as President and those that hate everything he stands for. I’m not a citizen of the United States, but I’m in the latter...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b097bkcy/child-in-mind?suggid=b097... I watched Men Who Sleep in Cars a drama, in verse, linking the lives of three men who, you’ve guessed it, sleep in cars, but one of them cheats, because he has the luxury of a Ford Transit van. It was OKish. I didn’t really intend to watch Child in Mind , with poetry by Simon Armitrage, I’ve got stacks of things to do, and by that I mean, read. I write too and sometimes...

Celtic 2— 2 Hibernian This was Neil Lennon’s return to Paradise, the former manager and Celtic player’s summation of the game and Hib’s performance was absolutely right. ‘We didn’t take a step back the whole game. It was an outstanding team performance. A draw was probably a fair result but we are disappointed not to win.’ Brendan Rodgers got a bit of dig in about the pitch (no pun intended) a message to the Celtic board, and how ‘it was always...

Scott Sinclair’s goal in the ninety-third minute to put Celtic three up put the sheen on a fine team performance and, more or less, guarantees Celtic third spot in the group table and a Europa League spot. European football after Christmas is not something we’re used to and after getting hammered by PSG the doom-mongers (let’s call them Ranger’s supporters) were predicting, once again, zero points in the group stage and an embarrassment to...

I, Daniel Blake is one of those films everybody thinks I should see. A typical conversation, or text message, goes something like this, sorry you missed the screening, you’d have loved it and the discussion afterwards in Dalmuir library. It’s one of those films I already know the story. Some old guy meets up with some young girl who has kids. They’re on the buroo and they get shat on from a great height because they’re poor and working class and...

I liked this book, it’s about us, the working class often portrayed standing outside history books adding a bit of colour to the stories of kings and governors, quietly happy to die for their country, or the working class portrayed as a Lemuel Gulliver lying down in the long grass and falling asleep and being tied down by Lilliputians who make theatrical speeches he doesn’t understand but he does what the little men, the 1% of the population...

I usually write a blog about Celtic’s big games, but this was one of those matches where everything goes as planned. Celtic didn’t score five this time. But if you listen to Steven Thompson on telly then Celtic could easily have scored five or six, had eighteen shots on target and he doesn’t think the gap between Celtic and Rangers has declined. Thompson is, of course, a former Ranger’s centre-forward and hardly a neutral. From where I was...

Roxane Gay is the author the New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist the tag on the cover of the book tells the reader. This is an easy book to read in terms of thin chapters and the subject matter of need and greed and what makes us what we are. This is right up there with the classic, Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face. Chapter 1 of Gay’s autobiography is one sentence long. Everybody has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir...