celticman's blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08j8jj3/smile-the-nations-family-album Produced and directed by the aptly named Kath Pick this programme interested me for a lot of reasons. I’m of the not-another-fucking-baby picture generation that doesn’t feel the need to endlessly catalogue what I’ve eaten or drank or where I’m going or have been on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms. My mobile phone isn’t very mobile. Half the time I can’t...

Poco a poco I’m working my way through Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, starting with Book 1, My Brilliant Friend . When I put it like that it seems like a chore, and that is not the case. Ferrante helps me enormously, and I guess other readers, by providing an index of characters. The first-person narrator looking back to childhood and adolescence is Elena Greco, also called Lenuccai, but known by the more popular diminutive Lenu. Elena is...

A draw that feels like a defeat. That’s how far we’ve come. The demolition of Rangers when they last visited Parkhead by five goals was comprehensive. If you can remember back to that day the big worry was that in-form Leigh Griffith was out. And Rangers would be nipping on our heels for the league. Joey Barton would be the best player in Scottish football by a mile (or so he said, but don’t misquote him). Since then Celtic have beaten Rangers...

Roll up. Roll up. You too could become one of the super-rich. The kind of person that if they won a couple of million on the National Lottery would hand the winnings to their son or daughter and advise their child to buy lunch and keep the change, but don’t give any to some poor bastard, because they’ll probably spend it on drink and drugs. SECRET #1. DON’T BE THE BEST. BE THE ONLY. I’ve been reading the Sunday Mail ’s sly propaganda campaign...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/under-lock-and-key Under Lock and Key highlights many of the problems discussed in caring for vulnerable people with complex needs. This shows how 'total institutions' work. I tackled this theme directly in my unpublished novel Hut's and more indirectly (I like to think in a Hitchcock fashion) in my novel Lily Poole . https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lily-Poole-Jack-ODonnell/dp/1783522356

I was out watching the fitba yesterday, having a couple of pints and old Lawrie was trying to explain what pub he’d been in, years ago, not by telling us where it was, rather by telling us who’d once owned it and who’d given him the money to buy the pub, but he couldn’t remember that either. ‘It was a great Scottish author.’ That was the clue to unravelling the mystery. ‘William McIlvanney,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A great...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08gd0gc/growing-up-in-scotland-a-century-of-childhood-series-1-1-education This is fantastic viewing. I wasn’t about in the 16 th Century when John Knox thought it a good idea that every village and every Kirk should have a schoolteacher, and every child should be able to read god’s word in the bible as a bastion against Popery. Until fairly recently that was the model of schooling for many children in...

All writers are historians. Subject and object. Subjecting what we know with what other people know. In other words, we read to write. We look for resonance in our writing and our reading. And sometimes somebody says it better and you’ve just got to acknowledge mastery. This is an honest book, a beautiful book in so many ways. When I start taking notes— Papers: 1991-2003; Tesserae 2003-2007; Letters 2011-2016—I find that I’ve copied word for...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08dww6z/the-scottish-bounty-hunter?suggid=b08dww6z Here’s the tagline Christian Matlock, aged 28, is a professional bounty hunter in Virginia. He used to be Scottish and now he’s an all-American action hero, spending days and nights hunting prisoners that have skipped bail. This is a three-act piece with a photogenic star, rock and roll music, guns, drugs, outlaws and shiny fast cars. ACT 1. Meet Christian...

Fiona Macdonald (2011) Robert Burns. A Very Peculiar History . This is a children’s book or a primer. ‘With the Bards own rhymes’. That suits me. I was once a child, and I’m always ready to be primed. Ignorance is a great motivation. I once shared a desk with the august figure of Professor Gerry Carruthers, Director of the Robert Burns Centre, University of Glasgow. I don’t remember him as being particularly smart, or brainy, as we used to call...