celticman's blog

Celtic were expected to win the last Old Firm clash of 2016 and they did, scoring two goals to Rangers one. But it wasn’t quite as easy as the last few meetings in which Celtic dominated from start to finish. Here Rangers scored first. We all know the rules. If the diddy team is going to win they must score first and their keeper must play brilliantly. Tick. Tick. Things go awry with the Tic. Wes Fotheringham has been brilliant for Rangers...

I recently watched a film by Andrew Haigh on DVD, 45 Years . It came with the usual plaudits, but was in an ugly word: boring. 45 Years never felt so long. Elena Ferrante The Days of Abandonment is, I guess, all the things 45 Years was trying to be, without sticking its tongue out in the form of a short novel and saying: Fuck You. The plot is very similar, a woman coming to terms with loss of the things she thought she knew and held true. In...

I guess I should review these books individually, but it’s my blog, I have god-like powers and can do anything I want. I asked Richard Holloway to sign my book, which is his autobiographical writing, when he visited Dalmuir library. He asked me what I wanted him to write in the flyleaf, I said that book you were talking about earlier, Andre Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just because I wanted to read it. I’m with the Society of Friends on this...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02544td Must see television programmes are like a good marriage, you’ve heard of them, but up close they rarely exist. But this is David Attenborough territory. So you can suspend belief and watch this like a child, with open-mouthed wonder. My bet is you’ve never seen over a million penguins on Zavodoski island, a live volcano rock. That’s a lot of methane and lots of guano. Until we get smell-o-vision we’ll not...

http://www.itv.com/hub/the-coming-war-on-china/2a4249a0001 The title is deliberately provocative. Does John Pilger mean trade war between the number one and two trading blocks in the world? Because we know that is already happening. President-elect Donald J Trump in his campaign –among other accusations – accused China of raping America and stealing job and the American economy was ‘hurt very badly by China with devaluation.’ The United States...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P5A2QFp0cE this moved me.

What attracted me to Elana Ferrante’s short, debut, novel was her refusal to publicise her books and the belief that a –good – book would find an audience. It seems counterintuitive, but the purity of such belief is hard to argue with, even though if I hadn’t read about her in the Observer Review , I wouldn’t know who she was and would not have read or written this review of her book. Twenty or thirty films in English are being sold to us every...

A writer has only one imperative or simple rule – read. Often I have little understanding of what I’m reading. Usually there is a but here. I do not understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but…kinda like a meme from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding: ‘We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started.’ Or Rumi’s parable of the elephant and six blind men. One holding onto a leg, or trunk, an...

The Second World War is a fading memory and America rules the world. Bill Bryson (2007) The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid: Travels Through My Childhood shows how it was won and it’s not on the front cover with a kid with a hard plastic hat painted silver, aerial attached, Pegasus’s ears pasted on, his face screwed up as he points a plastic ray gun of brightest gold, while behind him sparks fly and a surreal red and white star explodes,...

We create connections where there are none, Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1978, was in the winter months and fell on the same day as my birthday. Night is a slim volume, able to be read in one sitting. But it is a holy book, and in these increasingly dark times, it asks the hard question of what happens when. I dreamed my elder brother stood by my bed and mouthed words of warning. Ghosts speak and what our...