celticman's blog

I can hear my partner, Mary, yakking on the phone downstairs, talking to her Auntie Mary about another Auntie- Eleanor who is dying. ‘She did have a bit of fear…’ she’s talking about her Granny, not her Auntie Eleanor, but the story is familiar, the same one. The Big C. ‘Apparently one in three people get cancer,’ Philip Wright, the thirteen-year old narrator tells the reader. That’s a 50/50 chance. That’s a joke. Jokes don’t have to be funny,...

A good week for me. I’ve moved up the alphabet from arsehole to author. There was brouhaha over the other side of the Atlantic over plagiarism. You may not have noticed, but I’m attuned to these social markers. Donald Trump’s second or third wife (who is doing the counting and who really cares) in a speech supporting her husband’s suitability to lead not just the Republican party, but the American nation as President, began her speech with...

I share the same page as Jeremy Corbyn. We supported this crowdfunded book published by Unbound and I’d guess Corbyn shares many of my interests in equality and social justice. Left Field as the name suggests is about the You and non-You as a house master described the apparent differences between houses at Canford school in Dorset, to a pubescent Wilson, at the fag end of the not-so-swinging fifties. David Wilson or Commie Wilson as he was...

I was a bit miffed reading The Observer , ‘IN FOCUS’, that no one had asked me to write about David Cameron’s legacy. I can only guess that’s because a blank page wouldn’t appeal to the reader. They would think it was some kind of trick – like global warming on a miserable and wet Scottish Sunday. I listened to Jeremy Corbyn stand up (OK you can’t hear someone standing up on the radio)in the House of Commons (with very few commoners in the House...

Swing Hammer Swing! won the Whitbread Book of the Year. I like whitebread, but scientists with Twitter feeds say it’s not good for ducks or swans. The latter can’t moult and the young are unable to fly. This book does fly, but doesnae go very far. It’s the Gorbals, Scobie Street, when all the houses were falling down and the less-well heeled populist sent on their way. The ne’-er-do-well narrator Tam Clay, 28, wordsmith and would-be-author is...

Aye, I can hear you thinking. What’s he reading that shite for? Well, as you probably know I’ve been trying to sell my book Lily Poole to the unsuspecting public. For two years I’ve been making promises and telling enough lies to become the next Tory Prime Minister. Well, that wasn’t to be, but I did get a lot of support from a couple of homeless folk that I bribed with a bottle of Eldorado and the promise of enough cheap wine to float off to...

Theresa May, or may not be, the next Conservative leader and Prime Minister. But I’m with Clement Attlee on this one. : for the Tory party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Attlee was, of course, fighting his and Labour’s corner. Trying to kick-start the NHS and Welfare State and wrestle the money to pay for it away...

After the success of Jeff Torrington’s Swing Hammer Swing !, The Devil’s Carousel is his follow-up novel. Only it isn’t. It’s not a success and it’s not a novel. The Devil’s Carousel is a collection of short stories, versions of which are listed and have appeared elsewhere, such as ‘The Poacher’ in the Glasgow Herald , ‘The Sink’ in BBC publications, ‘The Fade’ in the Scottia Bar Writers prize. The setting in each story comes from the same place...

Ha-Joon Chang, The Little Blue Book: ‘Economics is politics.’ Charles Darwin urged the ‘weak in mind and body’ to refrain from marriage. That’s why I never married. Contemporary disciples of Francis Galton’s scientific racism now favour that dismal science of pseudo-economics. Economic racism doesn’t discriminate against the rich. It is premised on it. The poor are feedstock for those that have accumulated land and wealth. A propaganda war,...

I’m as repetitive as person with Alzheimer’s, but I think I may have picked this book up before and read the start of it. I really wanted to like this book, but didn’t get beyond page 40. We have the Triads: Tia Lo (the boss) his beautiful daughter Ming Fu. I could tell you who the other Triads are but really who cares. There’ll be another along shortly. And why do all daughters have to be beautiful? Why can’t she look like a banana? Well one...