celticman's blog

Maslow’s hammer – if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail . I don’t believe in a market for healthcare. I don’t believe in a market for schools. And I don’t believe in trickledown economics, the belief that giving money to the rich helps the poor. When I see the innocence of children I can believe in God. As Dr Benjamin Spock wrote for post- Second World War baby-boomers: ‘Each child is retracing the whole history of mankind,...

Where's the ba? In the net... I must admit I’d a fiver on Celtic to win at 33/1. You know it’s not going to happen, but think it might. And at those odds, you can’t really lose, although you did. We all know how it works. Barcelona need to have an off day as they did on Saturday against a newly promoted team. The Celtic goalkeeper has got to have the game of his life, as David Marshal once did, or even Frazer Foster. Here De Vries came in to...

‘Dear Brother, here where the doors are closed I have learned to walk through brick walls A copper-pot spider was my good friend and many lizards fed my heart Now every dream I see assumes the shape of a skeleton key. Once I heard Grandfather’s voice calling me back through the trees but I can’t go home that way I will remain by an older path over the plains on the river My offerings as I travel through the city of temples will be bones and...

gloat ɡləʊt/ verb gerund or present participle: gloating dwell on one's own success or another's misfortune with smugness or malignant pleasure. "his enemies gloated over the Huns death" synonyms: delight in, relish , take great pleasure in, enjoy greatly, revel in, rejoice in, glory in, exult in, triumph over, crow over; It was a long time coming, a few phoney wars and some people might even have watched Scotland playing Malta, but then the...

I could never call Mr McLaughlin, Hugh. He was always Mr McLaughlin, a wee, square and blokeish, old man that lived across the road from us, back in the day when everybody that was adult was old, apart from your own mum and dad, who weren’t old because they were your mum and dad. Times have changed, now everybody’s old. I was trying to work out Mr McLaughlin’s age before the mass and came up with three separate answers, one of which would made...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lily-Poole-Jack-ODonnell/dp/1783522356 I like to read and I like to write. One is the engine of the other. When you’re writing fast, with dash, you just fling words down, and hope for the best. Lily Poole was a serial on ABCtales. Bang, bang, bang, around 2000 words a day. It wasn’t called Lily Poole then, I’d given it the working tag, ‘School Photos’. First-draft stuff. Let’s not call it a novel, but a collection of...

I missed out on Gregor Fisher’s reading of his autobiography in Dalmuir Library recently. Tickets only. It’s a small place. Sold out. Gregor Fisher is a ‘National Treasure’ ran an advertisement campaign to promote a play ‘Yer Granny’ he was in. And on the front page of his book, the tagline from The Telegraph reads: Rab C Nesbitt is the most memorable comedy character Scotland has ever produced’. There’s a lot of good will to be tapped around...

Imagine someone handed you thirteen billion Euros, approximately £11 000 000 000, as the European Commission tried to do, claiming that Apple had acted illegally in Ireland and paid an effective Corporate tax rate of 50 Euros for every 1 000 000 Euros they took out of the country. In a deal known as the Double Irish, Apple claimed they did not take any money out of the country, but simply moved it between different offices with no staff and an...

It’s almost fifty years since The Outsiders was published. ‘The Original Teenage Rebel Story’ proclaims the tag on the cover. I’m sure William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had the same banner headline, but in yeh olde worlde English. Hinton was only seventeen when she wrote it. And like fourteen-year old Ponyboy, the first-person narrator, you can imagine her trying to impress her English teacher and scrape a better grade by turning a...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pqpfp The best thing for me about the Rio Olympics was it was on in the middle of the night because I didn’t need to watch it. Not that I would have. I couldn’t give a toss of your caber how many gold medals Britain racks up. There’s only one sport, one club that I follow and one team I support, Glasgow Celtic. And I’m bigoted and bitter enough to remember comedians with eighties punchlines Loadsamoney and the...