celticman's blog

It takes a war, a Great War, a Second World War to teach us values. It’s crude but effective. Thatcher before the Falkland’s War, behind in the polls, goes on to win in a landslide. The problem with the dead is they don’t stay dead. The Somme, six-million Jews, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The dead stay frozen, when homes fit for heroes remain unmade, and resurface minutes, hours, days, years, decades later as a soundbite to be counted off, or a source...

This Boy is a prequel to Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman , set before he started his working life spent, mostly, in the Post Office and via his union involvement access to the Labour Party, becoming an MP and becoming Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s government. Our current Prime Minster Teresa May, was, of course, a former Home Secretary. Her father was a vicar. Alan Johnson’s father was an arsehole. In the prologue we’re shown a black and white...

I think this was the first William McIlvanney novel I read. It won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. When McIlvanney was writing the book there were still such a thing as a coalminer. There’s probably a picture of one in the Daily Mail hate archives, the equivalent of a Lascaux cave drawing to remind them what these men that held the country to ransom, the aristocracy of the working-class, trade-union movement, looked like. Coal powered the...

The Celtic players went to the away end of a largely empty fortress Ibrox and celebrated as if they’d won the league. Leigh Griffiths who scored the second of Celtic’s goals, with a typical thunderbolt strike into the top corner, and was very unlucky not to have scored a third with a wonderful strike against the bar after a robust Jozo Simunovitch tackle on veteran Kenny Miller and a typical breakaway from one box to another. Griffith’s claimed...

This was one of those tricky fixtures. Rangers had nothing to lose. They were the underdogs that achieved a creditable draw at Parkhead in the last Old Firm fixture and around the same time last year they’d come to Hampden and won on penalties against a supposedly superior Celtic team. Fling in Celtic’s Hampden hoodoo. But if you want to talk sense and watched the game then you’ll know. Celtic were a better team that dominated the match from...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/born-to-kill This is the first episode of a four-part drama. I won’t be watching the other three episodes. I know the formula - a thrill at every advert break. So like Coronation Street or Emmerdale or whatever soap you watch something big is going to leave you wanting more than your cuppa and something small is left hanging during advert breaks to bring you back with a Kit Kat. Labelling theory contends that...

Ann Cleeves has written a whole stack of books. This is her 31 st . Sunday Times Bestselling author, and an imprint on the cover of the book showing some actor’s face, Douglas Fenshall, with the tag now a major BBC drama. She is everything I am not, an established author whom I’ve never heard of until West Dunbartonshire Libraries made her novel Cold Earth novel of the week. Here’s where I segue away and start talking about myself like those...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/09/freak-show-television-has-replaced-bread-and-circuses I know I don’t do enough reading or enough writing. Unless Celtic are playing on a Sunday, which increasingly they are, I do nothing much but read the Observer from cover to magazine. Kevin McKenna is the kind of specialist they consult about all things Scottish. Like me he’s a Celtic man. Here he is mimicking me, I’ve been saying these...

Book two of the quartet of Neapolitan novels The Story of a New Name , ‘Youth’ follows directly on from the childhood of Lila and Elena, My Brilliant Friend and their friends and families. This book, for example, ends when Lila and Elena are aged 23. Elena is indeed brilliant has graduated with top grades and top honours from the University of Pisa and finds herself engaged, to be married in two years in 1969, to another brilliant student and...

I bought this book about two years ago, started reading it and put it in a wicker basket at the side of the couch. It got covered by other books, but like yeast it worked its way to the surface and into my consciousness and left its thumb-print on me, which will fade, indeed, has faded, because I’m pretty dumb. By now, of course, Yuval Noah Harari has a follow-up book out, which I also intend to buy (and leave in a wicker basket by the side of...