celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0002k62/storyville-under-the-wire Unhappy is the land that needs heroes Bertolt Brecht. A Private War directed by Matthew Heinemann and staring Rosamund Pike as the heroic shambles that was Marie Colvin is in cinemas now. I see no need to see it. It’s all here in Under the Wire . Based on a book by Paul Conroy and his experience in the massacres at Homs. Here we are at the last stand. 13 th February 2012,...

I read the review of Bloody February in The Observer and it’s like deja-fuck-you, somebody had wrote the song that you wrote and sings it better. Set in Glasgow, in the 1970s. My turf and my time and my subject matter. This book fucking scared me big time. I was scared this book would be everything I was not. Leading writers of Scottish noir praise Bloody January on the cover. Ian Rankin, Alex Gray, Peter May and Louise Welsh, ‘Bloody and...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0002j52 This four-part Australian drama is a big budget production. A morality play, a kind of J.B. Priestly An Inspector Calls set in Brisbane and the Timor Sea. There’s lots of angst and gnashing of teeth. In An Inspector Calls class is the card played. Here it’s class and race, and religion in a toxic mix, as wealthy westerners in a yacht meet immigrants in a sinking ship on the Timor sea. Safe Harbour...

Let’s start at the end: In the morning and I was still alive. Maybe, I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. The largely autobiographical novel Charles Bukowski wrote in 1969 was a short book, Post Office, which sold over one million copies and gives all us other fifty-year-old bums that do a bit of writing a bit of hope. Somebody took a chance on Bukowski and it’s the classic rags-to-riches story, which is so fucking depressing, because...

There’s an old joke I tell about Brian when we get talking about fitba, and it’s Wilma was a better player than him. What I don’t tell anybody was that she once gave me a dunt and doing for being cheeky. A few of us were playing near the Gilmore’s that day. We rolled about for a bit, on the slope of grass, near the wall on Shakespeare Avenue. I let her win, of course, because I didn’t hit girls. She wasn't a better player than me. But I did let...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00029kr/son-of-saul Son of Saul BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, directed by László Nemes and written by Clara Royer. This is a straightforward narrative. A Hungarian man finds the body of a young boy, he thinks is his son and he wants to give him a proper Jewish burial. To do so he needs to find a Rabbi willing to perform Mourner’s Kaddish. Transpose that scene to an unnamed Nazi death camp, (Auschwitz), running at...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000264s/the-commune Nudity, whoopty whoo. This film was alright. It was kinda you get what you deserve. It began with a man and women, Erik and Anna moving into a big house in the 1970s, the end of the hippy era, with their adolescent daughter, Freja. It’s her idea to set up a commune in Copenhagen. He’s more pragmatic. The house is too expensive, his childhood home, but they can’t even afford to heat it,...

I loved this book and read it in one breathy go, thankful for the nourishment. If you’re a scribbler like me that tries to pour himself into himself, writes something down and always comes up with less than a quart-measure, and that’s on a good day, read on. I loved this book so much I’m going to start standing beside the Jehovah’s at the bridge in the Shopping Centre in Clydebank and handing it out to would-be-writers like me and asking them to...

Golden Friendship, Jim McLaren and ‘Grab a Granny’. I know that all sounds a bit of a mouthful, but I’ll try and explain it to you. Golden Friendship is a club run in the 543 Club. What type of club? Jim McLaren explained it to me a long while ago. And I’m not really sure he knew himself. Like most folk, I said, ‘Aye, Jim,’ while waiting for it to fall on its arse. His mum said much the same thing today. That first day of the Golden Friendship...

Tara Westover’s Educated has a tag-line from Barack Obama on the cover, ‘a remarkable memoir’ and in terms of sales I doubt there was a bigger selling book in 2018. I’m a voracious reader but it’s been a long time since a book kept me up to the wee small hours. I’d nibbled at Educated online, reading the first few pages, before getting the paperback and devouring almost 400 pages in one large gulp. It’s the kind of book I like, because it’s...