celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001lspj/storyville-blue-bag-life Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s...

I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate . It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12 th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population...

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/gagarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagarine When time and place merge in this way, usually, you’ve got something special. The idea is quite simple. Youri (Alséni Bathily) has been abandoned by his mum. He’s a precocious, a 16-year-old boy living in Cité Gagarine, a housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, who dreams of becoming an astronaut. But he channels his gift for fixing things into trying to fix the...

I heard about Lorraine Adair’s death in a convoluted way. I sometimes pass her sister on the canal embankment on my bike. Teresa is usually walked by a Rottweiler. I hang an arm out and wave as I pass. Teresa is married to Tam Henry. Lorraine was the youngest of the eight Adair’s. There are more Henrys than cement in Clydeside brickwork. So she’s related to most Catholics in Clydebank and many Protestants, too. I’d passed her twice in three days...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bront%C3%ABs-Inferno-Ewan-Lawrie/dp/B0CYSZJZ7N/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr = Writers create versions of themselves on the page. Ewan Lawrie is a better version of myself on ABCtales. I read Bronte’s Inferno in one go. I couldn’t decide whether Bronte’s Inferno with a veiled reference to the Bronte sisters and the mystical worlds they created with their brother was also a satirical play on the...

REBLOG TO MARK 2Ist. When Davie McCallum, aged 31, went missing on 28 th March 2003, his son David (junior) was aged five and about to start school. Now he’ll be twenty-four or twenty-five, he’ll be approaching the same age when his dad started a family. His wee brother, Robbie, was a one-year-old baby. Now he’ll have left Clydebank High School, the same school as his dad and older brother. The mother of his sons, Margaret McDowell, waiting for...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/memories-of-murder/on-demand/73142-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Murder Most of my writing is in Scottish Noir. In other words, if you’re waiting for a happy ending, watch The Waltons . Memories of Murder is South Korean Noir, directed and written by Bong Joon-ho. Largely based on investigation into the unsolved rapes and murders of young women that took place in Hwaseong in the late 1980s. In...

Here We Are or Here We Are again. Graham Swift won the Booker Prize for (I think) Last Orders . I checked to see if I’d reviewed it. I haven’t. But I have read it. But what sticks in my mind is the film version. Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren as the wife of the Caine character. Why am I going on about this? Well, Here We Are has much the same plot and tagline. Brighton, 1959. Punters are sick of war and rationing. They demand...

If you’re like me, you’ll associate Muriel Spark with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . I don’t think I’ve read the book. I’ve seen two television versions. Miss Jean Brodie really is a gift to any actress with our Dames playing the lead roles. Muriel Spark reminds us teachers in the James Gillespie’s Girls’ School in 1930s Edinburgh were also actors that had to instruct their audience: ‘ the creme de la creme’ . Not just be teaching, but by...