celticman's blog

You come away after reading Ewan Lawrie’s third poetry collection as if you actually know him. Multilingual. He can even write about himself in the third person. Smartass. He wrote a trilogy of books with a lead character—Moffat—and four other novels and two short-story collections. Fuck sake. Gie it a break. Worse of all, he’s got really great hair. Hunners of it. Mair than a brown bear. I’m no jealous. Honest. The thinks I know about poetry...

Tariq Ashkanani threw me. I learned his novel The Midnight King had won Bloody Scotland’s main prize. It used to be called the McIlvanney prize. Named after the author of Laidlaw . A Glasgow detective that set out not just to solve crime, but solve the world. Most of us remember Taggert . Most of us have been in drafted in as extras in the dour, detective drama. Which is a long-winded way of saying, The Midnight King isnae even in fucking...

Xion Island Zero is the sixth in the Inspector Nash series. You don’t need to know much about Nash as each book is a standalone. Five serial killers down. One to go. What remains consistent is place—Barrow (where the author lives). Nash also has to stay consistently inconsistent. True to himself, the criminal justice system and its values. When he’s outed as being gay the distance between what he believes and what he does lengthens. Those who...

Existential Nihilism. Aye, I don’t know what that means either. Some books leave you feeling flat. Others make you think. One of the questions you might ask yourself is ‘Why did I bother reading over 200 pages?’ There are no good answers. Sugar Street is a simple story. The title is the name of the street, the narrator lives in. There’s an immigrant community whom his landlady hates—as she hates almost everything and everybody, including him...

Darren McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us. How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain. I met Darren McGarvey a few years ago in Dalmuir Library. I’d passed him on the way in. He was having a fag outside. The library still exists, but in shortened form as part of the C.E.Centre as part of local-authority cutbacks. I bought the book he was selling, Poverty Safari . Out of sight, out of mind. I can’t remember much about it, even though it won...

Write what you know and a story within a story about a writer that doesn’t yet know she’s a writer and all that stuff nobody ever listens to because it’s all bollocks. I’ve an Irish writing friend Turlough who’s back in the auld country. He might even be following his ancient ancestor’s teapot trail from County to County and be near Tipperary ( https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/concept-rain-jaunty-angle ). Turlough’s blog, is 100 words a...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/piggy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggy_%282022_film%29 Fat is no longer just a feminist issue. My mate, Laughing Boy, is a baldy fat fuck. He’s got one of those prescriptions from the chemist for a weight-loss drug (I’ve no idea which one). I said he should give it to me. And we’d sell it with his Viagra for a few quid. Both markets are on the up and up. ( Cerdita) Piggy, is the name other adolescent girls...

Roz Chast (2023 ) I Must Be Dreaming . Roz Chast draws cartoons and writes for the New Yorker . You know where I’m going with this. Award-winning. Bestseller. It’s predictable as every Scandinavian citizen (including illegal refugees in the interest of parity) have written at least one bestselling novel. And Sigmund *Fraud, The Interpretation of Dreams . Dreams, of course, are never predictable. Perhaps that’s what makes them so fascinating. (*...

Scotland and surfing is an oxymoron like sunbathing on Mars. I’m with Billy Connolly on that one. The North Sea can wait. You go in feeling blue and you come out bluer. If the cold doesn’t get you, the midges or clegs will as I know from experience. Rodger Cox is made of sterner stuff than Jaws . He’s been writing about surfing in The Scotsman since 2005. The View From the Shoulder is apparently when you’re up on your board, riding that wave...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002kkn7/rosalie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalie_(2023_film) I didn’t get it at first. France, 1870. Rosalie is a young woman (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) awaiting marriage. She’s beautiful and fresh faced as eighteen-year old Dana (Rosemary Scallon) who was Ireland’s first ever Eurovision winner in 1970. All Kinds of Everything… reminds me of you.’ She lists them (and let’s take into consideration this if...