celticman's blog

Betfred Cup Final (what we used to call the League Cup Final before the rights were sold for hard cash). I know how Steven Gerrard must feel. I had two quid on Julien for first goal and lost the bookies line. Going further back than that I remember when Celtic used to play Rangers off the park during the Tommy Burns era, only for Brian Laudrup to gallop up the park and score the winner and the flying pig, Andy Goram, to make save after save...

https://unsplash.com/@olga_konono In the bestseller written by Elizabeth Strout called My Name is Lucy Barton , the protagonist idealises another writer called Sarah Payne. That’s a long sentence. I’ll break it down. Elizabeth Strout is Lucy Barton is Sarah Payne. ‘All life amazes me,’ is the last line in the book. And in the Buddhist world we all are each other (until we reject the illusion of Suchness and reach the shore of Nirvana, which isn’...

I’ve a tendency to read short books like this quickly. I should have reviewed it quickly too, when it was fresh baked in my mind. I thought the last line in the book was ‘My name is Lucy Barton.’ Wrong. On the same page, (three from the end). ‘But this is my story.’ A first-person account of her life. ‘And yet it is the story of many. It is Molla’s story, my college roommate’s. It may be the story of the Pretty Nicely Girls. Mommy, Mom!’ The...

An epiphany is a moment of sudden insight or understanding. Gram Seed, the bad seed, died and came back to life. You know how the story goes. He was lost and now he was found. He was drunk on the Lord Jesus. This was one of Robert’s books. For a reader like me – a short read of a few hours. The park bench were Gram Seed decided was the best spot to drink himself to death, I know it well. It’s there on Dumbarton Road. On the square, across from...

King of Nineveh Truth can be ugly – there’s no money in it. Everything is connected. The Third World War has begun. Us against nature and we’re losing because we won’t recognise we’re all one. I can go biblical on you. Jonah 2:3 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the second time, saying, ‘Arise, go to Trumptown and proclaim to it the message I tell you.’ Jonah went to Trumptown and proclaimed the message, ‘Yet forty years, and Trumptown...

I watched this film the other night. The one with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. I hadn’t heard of Bradley Cooper and had to google him. Google is a neologism. A Star is Born has been around longer than something we feel about words like googled, it has been here forever, but I was pretty pleased with myself, because I remembered the Judy Garland version and the name of her co-star, James Mason and the Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson...

Elton John (2019) Me Not many folk get to call their book, Me, and expect you to know who they’re talking about. The Glasgow imperative applies here: Who the fuck dae yeh think yeh are? If the answer is Elton John, you go, oh, aye, that’s alright then. Elton John seems to be everywhere at the moment, BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 4, Radio Four, Channel 4, but I can’t find him on ITV, which is a bit disappointing. He’s an institution. I thought I’d have a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bqt9/the-man-who-saw-too-much The story of 106-year-old Boris Pahor is a eulogy to the twentieth century. The man who saw too much and experienced too much is a testament to man’s inhumanity to man. He wrote a memoir, Necrropolis- City of the Dead about his incarceration in a little-know Nazi concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthhof in the mountainous regions of Alsace, France. He was also sent to Bergen...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bpkm/storyville-murder-in-the-bush-cold-case-hammarskjold Mads Brügger and private investigator Göran Björkdahl try to solve the cold case, the death of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. His plane crashed in the Congo killing the Secretary-General and all passengers. Brügger plays the role of amiable fool as he guides the viewer through a number of conspiracy theories of...

As you get older the spring of optimism gives way to the winter of pessimism. You know that no matter how hard you try you will never play for Celtic, especially given the fact that you couldn’t get a game for your pub team. Surplus to requirements. Your bullshit detector, however, gets more refined with age. The charlatan that is Boris Johnson gets short-shrift for everything he says and everything he stands for, for being Boris Johnson,...