celticman's blog

This is a play on words and the way the working-class soldier pronounced Ypres during the First World War. BBC 2 seems our best bet for this kind of costume drama, with Channel 4 hitting the futuristic buttons with drama such as Blackout-pronounced black---out. I didn’t black – out I stuck with the new dystopian drama, Blackout, to the first ad break. Good man I can hear you say in that Standard English accent used for voice overs and British...

I had to drink a Christmas bottle of Baileys because I’ve had a bad stomach for about five days to keep me interested. It’s not a real drink, but I usually don’t bother with Internationals. Next Wednesday. A.C. Milan v Celtic. Home win. The real deal. Wish we had Anya and not James Forrest. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m blind. Maybe I’m drunk (but hey, it is Bailley’s, so think again.). The games were fifteen minutes apart so I could watch both. I...

Some books you don’t want to finish and this is one of them. Hugo Hamilton’s memoir is a prize worth keeping. It's a shame it's a library book. Pre-adolescent Hugo tells the story of his father and mother and his growing family in words that bite. His father is a nationalist that refuses to let the children speak English or play with children that speak English or have anything to do with the English even though there are few people in Dublin in...

I’m not going to tell you who the original writer was, but I can tell you some of his themes involve the fading power of old men, gender swapping, love at first sight and a plot that he’s picked up from crumpled bits of folio that have been lying around his garret. This is no different in that Prospero started off in the original folio and was definitely a man. Helen Mirren is definitely a woman. Her Morgana all those years ago in Excalibur...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn finishes where it started with poor old Huck getting Mothered to death: ‘I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.’ It’s been that long since I read this book I can’t remember reading it. Long passages are dialogue thick with the argot of Nigger Jim, Tom Sawyer or the sly old Judge...

This was the big one. This was massive. This was when life and the death of our season hung by the ligaments of a severed sheep’s head (much has been made of our Asian friend’s propensity to sacrifice sheep for a good luck omen and as a kind of voodoo-we just eat sheep and of course we woo them to death with love songs of pastures green). Anyway, Shak are shak. They are the worst team I’ve seen in the Champions League and how they got to the...

Robert Jack was a few years older and like the rest of us he liked a drink, but unlike the rest of us he even had a girlfriend. He lived in Trafalgar Street long before it was renovated. A few years down the line I heard he’d got slashed. His cheek was marked, but he still had that Mediterranean oily tanned skin and straight black hair and, when I saw him in the Peppermint Park later that week he still had a girlfriend, although it might have...

I have an interest in New Writing Scotland because I’m new, I’m Scottish and briefly had Zoe Strachan as a writing tutor. Whisper it, I also plan to send in something to New Writing Scotland 32 for consideration, or even publication. I’d say I won’t hold my breath, but that’s a cliché. Life writing is the ultimate cliché. You just live your life and write it down. What could be simpler? This is exactly what Haslam and Neale has done. This book...

Vin Jones writing in Observer Review, ‘The rights won in the 1960s by the black community need defending,’ had me thinking that many of the things he mentioned apply equally to the poor in Britain. ‘When you live in a country where one of the major political parties, by its own utterances and plans and designs, has written off 14% of the population strictly because they’re black [poor and working class]. It’s hard to say we live in some kind of...

There’s a certain symmetry about someone that’s rich, even if it’s only a Ben Mez rich writing a story about accidental billionaires. I’ve accidentally burnt myself, fell into a greenhouse and almost drowned a few times. I think it only fair that I too should accidentally become a millionaire, or billionaire. I’m not that bothered. I’ll leave it to fate. For anybody that doesn’t know this film is about the creation of Facebook in 2003 and in...