celticman's blog

https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/broadmoor/series-1/episode-1 Broadmoor is a bleak sounding name. Its 150-years old, an asylum, sixty miles from London that is expanding out to meet it. It used to provide a daytrip for gentile Londoners to go and gawk at Broadmoor’s inmates. Now the cameras have been invited inside. I’m not really sure why. Broadmoor we are told holds 200 ‘patients’ at a cost of £300 000 per year, per patient, an annual cost to the...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04ndsb3/storyville-20142015-8-exposed-magicians-psychics-and-frauds ‘The Amazing Randi’ is indeed amazing. He’s in his mid eighties, stooped and worn and looks like he should be cast as Grumpy, or one of the other seven dwarves. But he has a very eloquent speaking voice and was awarded the MacArthur ‘genius grant’ about thirty-years ago. When he talks you should listen. He exposes fairy tales, New Age liars...

We all need a bit of help with editing, making our stories a little better, and a lot sharper. I’m certainly no exception to that rule. We often project what we think we mean onto the page. It’s often easier for someone else to pick up the faults and fault lines in our story. We need that other reader to see what we cannot. What I propose is to offer my editing skills. Pledge to Lily Poole ( http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole )and send me...

August 2007, Peter Connelly, a cherubic, 17-month old, blond-haired, blue eyed boy was unlawfully killed – beaten to death. Among other injuries he suffered were broken ribs, a broken back and a missing fingertip. His mother and her boyfriend were found guilty of those crimes. This is not the story about the 260 children that have died since the, 26 of them known to the local authorities. Or the story of the five to ten familial homicides every...

Not many people read dictionaries, especially, a dictionary of money-talk that will be out of date by the time it gets to print, but I was always a bit weird. One of the few and therefore scarce O’grades I got was in the ‘dismal science’ of economics. I got a B grade. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I know you’re secretly impressed. I was surprised. I’ll tell you my secret: if it wasn’t supply; it was demand. I could even pontificate about...

I admit to googling Michael Cannon to see if I knew him. He comes from the West of Scotland and has had a wide variety of jobs (snap), wasn’t very good at school (snap), has written a couple of novels (well I’ve kinda) and they’ve been published. Snap out of it. I don’t know the lucky bastard, but I have read his book. What attracted me to Articles of Faith wasn’t the author but the subject. The narrative setting in my hometown Clydebank, a...

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories , is published by Penguin Classics. That can mean the book is quite old. It does seem to be, with the stories I’ve read so far being set in post-Second World War America, or it could mean a guarantee of quality. An imprint that says - this is really good. The book is in five sections, with short stories in each section. I’ve finished section one and started on section two. My feeling was of...

Coal miners lives were nasty, brutish and short - that was only in the good years. In his preface Zola tells his reader that all authors are liars, but there is something like the truth between these pages that still holds true. Zola shows how the Company makes profit from wage slavery of men, women and children. The Maheu family, for example, live in Village 240, Block 2, house Number 16. The Company owns the houses they live in. It allows a...

I’ve been thinking of writing a book about poverty, and the cancerous growth of agencies as middlemen that add nothing but misery, leaving the rest of us to deal with the hidden costs. It’s too big a subject. You start getting lost in minutiae. What does it mean in a changing world, for example, to be working class? What does it mean to be poor? These are relative concepts. I once asked my former best mate Liam what the girl he got off with the...

Every day is All Fools Day when you’re just being yourself. Same beginning. Then two trillion -or more- cells later, we come apart. In between we acquire a repertoire of habits. Vincent Deary’s ‘How we are’, the first in his trilogy of How to Live, picks apart what makes us ourselves. In essence, a person and their reality, make up their personality. That’s me speaking, not Deary (and what a wonderful name for a pseudo-philosopher). I was...