celticman's blog

As Graham Greene famously said: ‘There’s always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' This the seed crop of Munro’s stories. It shows her father’s, fathers’ father, a cousin of James Hogg, leaving the Ettrick Valley in Scotland for the wilds of America, which was really Canada. A good author draws you in and puts you on the boat with them. I was all for leaving the Laidlaw family on the boat, but I persevered until...

I’ve not enjoyed a film as much for a long time. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) plays the kind of man I should hate. His job is to roam, first class, of course, over the United States firing employees for bosses to chicken to do so themselves. It’s a growth industry. Some of the early scenes were based on transcripts of former employees’ real life experiences. I’m sure men in employed in such an industry are not as suave as Ryan/George (or myself...

I thought I’d read this before, my memories pickled. Maybe I just lived it. My brother was an alcoholic. Dead. His pal’s Jas, Tommy, Billy. Dead. Dead. Dead. There’s more casualties. Drinks a funny thing. It builds you up and knocks you down. Healy knows that better than anyone. Violence is always a background hum. His Da tried to beat him into submission. The army tried to beat him into submission. The police lifted him and a regular beating...

I had heard of the Nobel Prize, but hadn’t heard of Alice Munro, sometimes these two things meet with a bang (oh dear). Each short story in the collections are long enough, or short enough, dependent on your mood, to read in one sitting. They are the ideal length. Time often opens out, between one paragraph and another, into ten, fifteen, thirty or forty years. In ‘Train’ for example Jackson scrapes his leg when jumping from a train, the next...

The Disappeared, as the name suggests, were those taken from their homes by the IRA in Northern Ireland during the troubles and their bodies hidden in bogs and ditches in unmarked graves, often in the Republic of Ireland. The most poignant of these was thirty-seven-year old Jean McConville. Her husband had died of cancer. She was a widow and mother of ten children aged between six and sixteen when the paramilitaries came for her in 1972 in the...

As expected the third seeds in the group, playing at home, beat the fourth seeds. It was a bity, terrible game, particularly in the first half, which suited Celtic. They went in at half-time 0-0, which is the point we were hoping for. Using the Celtic calculator we’d have taken that point and beaten AC Milan at home to qualify for the next round. Now the Celtic calculator needs to take in new permutations that include just about everything,...

I didn’t see any bonfires. They’re all caged in now. Full page advertisements in the newspapers and ads on the telly—I’m not sure who they are aimed at—featuring quite a pretty girl dressed as a firewoman tell us they are dangerous and take fire-fighters away from essential services. Wow. I never knew that. Kids must be thinking firemen should be sitting with their feet up sipping latte on Bonfire night. I may be wrong, but I don’t think kids...

In the good old days when a gentleman was not too busy bear-baiting or slaughtering foxes, he would sometimes take his young lady to Bethlem Royal Hospital, or the colloquially know Bedlam, to observe the performance of mad people. The Maudsley in South London is the old Bedlam. This is Jeremy Kyle lite. Here the cameras followed four patients who suffered from a variety of anxiety disorders. Helen, aged 33, had been stuck in her house for two...

Produced, written and directed by Sarah McCarthy, love is all around her and so the feeling go-oh-ohs. Sorry, I was thinking of that Wet Wet Wet hit that was a number one hit forever. This is a documentary and not a song. Though there are bits of science, like currants in a bun thrown in to spice things up, in the guise of a professor of psychology and relationship advisors talking about childhood bonding experiences. The narrative is quite...

Nowhere Else to Go . This is the first of a two part documentary about Britain’s lack of care for poor and disabled children and focusses on the decades following The Second World War. I told my girlfriend’s son, who works in a suitably remote area with children such as these, to watch this programme. It is a distillation of thousands of textbooks of containment and control in an easy to view format. Erving Goffman’s characteristics of a total...