celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001z8wc/better-off-dead I’m for assisted dying. What I fear is dementia. I agree with much of what Liz Carr argues. The slippery-slope argument. We live in separate worlds. But we all die. The disabled, like her, in a capitalist economy are costly and don’t die quickly enough for some. Boris Johnson’s comments, while Prime Minister, during Covid-19, ‘Let the bodies pile high,’ related to those older and in...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001zby4/janey Janey is of course Jane Godley. The assumption here is many folk will know who you are. Trump, for example. Or ‘Trump is a cunt’. Archive footage shows Janey holding that banner, protesting the moron’s moron when he visited Scotland in 2016 after being elected President. I certainly wasn’t disagreeing with her, then or now. I also thought Thatcher was a cunt. But that didn’t stop Janey and her...

The Zone of Interest was re-published posthumously after the success of the film of the same name. I wrote notes for both. But I’m not sure what I’ve done with them, which is of no interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film) The film version of the book, directed by Jonathan Glazier is an account of family life. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) is proud of her family home. She and her five children have everything they need,...

Would you kill yourself? I would. Like many people I’ve talked to that have cared for people with dementia, the retort usually follows along the lines of ‘just shoot me’. Wendy Mitchell has lived with early-onset dementia since her diagnosis in 2014. Her first book was the bestseller, Someone I Used to Know . Break out the bucket list. Do a bit of wing walking. Get real about what life you have remaining. Our brain shrinks as we get older. Our...

Dalmuir Library, Dalmuir Community Centre, Duntocher Road, Clydebank, G81 4RQ Tilly and me went on our bikes to Dalmuir Library. It’s in the old C.E. Centre. The old Dalmuir School, which features in my book Beastie . A library member had ordered a copy. Evonne, the librarian, asked me which category they should label Beastie under. I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t a category for ‘#arseholes I knew’. I suggested Scottish Noir or Tartan Noir. But that...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001sk36/dog-days-dog-days-60minute-version This reminded me of the old BBC Play for Today . Gutsy dramas like Just Another Saturday or Just a Boy’s Game . Here’s the setup. Zoso (Conor McCarron), a Glaswegian beggar in Dundee, mugs another beggar. He steals his guitar, but leaves his donations and also steals the busker’s shoes. He explains, he didn’t want him chasing him. He turns up at his old girlfriend’...

Derren Brown is magic. He writes stuff too. Much of which I’ve read. Here he condenses 17 chapters of his international bestseller, Happy . I’ve read that too. I’m unhappy that 99.99% of the stuff I read, I instantly forget. That should worry me. But you know what Derren Brown said? Well, if you don’t, I’ll remind you (and myself). ‘None of this is real.’ Happiness does not exist, but it’s one of those stories we make up and remind ourselves...

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon. One of the 200 brain surgeons in Britain. I should use the past tense because he’s retired. He wrote a book about that too in 2023, And Finally . His fist book was the 2014 bestseller, Do No Harm . As well as being a master surgeon, he’s a competent DIY craftsman and a master wordsmith. This is the in-between book of his trilogy, I hadn’t read. Or at least thought I hadn’t. But when Marsh relates confessing to a...

Reading is what I do. That’s the explanation I often give for my views. I sometimes add, I also write. But most readers aren’t interested in that. Lucy Mangan does both. She shares her home with her Bookworm husband and child and around 10 000 books. I love books too, but I’m not allowed to love them that much. ‘Books have not isolated me, they have connected me,’ Mangan tells us. Reading is an unnatural act. Think of it in analogous terms of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_(2023_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden Walden is a good name for a film. A good name for an American character. Walden (Emile Hirsch) is a court stenographer in a small southern town. The film was shot in Atlanta. Everyone knows each other. Everyone knows Walden. But he’s really not worth knowing. Penny dreadful. I was going to explain the plot. But if you’ve watched as many Scooby Doo cartoons as I...