celticman's blog

Betty (2020) Tiffany McDaniel.

Betty by Tiffany McDaneil is my novel of the year. Yeh, I know it was published in 2020 and this is 2022, nearly 2023, but I’ve always been a bit behind. I’ll try and explain why I think it’s pretty much perfect. I had to check Betty wasn’t real. This wasn’t autobiography. Listen to the first line. It’s an encapsulation of the whole book. ‘A girl comes of age against the knife.’ A coming-of-age story, but we all know they are ten a penny. Who...

I Am Ruth, Channel 4, 9pm, written by Kate Winslet and Dominic Savage.

Spoiler, I only watched about a half-hour of this. That old joke, it felt longer. Kate Winslet is an international star and has been a well-known face since she was in Titanic , 27 years ago, with that other guy (I wonder what happened to him?) Leonardo DiCaprio has refused to age. Seventeen-year-old Freya, played by Mia Threapleton, is Kate Winslet’s real daughter. In my day, your da got you a job in the shipyards. Kate got her daughter a...

I’m An Alcoholic: Inside Recovery, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Narrator Eve Pope, Producer and Director Jemma Gander.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001fyzd/im-an-alcoholic-inside-recovery Alcoholics Anonymous is 75 years old. The first meeting was advertised in The Financial Times (other newspapers wouldn’t allow such advertisements) and held in The Dorchester Hotel in 1947. Around 5000 meetings take place every day in the South East of England. Deepfake technology allows some of these alcoholics to tell their stories. I’m already familiar with them. I...

Surge, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Writers Rupert Jones and Rita Kalnejais, Director Aneil Karia.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001fhl5/surge I watch lots of films. I guess it’s a way of turning off my mind. A passive acquiescence. But I found Surge , claustrophobic. The plots of most stories are quite simple. Make it hard for the protagonist. And I’m not going to go into that thing of there only being seven basic types. Joseph (Ben Whishaw of This is Going to Hurt ) has a shitty job. He works in security at a London airport. He...

Scotland’s Stories (2022).

I usually pick up these wee books from the library every year. Anybody that has written anything knows the feeling of triumph at being published. They are published by Scottish Book Trust. And they’re free. The paradox of free stuff is snob value. If it’s free, it must be shite. Almost thirty stories and poems in five sections—Community legends, Making it home, Origin Stories, Finding my place and Tales to treasure—and not one dud. Most stories...

Sam Knight (2022) The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story.

Sam Knight reminds the reader, I’m not just making this up. I believe him. I love this kind of wacky stuff and read it in one go. But when Knight tells the reader what psychiatrist John Barker was thinking about when he was flying into New York in the mid-sixties, he’s writing fiction. It’s the kind of world Stephen King writes about and asks questions like how can we know what we do not know? In one of King’s novels, the protagonist sets out to...

The Ice Cream Wars, BBC 2, BBC Scotland, BBC iPlayer, narrator Kate Dickie, director Robert Neil.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d3jv/the-ice-cream-wars-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d3lb/the-ice-cream-wars-series-1-episode-2 Start with the big stuff. Headlines that grab your attention—and demand something needs to be done. The murders of six members of the Doyle family in April 1984, which included a baby and fourteen-year-old boy in Bankend Street in the north-east of Glasgow, elicits that guttural...

Wendy Woods (2019) Good Habits Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes Stick.

I read. That’s what I do. I’ve got books in the toilet. In the kitchen and hall. Down the side of my chair and in my van, stashed behind the passenger seat. I no longer keep a book in the glove compartment. I’m not therefore an addict. Before deaths and Amens, there’s a line that goes something like this: lead us not into temptation and out of our boozers and strip clubs, or away from offers of half-priced drugs because it’s Black Friday on a...

David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count, Channel 4, written and presented by David Baddiel, directed by James Routh.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/david-baddiel-jews-dont-count A quote attributed to Mark Twain, but perhaps not said by Mark Twain, the great American writer and humourist goes something like this: ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.’ David Baddiel shows footage of the moron’s moron supporters of the 45 th American President chanting, ‘We will not be replaced by the Jews.’ It...

Catherine Simpson (2019) When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke.

Catherine Simpson is around the same age as me. We’ve both received a little largesse from Scottish Book Trust. Her story is in the title. Most readers understand intuitively with the use of the past tense that her wee sister, Tricia, has passed over. In plainer terms, she’s dead. She died in December 2013, aged 46. My brother died around 1995. My partner’s brother died around the same time. They were both in their mid-thirties. Mother and...

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