celticman's blog

Disasters always happen in some faraway place. Then we forget about them. Not right away, but gradually our attention fades and we move onto something else, somewhere else. Lucy Easthope’s job is not to forget or look away, but to search for patterns and lessons learned. She offers a personal account of what it feels like to miscarry a much wanted child, time after time (she calls them ‘Titans’) but still live in hope for a better outcome. None...

Over 100 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the West has grown weary of fuel and wheat shortages and high prices. The eighth year of war. Russia occupying Crimea and Donbass regions, and almost twenty per cent of Ukraine since then, creating a land border, including access to the Black Sea. Catherine Belton’s prescient book is early and late. The modus operandi is in the title. Ryzard Kapuscinski’s Imperium is instructive how it...

I did this in the wrong order (if there is such a thing) I watched the film of the book, before reading the book. For J.R.Moehringer, books are holy things. And I know where he lives because I’ve read the book. F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Egg territory. J.R’s hometown, Manhasset, Long Island. Sigourney Weaver took her stage name from the guest list of Gatsby’s fictional legendary parties, which the whole of New York’s well-heeled...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00184br/my-name-is-leon Anyone that has been paying attention knows a Tory government that continually takes money from the poor and gives it the rich is where we are now. The worst cost-of-lving crisis in decades. More children taken into care by local authorities grows year on year, while central government takes away funds for caring ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/the-guardian-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0012y9d/judy The use of the singular name implies the universal. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Judy Garland arrives in swinging London for a number of sell-out performances in The Talk of the Town in the winter of 1968. Six months later she was dead at the age of 47. Renee Zellweger is Judy, with a long chin, white butterfly masquerade mask of a face with bright red lips. Get the spiky black...

I loved Meg Henderson’s memoir, Finding Peggy, which gave her a reading audience hoping for more, hoping for better. Ask me about the story and I wouldn’t be able to tell you very much. The leading character in The Holy City, Marion McLeod, around which much of the story of Clydebank winds is Finding Peggy feisty I’d tackled The Holy City before, but lost the plot with it and put it down. I picked it up again and put it down. I’m not sure why I...

Scotland last played in the World Cup in France, 1998. The qualification campaign wasn’t a matter of life and death. It was just a game of football, which Ukraine won quite comfortably. They play Wales on Sunday to decide who goes to Qatar in November. When there’s no football on Scotland are playing. Lyndon Dykes elbows Stepanenko on the back of the head as they go for a punted high ball, and gets a booking, sums up the first-half. Dykes doesn’...

The American Dream and Angela’s Ashes combined. Now a major motion picture (I haven’t seen it). Short chapters on life in rust-bucket America and California and what it means to be poor and smelly. Treated as an outcast. Yet throughout the reader knows Jeannette will rise. ‘One day I was walking down Broadway with another student named Carol when I gave some change to a young homeless guy. ‘You shouldn’t that,’ Carol said. ‘Why!’ ‘It only...

‘You are the loneliest girl I’ve ever met,’ Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) tells (Saint) Maud (Morfydd Clark). Amanda is on end-of-life care at her beach home in run down Scarborough. Maud is her live-in nurse. She takes care of her. A servant in the old fashioned sense in that she cooks her meals, feeds her, puts her to bed and gets her up in the morning. Administers (from the word minister) her medication. Maud is a trained nurse, an angel, but she’s...

The publication date is important here, 2008. Let’s say Sylvia Browne wrote the book in 2007. That gives us a baseline to work out how accurate her prophesies are in May 2022. Confirmation bias tends to confirm what we already know, or think we know. Sylvia Browne cannot see a human race beyond the end of this century. With global warming that seems possible, if not probable. ‘…we’ve got a planet that’s slowly warmed to the point of cataclysmic...