celticman's blog

I don’t blame Neil Oliver for cashing in on short-lived fame. He’s the one with long hair and a mellifluous speaking voice that can drone on for hours about our Coast, the invasion of the Vikings, the ancient stones of Callandish and all the things you’ll never see or thought of but he’s such a nice guy, you’ve got to believe him, he’s brought them right into your living room. He used to go to the University of Glasgow, which is a bit of an...

I’m not a great fan of Elizabeth Strout. Yet Tell Me Everything is the fourth or her six books I’ve read. Explain that? Well, the characters are familiar. As is the settings. Crosby, Maine and far-off (but not too far) New York. ‘This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about...

I spotted Robert Darroch at Gartnavel about seven years ago. He was sitting chatting to my partner’s mum in a greenish high-backed chair. He was quick to offer us the easy-to-wipe seat and move on. I said his name, but he didn’t recognise me. I’m not good with names. He was the opposite. Rarely passed without a smile and a quick word. He was especially good remembering children and old folk’s names (I guess I fit that category now) but that was...

Liam McIlvanney has writing in his blood. William McIlvanney, of course, is recognised as the godfather of Scottish noir fiction. When Liam McIlvanney won The Bloody Scotland, Scottish Crime Book of the Year—which used to be named after William McIlvanney—with The Quaker , you’d get the impression it was an inside job. A bit like Stephen King’s son, who’s also a writer, winning some big award for horror fiction. I picked up and put down The...

White Jazz is the last of the Dudley Smith trio. A quartet if The Black Dahlia is included. The Big Fix isn’t winner or losers. It’s an ongoing chase in which power is in plain sight. Classic noir asks: Can truth emerge? Ellroy asks more simply, Who controls what we believe after it does? Trump’s insurrection and civil cases, including E. Jean Carroll defamation for him raping her, NY Civil Fraud case, found guilty of falsifying his net worth...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-quiet-girl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Girl The Quiet Girl is a quiet film with a quiet girl like a spider at the centre of a web of things that happen over which she has little or no control. Summer 1981. Nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinchis) lives with her wastrel dad, a pregnant-again-mum and a brood on other brothers and sisters on a rundown Irish farm. Cáit’s belonging are packed up and...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/anais-in-love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%AFs_in_Love Anaïs in Love is to Paris, what Frances Ha is to New York. Annais (Anaïs Demoustier) is the eternal student, with a half-finished doctorate whose subject matter of French passion in the distant past puts herself at the centre of her non-studying universe. Each moment, each day, each missed deadline, uncovers new material waiting for her. Her mum’s...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05569p9/good-vibrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Hooley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Vibrations_(film) I was between books and wondering what shite to watch. I was going to say on the telly, but that’s as odd as admitting to owning a Singers Sewing Machine. Films and documentaries. Stuff that makes you think without really having to think. Good Vibrations was a bit of both and simply...

The Big Nowhere comes at the end of James Ellroy’s take on 1950s Los Angeles. Angels in The City of Angels are in short supply. Every crummy cop is on the take and it works all the way up the ladder to the city bosses and studio heads such as Howard Hughes. In walkies and talkies only money matters. Hughes can fill his studios with starlets and have apartment’s at ready to be filled with the fifteen-year-old farm girls with big knockers that he...

William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives is Holy. ‘Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking we have done enough killing’. Mass murder, displacement, famine. Blake was wrong. We can never get enough killing. W.H. Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant , got it. ‘When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.’ It’s personal for Mohammed Moussa. His mother, his sisters their...