celticman's blog

I’ve been following Danny Robins’ The Witch Farm on BBC Sounds. But I jumped ahead by reading Mark Chadbourn’s Testimony on which much of the Podcast is based. A small publisher, I’m guessing sales were dead. Now it’s jumped to Number 2 in Amazon’s Supernatural category. Resurrection of a different kind. Most funerals I go to now are humanist. No overt religious input. No hymns. But sometimes a floating jokey reference to him or her being...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f89c/imagine-2022-douglas-stuart-love-hope-and-grit Shuggie Bain , the 2020 Booker prize winner, was Douglas Stuart’s debut novel. It has sold around 1.5 million copies worldwide. His follow-up novel, Young Mungo , is also set in the Glasgow of Stuart’s birth and follows a gay son trying to hang on to the coattails of a mum that is lost to drink, but sometimes finds her way home. https://www.bbc.co.uk/...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7wn/here-before Reincarnation isn’t such a big deal if you’re the Dalai Lama, Buddhist, or many other religions that believe the afterlife comes back to haunt you, but for ten-year-old Megan (Niamh Dornanin) in contemporary Northern Ireland it could be problematic. Her parents, a young couple, Chris (Martin McCann) Marie (Eileen O’Higgins) have moved next door to Laura (Andrea Riseborough), Brendan (...

1.1 Bank Card. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f1td/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-1-bank-card My dad never owned a bank card. I’m taking it for granted if he didn’t, my mum didn’t either. He got paid in cash, a brown envelope (not so) full of notes and coins. A slip of paper inside with the amount paid and tax deducted. The bank card seen off hard cash. With many banks closing, used mainly by elderly customers, elegies to...

I’m not a big fan of Billy Connolly, but I do know how to spell the Big Yin’s name. The funny thing is never that funny. I think I’ve already told you the tale of a pal of mine, a taxi driver, she could be quite opinionated. She was driving him to Drymen and he was talking some pish about Scotland and she left him at the side of the road. He’d the last laugh by becoming a national icon like the Queen Mother but with a beard and Parkinsonism. She...

What do you think about when you hear: The Faithful Couple ? I think of an old couple being physically separated as they entered The Poor House. That was a last century thing, but we’re bringing it back step by step. Faithful Couple isn’t to me a guy thing. That old joke that your mates are whoever your wife’s pal’s husbands or partners is too near the bone. A.D. Miller twists this idea as he takes the reader through the lives of a faithful...

The writing on the cover is a bit funny. Then I realised it was meant to be that way. White writing on black background. A san-serif trick for the short-sighted drunk. A black dog appears with a red collar. Declan’s dog, Horace. But there is also an allusion to the Churchill version of the Black Dog. Declan is the narrator. He’s the wee guy that wants to be a writer. We’ve all been there. Writers write stuff. But there is another narrator. James...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p077ysvd/ptsd-the-war-in-my-head Who are you? What are you? A simple way of telling a story involves both elements. To be identified as a soldier tells who you are. Lt. General Harold G. Moore, for example, proudly claims in his New York Times Bestseller, We Were Soldiers Once…And Young . But it doesn’t tell what you are. The moron’s moron and Chief Commanding Officer of the United States Army, for example,...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001d6yr https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ddg1 I listened and was intrigued by The Battersea Poltergeist . Danny Robbins has assembled the same team to tackle another caseload, he terms ‘the most haunted house in Britain’. He’s repeating himself. But I wouldn’t want to stay within spitting distance. Or to put it another way, no way would I stay anywhere near that place. I’m not sure if I believe in ghosts...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001c1mt/deepfake-porn-could-you-b... Mariam-Webster [online] dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deepfake deepfake noun plural deepfakes Definition of deepfake : an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of...