celticman's blog

Detective novels are straightforward as a pigeon following a trail of breadcrumbs to find out the hand holding a hammer. I hadn't read any of Malcolm Mackay's books before this one, but the greatest compliment you can pay an author is reading another of his books. I'll start -anew-with his earlier debut novel. Here we have the beginnings of the breadcrumbs. ...some eyeless halfwit had gone straight into the side of her car...Freya began to swear...

There’s an afterglow to this sweet Old Firm derby. Neil Lennon had a few hard choices to make. In goal he could have played Fraser Foster, Craig Gordon or my mate’s mum. He said she could have played in goals and he was right enough. Lennon went with Fraser Foster. Celtic’s dodgy defence was on display. Rangers were at home. The bookies made them favourites. Celtic were 2/1. All the Daily Record pundits gave Rangers the edge by a goal or more...

I consume these books like sweets. A guilty secret. Guilt is always bad for you. You know how it goes. Anita Moorjani died then she has a choice whether she wanted to come back to this world, or stay where she was, heaven. Heaven is not a place with celestial gates and angels strumming harps, rather it is a state of bliss. Since there is no such thing as time, it could be said to be eternal. We know she came back, because here she is telling the...

Serhii Plokhy’s history of Chernobyl won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2018. He tells us what happened when reactor No 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant, named after Vladimir Lenin, exploded after what should have been a routine maintenance test on 26 th April 1986. First to arrive where firemen, who hooked up their hoses and treated it as a routine fire, no immediate threat to the around 5000 workers and their families living...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0007mxm/when-bridges-collapse-the... Forty-three people died, scores more were injured and 600 people lost their home when the Polcevera Bridge in Genoa collapsed on 14th August 2018. One survivor described how the road disappeared before him and it was like being in a cartoon. It was Italy’s worst ever road-bridge disaster. A design fault that allowed water to pool and steel cables to fray was blamed, but...

I’ve read this book before, but didn’t remember until I started reading it again. My memories like that, full of wormwood and dark holes. Most folks are that’s why we use terms like short-term and long-term and even working–memory and other types of memory that often doesn’t work. Types I’ve instantly forgotten, but no matter. We usually judge ourselves to be reliable narrators of our own lives, able to judge what is and what is not with...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006wg1/the-bleeder Sometimes you just hit upon a movie you know you’re going to love. Here it is. As surely as any movie written or starring Simon Pegg (or even an actor that looks like Pegg) is going to be a going to be a stinker, The Bleeder is a knock-out. I’m not a big boxing fan. Yeh, sure I remember the Rumble in the Jungle and Ali v’s Frazier. I watched them on BBC in the same way that I later...

All writing is an act of faith. I come from a long line of dead people and bar-room prophets, all saying the same things. We’re going to hell in a handcart. We’ve had the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama proposing The End of History . Karen Armstrong posits The Death of God. The time frame is opaque. But in places like Britain it seems more clear-cut, less than fourteen percent of people attend regular worship (Anglican or otherwise...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006vv7/louis-theroux-surviving-americas-most-hated-family I watch most of Louis Theroux’s documentaries. I thought I’d already seen this one. My tag-line was the Phelps’s family were no longer America’s most hated family, because that was the Trump’s. Wishful thinking. Theroux has got some good mileage out of the Phelps’s family, but paradoxically the Phelps’s family has also got something back from...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006vrs/chasing-the-moon-series-1-1-a-place-beyond-the-sky-part-one https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006vrv/chasing-the-moon-series-1-2-a-place-beyond-the-sky-part-two This six part serial set at the height of the Cold War tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between politics and technology. United States triumphalism that they had won the war, although unofficial...