celticman's blog

gloat ɡləʊt/ verb gerund or present participle: gloating dwell on one's own success or another's misfortune with smugness or malignant pleasure. "his enemies gloated over the Huns death" synonyms: delight in, relish , take great pleasure in, enjoy greatly, revel in, rejoice in, glory in, exult in, triumph over, crow over; It was a long time coming, a few phoney wars and some people might even have watched Scotland playing Malta, but then the...

I could never call Mr McLaughlin, Hugh. He was always Mr McLaughlin, a wee, square and blokeish, old man that lived across the road from us, back in the day when everybody that was adult was old, apart from your own mum and dad, who weren’t old because they were your mum and dad. Times have changed, now everybody’s old. I was trying to work out Mr McLaughlin’s age before the mass and came up with three separate answers, one of which would made...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lily-Poole-Jack-ODonnell/dp/1783522356 I like to read and I like to write. One is the engine of the other. When you’re writing fast, with dash, you just fling words down, and hope for the best. Lily Poole was a serial on ABCtales. Bang, bang, bang, around 2000 words a day. It wasn’t called Lily Poole then, I’d given it the working tag, ‘School Photos’. First-draft stuff. Let’s not call it a novel, but a collection of...

I missed out on Gregor Fisher’s reading of his autobiography in Dalmuir Library recently. Tickets only. It’s a small place. Sold out. Gregor Fisher is a ‘National Treasure’ ran an advertisement campaign to promote a play ‘Yer Granny’ he was in. And on the front page of his book, the tagline from The Telegraph reads: Rab C Nesbitt is the most memorable comedy character Scotland has ever produced’. There’s a lot of good will to be tapped around...

Imagine someone handed you thirteen billion Euros, approximately £11 000 000 000, as the European Commission tried to do, claiming that Apple had acted illegally in Ireland and paid an effective Corporate tax rate of 50 Euros for every 1 000 000 Euros they took out of the country. In a deal known as the Double Irish, Apple claimed they did not take any money out of the country, but simply moved it between different offices with no staff and an...

It’s almost fifty years since The Outsiders was published. ‘The Original Teenage Rebel Story’ proclaims the tag on the cover. I’m sure William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had the same banner headline, but in yeh olde worlde English. Hinton was only seventeen when she wrote it. And like fourteen-year old Ponyboy, the first-person narrator, you can imagine her trying to impress her English teacher and scrape a better grade by turning a...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pqpfp The best thing for me about the Rio Olympics was it was on in the middle of the night because I didn’t need to watch it. Not that I would have. I couldn’t give a toss of your caber how many gold medals Britain racks up. There’s only one sport, one club that I follow and one team I support, Glasgow Celtic. And I’m bigoted and bitter enough to remember comedians with eighties punchlines Loadsamoney and the...

Hapoel Beer Sheva beat Celtic on the night and caught a dose of the Scottish disease, the Celtic disease, of glorious defeat in victory. This game will be forgotten. The only thing that matters is who goes into the draw for the Champions League. Recently, Celtic have been taking one step forward and two steps back. This was a reminder of the Ronnie Roar night, but our last manager didn’t think we’d make the group stages, which was fair enough...

The kids are back at school. You know what that means, the school run, clogged streets and roads. Banners hung outside school gates warning parents that ‘Parking here is dangerous and selfish’, but some park there anyway, because it doesn’t apply to them, they’ll just be a minute and the people that are dangerous and selfish are the ones without cars, because their poor wee Daren might get wet and catch cold. My response isn’t two fingers in a V...

https://authorsinterviews.wordpress.com/2016/08/19/here-is-my-interview-... I can't claim any great credit here. Talking about yourself is easy. Talking about someone else, now that's a hard one.