celticman's blog

Things That Are is the size of a prayer book. And you should have to put on those white gloves snooker referees wear when re-spotting a ball, when opening its pages. It should be treated with reverence and awe, because there is wisdom in these words. It should become a religion with worshipers meeting up to discuss sentence and phrases such as the introduction to ‘Silly Lilies’, 'Most plants bend over backwards to cooperate with reality’. This...

I’ve tackled War and Peace a few times, but beat a hasty retreat. Initially the problem was the characters involved. I’m not the brightest. Easily confused. So having the patronymic and other names tacked on like stags antlers got a bit confusing. On the opening page, for example, we have Anna Pavlovna Scherer and she’s some kind of hanger on to Empress Marya Fedorovo, the Dowager Empress, and the former is at home having a soiree with the Abbe...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0755ms6/janis-joplin-little-girl-blue After the death of Johan Cruyff, I got talking and into one of those arguments about who was better Cruyff or Zinedine Zidane. I said it was close to call, but that Cruyff was just perhaps more elegant. ‘How can you get more elegant than Zidane?’ was the riposte. Fair point. Just my opinion. I’d seen both players in their prime, and love football. I was frequently number...

‘There was people waiting, families waiting to be evacuated…’ ‘I’m not sure how long we were away, although the house was damaged it was habitable…so we were in the back room with the windows boarded up because all the glass in the house was shattered, the blast had blown out all the windows…It was quite cosy. We had to cook on the fire.’ ‘I stood outside the burnt shell of what was my home with my children, all we had was what we stood in… how...

As a story teller, with Leicester City at the top of the Premier League it’s been the year of the underdog, and I’ve been following the Iain Duncan Smith, or the IDS narrative, with interest. He resigned from the Cabinet because ‘I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national interest…[I]...

Alone in Berlin is full of cartoon characters! And exclamation marks! And the third-person omniscient narrator who sees all and feels all, on behalf of his audience, suddenly comes clean about his omnipotent powers and directly addresses the reader and insists on a happy ending! Fuck that! But as we fall back into history and look at Boris Johnson and George Osborne vying with each other to think of new ways to beat the poor down and, on the...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07472y8 This is a programme about domestic violence. Violence against women. It follows Thames Valley’s domestic abuse unit, over a twelve month period, as its police officers go about the business of support Jemma, Helen and Sabrina and gaining a conviction against their attackers. The evidence seems straightforward. Helen’s dad, Russell, puts it this way, ‘I feel gutted. You never know what happens behind...

I am not a pilgrim. I am pillock. I read 84 pages, or section one, of 700 pages. I didn’t stick with it to find out how former FBI agent Jude Garret published in-house, as a front for the FBI, a book that he didn’t expect anyone to read about forensics; how this related to the pathology of crime and how what goes around comes around. A feeling I know well. But guess what? On page one, someone has read that book by Jude Garret, and it’s a woman...

I was up at my sister Phyllis’s house 13 th March 1996. That’s twenty years ago. I was a young thirty-three with a full head of hair and a ready laugh, now I’m a baldy, miserable old cunt, so nothings really changed, but I remember that day because it was Dunblane. News coverage was running on loop, but it was the same picture of parents rushing towards the school, knowing like us that something terrible had happened. I’m not an emotional guy. I...

Anne Rice, as most people know, is a novelist. Her bestselling work includes her first novel, Interview with the Vampire . This is the only novel of hers which I've read. It made her who she is. Gave her financial freedom. The blurb on the cover tells the reader that she has written twenty-eight novels. I've a dim memory of trying to read another one of these, but quickly put it down. I could run my finger down the list, but honestly I wouldn't...