celticman's blog

Thornwood (Steve) in AbcTales posts I hope the Tories have a change of heart about the planned cuts. 38 Degrees send me an email suggesting I contribute money so they can take out advertisements extorting George Osborne to think again. Dream on. Notes on poverty (in no particular order). Orwell suggest we need to state the obvious. Richard Hoggart wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier . 'Each decade we shiftily declare that we have buried class; each...

Director, Maurice Linnane http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l4929 There is currently a new film documentary out about Amy Winehouse. Since her death she seems to have become more popular. I don’t listen to music. I’ve read more about Amy Whitehouse than I’ve heard her voice. There she was in the pages of some tabloid falling over drunk, or out of her face on drugs, or both. Reams of newsprint on her boyfriend who went to jail because he was...

It takes a certain sort of courage to say that you are wrong. Robert D Putnam thought all the hoo-ha of kids not being able to grow up and get on – the essence of the American dream, work hard, play hard and you’ll get your just rewards – was belly aching from those that had failed to thrive. In any society there are winners and losers. He was a winner. He didn’t come from a rich family, and through hard work became Malkin Professor of Public...

This book left me cold. I read an extract of the story of these sisters in The Observer a while back, one living and the other dead. I was intrigued. I know what I’m supposed to feel. What I’m supposed to say. But it feels a bit like someone leaning over the garden fence and saying yada, yada, yada and I’m saying yeh, yeh, yeh. That’s true. You’re right. I wish I’d thought of that. In the first act of J.B.Priestley’s An Inspector Calls stasis is...

I met Scott Halley on my way up Singers Road. I assumed he’d been to the polling station. But he told me he didn’t bother. I know a lot of people that don’t bother. I can’t say I blame them. We live in a more-it-tocracy. The more you have the more you expect and the more you get, whether it’s wealth, jobs, health, or education. For the poor politics is something done to you. When you expect nothing and get nothing there are no surprises. That’s...

The Trouble With Our Trains, BBC 2, 9pm. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05sz83j/nick-and-margaret-the-trouble-with-our-trains Twenty years after privatisation, in which the number of rail passengers have doubled, Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford examine what was once British Rail, but is now a hotchpotch of different companies competing in the rail market. Only they aren’t. Four billion pounds of government money a year still subsidises...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/on-demand/57108-007 Reporter Harry Wallop goes undercover to investigate Sports Direct, and its owner Mike Ashley, listed as the twenty-third richest man in Britain, with an estimated fortune of £3.5 billion. I must admit a conflict of interests here. I own three-supersized Sports Direct mugs. Indirectly, I’ve contributed to Ashley’s fortune. The first half hour (or excluding adverts, twenty minutes...

James Wood (2015) The Nearest Thing to Life. The Nearest Thing to Life begins with a death—that of a friend’s younger brother—and the question, “WHY?’. There’s no real answer, how could there be? But in death Wood’s looks at the obverse, and how Woods, a bibliophile, has charted the great waters of life by clinging to books and the knowledge of humanity that they provide. ‘The Why question is a refusal to accept death.’ Heaven provides an answer...

"From the Collection of the Artist." Kurt Vonnegut turns up in the most unlikely of places. I’m not familiar with his writing, but I’m reading a book by Michael Lewis Liar’s Poker in which the author quotes Vonnegut below to describe how the bond market works to distort reality, and to make it seem normal, a theme the everyman Billy Pilgrim’s character stumbles into in his Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 . There is a magic moment, during which a man...

I’m not sure why Self-Publishing should have an exclamation mark! But I’m not going to argue with an exclamation mark. This book cost less than a pint of beer and more importantly I spent about five hours reading it. I dutifully followed all the links to some impressive Amazon sites that featured self-published authors have set up to sell their novels. I was familiar with some of the names featured. Joe Lawrence and East End Butcher Boy is...