celticman's blog

I had heard of the Nobel Prize, but hadn’t heard of Alice Munro, sometimes these two things meet with a bang (oh dear). Each short story in the collections are long enough, or short enough, dependent on your mood, to read in one sitting. They are the ideal length. Time often opens out, between one paragraph and another, into ten, fifteen, thirty or forty years. In ‘Train’ for example Jackson scrapes his leg when jumping from a train, the next...

The Disappeared, as the name suggests, were those taken from their homes by the IRA in Northern Ireland during the troubles and their bodies hidden in bogs and ditches in unmarked graves, often in the Republic of Ireland. The most poignant of these was thirty-seven-year old Jean McConville. Her husband had died of cancer. She was a widow and mother of ten children aged between six and sixteen when the paramilitaries came for her in 1972 in the...

As expected the third seeds in the group, playing at home, beat the fourth seeds. It was a bity, terrible game, particularly in the first half, which suited Celtic. They went in at half-time 0-0, which is the point we were hoping for. Using the Celtic calculator we’d have taken that point and beaten AC Milan at home to qualify for the next round. Now the Celtic calculator needs to take in new permutations that include just about everything,...

I didn’t see any bonfires. They’re all caged in now. Full page advertisements in the newspapers and ads on the telly—I’m not sure who they are aimed at—featuring quite a pretty girl dressed as a firewoman tell us they are dangerous and take fire-fighters away from essential services. Wow. I never knew that. Kids must be thinking firemen should be sitting with their feet up sipping latte on Bonfire night. I may be wrong, but I don’t think kids...

In the good old days when a gentleman was not too busy bear-baiting or slaughtering foxes, he would sometimes take his young lady to Bethlem Royal Hospital, or the colloquially know Bedlam, to observe the performance of mad people. The Maudsley in South London is the old Bedlam. This is Jeremy Kyle lite. Here the cameras followed four patients who suffered from a variety of anxiety disorders. Helen, aged 33, had been stuck in her house for two...

Produced, written and directed by Sarah McCarthy, love is all around her and so the feeling go-oh-ohs. Sorry, I was thinking of that Wet Wet Wet hit that was a number one hit forever. This is a documentary and not a song. Though there are bits of science, like currants in a bun thrown in to spice things up, in the guise of a professor of psychology and relationship advisors talking about childhood bonding experiences. The narrative is quite...

Nowhere Else to Go . This is the first of a two part documentary about Britain’s lack of care for poor and disabled children and focusses on the decades following The Second World War. I told my girlfriend’s son, who works in a suitably remote area with children such as these, to watch this programme. It is a distillation of thousands of textbooks of containment and control in an easy to view format. Erving Goffman’s characteristics of a total...

I don’t usually go to galleries. I’ve nothing against them, but I’m lazy, set in my ways and swallowed all the clichés so I'm fat with knowing. You might be asking why I made this exception. The answer might be that Ally Allan is about the same age as me, went to the same Secondary school—St Andrew’s—and we played football as a kid, but not together. I played for the Goston Swifts and the Dalmuir Stankcleaners. She played professionally in New...

This book is worth reading for Fowels’s foreword written in 1976. He describes it as ‘a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent’. But he makes no apology and neither should he. This is a magical book that keeps shape shifting. The narrator Nicholas Ufte is the kind of public school dolt that makes me want to bolt, but here he holds me spellbound. There’s lots of Shakespeare and classical allusions. Cochis is a Prospero like figure...

Nobody believed me when I said I’d a hole in my denim pocket and lost £10 million last week. It’s quite a nice number. It’s not eleven million which sounds pretentious or nine million which has that mingy, could do better, feel about it. Ten million is spot on. Billionaires are like Nazis always wanting to bring order out of chaos. But they are never unreasonable about it. It’s all about EFFICIENCY. I’ve used capitals to show it’s a big word...