celticman's blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049n0js The story of Agnessa Murselja (played here by Olivia Popica) a fifteen-year old refugee and pupil at Drumchapel High School that was taken with her family to be deported, in a dawn raid, and returned home to Kosovo. At home whisperings of fields unsown/ Maybe the kind old sun will know. Home is the key word here. The Home Office suggest her home was somewhere else. The Glasgow Girls, as the name suggests...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0499fb1/alan-hansen-player-and-pundit On the eve of the World Cup finals this is a hagiography of a football player and pundit. The latter is easy to deal with. He talks shite for a living. There wasn’t an aha moment. He’d been offered the Liverpool manager’s job after his mate Kenny Dalglish had left and he didn’t take it. With a wife and two kids, he contacted Sky(BSport) about commentary work and ‘fell...

I didn’t mean to read this book. It was a bit like having a wank, not unpleasant but plodding on and on. Harry Beck, one of the protagonists, is a writer. I’ve nothing against writers. I hold McIlvanney’s book Docherty with great affection. I remember it as a tale of a little man that is a big man, a miner that lives by his own rules. If you asked me anything else about it I’d be found out as a charlatan. The Big Man, well, that was a step down...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049bcfb Motor City Detroit no longer has motors and has lost much of its manufacturing base. About a third of its building lie empty, about 70 000 abandoned lots, many of them burned out. An estimated 20 000 homeless try to find somewhere to sleep in one of the coldest winters on record. Just when they thought things couldn’t get any worse Stacey Dooley is parachuted in to investigate. She immediately hits it off...

Jimmy McGovern has got his own production company. Anything he produces is snapped up and given prime billing by BBC 1. So when he rallies against the law of joint entreprise, McGovern doesn’t write to Parliament about it. He creates a drama. What can we expect? Strong women characters and weak men. Long pauses and melancholic trumpet solos and tunes. Working class lads that get shafted when they do the wrong thing and then shafted again when...

A good book makes you change your mind. I used to think the dropping of ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima was unnecessary. The American and their Allies had control of the skies. They were getting closer to mainland Japan. It was just a matter of time. But this isn’t a history book. This is an old-fashioned testament of the lost and found. Louis Zamperini’s mother was sixteen when she had her second son on January 26th 1917 (he had an elder brother...

Published posthumously Bulgakov’s classic is one of those books I kept meaning to read. The Master is Satan, or Woland, making a visit to Moscow, to have a look at mankind to see if they’ve changed much. But the master is also a would-be novelist, and the lover of Margarita. He is writing about Pontius Pilate, the astrologer’s son and fifth Procurator of Judea. At the trial of Christ Satan, of course, was there and had a front row seat, so when...

I love the World Cup. Simple match report. Rooney is not Suarez. England have a dog’s chance. Gerard, like Cassilis has been guilty of big game errors (think of his pass back that cost Liverpool the league). Here he missed an easy defensive header. Suarez didn’t miss the goal. Two goals of exquisite beauty. One a header. Suarez, Suarez, even a half-fit Suarez, is the top man. Rooney tap in. He peaked too early, three World Cups ago. Scholes was...

Jane wrote a few stories on Abctales. Here is a link to one http://www.abctales.com/story/ashb/boat-trip-3 Needless to say, after getting a coveted cherry she went on to win numerous awards and to have her short-story Saltwater Project published. The theme is water. I’ll not give the plot away, but in her first story in the collection Róisín, the younger sister of the narrator, follows up with her own story, about growing up in an Irish...

The title comes from the old Vera Lynn number: ‘There’ll be bluebirds over/ The white cliffs of Dover,/ Tomorrow, just you wait and see.’ Somehow Vesna associated that song with England, a country she knew little about, but knew vaguely through obsessing over old and new songs. This gave her a bridge into learning English, which was to prove useful in later life, because at the beginning of this memoir, she is a normal sixteen-year-old girl...