Jeannette Walls (2005) The Glass Castle.

The American Dream and Angela’s Ashes combined. Now a major motion picture (I haven’t seen it). Short chapters on life in rust-bucket America and California and what it means to be poor and smelly. Treated as an outcast. Yet throughout the reader knows Jeannette will rise.

‘One day I was walking down Broadway with another student named Carol when I gave some change to a young homeless guy. ‘You shouldn’t that,’ Carol said.

‘Why!’

‘It only encourages them. They’re all scam artists.’

What do you know? I wanted to ask, I felt like telling Carol that my parents were out there, too, that she had no idea what it was like to be down on your luck with nowhere to go and nothing to eat. But that would have meant explaining who I really was…

I know I should have stuck up for Mum and Dad. I’d been pretty scrappy as a kid and our family had always fought for one another.’

Professor Fuchs was one of her favourite teachers at college. She taught political science. (If politics was a science it could explain the rise of the moron’s moron and what the cure was for a Trump Presidency, her mum accused Jeannette of become a Republican, but that’s an aside).

Fuchs asked a question in class that had particular resonance with Jeannette. Her dad was a genius that could fix anything and do anything. The Glass Castle in the title referred to his believe that was the house he designed they would live in when he came into some money. In the meantime he couldn’t keep a job, drank all the money they had and borrowed more. Her mum had visions of being an artist. She worked hard following her dream, and ignored little things like her children having nothing to eat and little to wear. The bigger picture was always beyond her.

‘I was on fire.’

First lines are so important. It asks questions, who are you? What are you? The family live in a trailer park in Arizona. Jeannette is cooking hot dogs, prodding them with a fork. She’s three-years old and has pushed a chair up against the stove. Her mum taught them not to whine and complain. She’s getting on with it. Juju, their black mutt, watches her, hoping for a share. Her dress is pink and she loves the way it makes her feel. Made of nylon, it sticks out like a tutu. As her dress went on fire, she didn’t know what to do. She’d never been on fire before and felt the heat climbing up her body.

Mom and Dad and Lori her older sister, Brian her young brother and baby of the family, Maureen, live in the ‘Desert’ then they don’t.

Dad came home in the middle of the night a few months later and roused them. They’d fifteen minutes to pick up what they needed. They were on the move again. An odyssey like that of the Joad’s. They pass through Oklahoma in their broken-down car. Mom laughs, they must have come down in the world, even the Okies are laughing at them.

Battle Mountain. Welch was where they dug coal out of the ground and where John F.Kennedy did a tour to show the foodstamps wasn’t a socialist plot. Mom and Dad prided themselves on never taking Welfare. Instead, they starved. They were the skinniest kids at school. Dad’s mum had paedophilic tendencies and tried to feel up Brian. And their Uncle tried to feel Jeannette up. It was just one of those things.  Everybody fought with each other in Welch, but the Walls family repelled all on comers including Child Protection. They were fine. Just fine. And when Dad was sober, they were mostly fine, but in Welch he was never sober. It was a hard-drinking town. Jeannette’s dream was to leave for somewhere else, something else, and that place was New York. From Battle Mountain to Barnard. She’d made it. They’d made it out.

Professor Fuchs could not see that child that Jeannette shows the reader in this novel. Fuch’s asked if homelessness and drug abuse was the result of a misguided entitlement programme.  

Or was it cuts to such programmes and lack of economic opportunity?

Jeannette’s answer: ‘That sometimes people get the life they want’.  

Fuchs had read about poverty. Jeannette lived it. Here it is in black and white (or in colour if you watch the picture).

Saint Maud (2019) written and directed by Rose Glass.

‘You are the loneliest girl I’ve ever met,’ Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) tells (Saint) Maud (Morfydd Clark).

Amanda is on end-of-life care at her beach home in run down Scarborough. Maud is her live-in nurse. She takes care of her. A servant in the old fashioned sense in that she cooks her meals, feeds her, puts her to bed and gets her up in the morning. Administers (from the word minister) her medication. Maud is a trained nurse, an angel, but she’s agency. She lives in a grotty bedsit in the town. Something unspecified happened in her last job, and that kind of put Maud off the rails.

She talks to God, and with voice-over we hear her thoughts and what she is saying. Amanda’s had a life. She used to be a world-renowned dancer. But that life is gone, although she’s not yet dead. A thread of existence. She calls Maud, ‘her saviour’ as they prop each other up and gives her an artistic book as recognition of their ambiguous relationship.

Maud’s clinging onto existence too. And she takes that ironical statement literally. For example, she tries to stop Amanda’s friend, lover and prostitute Carol (Lily Fraser) from visiting her. She tries to warn Carol off, and thinks she’s succeeded. But she also sneaks a look at them flirting and making love. A voyeuristic element with homoerotic undertones.

But everything about Maud is shutting down as her belief in God grows, she mortifies her flesh be cutting herself and putting spikes into the shoes she walks on. She makes an altar of her lonely life and her mission to save Amanda, becomes a reason for being.

Rose Glass’s claustrophobic script raises the ante and the denouement is both a relief and burden. Wonderful storytelling, it allows the viewer into the Saintly, or mentally deranged, world of the outcasts in our throwaway society.  

Dylan Thomas on  His Birthday

Dark is a way and light is a place,

Heaven that never was

Nor will be ever is always true.

Sylvia Browne (2008) written with Lindsay Harrison, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World.

The publication date is important here, 2008. Let’s say Sylvia Browne wrote the book in 2007. That gives us a baseline to work out how accurate her prophesies are in May 2022.

Confirmation bias tends to confirm what we already know, or think we know. Sylvia Browne cannot see a human race beyond the end of this century. With global warming that seems possible, if not probable.

‘…we’ve got a planet that’s slowly warmed to the point of cataclysmic flooding and violent weather events because of extreme levels of greenhouse gases. Rather than preserving our global forests we’re clearing them to create toilet paper…Tragically, we’ve become a cancer here, sending species after species into extinction and apparently forgetting that we as humans are every bit as vulnerable to extinction as any other species on Earth.’

One swallow does not a summer make. But you do not need to follow Postcards from the Anthropocene Age to know we’re on the same page. Our weather is switching on and off and once-in-a-lifetime events are common and becoming more probable. The lungs of our planet, and creator of our weather patterns, the Arctic is gone. A NASA study in 2019 verified that it had become a net emitter of greenhouse gases in the hottest recorded month in the history of our planet. Disasters are fine, as long as they are somewhere else. What Mystic Meg and NASA scientists is the same thing. We’re all connected.  When nothing matters, everything changes.

I’d put a tick beside Browne’s name for her prediction about the coronavirus outbreak.

‘In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatment.’

A cross against her name for

‘By 2013 we’re going to see an amazing development in the treatment of mental illness.’

Mental health problems have grown exponentially, especially, among the young. No cure involving ‘electromagnetic impulses’ as she believed. Her model is based on there is something lacking in the individual that a magic wand of technology can fix. Rather that societal pressures that also need a magic wand, but of a different sort that treats richness as an economic illness that  poisons politics and pollutes the wider ecosystem and stunts individual growth of the disadvantaged poor.  

‘We will have a very substantial drop in the crime rate’. She attributes this to satellite spy technology that monitors everyone. And the collection of a global database and an upgrade in forensic science that means there can be no secrets. We said much the same thing in the nineteen century with fingerprinting and in the twentieth century by DNA analysis. Twenty-first century fingerprinting will be of our eye iris.  Crimes such as femicide grow year on year, but are not picked up. Classified as crimes of passion. No eye in the sky can stop what goes on in our homes. And hard-core criminals aren’t stupid. They adapt new technologies and don’t think they’ll get caught as crime moves online.

‘The year 2020 will mark the end of the US Presidency.’ She might have a point there, with the Trump farrago and storming of Congress from the moron’s moron foot soldiers. The moron’s moron fulfils all her elements of a doomsday cult leader. Supported by the church vote, he too could be described as antichrist.

‘Any prophet/messiah who claims to be infallible is a liar.

Any prophet/messiah who claims that all those who criticise him or disagree with him are evil and doomed to God’s eternal punishment are a liar.

Any prophet/messiah who insists that no one cares about you or understand you as much as they do is a liar.

Any prophet/messiah who believes he or she is exempt from the laws of God and society and is entitled to divine immunity from consequences is a liar.

Any prophet/messiah whose power is based on fear, abuse and threats is a liar.    

The moron’s moron’s Presidency was based on fear, abuse and threat. The question that remains is is he too stupid to be the antichrist? But his ignorance and bullying didn’t end with him leaving office.

Browne therefore gets it totally wrong with her prophecy that the Presidency would end and the President would die in office of a heart attack (although Joe Biden might, soon). As she did with the idea Republicans would grow a backbone and gain some kind of moral legitimacy. The opposite has happened. For example, Browne’s belief in a  public health system and tax bonuses for those with careers in the arts, education…’ based on a ‘flat-rate’ tax is just hoo-ha. Thatcher introduced it here in Scotland, it was called the poll tax. A morally and economically bankrupt idea. You don’t need to be a prophet to tell which way a regressive taxation system works, but it helps if you’re an economist like Thomas Piketty.

‘Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored…The long-term effects of the reorganised government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of accountability and public trust, and state government will follow no later than 2024…’  

 Everyone’s favourite prophet, Nostradamus, predicted the world would end around AD 3797, but his quatrains were of the time and of the event. For example,

The young lion will overcome the older one.

On the field of combat in single battle.

He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage.

Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

Nostradamus had to be careful what he said or wrote, because he could have been burned as a heretic and witch. Ambiguity was his friend. Context is everything. But Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, who ruled after a lance killed the king, during a jousting tournament, after passing through the ‘golden’ face mask of his helmet and piercing his eye, protected Nostradamus. The prophet predicted his own death with unerring accuracy.

In the year 1999 and seven months

The Great King of Terror will come from the sky.

He will bring back Genghis Khan  

Before and after War rules happily.

I have no idea what that means, but the reference to Genghis Khan could be a reference to Putin as the third antichrist, or maybe not. We see with our beliefs. Narcissistic sociopaths seems to be in the job description for the leaders of of doomsday cults. She lists some, such as Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, Heaven’s Gate; Jim Jones and the People’s Temple; David Koresh and The Branch Davidians; Sun Myung Moon and The Unification Church; Jeffrey Lundgren and the Reorganised Church of Latter Day Saints; Charles Manson and The Family. You could add L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology to that list. But then it gets a bit hard to stop. Donald J.Trump. Vladimir Putin. What about religions were someone says God spoke to them from a burning bush? Or was born to a Virgin, or went into a cave and came out with the word of god on his tongue, waiting to be transcribed? I quite like the story of Buddha under the Bodhi tree. But that’s an aside.

Biblical eschatology used to be like crosswords. Everybody was doing biblical calculus, trying to work out end of days. Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, when he wasn’t working on how gravity behaves or light bends, drawing on biblical sources, concluded he world would end in 2060. I’ll be about 100 by then. Maybe I’m the antichrist.

Checklist:   I’ll be dead. [tick] or worse have dementia. But Browne claimed it would be cured by now.

Heaven in these kinds of books always ends up sounding like a shopping centre you don’t want to go to, but end up there anyway.

‘As long as Earth exists, our Other side will exist too.’

Aye, read on. Free download of this book before the world ends.

James Robertson (2016) To Be Continued.

There’s a quote from some writer, and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember her name (you might). It goes something like this. ‘Tick, Tick, Boom… That what it is to be a writer. You just keep throwing yourself against the wall and hope something sticks.’

James Robertson’s books usually stick with me. This one doesn’t. It slides down the wall. It’s probably his most autobiographical. The commentator and narrator, well, mostly, is Douglas Findhorn Elder. It’s 2014, he’s just turned fifty and attending a funeral of a colleague, well, ex-work-colleague in every way. Elder’s left his job as a reporter with an Edinburgh newspaper and he’s freelancing, trying to make a dishonest buck. His father’s in a Couldn’t Care Less Home. And his long-term girlfriend, Sonya, isn’t really his girlfriend any more. He’s offered freelance work to interview a woman turning one-hundred that used to be something, but is now largely forgotten. He’s going to ask Rosalind Isabella Munlochy (nee Striven) former MP and author what she thinks of Scottish Independence. Robertson fixates on that question. The past isn’t even past.

Robertson’s books follow a similar trajectory. Most of the action takes place in the Highlands in some neglected castle or croft (sometimes both). Here’s it’s Glentarager House. Rosalind Munlochy has a granddaughter, Coppelia ‘Poppy’ who seduces Douglas Elder. Or her alter ego seduces him, because sometimes she’s somebody else. Then there’s Corryvaken, the faithful servant of Rosalind and Poppy, but also a wandering bard and owner of the rundown hotel. Three different people who he is unaware of sharing his body. A fourth ego, Ed, is added to tie up the loose end of Douglas’s ex-girlfriend and first-love and fate being fated.

Robertson’s trademark unreliable narrator flings up, in no particular order, a talking and walking devil, or saint, or indeed sometimes the booze talking. It’s not as bad as it sounds and often works. Here it’s a talking toad, Murdo. This might just have been the step I wasn’t looking for and stumbled over.

If this had been the first of Robertson’s books I’d picked up, odds on I wouldn’t have finished it and wouldn’t have picked up any of his other books, which would have been a shame. We talk about an author’s conceit when writing books. To Be Continued is far too smug for my liking and I hope it isn’t continued.         

Being Gail Porter, BBC Scotland, BBC iPlayer, presented by Gail Porter.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000df09/being-gail-porter

‘I’m no longer a pretty girl,’ Gail Porter says in a conversation she’s having with an old friend, but she’s also speaking to the viewer.

We judge so much by appearance. And she’s right. She’s no longer young and she’s no longer pretty. Alopecia has robbed her of her trademark blonde hair. In 1999, she was one of the most well-known presenters on telly. Her naked image was projected onto the Houses of Parliament. FHM magazine sold out. She remembers herself being one of the top ten hotties, but with her usual candour notes that she didn’t win. She wasn’t voted number one. Sometimes when you scratch the surface, you get more surface.

But Gail Porter is no longer a pretty mess, she’s just trying to get by. We go back to her roots, off Portobello in Edinburgh. An idyllic upbringing, sorta. Right on the beach, but mum and dad were always fighting. She was a pretty girl and got work as a children’s presenter. Anorexia was her fall-back positon. But watching these clips a different kind of girl emerges, vibrant and funny and a natural in front of the camera. She was the real deal.

Moving to London was a natural stepping stone. Everybody loved her. She even got to present Top of the Pops. That brought her a boyfriend, the lead singer of Hipsway, and a much loved child. But she suffered from post-natal depression—and depression in general—she was sectioned in 2014. Mental Health patients are hiding away at the back of the hospital she was admitted to in London.  And she admitted to being homeless and sleeping on a park bench.

The tabloids fed on her fall from fame. Her alopecia and drunkness. She also cut herself. Serious self-harm. Make-up girls were familiar with these wounds and worked out how best to hide them when she had work presenting. When the phone stopped ringing. When she had no work and no home. There’s no way out. A self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. But here’s the thing, she’s no longer pretty, but Gail Porter is lovely. She’s self-depreciating and honest. That little girl that never quite grew up has retained her childlike wonder. The media sucked her in and spat her out. But Gail Porter is still Gail Porter. I wish her all kinds of well.  

Fergal Keane: Living with PTSD, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, presenter Fergal Keane, Director Mike Connolly.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0017795/fergal-keane-living-with-ptsd

There’s a contradiction Fergal Keane suffers from Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD) but he’s in Ukraine. He’s on the frontline. He’s been there before. Cutting his teeth in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He’s been in South Africa and Rwanda.

The British journalist, Linda Melvern (2000) A People Betrayed, outlines the role of the West, NATO, and the international community, which stepped aside in 1994 and Rwanda’s genocide with over a million dead. She outlines here reports of victims from a peace-keeping mission:

‘They left the Bangladeshi crew with the Armoured Personnel Carrier, and walked into the church gardens. It was there they found the bodies. Whole families had been killed with their children, hacked by machetes. There were terrible wounds to the genitalia. Some people were not dead. There was a three-month-old baby, the mother raped and the baby killed with a terrible wound. There were children, some with their legs and feet cut off, and their throats cut. Most of the victims bled to death.’

Keane witnessed this genocide. We saw footage of children in the back of a truck fleeing and being stopped at checkpoints by murderers with machetes. They were waved on. The cameras and Keane’s presence probably saved them. He sought a reunion with a child refugee from that convey in London.  He should have perhaps asked her what she thinks of Boris Johnson’s latest publicity stunt—away from Ukrainian war washing of his reputation—of sending refugees to Rwanda.    

Keane admits booze helped him over the next hill and the hill after that. He had nightmares of being trapped under bodies. His body too was shot with anxiety; yet, the next high of war work was addictive as any drug. That was his job. That was who he was. Working for the BBC was a blessing and a curse. He was suicidal, but he was treated with dignity and courtesy. All of the middle-class job virtues we wish poor people were allowed. He met with his therapist in The Priory. Her treatment was unconventional and involved mimicking deep-sleep patterns by rubbing and tapping his hand. But then too so was Rivers in Pat Barker’s first-world-war trilogy (The Ghost Road). His therapist’s treatment worked for Keane, but he could never be cured, and only hope was to stay sober and grounded.

There was an interesting aside about stress patterns being inherited, from generation to generation. His grandmother taking to the bed as the Black and Tans committed murder in the name of preserving law and order.  Fergal Keane as a special correspondent was there when duty called. He’s put himself back in the line. For many others with PTSD the choices are narrower. And there are no easy answers that don’t involve investing more money in health care.

https://odonnellgrunting.wordpress.com/2019/12/26/fergal-keane-2005-all-of-these-people/

The Tender Bar (2021) Amazon, screenplay by William Monahan based on a memoir by J.H.Moehringer (J.R.Moehringer) and directed by George Clooney.

https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0LKB4TVGOKF41EW4RDDQFCHTNB

A lot of big hitters in this movie. I wasn’t sure about it, but I gave it five minutes and watched to the end. It jumps between 1973 and 1986. Daniel Raneri (with very long eyelashes) plays J.R. Maguire, a kid returning to his grandad’s house in Long Island. Tye Sheridan plays an older J.R.

His mum, Dorothy Maguire (Lily Rabe) has a mattress attached to the roof of their car and all her worldly belongings. She’s going home, but carries with her a sense of failure. Her marriage to ‘The Voice’ (Max Martini) has broken down and he refuses to pay child support. Grandad (Christopher Lloyd) is grumpy and put out, his house is already filled to overflowing with his children and grandchildren. J.R’s mum is upset, but the young J.R. admits to love living in grandad’s house. It’s full of fun, mostly, in the figure of his Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck).

Uncle Charlie Maguire gives him the sit-down talk most fathers baulk at. He tells him he should always have a car and a job and a girlfriend—and you never hit a woman—and a stash in your wallet where you put a little something away in case of emergencies. Uncle Charlie knows about these things, he runs a bar, The Dickens. Anyone that has watched Cheers will know that kind of bar, filled with interesting characters that offer monosyllabic advice that you could take or leave and where everybody is your friend.

Uncle Charlie also tells J.R. he’s been watching him, and he’ll never be much good at baseball or sport, in general. Perhaps he should think of being something else when he grows up. He asks if he has any ideas. At that age, my ideal job was being a bin man or playing for Celtic. People were always telling me I was shit at sport, but I never listened. I tried to prove them wrong until my knees got arthritic. J.R. has a singular vision. He wants to be a writer.

J.R. begins straight away. Uncle Charlie has a look at his work and tells him he has got talent. But he needs to read. Uncle Charlie has a cupboard filled with a stash of books for him to dig into. J.R. also needs to get lucky.  Not the kind of geek luck that got him into college at Harvard, or even the job at The New York Times. Writers are supernatural being.

There’s a story-book romance with Sidney (Brianna Middleton). She continually dumps him. And there’s a kind of in-joke that fiction sells, but there’s a market for memoirs. And here we all are with J.R.Moehringer becoming an international bestselling author, with a film being made of his words.

For those of us that write (millions of book published, ironically, on Amazon every year) it would be nice to bask in this nostalgic afterglow of God-given success. Hopefully, my next novel, Beast, sells more than ten copies. Enough to buy a can of Coke. I’m a fan of fellow American writer, John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and he tells us two truths that make more sense to any aspiring writer:

 ‘You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.’

Most importantly of all:

‘The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.’

I watched the film. Now I’m going to do things in the wrong order (it should always be book first) and read the book, The Tender Bar (2005). Read on.

Celtic 6—0 Motherwell

Celtic win the double. Kyogo Furuhashi scores a first-half double as does our Greek striker, Giorgos Giakoumakis, but in the second-half. David Turnbull and Jota add to a six-goal rout. But all eyes were on Tom Rogic and Nir Bitton. They’ve decided to move on. But there was none of the baggage that left us with a squad full of outcasts who didn’t want to play for the club at the beginning of the season. We wish them well, but the Wizard of Oz, in particular, will be a big miss. But we’ve got Matt O’Riley to step in. We’ve got depth and strength we didn’t have at the start of the season—and we’ve got a £40 million Champions League windfall. We’ll be playing with the big boys next season—thanks to Ange—and I absolutely love it.

A long summer of recuperation and recruitment. No more qualifying rounds. Just straight into defending our tenth title in eleven years and straight into the Champions League. Bigger and better. We’re going to take some batterings, but we’ll get better. Let’s make it two-in-a-row under Ange and back up to the ten. Let’s build a dynasty. We all know that managers have a shelf life that’s shortening year on year. Look at Brendan Rodgers. He wanted out. And if he’d done the honourable thing—like Rogic and Bitton—and waited until the end of the season most of us (well me) wouldn’t have begrudged him his move. History now.

It was good to see the Scottish young player of the year, David Turnbull, back in the team and scoring. He’s got a habit of scoring against his old club and did so again, in between Kyogo’s double. Tom Rogic almost had the goal we all wanted him to score, but hit the post.

Kyogo’s double were wonderfully inventive. The first swivelling and somehow getting a shot away through a ruck of players and in off the post, in the twenty-first minute. His second, just before half-time was wonderful. He took a chipped pass from Tony Ralston, which came over the top of the Motherwell defence, and hit it first time into the net.

Giakoumakis came on a substitute, he helps create a debate whether Kyogo is better, whether he should be starting by continually scoring goals. One of them was his trademark overhead kick.

But Jota had already put us four up on fifty-nine minutes. He’s been a bit cagey about whether he’s staying or going. But the on-loan Portuguese player has scored and created opportunities all season. His last-minute goal at Pittodrie got us all three points and helped create a run of games in which we didn’t lose. I’d like to see him stay. But it’s really up to him. We just keep going as the post-match printed T-shirts said (smell the glove, remember that one?)

Celtic romped it against Motherwell, playing incisive one-touch football. Callum McGregor picked up the trophy. And I think this is his best season in a Celtic jersey. He helped carry the team. At the start of the season we were in a vicious cycle. Celtic are in a virtuous circle now, when everything that can go right does and the money flows in. In November of last year I was talking about a dog’s chance in the league. Comparisons have been made with Wim Jensen’s minor miracle and double-winning team. Ange’s team might just have topped that. He’s brought in players and they’ve made a difference. A real team effort.

And no, we don’t wish our Glasgow rivals all the best in their cup finals. We might have been turning Japanese this year, but we’re turning Germanese midweek and Edinburghese on Saturday. Small minded and bigoted. All the words you’d associate with your typical Orange Order. Just holding up a mirror.        

Dundee United 1—1 Celtic.

The league won. Tidying up time and with two games to give some lads a runabout. James Forrest, for example, and Liel Abada. Kyogo on the bench, gets a few minutes of injury time. Giakoumakis comes in. The Greek strike got his goal at the end of the Hearts game to keep his strike rate up—to a very impressive level—and scored again to officially win the title. Great leap from Giakoumakis top power home the header, but the donkeywork was done by Tony Ralston hanging the ball in the air from out in the touchline.

Tony Ralston is a bit like Anton Rogan used to be. He gives his all, but I’m thinking we need better. He was wasteful with the ball in the first half in which Dundee United had one shot on goal. Archie Meekison with fast feet finding space just outside the box and getting a shot away. But Ralston set up a goal and with a tackle saved an almost second Dundee United winner.

We had three-quarters of possession, but didn’t look that deadly. Hatate, for example, skying two half-decent chances.  It was looking like one of those pre-season knockabouts in the first-half.

David Turnbull drops out of the team and Hatate comes back in.  The ever impressive O’Riley keeps his place and Rogic out of the team. We know they’ll all come on for a runabout. After sixty minutes, and the opening goal, Ange brings new legs on. It’s worked fine in the past. Jota come on for James Forrest.

The game opened up after Celtic scored and we looked for a second goal to clinch it. But we almost conceded immediately. Rory MacLeod hit the post. Nicky Clark bundles the ball into the net only for the linesman to flag offside. A close call.

Forrest was tidy, but never a threat. Jota with his first touch, a nutmeg and waltz into the box, with a snapshot forced Benji Siegrist into a save at his near post. Potential candidate for goal of the season if it had went in.

Abada got injured and was taken off to be replaced by Daizen Maeda. Another injection of pace. But it’s substitute Charlie Mulgrew that helps set up the United equaliser. His first touch was a free kick, which he hit into Joe Hart’s arms. But later he simply lays the ball off, a simple pass. Dylan Levitt (on loan from Manchester United) takes the shot on from over 25-yards. He beats Joe Hart with a bit of a wonder goal and with ten minutes to go it’s a nervous finish.

A Tony Watt header has Joe Hart flapping. Jota makes space inside the United box but hits the side-netting. Maeda creates space for himself inside the box, but his finish is well over the bar. Celtic get a corner in the last minute of extra time. But we play the ball back the way, go back the way, in a season where we have been going forward.

Building the team, player by player. A Double in his first season, a minor miracle I prayed for, but just couldn’t see happening.  Ange could:

‘It’s been a hell of a season. Our starting point was a fair way back and the way this group of players and staff has risen to the challenge – I couldn’t be more proud.

It’s fairly overwhelming. It’s taken every ounce of me to get us where we are and when you get to the finish line, you just want to collapse.

We’ve been focused all season, not getting distracted by anything. The players were really good at dealing with what was in front of them – and that’s not easy to do.’

Celtic 4—1 Hearts.

Manager of the year. Player of the year. Young player of the year. One change from the team that drew with Rangers (and we don’t need to ask if we wish our Glasgow rivals well in Seville, but we do wish our rivals, Hearts, all the best in their final). Best for Hearts today, Craig Gordon which tells its own story.

 Our generosity extended to giving them the opening goal in three minutes. A shy, a Boyce touch and Ellis Simms lashed it into the corner of the net.

David Turnbull in for Hatate. The Japanese midfielder has looked jaded in recent games. And it wasn’t that long ago that the Scottish young player of the year was a first pick for Celtic. His first start since December. He looked sharp and had our first chance to equalise, chesting the ball down and shooting from just inside the box, but an easy enough save from Craig Gordon.

 Competition for places has made us stronger. Matt O’Riley starts ahead of Rogic. But we all know the Australian will come on. Just as we know that Giakomoukis will come on for Kyogo. Abada, perhaps even Forrest or Bitton, will get a run out. It was our on loan Portuguese winger who created both goals in the first-half.

Half-hour in and he played a ball for Kyogo, who was coming back from an offside position. Jota picked it up himself and squared the ball to Daizen Maeda. His shot went between Gordon’s legs.

Seven minutes later Kyogo got his goal. O’Riley out wide created space and whipped in a cross. Jota’s headed cut back and Kyogo’s header was over the line, despite Gordon palming it out. We were in front for the first time and dominating possession. McGregor, in particular, looked to be everywhere.

Kyogo had an earlier chance saved and O’Riley had a header easily saved by Gordon. There might even have been a penalty, just on half-time with Taylor going down in the box after a flailing arm from Ginnelly. But the Japanese duo helped put us ahead after a strong Heart’s opening.  

Matt O’Riley gets my vote for man of the match. At the start of the second-half he got away from Moore in the box, but rather than shoot he squared the ball and it was cut out, but that apart, flawless.

Gordon almost scored an own goal. Palming a ball off Kingsley from a Maeda cross. Then O’Riley found some space in the box, hit it with his left foot which was blocked, and hit the inside of the post, with the rebounded right-footed shot.

Hatate, Abada and Giakoumakis come on for Turnbull, Maeda and Kyogo.

Hearts began to dominate possession and had several crossed and corners. O’Riley’s size and strength allowed him to defend and clear from Boyce and other attackers. When it was getting a bit nervy, O’Riley effectively finished the game for us. With around 15 minutes of the 90 remaining, he picked up the ball at the back post and guided a shot into the corner of the net—Champions.

O’Riley found space from a Greg Taylor cross to the back post to almost grab a second and a third goal for Celtic. Gordon saved. Tom Rogic came on for O’Riley.

Jota, who was also man of the match (since we’re Champions, I can nominate two man of the matches), thought he’d scored, taking the ball through and dinking it past Gordon. He went away to celebrate, but realised he was offside. He was replaced for a James Forrest cameo. He set up, fellow substitute, Hatate who had a couple of near misses from the edge of the box.  Forrest also had a couple of strikes on goal, before helping set up our poacher supreme, Giakoumakis. He got the goal he craved on the 90^th minute. We got the victory we deserved. Celtic do the huddle after a 25 point swing from last season and a poor opening spell. Celtic do the double. Ange Postecoglou takes us to where we want to be. Guarantees us £40 million Champions League money. Alleluia.   

Abada had time for another effort on goal, but missed. He picked up an injury in the dying seconds.