Author: odonnelljack52

No Helicopter Sunday—The Spurs’ dilemma.

Brendan Rodgers said he won’t watch Rangers playing at home to Dundee. Neither will I. Both of us will check the score later. It’ll be interesting to see how many season-book holders turn out on a dreich night with nothing to play for. We’ll watch Spurs take on Manchester City.

City have had a shit season by their standards. No Champions League. Despite outplaying Real Madrid, they were knocked out by their rivals. Celtic can only win the league for the fourth season on the bounce by winning their next two matches. They’ve got an FA Cup Final to finish the season. Like Celtic it’s against their rivals and they’ve favourites to also win the consolation prize. The League Championship is the big one.

Ange Postecoglous’s Spurs team led the League at Christmas. They lost four games before their latest home win. They’ve no real chance of finishing fourth and obtaining a Champions League spot. Aston Villa have got that pretty much nailed down. We here all the usual nonsense about playing on until it’s mathematically impossible. The reality is Spurs last two games, like Rangers in the Scottish League, are unfriendlies. Meaningless fixtures they are obliged to complete.

Arsenal fans for once want Spurs to win. In Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, we sneer at other teams having a rivalry that is not written in blood. Ally McCoist said he’d want his son to miss a penalty if he was playing for Celtic against Rangers. I’m reminded of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of when Dixie Deans signed for Celtic his brother, a staunch Rangers man who drove a bin lorry, emptied the contents in his front garden. Which was fair enough. But he called for a second load.

Could you imagine the circumstances when you’d want Rangers to win? The media reminds us of Europa’s and Champions League coefficients and how they’ll affect Scottish football. Fuck them, I say. I want Rangers to lose, regardless.

I’ve got a drinking buddy, Archie. He’s one of the many that got sucked into the Ponzi scheme and lost thousands of pounds investing in Rangers after Chairman David Murray sold the club for £1. Overpriced, I thought. But, hey, I’d have paid a quid for it. Archie tells me when Celtic are playing in Europe, he wants us to win. He’s a Scottish fitba fan.

Nah, I could never say that about Rangers. I was at the game at Love Street when Celtic had to win by five goals and Hearts had to lose. Which they duly did to Dundee. Thank you, substitute Albert Kidd.

Could I imagine a scenario where instead of Dundee, Hearts were playing Rangers and for us to win the league, Rangers had to win, as Dundee did, all those years ago?  

It would be tough. Sophie’s Choice, which kid do you want to save? I can’t find it in my heart to say I’d want Rangers to win. But hey, Rangers always beat Hearts anyway. I couldn’t wish it, but if it happened, it happened.

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Teresa Henderson 27th September 1953—8th May 2024.

Recently, I said to Teresa that I had to keep correcting myself. It was no longer Jimmy and Teresa—Jimmy had died at the end of June 2023—it was just Teresa.

A flicker of a smile, but she was quick to correct me. ‘It’ll always be Jimmy and Teresa,’ she said. ‘Always.’

I guess it is again. She’s buoyed herself up during his long illness. In and out of the chemists. Up and down Singers Road carrying messages. She’d carried him to the end. With nothing to carry, she dropped.

Teresa was taken into the hospital nine days ago. A variety of ailments. The official diagnosis cannot say she bled sadness. It can list pneumonia as one of the contributory factors to her death. A good death, I’d guess.

His life was her life. Teresa was born into the Elizabethan era in Rottenrow. Millions across the Commonwealth listened to the Coronation Ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster on the radio hoping she wouldn’t drop the crown. Some even nipped out to watch on the new-fangled telly in showrooms where a technician could show you how to turn the set on and off and where to insert a shilling for a rental fee.

Teresa married Jimmy in a Glasgow registry office. There were souvenir pull-outs. Fireworks, the Household Calvary, and a twenty-one gun salute. But neither Jimmy nor Teresa were Royalists. Teresa was a peace-loving Libra. Likeable and charming, she wouldn’t be one to hold a grudge about the Jubilee Celebrations trying to upstage them. When they went on a camping holiday, got lost and spent all their cash, she could find common ground and new friends. They could bundle up and sleep anywhere.

He went to a Proddy school in Drumchapel. She went to a Catholic school in Knightswood, which is a grammar school in comparison. She worked part time at a pub. Neutral ground. Jimmy had been a sailor. Port to port. Around the world. He’d even been in Woodstock and The Summer of Love. But that was America in the sixties for you. He’d the long hair and the good jacket and the patter. There wasn’t any free love in Glasgow in the early seventies. Teresa wiped him out with a smile. If there was going to be any loving, he’d have to work harder for it than a sighting of Nessie.

After they married, they moved to a tenement in Partick. That was as close to Woodstock as Teresa got. There was a pub on every corner. There didn’t even have to be a corner. She was working secretarial. Jimmy had plenty of jobs. And a flat cost less than five grand. It might not have had a bath or shower, but they could wash in the sink like everybody else. Pubs shut at 11ish. Jimmy and Teresa’s door was always open. Jimmy even owned a guitar and sang too much to their neighbours’ liking.  

Jimmy talked about selling their bungalow. Cashing it in and going back to the good-old days. Over thirty-five years before becoming shackled by property. Teresa went up and down the road. Sometime I picked her up and dropped her at the station. She worked a few days, office work, in Drumchapel until she too, officially retired.   

 I’d here the latest gossip. Jimmy told us a story year ago, when we drunk in The Drop Inn. He had panicked one morning, when he was sure Teresa left him. She’d run away with Jaz Cunningham. He was the hardest man in Dalmuir. He’d been back to their house the night before after the pub with a few others. Jaz was away. Teresa was away. Jimmy would need to get her back. In a fair fight, Jaz would win. In an unfair fight, Jaz would also win. Jimmy would need a leveller. He’d need a gun. But the only person he knew he’d get a gun off was Jaz. So he did the only thing a man could do. He went back to sleep. She came back from the shops.  

Teresa never left him. In sickness and in health. Forsaking all others. Forsaking herself. She comforted and honoured him with her presence. When he was gone, as always, the better part of her followed. Unto death do they depart. Teresa believed in Jimmy. Jimmy believed in Teresa. A handful of ash separates them now. A holy estate complete. RIP.      

Teresa’s funeral is on Wednesday, 22nd May 3.30pm. Crematorium.

Celtic 2—1 Rangers

Celtic—all but—confirm their twelfth title in thirteen years with two first-half goals from man of the match, Matt O’Riley and an own-goal from John Lundstram (my man of the match) enough to give us victory. Cyriel Dessers got a consolation goal just before half-time.

Philippe Clement’s men did not do enough to grab a ‘moral victory’. Rangers have lost three to Celtic and drawn one. Their game plan yesterday was to sit in—like the other Scottish, second-tier teams—and hit and hope. But it could have been gone in thirty seconds with a ball flashed across the Rangers’ box almost ending up in the net.

John Lunstram did manage to score for Celtic’s second goal. Carter-Vickers had played an exquisite ball up and over to the left wing. Daizen Maeda was (again) ahead of Tavernier and going towards the touchline. Lunstrum lunged at his cut back and knocked it into the net. Maeda was booked for his celebrations.

Lunstrum was also booked for his tackle in Alistair Johnston just before half-time. Kenny Miller was the only Rangers celebrity that claimed it should have stayed a yellow. Even serial apologist Kris Boyd marked it out as red. It was the kind of tackle Tam Forsyth routinely administered to Celtic forwards in the early seventies. A slide-tackle that took the man and none of the ball. A leg-breaker, in other words. Clement’s reference to it wasn’t favourable, either. He hinted it had changed the game.

In a way, he was right and wrong. Fabio Silva had almost opened the scoring with a cross-cum shot. He also went down for a penalty, nipping in front of Johnston and falling down in the six-yard box. He’d a free header and would surely have scored had he stood up and been braver. Desser’s goal was unexpected as it was expected in ways we’ve come to expect in recent weeks and over this season. Ball from Silva to the back post, on the left-hand side. Sterling beats Taylor. Scales and Carter-Vickers posted missing as he headed it back across goal. Joe Hart watches him head it into the net.

It was a Rangers’ goal that silenced the 60 000 crowd. At 2—0 the game looked finished. O’Riley had three shots and a free kick that was just past the post. McGregor had two or three shots at goal which tested Jack Butland. Kyogo did what he does. He’d popped up outside the six-yard box and his instinctive shot was just too close to Jack Butland. In other words, Celtic were dominating. For every chance Rangers created, Celtic had three or more. But they were still in the game with Celtic only having a one-goal lead.

With Lunstrum off, the second-half pattern and was magnified. Rangers looked buried. Mahomad Diomonde clattered into O’Riley and gave away a penalty. Another pattern emerged. Celtic’s penalty misses. Powder-puff O’Riley penalty added his name to a roster of players that have missed from the spot this season that includes the captain and goalkeeper.

I don’t want to use words like that spurned Rangers on. Kyogo came off, and that allowed Idah to miss two sitters. James Forrest came off. This was one of the big calls Rodgers got right. Kuhn looks an empty jersey and Forrest has been on fire. It looked a no-brainer, but I expected the German to start. But he did almost score. Jinking into the box and taking too many touches and getting his shot blocked.

Maeda. We love Maeda. If he’d any skill he’d be dangerous and worth tens of millions. He scored two offside goals, but he stayed on the pitch and was the right call.

Brendan Rodgers got a bit of payback with the league done. Punters like me that had called him Judas could eat our words. This was the strongest Celtic team he fielded this season. Most of the punters would have picked the same team. Far superior to anything the blue-hoards could offer. We glory in victory. Ranger got forward in the final minutes. The usual pantomime of Jack Butland coming up for a corner. We did see it out in a game that should have been over. If O’Riley’s penalty went in, I’d guess we’d have hit five or six. We flapped a bit in the end, when we should have strolled it. Rangers got what they deserved—defeat.

We won the league because we were better. But we want better than we have. All of last year’s signings can go now. We know O’Riley is going. We need to replace him. We need a new goalie. Scales is a stop-gap. We’re looking at the problem left-back area where we lost so many goals. I’m delighted we won the league. It’s the biggie. Pity about the qualifying round to Champion League riches. That’s always fifty-fifty.

I think Rangers will win the Scottish Cup. Not because they’re better, because they’re clearly not. Just a gut instinct. That will change the narrative for next year and leave Clement and the Rangers’ denizens baying for new blood.  I hope I’m wrong, of course. I wouldn’t want Rangers to win even a game of tiddlywinks. If we win, they’ll still be baying for blood, but Clement will find himself hanging by a thread. Brendan Rodgers can get on his soapbox and castigate us unbelievers again. I’ll take that on the chin any time. We can make a pretty poor season into something better. Nice to see the King, Henrik at the game.       

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Real Madrid—serial winners—Ancelloti-time.

Celtic (my team) played Real Madrid in the Champion League, November 2022. They beat us 2—1 at Parkhead. We should have been well ahead at half-time. Missed chances. Punished and comprehensively beaten. Carlo Ancelloti said all the usual things about the fans and the stadium. Real Madrid are not the best team in the competition. They haven’t been for a few years. That would be last year’s winners Manchester City. Madrid edged them out on penalties. That late, late goal again, doing it for City. Two years ago City looked to get past Madrid. In a team filled with superstars, they just had to see it out in the Santiago Bernabeu. Two late goals, City out.

I’d watched bits of the PSG v Borussia Dortmund (the sixth best team in Germany). PSG hit the post and bar five times. They couldn’t score. They couldn’t get that equaliser. We’d all the usual talk of a defensive masterclass. I see it every week at Parkhead. Opposition teams sit in. Celtic simply have better players. When the diddy teams comes away with a result, my team are castigated and the opposition are lauded. Defensive masterclass as a cliché is always used. Mats Hummels made a joke about it. Ally McCoist, the commentator, was trying too hard to make something special out of it by calling him ‘The Magnet’.  

Another way of putting it is they got lucky. Teams, and managers in particular, need to be lucky.

26th May, 1999. Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona. Bayern Munich are beating Manchester United 1—0. Game over.

United had run out of ideas. Bayern were seeing it out. Substitutes, Teddy Sheringham scored in the 91st minute. Ole Gunnar Soljskaer on the 93rd minute. Dead and buried. They scored in Fergie-time, which has come to feel like Ancelloti-time.  

 Goalkeepers? Manuel Neuer sold the shirts. Simple. Bayern get the lead and they look to see the game out. Real Madrid look out—again. Neuer makes the kind of goalkeeping error that has an under-ten coach turning away in disgust. Vincius Junior’s shot was of the past-back variety.

The back-up striker, Joselu Mato, didn’t even have time to thank Neuer for dropping the ball at his feet to knock into the net, before he’d scored the winner. Bayern were gone in just over sixty seconds. Harry Kane, who went there to pick up silverware, picked up nought in his debut season.

It’s difficult to imagine the former Stoke and Newcastle striker heading to Wembley to play in the Champions League final.  Carlo Ancelotti looked to have run out of ideas as Everton manager. Going back to Real Madrid…well, that’s hardly a step down. Pep Guardiola is no longer in Spain. Barcelona are no longer the best team in the world. It’s a one-horse race. But when it comes to the Champions League, Ancelotti and Madrid have had the luck of the devil. This looks like being their year, yet again. Can Dortmund beat Madrid? No.  But they can score and they do have ‘The Magnet’. Dog’s chance? Hey Jude, Poor old Harry, it’s a dog’s life.

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Celtic 3—0 Hearts

At the business-end of the season, Kyogo comes alive. Lawrence Shankland almost scored in under a minute. The Hearts forward had a stinker. His handball late in the second-half gave Celtic a penalty, well dispatched by O’Riley into the top corner and made the game safe.

Kyogo scored in three minutes. VAR took almost as long to decide he was onside and it was a goal. The Hearts keeper opted to punch out a corner. Hattate on the edge of the box, looked to shoot, but instead opted for a lobbed cross. Kyogo nipped in front of defenders and keeper to head into the net.

Hatate, in contrast, had one of those games where he ballooned shots over the bar and gave the ball away, but he’s still one of the best in midfielders in Scotland. He literally rolls with the ball and creates pockets of space all around him

The Japanese’s forwards second goal was a thing of beauty. Hearts had shaded possession. O’Riley on the right touchline on the half hour mark played one of those precision passes you see on video screens. Kyogo’s finish was also sublime. Running onto the ball and volleying home from inside the box. Simple but effective.  

They had created chances. With Joe Hart making a wonderful fingertip saves from Devlin to keep Celtic ahead. Overall, the Celtic keeper had a great game. He wasn’t as busy as his counterpart in the Hearts’s goal, Zander Clarke who had to deal with almost twenty shots on goal and was easily Hearts’ best player. But Joe Hart had to make important saves at important times. And  he was up for it. Vargas’s  onside and offside shot was saved by Hart (if it went in, he’d have been on). And late in the game with it 2—0, Taylor went down on the touchline and Hart had to come out to block another one-on-one.  

Brendan Rodgers went for the same team that started against Dundee. No surprise that James Forrest, who dragged us out of a giant hole of our own making, keeps his place. Nicolas Kuhn must be doing something extraordinary in training because he’s shown little on the big stage. It was good to see Kuhn, for once, hooked before Forrest. Maeda coming on. Forrest was by far our most effective winger. I’m hoping it’s Forrest and Maeda next week when we’ll beat Rangers and we’ll go through all that bullshit of it being not mathematically done yet.

 Of course, we know Daizen Maeda is back. That thought fills me (and I suspect many others) with joy, because our win today and next week—and we’re Champions. Maeda always turns up against Rangers.

We’ve been reminded Hearts have beaten us twice. One was a free hit at Tynecastle. A penalty that wasn’t a penalty and a man sent off that shouldn’t have been. But we’ve moved on. Hearts other win is something we’ve grown used to. Smash and grab. Hearts actually played better today, shading possession in the first thirty minutes. This goes way back to the Postecoglou era and in recent matches against Dundee and Aberdeen, we’ve been lucky.

We were seven points ahead. Five points behind. Now we’re six ahead with the finishing line in sight. Plan A—beat Rangers and it’s done. But as Hearts showed in spells today, if the opposition get the first goal (we certainly hope not) then it’s not a given we’ll win. I’m pretty sure we will. Plan B is win out remaining matches. I’m pretty sure we’ll do that too. Then it’s fifty-fifty for the last game of the season and Cup Final.

We’ll take the league. First and last and always.  

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Dopesick (2021), BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, produced by Danny Strong based on the book by Beth Macy,  Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001ys7b/dopesick?seriesId=m001ys7c

I already knew the story of the Sackler family, having read and reviewed Patrick Reeden Keefe (2021) Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Family.

Patrick Radden Keefe (2021) Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

Greed has consequences. This eight-episode dramatisation of the American dream turned nightmare for the little people is still being played out. An on-screen calendar flickers back and forward to show how corruption works and eats into people’s lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(miniseries)

The first episode, ‘First Bottle’ flashes back to the beginning of the opioid—OxyContin—crisis. All the main players are brought in.

Michael Keaton as Dr. Samuel Finnix,

Peter Sarsgaard as Rick Mountcastle,

Michael Stuhlbarg as Richard Sackler,

Will Poulter as Billy Cutler,

John Hoogenakker as Randy Ramseyer,

Kaitlyn Dever as Betsy Mallum,

Rosario Dawson as Bridget Meyer,

The initial focus is on the Christ-like figure of Dr. Samuel Finnix. His practice in the mid-1990s, the West Virginia mining town of Finch Creek. His wife has died from cancer. He goes that extra mile to ensure he takes care of his patients. For example, before going home, he nips into an elderly patient’s home that has dementia and makes sure she’s taken her tablets. He knows all his patient’s names and is too good to be true.

His nemesis is up-and-coming swaggerer Billy Cutler. He’s selling this new wonder drug. An opioid with little or no side-effects. Finnix is sceptical. He knows about opioids and their addictive properties. It’s a mining town after all. He’s not going to get sold moonshine. But he’s no match for modern marketing techniques. Cutler tells him what he’s been told. There’s a less than one-percent chance of addiction because of all that sugar coating.

Poor  wee Betsy Maullin. Generations of her family have fed the mines with their bodies. Her mother and father are on first-person speaking terms with Jesus Christ. They pray before meals. The kind of family that would tend to vote for the moron’s moron Trump and praise the Lord for his inequities (I’ve gone off track here). Betsy has a terrible secret. She doesn’t like boys. She prefers girls. She wants to run away with a girl at work. But she gets hurt in a workplace accident. Her back is out. She’s out, but not in that way. If she can’t work she’ll have no job. She’ll have no dream to run away to.

The Christ-like figure of Dr. Finnix brought her into the world. He cannot let her suffer. He prescribes her this new wonder drug. And it is, at first, a wonder. She is painless. She can go back to work. We know the fallout. But well worth watching. No rich person was hurt in the making of this mini-series.      

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The Power of the Dog (2021), Screenplay written and Directed by Jane Campion, based on the novel of the same name (which I haven’t read) by Thomas Savage.

The Power of the Dog (2021), Screenplay written and Directed by Jane Campion, based on the novel of the same name (which I haven’t read) by Thomas Savage.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001pvtv/the-power-of-the-dog

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Dog_(film)

 Jane Campion is a Hollywood name. She might not have the leverage of say Brad Pitt or George Clooney, but mostly, when she wants to make a movie, producers find the finance and it gets made. The Power of the Dog won many plaudits on its release.

I found it watchable. The sets were fabulous and everything looked and sounded just about right. Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) who revels in his nasty, unwashed cowboy persona and his ability to dominate all around him, including his brother, George (Jesse Plemons) plays the master of their ranch in Montana in 1925, and screams Oscar-winning performance.

His nemesis isn’t just a pretty face, Rose (Kirsten Dunst). A widow who runs a boarding house and restaurant after the suicide of her doctor husband. George finds her weeping after Phil’s particularly brutal belittling of her effeminate teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) while serving dinner to their cowboy crew.

George marries Rose and takes her to their ranch house. Phil labels her a gold-digger. They are certainly wealthy enough for Peter to go to medical school and the governor and his wife to come to their ranch for a meal.

These scenes are labelled ACTS which made the film seem rather pretentious. Another three acts remained. Phil’s fixation with the man’s man and real American cowboy—who taught him and George everything they know—Bronco Henry is a façade which begins to unravel when the effeminate Peter takes a break from his studies and comes to live on the ranch.

Rose’s alcoholism seemed plausible. This isn’t Brokenback Mountain and it seemed contrived, which is another way of saying, not really my type of film.   

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Dundee 1—2 Celtic

A James Forrest double gets us over the line. With four games remaining, Celtic, with a win over Hearts, can effectively win the league by beating Rangers at home in the penultimate match. This was a twitchy match. Like many others we could have been out of sight or left reeling in injury time when Mellon missed a free header at the back post.

The Dundee plan was exactly what we’ve come to expect. Sit in, hit longish balls towards the forwards, focus on Taylor and Liam Scales side of things were Celtic are vulnerable to cross balls and corners in particular.

Celtic do what we always do. Started well with seventy or eighty-percent possession, with a few half-chances. Nicholas Kuhn and Reo Hatate threatened. The latter hitting the post with a wonderful drop of the shoulder, in the second half, but his shot hit the inside of the post. With Celtic two ahead that would have settled the match. Hatate is not back to his best, but he always tries to make a forward pass. He was the best midfielder in Scotland last year. Kuhn has had teething problems with his teeth and weight loss. I’ve yet to see him play a good game. To me, he is an empty jersey as he was again today.

James Forrest—yes I used to slag him off, but even a blind Rangers supporter would recognise him as our best winger in a poor bunch—match winner. Brendan Rodgers said something along the lines of he was the best winger at the club. Play him, many of us have been saying so for weeks. Palma looks good enough for backup. Yang may prove a good buy next season or the season after, but it doesn’t look good. Kuhn (sigh) I don’t understand why he keeps starting. I’m waiting for him to prove me wrong.

Forrest has nothing left to prove. But he’s only 32. His first goal on the half-hour mark was a belter. Kyogo teed him up from the edge of the box. A ball fired into the Japanese striker. He spun away with the outside of his boot. Forrest took it first time on the volley and fired it in the net.

Around the hour mark, after Dundee had started the second half strongly and corner after corner created goal scoring opportunities for the Den’s men, Forrest robbed a defender on the edge of their box. He played a give-and-go with Hatate and got on the end of it. Ricki Lamie and Portales played like Laurel and Hardy and Forest nipped in and nutmegged the keeper. That looked like job done.

Forrest, of course, comes off for Palma. Kyogo off for Idah. But it was the loanee Norwich striker that brought Dundee roaring back and looking for an equaliser. Mo Sylla and Jordan McGhee headed past the post and straight at Joe Hart. The Celtic defence looked to have cleared—yet another—free kick. Portaless’s downward volley was nothing like Forrest’s, but it hit Idah and wrong-footed Joe Hart.

Hart found time to get a late booking for time wasting. He deserved it. But it would be interesting to see if the same rule was applied when we play home and away and keepers take an eternity and opposition players fall down.

Man of the match by a mile, James Forrest. I gave him the man of the match for his contribution against Aberdeen. Let’s hope he’s a certain starter for the remaining fixtures. We still lose too many goals. McGregor still looks off the pace, but he’s still far superior to Iwata. If we can get Maeda back and Forrest on the other side, we’d be full strength for the remaining four league fixtures and the cup final. We’ll win the league, not the cup. I’ve been saying that for a while. I hope I’m wrong and we win both. Maybe Kuhn will get a hat-trick in the Cup final. Let’s just get over the line. Hearts at home. Home win.

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Angela Carter (1984 [2006] Nights at the Circus.

Angel Carter’s Nights at the Circus explodes on the page in the form of six-foot-two, eyes of blue, fourteen stone Fevvers, a feminist icon, who has wings and really can fly. Or so it seems, she’s an aerialiste that needs no high wire. The high-flying star of Colonel Kearney’s circus—a fool and his money are easily parted; never give a mug a break—courted by Royalty, The Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse Lautrec. She’s the toast of Paris, of Berlin, of Europe. Her tour will take her from smoke-filled London of 1899 to the beginning of a new century, and to dazzle St Petersburg and onto the cold wastes of Siberia.

Magical Realism hadn’t been invented. American reporter Jack Walser finds himself trapped in her London dressing room after another wildly successful show. He plans to include her in a series of stories about the great humbugs of Europe, but the questions he asks isn’t the questions she answers. Her constant companion, Lizzie, is also an unsettling presence. He’s befuddled and intoxicated in more ways than he knows.

‘Lor’ love you sir! Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why I first saw light of day in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed “the Cockney Venus”, for nothing sir, though they could just as well ‘ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I came ashore—for I never docked via what you might call normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no, just like Helen of Troy was hatched.

Hatched out of a bloody great egg, while Bow Bells rang, as ever is.’    

Angela Carter’s short-story, Lizzie’s Tiger, begins in a quieter way. ‘When the circus came to town, and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way’.

Nights at the Circus has tigers and Princess and a strongman rapist but ever stronger women, who tend to stick together. After all, Fevvers (a nickname derived from the feathers that sprouted on her back) was raised in a brothel and then adopted. Lizzie breastfed her, but she had a multitude of mothers who were well aware of what men were like in close quarters.

Lizzie had to step down from her harlotry and become a housekeeper because she asked too many awkward questions as Angela Carter does of her readers. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Have you a soul?’ ‘Can you love?’

With subcategories that tend to be didactic. Attitudes to ‘white slave trade?’; ‘rights and wrongs of women?; ‘universal suffrage?’; ‘the Irish question?’; ‘the Indian question?’; ‘republicanism?’; ‘syndicalism?’; ‘abolition of the House of Lords?’.

‘Nothing can come from nothing?’ And the question that Othello dare not ask adds a learned Shakespearian tone to what is in essence a love story as Walser goes incognito and joins the circus as a clown and travel to St Petersburg to find out the real story about Fevvers.

Essence is a theme. ‘Singularity,’ where gravity become strong enough to bend spacetime, where physics breaks down, but this is what Lizzie urges her not-so-little Fevvers to avoid, to keep her essence, to keep her singularity and not become the property of a man, any man, including the clown Walser. To keep her wings. To keep her singularity so that she can be who she is and fly and be herself.

An explosion of colour and depth, with an emphatic understanding of what it means to be poor. (The rich tend to be villains.) Well worth reading. I haven’t captured the essence. I’ll be reading more of Angela Carter’s works.

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Sean Connolly (2022) On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World.

My mother’s maiden name was Connolly. As a child, she was sent ‘home’ to Ireland, during the Second World War, with her sister (my Auntie Phyllis) to safeguard them from German bombs and to make their Roman Catholic faith bombproof. She didn’t talk about it, certainly not to me, but there were whispers of predatory paedophilic attempts. And as outcast Irish, they were treated like cow shit. My Auntie Phyllis and my mum had a lifelong-bond based on shared hardship. They were Irish immigrants of a different kind, but they faced the same kind of prejudices and poverty.

My dad was born in Northern Ireland. But he came here as a child. His dad was here and his mum died early. He went to Our Holy Redeemer’s School (still going strong) in Whitecrook. He had a Scottish accent. Not Irish, like my Uncle Charlie and my godmother, Auntie Josie. Or like Pat McDaid’s dad, or Sporter Sweeney or Boxer Toi’s dad. We’re second or third generation and experience the cultural fade of fitting in and marrying into the existing population. Most of us remain mad Glasgow Celtic fans.

In the United States, it is evident that there is little or no difference between the second and third generation Irish who voted Republican and for Trump, the moron’s moron. A generation ago, when John Kennedy won by a very slim majority (and a bit of electoral cheating) Catholics were demonised and if it wasn’t for the electoral blocks delivered wholesale by Capos of the Irish-Catholic, Democratic, immigrant machine, he would have lost.

The Ireland my Uncle Charlie and Auntie Josie left a lifetime ago was rural. What little industry there was in the North, in Belfast, weaving and shipbuilding. The population halved after the Irish Famine (there was also a Scottish Famine mostly in the Highland and Islands) but it was in Ireland were subsistence farming meant the humble potato was breakfast, lunch and dinner for millions that famine took around a million lives directly and indirectly.

Ironically, the root cause may have been a cargo of seed potatoes from across the Atlantic in 1845. The population of Ireland had doubled from 4.4million in 1791 to above 8 million in 1841. Almost 90% of the population depended on the potato. The more prosperous tenant farmer who could afford a cow had assets to sell. Most did not. All they could offer was cheap labour.

An estimated 109 000 sailed for North America in 1846, almost double the total of the beginning of the Famine. What we now know as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina were less popular destinations. For those with little or no money, the short hop across the Irish Sea meant that tens of thousands a week ended up in the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow.

In their poverty and need, we were caricatured as sub-human and disease stricken. There was some truth in the latter. Ships bringing export goods from America and the British colonies filled their holds with human ballast, which they could charge a fee, and make the return journeys profitable.

For babies, one-in-seven did not survive the journey. Those packed below deck had a nominal space of 6 feet by 3 feet for married couples. Toilets were rudimentary. Women, in particular, crouched down and shat and urinated wherever they could. Water and food were rationed. Typhoid and dysentery were not. Coffin ships delivered their cargoes to cities that started asking for bonds to offset the cost of treating the ill, but which pushed up prices and more ships towards Canadian ports. But more than 90% made it ashore and became citizens. Women, in particular, became a prized asset.

When my Uncle Charlie left Ireland the population was still haemorrhaging the young and fit, but the destination pre-and-post War—with the Hungry Thirties as an interlude—was to British cities. Cities that were crying out for cheap labour the Irish specialised in. Labour that dug canals with pick and shovels, connected railways across continents, created reservoirs and build road after road and house by house helped make Britain and its former colonies Irish enough to have St Patrick’s Day parades and indulge the bonhomie of a green and pleasant land usurped by British rule. Step forward President Joe Biden, following in the footsteps of JFK, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronnie Reagan whose aspirations were more Protestant blue blood.

Ireland, that Irish tiger that has become a parking space for big corporations—with promises of low taxation—inside the EEC has seen its population double from when my Uncle Charlie left Ireland to around five million. It has more Polish immigrants than Britain. And to my great shame has also played the race card. Demonising immigrants while most of its wealth, like in Britain, goes to the rich and Irish 1%. The most oppressed people ever banner, once worn with pride, is now a rallying cry to deport and demonise those at the bottom. Cultural fade. Not for me. I’m not buying into that propaganda. We’ve a different kind of famine in housing and public services and it’s the rich that we need to pay their way. Not the poor, oppressed masses that America once claimed to represent as a sanctuary and offer a welcome. I’m not ashamed to be part Irish. I’m ashamed of such policies finding fertile soil in whatever side of the Atlantic you happened to be standing on. Sean Connolly offers a comprehensive account of what it means to be Irish, but that doesn’t mean the story is ended. It’s still being written by us now and I don’t like what I’m seeing or hearing.

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