charlieforbes9
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Book Club – ‘How Late It Was, How Late’
A comedy of errors without much to laugh about, 1994’s How Late It Was, How Late was a second-hand purchase of mine bought on a whim. It stuck out in the Scottish Literature section like a sore thumb as the title rang the bells of familiarity in my head. Counting out my loose change to…
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The Call of the Void
I’ll preface this post by saying that none of this constitutes any qualified opinion or advice regarding mental health. I’m mainly putting this out to raise awareness and give people an idea of the lived experience of a misunderstood mental illness. For resources from charities, health bodies and psychologists, please see the bottom of this…
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Snakes and Ladders | Part II
If you have found yourself here without reading Part I, you can find that here. Thatcher set out creating her game a year after she came to power in 1980, the year when her Tory government passed its landmark ‘Right to Buy’ legislation through parliament. The new law granted anyone living in a council house…
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Snakes and Ladders | Part I
It was the turn of the 20th century, and Lizzie Magie found herself in a predicament. America would not grant women the vote for another two decades or so, and yet Magie was proudly outspoken: brimming with fierce intelligence and committed to bravely promoting ideas that would have been controversial for her time. She was…
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Movie Mondays – Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The risk with making a romance film is that it doesn’t come across as authentic enough, or worse still it reaches so far into seriousness as to become a parody of itself. Filmmakers are often not ambitious enough when it comes to romantic relationships. Either they’re carefully positioned as a secondary consideration to the plot,…
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Book Club – ‘Sapiens’
Sapiens by Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari is a book that can make a rare claim to being a blockbuster read in a time when reading books is in sharp decline. Since its publication in English in 2014 it can often be spotted in living room bookshelves and hostel sunbeds the world over, having been…
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Movie Mondays – Under the Skin
I always find it a point of total fascination that watching a film or listening to an album can be experiences where your enjoyment of what you’re consuming is not a guaranteed constant. Returning to stuff you used to like can sometimes provoke warm nostalgia, or otherwise make you coldly question what you even liked…
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Back of a Cocktail Napkin Election Report
It’s a rare thing that a party in power for 14 years can increase its majority, but such is the situation in Scotland that the euphemistically named “constitutional question” continues to dominate. Even parties that complain about nationalists constantly banging on about independence seem to do extremely well when they also constantly bang on about…
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Beware the Beat of the Culture War Drums
With every passing week brings another bloody battle in the so-called Culture War that seems to have gripped Britain. In the red corner we have the lefties, supposedly baying for anarchy and hellbent on destroying our traditional way of life. In the blue, the Tories: their puffed-up outrage about such a threat on full display…
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Movie Mondays – Patrick
Following on from Ewan’s post last week I thought I would also review another film from Aberdeen’s beloved Belmont Filmhouse’s shiny new streaming service, this time 2019’s Patrick directed by Tim Meilants. A black comedy set on a Belgian naturist camp, this film reveals all but also shrouds a great deal in mystery. Once you…
inertia 