Coulter, Culture and Culter! by James Christie
“The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively > a refined understanding or appreciation of this.” (Concise Oxford Dictionary. – 10th ed.) “We are simply passing through history. This, this is history.” (Raiders of the Lost Ark) Coulter Burn flows down through the toun from Birthwood, the Border Fells and beyond. Unremarked […]
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Wednesday, March 29, 2017 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie’s blog: Why Stop the One Stop Autism Shop?
So it seems the future of Scottish Autism’s One Stop Shop in Motherwell hangs in the balance. Three years financial support by the Scottish Government is coming to an end and as yet no joint commitment to further funding has been made by either North or South Lanarkshire councils. One concerned parent, Karen Noble, has […]
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Thursday, May 5, 2016 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: Walking the Mexican Wall
You wouldn’t think Donald Trump’s ludicrous bombast re building a border between the U. S. and Mexico (plus the primary elections now taking place in Ohio, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Illinois which might just give him the platform to put his bonkers idea into practise) would have much to do with some middle-aged Asperger […]
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Monday, March 21, 2016 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: Thorns Upon a Rose
It’s surely tempting fate to satirize James Bond the way I did in another blog, assuming that every time I head off on an innocuous assignment I’ll end up avoiding a shooting war by the skin of my teeth or be seduced by a Monica Bellucci look-alike. So it was certainly quite a surprise only […]
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Friday, December 18, 2015 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: To the Future, Back…
This day, October 21st 2015, think on the most delicious notion… What if Back to the Future, whose fans are now celebrating the fact we’ve reached the actual date in 2015 to which Marty McFly time-travelled in the 1989 sequel, had actually happened? Think I’m crazy? Well, I don’t have a DeLorean in the driveway […]
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Friday, October 23, 2015 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: Last of the Rare Book Cataloguers
Only a few more books to go and then I too shall pass. It’s been a long journey to a small room in the dark tower of a Victorian hunting lodge. My last library job turning out to be voluntarily cataloguing old and rare books not ten miles from the room where I first learnt […]
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Tuesday, March 31, 2015 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: Led by the Lamb to the Slaughter
Can changes in the law bring about changes in attitude? “He was gasping, but forced himself steady, and said solemnly, ‘I have given us our freedom.’ And he paused, aware at last of the gathering weight of the silence. Fourteen images stared at him, without any of them offering a word in response. Bakst said […]
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Wednesday, March 11, 2015 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
Chuck the Librarian, Charlie Hebdo! by James Christie
I surely hope that despite the slaughter on Rue Nicolas-Appert, publication of Charlie Hebdo shall not cease. The satirical magazine’s raison d’être was to challenge the powers that be, hearkening back to the grand French tradition of taking the piss out of the Establishment via graphically illustrated scandal sheets exposing all the illicit shagging going […]
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Tuesday, January 13, 2015 | Filed under: Books, Talks, Poetry and Creative Writing Events, James Christie Blog
James Christie’s blog: Scots and British? Still Shifnal’s Son!
Scots and British? Still Shifnal’s Son! I sent myself and Mum down to a town called Shifnal in Shropshire’s east a week last Wednesday or so. The purpose, publicly, to talk of my book in the local library of the town where I grew up. Privately, it was my mother’s 86th birthday present, taking her […]
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Wednesday, September 24, 2014 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
Second Base in Santa Barbara, James Christie
Second Base in Santa Barbara Elliot Rodger couldn’t get to second base with girls in Santa Barbara, so he killed them. Then he killed himself. His father’s lawyer, Alan Shifman, confirmed that twenty-two-year-old Rodger was being treated by multiple professionals. Aah, the child was diagnosed at an earlier age of being a highly functional Asperger’s […]
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Wednesday, June 4, 2014 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
Talent, How Not to Train or Keep It… James Christie, Writer.
Talent, How Not to Train or Keep It… Rifling through the pages of The Times after a fine and fruitful meeting with my publisher at The Fox in Felpham, I found a supplement entitled Employee Engagement & Benefits and some fascinating phrases about problems facing businesses from Andrew Benett, author of The Talent Mandate: “Amid […]
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Monday, June 2, 2014 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: The World, The Stage
The World, The Stage It’s one of the odder things on Earth, wondering how someone will portray you on stage. It never occurred to me that the events through which we lived could be translated to theatre. I’d thought in terms of a film or radio play, but in retrospect it now seems obvious […]
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Friday, April 4, 2014 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
The Landau Project: James Christie, Glasgow Writer
The Landau Project Tricky to critique The Rosie Project, the most recent “big” autistic novel published by Graeme Simsion and Penguin, without sounding like I’m serving up the greatest bunch of sour grapes in the known world (you got your rights sold to 35 countries and went to number one in the hit parade while […]
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Thursday, February 13, 2014 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
James Christie: US Trip
The Day The Music Died Don McLean was right, the party’s over and the prom is past, but America is in denial. I’m sitting in a café just opposite the convention center in Austin, Texas, where Wizard World’s comic-con has just taken place. It’s a good day, if cold (I seem to have brought the […]
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Thursday, January 2, 2014 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
Cross At Needles by James Christie
Cross At Needles If, five years ago, someone had asked me where I’d be today, no foresight could have told me I’d be in a coffee house in Needles, last leg of the road to L.A. My guide along the way is gone. If Drusilla the vampire did find her chosen one, then she […]
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Thursday, December 19, 2013 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
Walking The Crow Road
I like being an author. Although the only bookshop in which you can buy a copy of my one small work is in Biggar, though my sales number in the low thousands rather than the high millions and round my way, I’m known as “your local celebrity no one’s ever heard of,” I can […]
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Friday, June 28, 2013 | Filed under: James Christie Blog
Joss at the GFT
Sometimes truth really is strange than fiction, and a decision I made nearly four years ago to answer an email from a Hollywood star has led to a situation in which I find myself with a vampire flatmate, an online celebrity correspondent, the resolution of an unfinished story arc which – if published – […]
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Tuesday, March 5, 2013 | Filed under: James Christie Blog