I had offers from Celtic and Southampton as well.
If you're let go from Celtic, the club you support, and go to Queen's Park, people think it's a disaster. I don't think I cried, but I was very upset. As a young boy, your dream has been taken away. But I had good people around me, and it was probably the best thing that happened.
Shetland's influences are far more Scandinavian than Celtic.
Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.
Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title.
When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place.