Clare Grogan: Celtic has always been part of my life
By Newsroom Staff
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STUDY Clare Grogan’s CV and you will discover that she has enjoyed a wide and varied career, as a singer, actor, TV presenter, football reporter and children’s author, amongst many other things.
Having first come to prominence with Altered Images, and still performing with the band to this day, as well as her starring role in Gregory’s Girl, she has been a familiar figure on TV over many years including appearances on EastEnders, Red Dwarf, Skins and even Father Ted.
On the big screen she featured in The Wee Man, in a role as Martin Compston’s character’s mum. She has also presented a host of shows on television and radio.
More recently, she has turned her hand to writing, penning a couple of children’s books about an aspiring pop star, with a third one in the pipeline. Her most important role, which has been for a few years now, is as mother to daughter, Ellie.
As she explains in a new book,
This Is How It Feels To Be Celtic, the club has also been a constant in her life, with her born into a Celtic-supporting family and taken to games by her dad when she was younger.
It would have been a different Celtic Park, and a different environment amongst supporters within the stadium, compared to now, but it was something that she enjoyed. It also established a lifelong love of Celtic.
By the time she was five-years-old, Celtic were the Kings of Europe, having defeated Inter Milan on May 25, 1967 in Lisbon’s Estadio Nacional to win the European Cup.
Those players would become her first Celtic heroes, while the game remains implanted in her memory, given she was scanning the television screen in the hope of spotting some of her aunts or uncles amongst the Celtic fans in the crowd.
“At that age it’s all quite impressionable, and I’ve really enjoyed the banter around it all in my family and in my life,” Clare Grogan explains in the book. “It’s always been a very positive and joyful thing, and a celebration.
“I also think it’s also about being a child allowed into an adult world for the first time, because I felt really grown up and accepted. For me, and for a lot of people growing up in Glasgow, Celtic is almost a cultural thing. It’s part of your upbringing, and Celtic has always been in my life.
“I’ve always been surrounded by people who are really passionate about Celtic and I think that all of us in Glasgow either really identify with that passion which football brings with it, or you reject it to a certain extent. I just always embraced it.
“I think that goes back to my dad taking me to matches when I was a really wee girl, and like a lot of kids, just being lifted over the turnstiles. I thought that was something everybody did on a Saturday.
"It was probably quite brave of my dad in many ways, to take me to the games at that time, but I never felt odd or out of place. For a long time, I just thought everyone was a Celtic fan when I was a wee girl growing up.
“For me, Celtic is about a beautiful noise almost. I’ve been to a lot of football matches over the years, but no matter where I go, it’s just not the same, and it isn’t. I believe that life is all about inclusion and not leaving anybody out, and for me, to know that I could go there, it just gave me that feeling of belonging, and that I really belonged here.”
Clare Grogan's Celtic story is featured in the new book, This Is How It Feels To Be Celtic’, which is out now. The book also features Kieran Tierney, Callum McGregor, Lisbon Lion, John Clark, former Celts, Anton Rogan and Raymond McStay, and celebrity fans such as Martin Compston, alongside supporters from all walks of life, each of them telling their own Celtic story.