Minor Art Deco Buildings in Retford

Former Bridgegate Chambers, built 1934. Seems to be now known as the Bridge Church. From this end I couldn’t get it all in one shot. Note lozenges in the brickwork above the windows:-

Retford Art Deco Shop 1

Retford Art Deco Shop

Reverse view. Nice rounded corner:-

Retford Art Deco Shop 3

The windows on this one look like Critall ones:-

Art Deco Style Shop, Retford

The ones below are hard to see for the trees but seem to have some deco about them:-

Retford. Two Art Deco Style Shops

The Spartans 2-6 Dumbarton

SPFL Tier 4, Ainslie Park, 16/3/24.

I had noted from the league table that we could go above Spartans if we beat them by four but I never expected it to happen. This was just one of those odd games that occur from time to time.

The early minutes were a bit of a non-event with neither team really threatening but then Craig Durnan surged forward and passed to Michael Ruth who seemd to me to run into a blind alley but he drew the foul and Ryan Blair stroked it round the wall and in off the post for our first.

They hadn’t laid a glove on us till they were awarded a free-kick. It was a well-hit strike but Jay Hogarth maybe wasn’t as well positioned as he might have been.

We kind of took control for a while and started peppering their goal. A Jinky Hilton strke was well saved by the goalie’s feet but from the resultant corner we got another on the other side and Aron Lynas made sure he got on the end of it. Our third came not long after. Another corner saw a bit of ping-pong in their box before the clearance was placed on the volley into the goal by Gallagher Lennon. The flight of ball forward for their second was misjudged by two of our defenders and the header on fell kindly for their scorer.

In  the second half Jay Hogarth stood up well to a chance at the near post to stop them equalising and then Ryan Blair all but copied their first from much the same position. Again their keeper was probably too far left in the goal. Our fifth was all about Michael Ruth. From inside our half he chased a pass back and pounced on the keeper’s poor nudge forward before rounding him and scoring.

Our sixth was a peach, Finlay Gray driving forward from the halfway line. I thought he would shoot but instead he slipped the ball to loanee James Graham who’d got himself into space in the box and dinked it very neatly past the keeper.

It’s not often we win 6-2, never mind away; still less to a team above us, so well done to the lads

But.

What price Spartans beating us if we get them in the play-offs? It’s a funny old game.

 

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf 

Wordsworth Classics. (In The Years & Between the Acts.) 2012, p, including x p Notes and a xix p Introduction to both books by Linden Peach. Between the Acts was first published in 1941.

This was Woolf’s last novel, published posthumously. A prefatory note by her husband said it was completed but not corrected nor revised, though he believes she would not have made any large alterations. I beg to differ.

Like The Years (with which it is combined in this edition) this is more straightforward than Woolf’s earlier novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. That doesn’t do much to recommend it though as what we are given here is a portrait of tiresome upper-middle class people doing and saying upper-middle class things but that could perhaps be borne were it not for the fact that the main part of the book is a struggle to get through as it contains a blow-by-blow account of a local pageant in all its lengthy tediousness.

In Linden Peach’s Introduction to Between the Acts he asserts that the novel is interrogating Englishness. If it does, it is only Englishness of a very narrow sort.

The text mentions an incidental character by describing him as “a Jew”, as if that said all there was to say about him.

Sensitivity note: as well as the gratuitous remark about “a Jew” we also encounter the phrases “worked like a nigger” and “white man’s burden.”

Pedant’s corner:- again the Notes explain references of which a British reader would be aware; Somerset House etc. Otherwise; “said Mrs Manresa ogling Candlish, as if he were a real man” (would be better punctuated as ‘said Mrs Manresa, ogling Candlish as if he were a ….’,) “it was a mellay” (usually spelled melé or mêlé,) “Mrs Rogers’ chin” (Mrs Rogers’s.) In the Notes: Sohrab and Rustum is said to be by Matthew Arnold. While he did write such a poem (and Woolf’s characters would undoubtedly have been familiar with it) the original story was in fact from Shanameh, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh) an epic poem by the Persian  Ferdowsi (Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi,) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi) Daladier is said to have been Prime Minister of France from 1838-1840 (it was 1938-40.) “Il Rissorgimento” (Risorgimento.)

Retford War Memorial

Retford’s War Memorial stands in the Market Square and takes the form of an Eleanor Cross.

Retford War Memorial

Inscription:-

Retford War Memorial Dedication

Names, Great War above, World War 2 below with WW2 dedication:-

Names

Names, Retford War Memorial

More names:-

More Names on Retford War Memorial

Retford War Memorial Names

Areas/towns fought over:-

Detail on Retford War Memorial

Retford War Memorial, Detail

Great War dedication:-

Retford War Memoria Great War l Dedication

Korean War name:-

Retford War Memorial, Korean War

Crosses and wreaths:-

Crosses, Retford War Memorial

Donation and presentation plaques:-

Plaque By Retford War Memorial

Retford War Memorial Planter Presentation Plaque

Information board by Memorial:-

Retford War Memorial Information Board

 

Live It Up 113 and 114: Don’t Bang the Drum + Ship of Fools. RIP Karl Wallinger

This week Welsh musician, Karl Wallinger, also left us.

He wrote Don’t Bang the Drum for The Waterboys’ third LP This is the Sea before leaving to form the group World Party

I’ve featured their songs here and here.

His 1997 song, She’s the One, was later made a hit by Robbie Williams.

The Waterboys: Don’t Bang the Drum

 

World Party: Ship of Fools

Karl Edmond De Vere Wallinger: 19/10/1957 – 10/3/2024. So it goes.

Reelin’ in the Years 233: Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)

So US songwriter and Eric Carmen has left the chorus.

As a solo performer he was perhaps most famous for writing and singing All by Myself and for the hit Hungry Eyes.

He had in the early 1970s been in the US group The Raspberries for whom he wrote this song.

The Raspberries: Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)

Eric Howard Carmen: 11/8/1949 – 11?/3/2024. So it goes.

Former Regent Cinema, Retford

We passed this on the way in to Retford and I wandered back to photograph it after we parked. It has many Art Deco features but is now a Masonic Lodge:-

Retford Masonic Lodge

Frontage:-

Former Regent Cinema, Retford

Masonic Lodge, Retford

It’s situated near to a bridge over the Chesterfield Canal, which the building lies beside. Side view:-

Side of Masonic Lodge, Retford

Reflections on the Chesterfield Canal from steps down from road. Former Regent Cinema reflected on right of photo:-

Chesterfield Canal, Retford

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2022, 373 p, including 3 p Afterword.

This one was published twenty years after Welsh’s first novel The Cutting Room and in it she returns to the central character of that book, Rilke, an auctioneer for the financially troubled Bowery Auctions. Rilke is gay and the intervening years gives Welsh, through Rilke, the opportunity to comment on the evolution in attitudes towards homosexuality that has taken place in that time. (Some prejudice still appears here but on the whole the other characters – even those he is meeting for the first time – by and large accept who and what he is.)

This starts from the first scene where Rilke is attending the wedding of the two Bobbys, where the parents of one of the two grooms were never to be mentioned. Rilke has to escort one of the guests, Jojo, out of the reception to avoid the possibility of a scene. Jojo gives Rilke a tip about the wind-up of an estate at Ballantyne House in Dumfries and Galloway whose owners are looking to sell off the house contents, a commission which might save Bowery Auctions’ somewhat failing fortunes. The next day Jojo is found dead in an alley.

As Rilke delves into the circumstances of the death via Jojo’s lodger, an art student calling himself Sands, he gets embroiled with gangster Jamie Mitchell and encounters a strange situation regarding the affairs at Ballantyne House and farm, where there was a car crash a week or so before and the auction crew rescue a frightened Vietnamese refugee, Phan, on a nearby road.

Welsh is always on top of her material here and interweaves her plot intricately. We are almost incidentally given glimpses of the more outré aspects of Glasgow’s gay scene.

Her talent for characterisation is illustrated by the on-off relationship between the auction house’s owner, Rose, and police Inspector Jim Anderson. There was the neat observation, “He had slicked his wet hair back from his face, like Brian Ferry before the cardigans set in.”

This doesn’t quite reach the levels which The Cutting Room did, but it is still a very good piece of crime fiction. A cut above you might say.

Pedant’s corner:- Burns’ (Burns’s,) “the frail women’s exit” (frail woman’s,) “a pair of storm doors” (on the top floor of a tenement? Storm doors are external. I think Welsh meant ‘vestibule doors’,) Sands’ (many times; Sands’s,) “black surplice” (on a minister at a funeral. Surplices are traditionally white and can be worn at funerals. If they’re black they’re most likely not a surplice but an ecclesiastical gown.) “Rose looked out of place the lady of the house” (needs a comma between ‘place’ and ‘the lady’,) “aren’t I?” (The speaker was a Scot. We say ‘amn’t I?’) “a group of youths were huddled” (a group … was huddled,) “people who never had no luck at all” (the sense demands ‘people who never had luck at all’,) “Sand’s said” (Sands said,) “some bullets” (these were for a shotgun, which traditionally is loaded with cartridges, not bullets. As indeed this shotgun was, later,) “let off three quick shots” ([again traditionally] shotguns can fire only twice before needing reloaded,) distributer (distributor.)

Retford

Last May we travelled down through England. We stopped off at Retford in Nottinghamshire to break the trip up.

This, in the Market Square, is the Town Hall:-

Town Hall, Retford

I was intrigued by the flags on the building below. It was only when I recognised the figure must be Robin Hood that I realised this is the flag of Nottinghamshire:-

Nottinghamshire Flag on Building in Retford

This booty from the Crimean War is the Sevastopol Cannon:-

Sevastopol Cannon, Retford

Plaque on cannon:-

Plaque on Sevastopol Gun, Retford

The information board nearby calls it the Sebastopol Cannon, using the modern spelling:-

Information Board, Sevastopol Cannon, Retford

 

 

East Fife 3-2 Dumbarton

SPFL Tier 4, New Bayview*, 9/3/24.

Well; I wouldn’t have given you odds that the game would be this close after the first five minutes. Nathan Austin had scored from a loose ball after their player had waltzed through our left hand side and Jay Hogarth only partially blocked the shot. Austin then somehow managed to hit the post when another goal looked certain and then they hit the bar with a long range effort. Another 5-0 or 6-0 shellacking as on Tuesday night loooked very much on the cards.

Our main tactic seemed to be to lump it up to the small man. Michael Ruth is a decent hold-up player but he’s not the tallest guy on a pitch.

Towards the end of the half we settled down and began to create. A great Michael Ruth turn allowed him to get a shot away from among a few bodies but it was straight at the keeper. Then Finlay Gray worked himself into a one-on-one but his shot went past the post.

The first ten minutes of the second half were a total turn round. We were all over them. A nice interchange between Ryan Blair (on as a sub for a harshly booked but not very effective at left back Blair Malcolm) and Tony Wallace got the ball to Finlay Gray just outside the box. He killed the pass then blasted the ball into the het in almost the same movement.

Our next goal was entirely down to Michael Ruth’s selfless running. He chased down a ball he had no right to get, made the defender play it and then nicked the ball before sending it across the edge of the area.  Finlay Gray gave it a nice dummy (he probably got a call)  and Jinky Hilton stroked it past the keeper. Delirium in the away end.

It didn’t last; we conceded poorly from a corner. (Why we didn’t leave at least one man up on opposition corners I have no idea. If we had, the penalty area would have been less crowded with more chance to clear a ball and someone to play it to.)

East Fife were more into it late on and I got increasingly annoyed that our assistant manager, Frank McKeown, kept telling our players to slow the game down. We might have won the game if we’d gone for it. (We might not have but I’ll never know now.)

Late on Jay Hogarth pushed a swerving shot somewhat uncomfortably onto the bar. A stronger hand would have pushed it out for a corner and subsequent events might have taken a different turn. East Fife reworked the situation and the ball got crossed to Nathan Austin whose header looked savable but was only deflected into the net by Jay Hogarth’s hand, not pushed away. Another late goal lost. I don’t suppose any Dumbarton fan was surprised. We make a habit of it. As we do of no-one moving to create space at our throw-ins (but on that one we always have.)

It was my first look at Hogarth, Gallagher Lennon, Cian Newbury and Aaron Healy. They all seem to be a bit raw yet for the hurly-burly of our division. Marc Kelly and James Graham came on for the last few minutes. On that evidence Kelly is no Michael Ruth.

*Apparently now the MGM Timber Bayview Stadium. Please yourselves.

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