I was browsing the www last night and I discovered that Aberdeen City Council has recently closed these baths apparently not long after refurbishing them.

To see how sad a loss this could be just feast your eyes on these pictures. This is such a wonderful Art Deco interior. This is simply how a baths ought to be. When I first saw the photographs I was stunned.

It is a pity that the facilities are no longer cost effective. It seems each visitor to the baths was effectively subsidised to the tune of £11 a visit!

In these cash straitened times I suppose Aberdeen council has to make cuts somewhere but surely this interior deserves preserving and cherishing.

There is a link – which I can’t seem to follow – to a petition against the closure and also a statement that these baths had the only diving boards in Aberdeen!

I realise the upkeep is a severe strain on the public purse and people want more modern facilities, flumes etc, but I don’t think beautiful is too strong a word to describe what can be seen here. Magnificent even.

Is there not a way the Bon Accord Baths can be taken over by some preservation trust?

I’ve not done one of these for a while but nobody’s remarked on any of them so perhaps it’s just me who cares. Still!

What is the number that comes next in the sequence 5,4,3,2,1, ?

I disagree with the dictionaries on this one. Along with other definitions they give the name nothing to the number concerned.

But!
Subtract (or most likely “take away” if you’re young Tom Daley) 4 apples from 4 apples and, yes, you are left with no apples; but you certainly do not have “nothing.”
You have the bag they were in or the plate they were on – or the symbol 0.

To my mind nothing means absence of thing. A void. No thing.

The number in the sequence above is nought, or zero. It is not “no thing.” It exists as an abstract concept, the number 0, and is one of the only two important numbers in the universe. (The other is 1. The rest of the numbers, 2-9 and all the possible combinations of digits, are just window dressing; an effusion resulting from the world view of ten-fingered bipeds.)

Even the symbol, 0, is not “nothing” – I can see it there on the page or screen.
It was, I believe, invented in India – like the other nine of our so-called “Arabic” numerals.

Without the number zero modern mathematics would be complicated and clumsy, if not impossible (think Roman numerals – they had no zero) and the world would be a very different place.

I wouldn’t be able to post this, for a start. I wouldn’t have a blog. No-one would.

0 is certainly not “nothing.”

Gordon Brown’s ministerial reshuffle has gone beyond satire.

Peter Mandelson? PETER MANDELSON?

A man whose judgement has twice been shown to be distinctly dodgy and had to resign as a result? And I must say who looked even more rumpled and seedy than before as he entered Downing Street. Smarm doesn’t begin to describe his oiliness.

At this rate he’ll get more second chances than Joey Barton…

The Rock, 4/10/08

I think we can definitely say Annan’s bubble has burst. They may well now struggle badly; at least until the January transfer window.

Nevertheless this is a good win. As I recall we haven’t scored four against anybody since the second last game of season 2006-7 when we put 5 past the Shire.

And we clawed back two points of the difference from Stenny at the top. Nice to see Forfar paying us back for last week’s late equaliser by doing it again.

Pity we couldn’t improve the goal difference in the second half but I suppose the players knew the game was won and relaxed a bit.

But: second place after the first quarter was something I think we’d all have taken before a ball was kicked.

The post title paraphrases a poster from the Nixon Presidency in the US, which reflected Tricky Dicky’s lack of trustworthiness – and that was before Watergate. David Cameron’s “I have a plan” speech for some reason reminded me of it.

Cameron was possibly trying to echo Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” but failed bathetically. The insipid phrase evokes not only the canal in Panama palindrome (link via doctorvee) but also Jamaica’s Michael Manley who subsequently became known as “The Clot With The Plot” and moreover it apparently originated with Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell ca 1959.

More importantly though, it shows lack of foresight and imagination. Cameron is surely old enough to be familiar with the works of Stevie Wonder. That he did not, therefore, steer clear of the phrase is astonishing.

For it reminded the good lady, who reminded me.

“He’s a man with a plan” is followed by “he’s got a counterfeit dollar in his hand” and later, “if he shakes on a bet he’s the kind of dude who won’t pay his debt.”

So, does David Cameron think he’s mister-know-it-all? And that we haven’t noticed?

Please beware of a man that just don’t give a care.

Boormt, boo-boo, boo-boo.

The Rothesay Pavilion has just celebrated its 70th anniversary.

The style of this building, with its sweeping rounded frontage, irresistibly reminds me of the archetypal British Modernist seaside Pavilion – Mendelsohn and Chermayeff’s masterpiece, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-On-Sea, Sussex. The main difference is of course that the Rothesay building is clad in stone while the De La Warr, apart from being much grander, is presumably concrete, painted strikingly white and shining with glass and steel.

I have been inside the refurbished De La Warr – attending an antique fair ten or so years ago – and its interior staircase is magnificent.

If I have entered the Rothesay Pavilion I do not remember it – despite childhood trips “doon the watter” on various Clyde steamers. Those were the days.

The Rothesay Pavilion’s design was probably influenced by the De La Warr as it was built in 1938 in the Modernist style – essentially Art Deco by another name. In itself it is a fine Grade A listed example of 1930s public architecture and a hub of social and leisure activity in Rothesay. A brief trawl through the www shows many concerts have taken place there.

However, despite being listed, the building is apparently in some jeopardy, needing substantial conservation and upgrading work to ensure its long-term survival. For the money which will be required it seems to be in competition with Campbeltown, Oban, Dunoon and Helensburgh.

Speaking for myself Helensburgh ought not to be in Argyll and Bute as it is really part of Dunbartonshire but it was gerrymandered away by the Tories in the dog days of their last spell in government in a forlorn effort to keep at least some local councils in Scotland under their control.

More views of the Rothesay Pavilion can be seen on this flickr site. Sadly there does not seem to be much in the way of deco in the interior from the photos I was able to find on the web.

There are close-ups of the Pavilion terrace here and here which do show some need for refurbishment.

This is still a striking building, however, and it would be sad to see the Rothesay Pavilion lost for any reason.

The reading gig is tonight, Wednesday 1 October, at the Owl & Lion, 15 Grassmarket, Edinburgh EH1 2HS 8:00–10:00 p.m., £6.00 (£4.00 concessions.)

Authors appearing will include: Jack Deighton, Morag Edward, Andrew C. Ferguson, Gavin Inglis, Stefan Pearson, Hannu Rajaniemi and Andrew J. Wilson.

Full details at my post OWL & LION AND WRITERS’ BLOC present Print Factory