New English Library, 2000

I found this one a bit of a slog. A move from the sublime (The Execution Channel) to the cor blimey.
The set up is that extraterrestrial lizards interrupted World War 2 in 1941/2 and 18 years or so later are established across the warmer parts of the Earth and also occupy China, Australia and Poland. See my review of the previous volume in this series, Colonisation: Second Contact, for further details of this background.

I know new entrants to Turtledove’s scenario require some infill from previous volumes but we surely don’t need so many reminders of lizard (and human characters’) behaviour – or is it just the author keeping track? It’s as if Turtledove relies on cue cards for each of his dramatis personae (et saura) and so (forgetting we know this stuff already?) reminds us of that character’s particular tic each time we encounter them again. This gets wearing after a while. And would new readers start here? Surely they would go to Colonisation: Second Contact first; or even World War:In The Balance.

The new slants to the story arc in Down To Earth are the introduction to Earth, from the lizard’s world, of crops and both domestic and food varieties of animals, with the likelihood this presents of concomitant destructive effects on Earth’s ecosystems, and the attempt by humans to raise two lizard hatchlings from eggs to adulthood. But not much actually happens. There is a real sense of marking time here. Relationships are extended or made but the plot doesn’t advance far, if at all. It is the second in a trilogy after all.

I was trying to work out why the Colonisation series doesn’t work even in the limited way that Turtledove’s World War/Balance books did. It’s not just that the lizards appear too thick, too hidebound, to be technological spacefarers. It’s also that the war aspects are largely missing; until nearly the end of Down To Earth there is no actual combat in the Colonisation series, and even then we only get two scenes of fighting from the latest war (between the Third Reich and the lizards) with the earlier humans’ rebellion in China not described in terms of fire fights. As a result there is little by way of tension.

Turtledove’s writing remains functional but rarely rises above it. The breaks between chapters appear to be placed arbitrarily or maybe just come after a set number of words – there is no structuring to the chaptering as such. The characters are there only to string the story along. They rarely if ever come to life, resolutely refusing to fill anything other than plot functions.

Also in Down To Earth the emphasis on Jewish experiences finally does come over too strongly.

Though the prose reads smoothly enough there is no real meat to it. I realise Turtledove’s concerns are elsewhere but this is a missed opportunity to speculate on what such an alien invasion could have meant for mid, and late, 20th century Earth.

However there were still enough teasers for me to want to know where the story is going, especially as I wish my suspicions to be confirmed.

Part 3 of Colonisation over Easter, then.

Today Woolies in Kirkcaldy ran its shutter down for the last time.
A fixture on the British High Street for nearly 100 years, a lot of Woolies’ shops were in Art Deco style buildings. Though the Kirkcaldy store shut for a while (its location was at the “wrong” end of the High Street, which ironically has recently undergone something of a regeneration: that’ll probably Credit crunch to a close) it reopened in 1998 in a mall location, The Merkat, which runs off the High Street and back round again to the rear of Marks & Sparks.
I remember the Dumbarton and Helensburgh stores fondly from my youth. They had fantastic wooden floors, their bon-bons and rum and butter caramels were a delight to my young sweet tooth and more recently it used to be good for buying cheaply singles that had recently fallen out of the charts.
I can’t say I made the Kirkcaldy store a destination every week but it was good to have it available for all those things it sold that nowhere else in the town centre did and it held a better selection of sweets than the local Tesco.
It was sad to see the state to which the administrators reduced it in its final days – ugly reduced posters plastered everywhere, as many laundry hooks as you could ever wish for (plus hundreds more,) empty spaces galore on the shelves.
I think it could have been viable but the latest high-ups allowed no leeway to local managers and as a result some of the items for sale verged on the bizarre (though it wasn’t actually in Woolies I saw racks of England tops for sale in Kirkcaldy.)
It will leave a big gap in the Mercat.
Doctorvee has recently posted about Woolies history and has another post planned.

I don’t know why it is but I always seem to have less time for doing stuff when I am on holiday.
Partly this is because I set the alarm for later and tend to have a lie-in (note: this is never called a lay-in, even the tin-eared do not say that) beyond the time it goes off.
I also relax and mooch around a bit.

It’s worse at Christmas and New Year, though, because the time always gets taken up, by last minute shopping, making sure we have enough milk and bread etc for the two days the supermarkets are closed for – only one day over New Year this year, surprisingly – and visiting family and the like.

So today it was back to work and it didn’t feel like I’d had a holiday at all. (I’m not asking for sympathy; I know shop workers had even less time off than me.)

On a cheerier note, the sky was brightening when I left the house, not something I could say was true of any time in December, so the mornings are certainly progressing in the right direction.
It was icy underfoot, though, not a typical occurrence outside Son Of The Rock towers. it had warmed up by the time I got home but tonight looks icy again.

It also snowed during the day in Dunfermline, but only a little. This made the surroundings brighter and cheerier. All that white on the rooftops seemed clean, somehow, and the air was clear. I could almost feel summer a-coming in.

(I suspect a lot more postponements between now and then though. They will cost us.)

Since before I started this blog, June 2008 in fact, I have been on a diet. The early few pounds fell off easily. Progress then slowed but I persevered. Up until Christmas I had managed to lose nearly 1½ stones (20 lbs to be precise) to end up around the lower border for reasonable weight for my height as opposed to the upper border. As a result few of my trousers now fit properly and a belt has become a necessity. I suspect I am slimmer than I have ever been since I became an adult. I feel much better for it.

There was no great secret to it, no magic bullet to losing weight. I merely ate sensibly and more or less normally, but cut down – no nibbles between meals – and went for walks over an hour long nearly every day. One of the local parks is just over the railway from Son Of The Rock Towers and is almost ideal for walking – there is also an incline to negotiate on the circuit of the park. Kirkcaldy promenade is handy too, and over a mile long (Kirkcaldy is not called the Lang Toun for nothing,) but you sometimes have to dodge the waves fountaining over the sea wall when it’s a bit wild, or even when it’s relatively calm!

One of the main contributors to cutting down was having only one sandwich for lunch at work instead of two. Changing to a smaller lunch box helped with this.

The trick will be not to get back into the old eating habits when I stop dieting, which I haven’t really, (stopped dieting that is.) But Christmas and New Year won’t have helped.

This is the real end of an era.

Though manager Jim Chapman played for us when we were domiciled at Boghead, with the release of Craig Brittain – announced by the club website today – there is no longer a current player link to our old ground.

Dumbarton played at Boghead for over a century, and at the time of the move to the Rock (SHS Stadium,) were comfortably the longest continuous occupiers of one site in senior football in Britain. This record will of course be superseded by other clubs. (It probably has been already.)

The loss of wee Craigie is notable for that alone but his leaving was always going to be marked for another reason.

Craig had been loaned out to Beith Juniors at the beginning of this season and was already missed by the fans as he was a favourite who always gave his best for the club whenever he was in the team. That move is now permanent.

He suffered from the fact that he was of diminutive stature: it was probably this that meant he never moved on to a “bigger” club and that caused a succession of managers to drop him when they arrived only to restore him to the team when they eventually discovered that he was the best left back we had – by a long way. It is a testament to the way he approached his football with the team that this never prevented him giving his best and ensured the long standing affection the fans have for him. There are few players nowadays whose senior football is played with the one club for so long.

His service to the club was recognised with a testimonial a couple of seasons ago. No one deserved it more.

There were signs last season – a long injury break among them – that the standards he had achieved were beginning to slip. Nevertheless he was still a fans’ favourite and the loan to Beith was subject to criticism in some quarters. And Dumbarton left backs years from now will be told, “You’re not a patch on wee Craigie.”

Jim Chapman is not one for sentimentality, however. He has come to the conclusion that Craig can no longer contribute to the club as effectively as others in the squad. His decision. Players in the left back berth have a lot to live up to, though.

A guid New Year to yin and a’.

(And mony may ye see.)