Cliftonhill, 17/3/09

I spent the last half hour of this game flicking to the BBC live score page and fulminating at it because nothing was happening. I gave up and came back later for confirmation of the defeat and what had we done? Only equalised in the last minute.

Stop doing this to us, guys.

So we’re now second. Not as good a position as it would have been say 5 years ago (before play-offs) as it now means very little.

Home game on Saturday; a wee break then three away in a row, hard on each other’s heels. Ouch!

Our recent away record is dismal, a contrast to early in the season. Sharp improvement needed here.

This is one of my favourite relative obscurities from the sixties. It is by a group called Rupert’s People. The band was actually cobbled together from various elements to make the single.

I think one of the reasons I like this is because of the classical influence. As the above links note, the song itself was adapted from an earlier version (which I would love to hear sometime) to fit the tune of Air On A G String.

It had the great misfortune to be released just after the similarly inspired A Whiter Shade Of Pale began sweeping all before it.

Unlike Whiter Shade Of Pale, though, the lyrics of Charles Brown are not laden with obscurity even if they do perhaps constitute a bit too much of a downer to have become a big hit.

I also like the “cracked” quality of the singing voice. I believe it was the song’s composer, Rod Lynton.

I’m not quite sure why whoever posted this on You Tube used pictures of a construction site.

The B-side, Hold On, was more or less a straight forward rocker but it’s a storming track in its own right.

Links Park, 14/3/09

Oh well. Jitters justified.

That was rubbish with a capital P. We could have played till midnight tomorrow and never scored.

No complaints. The better team won.

I got there late again (it’s a long way and there were holdups on the road) but I don’t think we troubled the Montrose keeper all game. He certainly didn’t have a save to make. Twice we got a man over but he had too heavy a touch and ran the ball out.

We did look a bit better when Murray and Carcary came on, but that was after the goal was already lost and we still didn’t really threaten anything.

The windy conditions weren’t conducive to football and I remain to be convinced about the plastic pitch.

We had the wind at our backs for the first half and managed two shots at goal.

The goal we lost, the ball broke to their player and he just thumped it but they had more attempts; one was bound to go in.

The BBC report of the game has the following gem. “Montrose made all the running at the start and then scored after 19 minutes when Jamie Buchan headed over.” That would have been a controversial goal.

At least we lost no ground on the two above us but Cowden’s bad run won’t go on for ever and we could run out of games.

Vintage, 2003

An unnamed male narrator feels a compulsion to return to a hotel in Sapporo where one of his former lovers, who called herself Kiki and later left him abruptly, once took him. The old hotel is gone, replaced by a brand spanking new one but the staff are reluctant to speak about the old place.

He befriends a female receptionist who tells him of a strange experience she had on exiting a lift on the sixteenth floor into utter darkness. Later, he has a similar episode on the same floor, an almost dreamlike encounter with someone he calls the Sheep Man who tells him to dance, dance, dance through his life.

As he prepares to return to Tokyo the receptionist prevails on him to accompany a thirteen year old girl, Yuki, whose mother, a famous but self-centred photographer, has upped and gone to Thailand on a shoot, forgetting all about her daughter.
Yuki and he keep in touch after they get back and gradually become friends as he is more considerate to her than either of her parents is.

When seeing his old schoolmate Gotanda acting in a film with Kiki, he decides to contact the actor to try to find out where she is now.

The remainder of the novel explores the various relationships between the characters as the narrator tries to puzzle out the mysteries he encounters and what happened to Kiki.

The translation by Alfred Birnbaum is very good – my only quibble being that it is into American. We therefore get “fit” and “shined” as past tenses (shined? of a torch?) installment, and suspenders instead of braces.

While there are some strangenesses – the sixteenth floor, an apparent ability to walk through walls in later dreamlike sequences – the overall effect is realistic enough. The decision to use the name Hiraku Mikamura, an obvious anagram of the author’s, for Yuki’s father seemed to me a bit odd, though, an authorial joke or game with little apparent dramatic purpose.

This is only the second Murakami I have read – the other is Norwegian Wood – and I will have no hesitation in seeking out others.

I haven’t done one of these posts in a while as I was waiting till I got over to Glasgow to take a few photos, but I was browsing the old internet and came across this.

Click on the photo for the Flickr page information.

Apparently it’s just been listed by Historic Scotland. Good on them.

I remember there was a tidal swimming pool by the Clyde at Levengrove Park in Dumbarton. There’s another at St Andrew’s. Both are silted up/worn away now and neither were anything more than a stone wall in a rectangular shape. No Art Deco building.

This is almost like a lido but the location is surely all wrong. You’d have to be hardy soul to brave the Moray Firth, even with this as a backdrop.

See also this picture and this at Flickr. The second of these reminds me of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album cover.

The colour photos below show the degree of dilapidation. (But the tide is out.)

The Rock, 10/3/09

Another win, another clean sheet and two forwards scoring.

That’s three wins in a row now and no goals conceded.

I’m getting jittery.

When did this phraseology start to get muddled up?

It seems few people now use the term “on so-and-so’s behalf” in what I persist in thinking of as the correct sense. Instead they appear to use it to mean so-and-so did it (whatever it was.)

But “on so-and-so’s behalf” of course means “for so-and-so.” It means someone else did it; as an agent for so-and-so.

Something done by so-and-so would be done “on so-and-so’s part” not on their behalf.

The Rock, 7/3/09

Another three points, another clean sheet. What is the world coming to?

A scrappy game by all accounts. Still, I’ll take a scabby 1-0 win against the division’s form team – which Rovers were (and still are, along with the Shire)* – any time.

Our result on Tuesday night looks even better now.

Is this Tuesday going to be a banana skin? We’re playing the bottom team who are just off a hammering, after all. That’s the sort of match, where we could go up at least one place, we quite often don’t do well in.

*Edited to add:- not now.

Gollancz, 2005

Disclaimer:- Eric is one of my many acquaintances in the SF world. I have been in his company at various conventions and shared many talks over a glass or a meal. We stay in touch. He, for example, steered me in the direction of ‘Postscripts’ which recently accepted my story “Osmotic Pressure.”

The Fall Of Tartarus is a collection of short stories/novellas Brown set on the planet Tartarus in the two hundred years before its sun was to go supernova. Published in various magazines between 1995 and 2000 they were not collected in the one book till 2005.

As a playground for Brown’s imagination Tartarus provides fertile soil. Tartarus is terrestrial and therefore familiar in some respects; jungles, lakes, extinct volcanoes and so on. In others it is not like Earth at all; bizarre plants, exotic locales, alien creatures, a rather restricted social organisation described as mediaeval. This gives the place a dated feel – the adolescent sexuality of A Prayer For The Dead notwithstanding. In particular the planet has affected some of its inhabitants, who, though descended from immigrants from Earth, can be totally unlike their forebears. There is a dreamlike quality to some of the events which adds to the strangeness. At times there is a stilted tone to the writing, emphasising the old-fashioned feel. Above all, life on Tartarus is never comfortable.

Reading the stories together it is possible to pick out various common threads. There is the same tonal quality throughout (which is not an absolute requirement of tales such as this) and extensive use of flashbacks. One character, usually the narrator, will be on a quest of some sort. Someone will be seeking to atone for past deeds. There is a strong emphasis on the importance of family. Religions feature strongly, with their usual exhortations to sacrifice and martyrdom, heightened here by adherents of various faiths that their excessive devotion may stem the sun’s demise. In several stories characters explicitly state that their destiny lies on Tartarus, though that, of course holds for everyone in all the stories, whether their characters realise it or not. Most obviously, and not surprisingly for such a doomed setting, there is a preoccupation with death. Not that all of the tales have a downbeat ending. Occasionally we are allowed a life-affirming conclusion.

I found myself wondering if sometimes, for original publication, Brown had to accommodate a particular story to the limits of a word count. The People of The Nova rushes a bit in the run-up to its climax and makes too little of the partly redemptive event that occurs afterward, though the reverse is true of The Hunting Of The Slarque which has a few longueurs.

It would be interesting to discover in what order the stories were written, how Brown developed his ideas. It is as well, though, that Dark Calvary finishes up the collection as there is nothing redemptive in it at all. This, of course, is when the supernova finally strikes. Farewell then, Tartarus.

If you like stories which, while not neglecting ideas or action, focus primarily on characters and their dilemmas, Brown won’t fail you.

The Rock, 3/3/09

That’s better! Three points, two strikers scoring and a clean sheet is more like it. Just goes to show the difference home advantage makes. We’ve got to build on this with two more home games coming up.

So it’s back to the status quo ante vis-a-vis the top four in Div 3 after the respective double headers, with a home win each and no change in goal difference. (Makes you wonder why they bothered to play the games at all.)