The good lady and I were watching something or other on the TV the other week and there was a character on who was supposed to be Scottish but was named Adrian. We both looked at each other and said, “Nuh. No chance.”

This reminded of the Eastenders character called Trevor. (You know the one, the wife beater who gave Little Mo such a hard time before she turned round and biffed him with an iron.) Quite apart from the stereotyping involved here – not all Scots are violent, wife beating psychopathic bastards after all – I have never, ever met a Scotsman called Trevor. I doubt that one exists. Imagine the time such a poor sod would have had at school with a given name like that.

Another example of the scriptwriters’ (and editors’) of Eastenders lack of understanding of Scotland came when Janine murdered Barry while up in Scotland for New Year. She brought his ashes back to “the Square” in an urn, having apparently managed to get him declared dead, and then cremated, sometime between Hogmanay and Jan 3rd. This was highly suspicious: but of course no-one in Eastenders noticed anything amiss.

Anyone who knows Scotland also knows such a feat is impossible. Such services shut down over that period. Jan 2 is a public holiday in Scotland, after all. I know from personal experience that funerals/burials/cremations etc cannot be arranged quickly at that time of year. Two years in a row I missed my first day back at work after the year end break due to attending funerals of people who had died between Christmas and New Year. The ceremonies didn’t – couldn’t – take place until the 6th or 7th at the earliest, mainly due to the backlog which builds up. Janine would have had to kill Barry before Christmas.

Just another small example of the lack of awareness the biggest part of the United Kingdom has for the customs of the smaller. (Don’t get me started on so called Bank Holidays; nor on complaints about Halloween being an import from America.)

This one’s about a retired surfer who refuses to perform on the new artificial waves produced and controlled by the Mesh, a collection of human minds connected by some sort of neural equivalent of the internet. He is in love with the female star of the Mesh Surf Pro Tour. I’m sure you could almost write the rest yourself from here.

The idea behind Surf Town is fine, if a little trite, but the execution is lacking once more. Plus the whole story badly needs proof-read. Words are missing, others repeated at too short an interval and some of the sentence structures leave a lot to be desired. We also have in the first sentence the neologism skool but later in the story the usual spelling appears. And there is a “span” count of three. (Shudder.)

One more complaint: in a future this far away (such a Mesh is not a likely near future development) the word dude as an appellation will surely have vanished. Its use here is an over-clumsy attempt to convey shallowness of character, made worse by being repeated ad nauseam.

You’ll have guessed I wasn’t impressed.

The writing in this is much better than in Gladwish’s story. No missing punctuation, no errant words, no dangling participles. Allan clearly knows the nuts and bolts of language and how to weave them together.*

But, for an entry to a competition run by a Science Fiction Association, Time’s Chariot is, at best, borderline SF or fantasy and could be read entirely as a mainstream piece (or slipstream if you will.)

It is about the close relationship between a brother and sister in an idiosyncratic but slightly dysfunctional family (wherein I felt that one or two of the familial dynamics depicted did not quite cohere.) To say more would be to give away too much.

I did like Allan’s designation of a watch as time machine. I believe she intends us to take this literally but to my mind the working out of the story does not really lend itself to that. Whatever, it was a good pun. One that made me think for a minute.

The story’s major fault, though, is that too much is told; not shown. However, it is atmospheric, with some fine descriptive writing and a tender sensibility too often missing in the genre. Allan may be one to watch.

*Edited to add:- Except I’ve just read her article in the previous Focus, which I hadn’t got around to till now, and she appears to believe the word “none” is plural. She certainly employed it with the plural form of the accompanying verb.

Yesterday was strange. It was the first Saturday in a good while I hadn’t felt that peculiar admixture of anticipation and fear that marks the run-in to a potential promotion. The fear is nothing like that which attends a relegation fight, I hasten to add; but it’s still there. (Curiously, the joy when avoiding relegation can be greater than on winning promotion. But not this year.)

Yesterday there was none of that, “Should I check the score while the game is on and maybe jinx it? Or wait till the game is over,” business.

What I did feel was a kind of emptiness. I almost had a sense of loss. In part that’s because, for us, the season is over and there are no games to look forward to until July (summers without World Cups or European Championships are deserts) but mostly it was because it very likely won’t get as good as that final promotion push again for years, if ever.

Back in August when I started this blog it was mainly to post about writing and only to use Dumbarton FC as a kind of filler when I needed something else to write about. (So much for self delusion.) But I certainly never thought that I’d end up chronicling a promotion season, especially a Championship. All I really hoped for was a play off spot.

Yes, after the first game at Airdrie in the Challenge Cup I was confident we could play attractive attacking football – as is our heritage – but I was worried that defensive frailties would do for us. The diminutive nature of Derek Carcary and Stevie Murray was also a concern as the Third Division is a hurly burly kind of league not generally kind to smaller statures.

What the manager, players and club have done over the season – but especially in the last quarter with the long, no-goals-conceded run – is a magnificent achievement given where we were this time last year. I still don’t think it’s really sunk in.

Yet I find myself quite optimistic about our prospects of doing reasonably well in Division Two next season. (Fatal, fatal thought.)

I blogged a while back about the BSFA’s latest mailing and the inclusion in its magazine for writers, Focus, of the successful stories in its 50th anniversary short story competition.

I have now read all six. My thoughts about them were jotted down before perusing the author biogs at the back of the magazine. A summating comment will appear after all the reviews.

Set on a tidally locked moon orbiting a gas giant some time after a war which threatened to wipe humans out completely, a surviving hero of that war, along with his family, is subjected to a medical examination by someone from a central authority.

During the narrative and the two flashbacks to his war experiences we discover the life-changing choice he made. The story explores its ramifications.

Amid agreeable suggestions that beyond the bounds of the story other things are going on (the enemy has mysteriously disappeared but may come back) the central idea is fine. Unfortunately its execution isn’t. The writing is too often marred by lack of punctuation, a blizzard of dangling participles and a few instances of words wrongly used. (Examples: lightening for lightning, lead for led, loose for lose, breath for breathe and “in vivo” where the contrast was not with “in vitro” but to refer to a procedure which itself takes place in vivo later in life.)

These things do matter, as they interfere with comprehension. More than several times I had to go back and reread sentences to make sense of them. If you are trying to communicate to a reader and the concepts are not in themselves inherently difficult then this ought not to be necessary. Writing like this is comparable to the products of a carpenter who does not have full knowledge of his/her tools. The end result may be serviceable but it’s not quite as functional or satisfying as it might be. You might say the drawers don’t fit properly; they stick or squeak as you run them out or in.

I read this story – the overall winner of the competition – first, and began to wonder to what degree the BSFA has printed the six stories as submitted, without any amendment, warts and all.

Gladwish undoubtedly shows promise but his faults need ironing out. A good editor, perhaps, or a writing group that can help him eliminate them. (If someone of a similar standard applied to the group I belong to I would certainly vote for their inclusion.)

On this evidence Gladwish is almost there as a professional standard writer, but not yet quite. In that sense, the competition has succeeded in identifying promise.

This is a street where, along with some more traditional stone properties, there are a few houses that must have been built in the 1930s as Art Deco external features and stylings abound.

Block of four buildings; semi-detached villas.

Rough cast/pebble dashed semis. Were these once flat-roofed? The one on the left seems to have the original window styling.

Pair of semis; flat-roofed; eyes poked out.

More flat-roofed semis.

Pair of semis with nice Deco detailing but replacement windows.

White painted rendering cracking up a bit.

Fifth pair of semis: eyes poked out.

Nice entranceway detail on a thirties house.

Two more semis.

Yet more. These are on the opposite side of the street to the others.

Macmillan, 2005

This book begins with a rather startling Herman’s Hermits (or, if you’re younger, a Carpenters) reference, which was promising, as was the zeroth chapter – and I will say that Robson’s descriptive writing is a joy – but I found as time went on I just couldn’t get to grips with it. As with Robson’s Mappa Mundi there is a deal of info-dumping and the subject matter is also complex but the major problem was the multiplicity of viewpoint characters, each of whom got a shot at narration for a short while before another took over. This is not necessarily a severe drawback, it works very well for George R R Martin in his Song Of Ice And Fire volumes, but each character there gets an extended chapter; here it entailed too much disruption to the flow.

The nearest I can summarise the plot is that Earth is no longer alone, entry to other worlds/existences is possible via portals/bridges through which we are taken at different times into these various places. There is also much mention of different dimensional universes, our own familiar one of four and those with seven and eleven. The main character is Jalaeka, a kind of shapeshifter with a colourful past, who seems to be a detached fragment of a higher dimensional entity called Unity which wants him/her/it back. Jalaeka is attractive to humans – especially Francine, the main female lead – and is described, and describes him/her/itself as a kind of God.

I don’t like to give up on a book so I persevered and, yes, it does have things to say about redemption – even if we have to endure some graphic scenes before that becomes apparent – and about the permanence of love, but in the end I found it a chore to read.

The fault is likely mine. After all, Living Next Door To The God Of Love was nominated for several awards. However, for various reasons at time of reading I wasn’t able to give it quite the attention it obviously demands.

In the spirit of fairness here’s a link to a reviewer who made more of it than I did.

Later with Jools Holland came on the TV on Friday (8/5/09) as I was brushing my teeth. When I got to bed the good lady said to me, “Paolo Nutini’s been on. He sounds just like an old Scottish singer, I can’t think which one.”

I watched the rest of the show and when Nutini came on again, true enough, he spent most of his performance bent over like an old man. All he was missing was a walking stick.

Then I had it. He’s Harry Lauder returned.

This clip is from 2006. Nutini was a bit more upright then.

Here’s what he looks like more recently. Bent over, you’ll see.

And here’s how he sounded when he first found fame.

I couldn’t find actual footage of Lauder on You Tube, which is a pity.

I caught Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra on BBC 2 on Saturday night (9/5/09.) His take was, of course, comedic, but included some semi-serious stuff about the use of bassoons, oboes, muted trombones and the like.

Even more light-heartedly we had a rendering of both the Moonlight Sonata and the William Tell Overture incorporating Cockney Music (Oi!) More examples from Bailey of Cockney Music influencing the classical arena can be found in the following clip.

The highlight of Saturday night’s show for me, though, was the Doctor Who theme tune reimagined as a Belgian Jazz song. Like the Cockney Music section this seems to be a reworking of part of Bailey’s stage show as in this clip from You Tube but he added some more jokes in cod French in the Orchestra programme. (Les Daleks ne pouvait pas monter les escaliers was one that tickled me.)

He did say, “Je suis Docteur Qui,” at one point, though. True aficionados (aficionadi?) know the correct phrase would be, “Je suis le Docteur.”

If you’re interested in music in a general sense with, like me, only a smattering of knowledge about it, search the programme out. I suppose it’ll be on the iPlayer at the moment.

Galabank, 9/5/09

So that’s the 100% record at Galabank gone, then. We’ve got a 50% record there now, what with our first win.

Well done the lads!

I didn’t go to the game as it’s a bit far away and I saw the effective clincher last week anyway. (In a comment on this post, Onebrow said 65 points would win the championship. As it turned out 64 points would have been enough. We reached that last week.)

The only (slight) downer about this game was the termination of the clean sheet record. It would have been nice to see the season out without losing another goal but we were 2-0 up so maybe the lads eased off a bit.

Still, it’s eight games unbeaten at the right time of the year.

If we can keep the manager and the players together – with maybe a few additions – we ought to do well enough next season.

Alloa, Arbroath, Brechin*, Clyde, East Fife, Stirling* – and maybe Airdrie* – here I come!

*Depending on play off results.