The trouble with Kurt Cobain was that he named his band Nirvana.

This means that whenever I mention the original Nirvana, the true Nirvana, I have to explain I don’t mean a grungy bunch from Seattle.

The earlier (1960s) Nirvana’s mainstays were Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos. Together with producer Chris Blackwell they produced a series of idiosyncratic singles with classical/orchestral influences and also released what was probably the first concept album, The Story Of Simon Simopath, which had a quintessentially 60s psychedelic cover – complete with blocky unequal sized lettering.

This is their first single, Tiny Goddess, which has more than a hint of Pachelbel.

Loftus Versfeld Stadium, Tshwane, Pretoria

Last night I watched the Confederations Cup game between the USA and Italy.

I know it’s a nothing tournament dreamed up by FIFA to justify the organisation’s existence but my excuse is it’s the close season and I also have to practice for the World Cup next year.

I thought the USA didn’t keep the ball well enough even before they had the man sent off. Nevertheless they were worth their half-time lead. Italy looked disjointed but they’re Italy. Somehow it was always going to be them winning.

But quite apart from the new lighter shade of blue of their jerseys Italy sported an outfit that completely gives the lie to tales of Italian snappy dressing.

Their shorts and socks were brown.

What on Earth was that all about?

(Spanking first goal from Giuseppe Rossi, though. His other finish was a peach too.)

There has been much talk of late about the electoral system for the UK Parliament. This will be another round in the ongoing battle to extend and improve the franchise which has been unfolding since before the Great Reform Act of 1832. After that date a series of Representation Of The People Acts gradually allowed more and more men the vote till finally all males aged 21 could. Then after World War 1 women aged 30 were granted the franchise, and when it was realised that the world had not come to an end simply because the fairer sex could vote, women at 21 received it sometime around 1930.

I still remember my grandmother struggling out to vote even though she was an old lady. She did this religiously because she could remember the time when women did not have that right and was determined that she should exercise it whenever possible.

Finally (in the 1970s if my memory serves – I’ve not Wikied any of this so far, it was one of the bits of History I did do at school) the voting age was reduced to 18 for all voters. Gordon Brown has even floated the idea of reducing it to 16!

My younger son likes to take credit for the genesis of this proposal as during the last General Election he was in Kirkcaldy High Street and was accosted by our Labour candidate (you know who) and asked if he was going to be voting for him. He had to reply he was too young and couldn’t vote.

The Chartists were a group who agitated for electoral extension and reform in the mid 1800s with six main demands – all of which were rejected at the time. Yet they prevailed in the end; mostly.

The only one of their demands that has not yet been enacted is Annual Parliaments. This might be one reform now worth considering. By this I (unlike the Chartists) don’t mean hold a General Election every single year, but instead have, say, a quarter of the House Of Commons come up for election each year with members sitting for a fixed term of four years. A similar sort of thing used to happen in council elections in my youth when every council ward had three members, each coming up for (re)election every third year. My proposal is not for constituencies to have four members each but for a rolling programme of elections.

Perhaps a new People’s Charter should be set up to agitate for this.

Whether it would alleviate or exacerbate the endemic short-termism that bedevils British government I’m not sure but I think it would lead to a reduction in excess by whoever is in office. Would, for example, we have had the worst extremes of Thatcherism or latterly the Iraq war if a quarter of the House Of Commons had been facing imminent re-election? I suppose there would still need to be the ability to hold a widespread General Election at any time – but only if Parliament voted for one.

Along with a more proportional voting system (STV?) and a smaller upper House – perhaps to be elected on a longer term basis, but not for life and certainly not because your ancestor once happened to be boffed by a king – with a scrutineering role and which would also represent the nations and regions of the UK more evenly this would go a long way to making UK government more accountable. All Members of Parliament, of both Houses, to be subject to some form of dismissal in the event of financial shenanigans or other disqualification (such as being jailed.)

It won’t happen, of course.

Dumbarton lost only seven league matches last season.

Yet I was at four of them. (The two against the Shire at Ochilview, the January game in Cowdenbeath and the March game at Montrose.)

Until April I had only seen us win one league game (at Montrose in October) plus the penalty shoot out against Annan in the CIS way back in August. There were two draws along the way though.

On the face of it that would suggest I am a bit of a jinx.

But I can only really get to away games since I live so far from the Rock and the likelihood is always that the away team doesn’t do as well as it does at home; so that sequence wasn’t really a statistical quirk just an inevitable consequence of being a long distance supporter.

But in a triumph of perseverance – and hope firmly suppressed – I then saw us win two games in four days; at Ochilview against Stenny and at Forfar. The championship became a possibility that week because Cowden were not winning.

The rest is history.

All in, in the league I saw 4 wins, 3 draws and those 4 defeats.

As I mentioned before, for me eight out of nine of the away venues are travellable next season. Will I see more than three away wins?

Unicorn (Unwin), 1986

I came to Colin Greenland late, when he turned to SF rather than fantasy and Take Back Plenty won all those awards. I first met him at a Science Fiction convention in Leeds and he’s a really nice bloke, one of nature’s gentlemen. I’ve had the pleasure of his company at other cons since. This is me catching up with his back catalogue.

Daybreak on A Different Mountain was Greenland’s first novel, the start of a fantasy sequence. In the city of Thryn, walled off from the outside world for ages, the local priestess of the god Gomath identifies one of the aristocratic Agui, Lupio, as some sort of messiah, called the Cirnex. Dismayed, he breaks the law by leaving the city, teaming up with Dubilier, who has different reasons for escape. Together they venture off towards a distant sacred mountain. The book chronicles their odyssey.

The novel has an interesting symmetrical structure. Two sections set in Thryn bookend the longer middle part which is itself symmetrical as Dubilier and Lupio have various adventures on their way to the mountain and on the way back meet characters they encountered on their outward journey.

(The next sentence contains a slight spoiler.)

They find the city they come back to is very different from the one they left and the way their encounters are mutated and transform into the mythology Lupio was trying to escape is cleverly done.

The book is 25 years old now, being first published in 1984 and is of its time. Yet while Greenland’s deftness with character is already evident here there is that fantasy quirk whereby many are given strange names. Piripheis anyone? Hirfan? Ibet?

If I were recommending a starting point for anyone unfamiliar with Greenland’s work I wouldn’t suggest Daybreak though it is a worthwhile read. Try instead Take Back Plenty or, better still, his excellent mainstream novel Finding Helen.

My blog’s stats spiked yesterday.

It was the highest number of unique visitors I’ve ever had.

Such a shame that it was because people were looking for items about Gordon Lennon.

It does say a lot about the man, though, and the way people have responded to the tributes paid to him.

I came in tonight not having heard any news today and looked at the club website. It was with profound shock that I read of the untimely death of captain Gordon Lennon after a car crash.

I remember him coming over to the stand after the end of the Elgin City game where the championship was clinched all bar arithmetic and taking a baby into his arms. This was his then 4 month old child, Kai. His tenderness as a father was apparent in that moment. His partner Kelly and the baby will of course miss him more than anybody.

At times like this football is a very minor concern but he will be forever remembered at the Rock as a championship trophy lifting captain and great guy who always had time for the fans.

Tributes to Gordon have been posted on various fan forums. He was held in high esteem by fans of his previous clubs and those of clubs whom he only played against.

Gordon Lennon 1983 -2009. So it goes.

I’m a bit late with this as I’ve at last fallen into close season mode.

Dunfermline. Hmmm.

Pity it’s at home. I’ve not been to East End Park in ages.

Not much else to say about this except we’re out.

No; we did okay against 1st Div opposition last season. (But I can’t really see us progressing.)

This is a sad one as it’s now in a depressing state. I caught a glimpse of it one day when driving past and the next time I was nearby and on foot I made sure to take a photograph.

Upstairs used to be the cinema’s cafe. The windows there are just amazing.

This is what it looked like when it was still operating as a cinema.

There are some photos of the closing night also on the Scottish cinemas website.

Two more photos of the cinema in its heyday are on this site.

It’s a shame that a building like this has fallen into disuse.

Vintage, 2005

This is Roth’s Altered History, set in a 1940s America where Charles Lindbergh became President – apparently mainly as a result of taking to the air on the campaign trail in the Spirit of St Louis – then forged an understanding with Hitler and so kept the US out of World War 2. Given Roth’s lineage the book unsurprisingly deals with the implications of this outcome for America’s Jews, who are increasingly made to feel alien in their own land. As a result, the Roth trademarks from the other books of his that I have read (Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life As A Man,) viz masturbation, obsessive sexuality and male angst, are muted, if not absent.

The story is rendered more rooted than it might have been otherwise by the fact that our narrator is named Philip Roth. We are hence invited to believe that the family depicted is the author’s own from his youth, reimagined in the changed circumstances. This allows Roth the author, through the medium of Mr Roth the character, to express more forcibly the anger that any citizen must feel in being deprived arbitrarily of the benefits of citizenship.

Coming from a mainstream literary perspective Roth’s handling of this material is distinctive. A Science Fiction author would likely have approached the scenario from a completely different direction. And Roth does that rather annoying mainstream thing of giving us a potted biography of every character who happens to pop up whether we need this information or not. In this case it may be of everyone whom the actual young Roth met in the 1940s. There are also longueurs in the narrative which would be absent in a more plot driven Altered History.

At times, too, so much background is loaded into it that the novel reads more like a history book. Roth presumably believes that his setting is too far removed from the present day to be accessible without it. This approach culminates in the penultimate chapter where the book ceases to be a novel at all and instead descends into a – nevertheless thoroughly readable, Roth’s prose easily encompasses exposition – recitation of events and a farrago of ever wilder conspiracy theories all told by Philip at one remove, rather than experienced by him at first hand. The unlikely heroine of the piece (and this is not really a spoiler as there’s nothing there to spoil) turns out to be Mrs Lindbergh. That the impact of these events is brought home to Philip in the final chapter, through the medium of his fellow-travelling Aunt and some former neighbours, in no way remedies the egregiousness of this colossal info dump. Quite simply this is not the way to write a piece of fiction; high- or lowbrow.

It has to be said that not much in the way of jeopardy ever befalls the Roth family, most of it lies in Mr Roth’s mind. Yes, Mr Roth has to change his job to a poorer one; but there are no outrageous restrictions on their civil liberties, no concentration camps – only the intermittent attentions of an inquisitive FBI man and a later series of riots spilling over into pogroms which don’t affect the Roth family directly.

Ultimately the book is really a long discourse on what it means to be American (that is, I feel obliged to say, being a citizen of the US rather than born in the continent in which that country lies) and the inclusiveness that entails. Here is where more of the doubts creep in. Whatever Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic views may have been – and Roth goes some way to exculpate his Lindbergh from them – a fascist takeover in the US would surely have had other, more obvious, targets for dehumanisation. In the end, perhaps because he is unwilling to believe the worst of his fellow countrymen or else as a sop to their sensibilities Roth rather lets the US off the hook. This, I note, is in stark contrast to what the English SF writer Keith Roberts did for the UK in his excellent short story of a Nazi-dominated Britain, Weihnachtsabend.

Is The Plot Against America a commentary on the recent Bush administration? On how easy it is for freedoms to be subverted; how the price of freedom is eternal vigilance? If so, it is rather too diffuse to be effective.

I was so, so disappointed in this book. Its central idea has the potential to be huge but in his tight focus on the family Roth the author renders it far too small. Mainstream literature sometimes prides itself on illustrating the universal by anatomising the particular. In this context choosing as the narrative voice a boy between the ages of 7 and 9 is too limiting. The themes simply cannot be dealt with adequately from the young Philip’s perspective.

Before reading this I would have contended that Altered History in and of itself is always a subset of Science Fiction. The Plot Against America, however, is not SF, since Roth, within his plot, falls too short, even implicitly – never mind explicitly – of contrasting his scenario with what actually happened, and the book is the poorer for it.

But after the novel finishes we are provided with postscripts on the actual lives of historical characters mentioned in the text. Part of the joy of reading Altered History is in recognising figures such as these in their new context; one of the drawbacks is you might miss a few in the passing. Roth’s end notes can only be there to bolster his fiction; to say, “Look at the research I did – or the prodigious memory I have.” Had the novel been written halfway adequately these notes would be superfluous.