After the game on Saturday I took a trip down to the quay at Dumbarton. I’ve always liked the fact there are loads of swans on the river there.

I’d never seen a black one before, though. It was swimming all on its own.

Black Swan in River Leven

The good lady said it had flown in from Russia or somewhere and wouldn’t find a mate as it’s a different species from the white ones.

It’s actually more of a deep brown colour than black. It’s a beautiful thing with a red beak and striking red eyes.

Here are the pictures of the championship flag ceremony from Saturday. Apart from the goal it was the only thing to celebrate.

The players formed an honour guard for the flag raising party.

Players lined up.

The flag was raised jointly by Gordon Lennon’s father and the manager Jim Chapman. Gordon’s partner Kelly and son Kai can be seen just to the left of these two. Other members of Gordon’s family are on the extreme right of the picture.

After the ceremony a lone piper played a lament in memory of Gordon Lennon.

The poster being held up says, “Hero Guido Gordon Lennon.”

I’ve now been doing this blogging thingy for a full calendar year. (To my loyal readers it just feels like longer.)

In that time I’ve made 305 posts – nearly one a day I’m astonished to note – and had 323 legitimate comments (including pingbacks.) Thank you to all who have taken the time to read my ravings and to the smaller number who have contributed.

I’ve had visitors from the Americas (North and South) Europe, Australasia, and the Near and Far East as well as from the UK.

There have also been over 4,000 spam comments. Why are a lot of them in Cyrillic?

According to the stats, apart from Gordon Lennon’s sad death the most interest has been in my Art Deco posts. I keep finding new Deco buildings in Scotland to include so that’s an ever extending topic. I’ll be doing a series on Art Deco in Dunfermline (where I work) soon but I think the most comments on any one post have been about the poem “The Boy In The Train.” Amazing what a piece of doggerel can engender.

As to this post’s title, my elder son said to me recently, “You come across as a terrible pedant on your blog, Dad.” He was using the word terrible in the colloquial sense of excessive, of course, rather than meaning that I was not very good at being pedantic – or that my posts inspire fear.

Guilty as charged as far as pedantry is concerned. The good lady swears I could be pedantic for Scotland. She is long suffering it’s true.

I can’t promise I’ll be cutting it down in future, though.

The Rock, 8/8/09

Well, we’re not Dumbarton nil.

But we should be. Despite the announcer giving our goal to Ben Gordon, it was an og. (I see the BBC red button says it was Grant who headed it past his own keeper.)

Whether the result would have been different if we had scored first I don’t know. Certainly Michael Crawford had at least two good saves, one before and one after Alloa had opened the scoring. And if Ross Clark had put his header in instead of past the post at 0-0….

Defensive blunders cost us. The first when Geggan and Smith got switched at full back and never sorted themselves out, all compounded by Ben Gordon’s misjudgement and lack of midfield tracking back. The second when Geggan was pulled out of position again and Smith was then left exposed and couldn’t prevent the cross. The less said about Mick Dunlop’s mistake for the third the better.

And I wasn’t convinced by Michael White in goal when he took over at half time.

Stevie Murray looked found out to me. Whenever he got the ball he was surrounded by three Alloa players and couldn’t do anything with it. Only when he played simple balls straight away was he in any way effective.

The midfield lacked balance. No dig. McStay needed? Onebrow remarked to me that Craig and Murray were trying to do the same job and so were Clark and Chaplain. Plus there didn’t seem to be a set formation, the midfield were all roaming all over the place.

The stand side linesman was atrocious all game and contributed to Dennis McLaughlin’s frustration but he still really should have known better than to kick a guy right in front of the ref.

The pre-match flag unfurling (photos to come later) and remembrance of Gordon Lennon seemed to take all the passion from the crowd; and the team. I’m glad I was there to witness that, though, it was an emotional moment. Pity the result couldn’t have been better.

9/8/09 Edited to add: I meant to say that I thought Alloa showed their familiarity with this division. They were assured and comfortable on the ball throughout and, despite Crawford’s saves, never really looked troubled.

It was not long after I started watching Dumbarton regularly – three seasons or so – that the team won promotion to the top division. Four seasons later we were gerrymandered down to the new second tier. We had a continuous run there for twelve years (apart from a brief elevated foray to the Premier Division for one season) until finally falling into the third level. We got promotion four years later, were gerrymandered down again after two seasons then won promotion to the present Division One at the first attempt for one season only before a disastrous couple of successive relegations and totally bottom finish the year after that. Then it was pretty much years of bumping along near the bottom.

It is probably that relatively successful 23 year period in the club’s history – along with being the first ever outright winners of the whole Scottish League way back in the 19th century and a former winner of the Scottish Cup – that lends me the ludicrous sense of entitlement I feel that we should be playing at least no lower than that level.

And historically that is our ranking.

However since 1997 we have been predominantly a fourth tier club (except for four seasons in Division Two between 2002 and 2006.)

Division Two again looms. I’m probably going to have to settle for that. Right now, and given the last 12 years, I’d be happy to.

Another fruit of my “Doon The Watter” trip.

This shot was taken from the south Bank of the Clyde almost at Langbank. The tide was out, showing the rocky foreshore.

Dumbarton FC’s stadium is immediately behind the Castle Rock as you look at it from here.

This photo shows a cloud shrouded Ben Lomond (the only Munro I have ever climbed) in the background.

There actually is an angle, just west of Langbank, I glimpsed it on my way back down later in the day but I was on a motorway and couldn’t stop, where the Castle Rock does look like a recumbent elephant. Hence the Elephant And Castle pub in Dumbarton High Street – now closed I believe – and the football club badge. I had always thought it was Dumbuck that was supposed to be elephant-like but it is the Rock after all.

This picture shows the Rock from Greenock. I seem by accident to have caught a seabird on the wing.

On my trip Doon The Watter I ended up at Largs, so naturally I took the chance to visit and photograph the refurbished Nardini’s.
This is a stitched together photo of the two I took of the exterior. I like the flags, a true Art Deco touch. Note the “ghost” of the car that was turning left on to the main street.

What a splendid job they’ve made of the restoration. It’s been tastefully done with lovely light shades in the cafe part, stepped octagonal box shapes.
The ice cream selling area (through the corner entrance) also has a Deco type shade on the central light but it’s a stepped cylindrical shape.
The glassware on the doors has also been rendered in the Deco style.
The décor inside and glass doorway reflect the Art Deco feel. The chairs and tables in the café part were less striking though.
This is the photo of the left side.

The present owners have no connection with the Nardini family as far as I know.
Encouragingly the place was busy, though.
We had to sample the wares, of course. The good lady had a double cone with Belgian Chocolate and Caramel Shortcake flavours, I had Double Cream Vanilla and Tablet. (The sign said, “Scottish Tablet,” – must be for the tourists.)
Here is the photo from the right aspect.

There were other ice cream purveyors in Largs including a different Nardini’s – perhaps someone from the original family trading on a smaller scale than before.
Largs is still a typical seaside town. There were even people buying rock from a wee sweetie shop. It took me back.

Due to someone viewing (on 1/8/09) my previous post about Nardini’s (see link above) I found this video on you Tube.

Nardini’s website is here. See also this nice set of aerial photos.

Solaris, 2009

Disclaimer:- Keith Brooke is another of my SF acquaintances and I’ve known him for years now. He even got me to review books for his SF site, Infinity Plus.

In this novel people can undergo periodic brain dumps which are then warehoused until the “owner” dies, when they are transferred into the Accord – a virtual heaven, a consensus reality, overwhelmingly real, almost indistinguishable from the true world, assembled from the minds of those who have died and been uploaded into it. Its creator, Noah Barakh, in the run up to the Accord achieving a kind of critical mass where it will become more or less fixed, can negotiate its protocols, run and rerun different realities. In the real world from which the dead came there is increasing chaos making the Accord a more and more attractive proposition to the living.

The book’s chapters are not numbered conventionally but rather as 0.01, 1.08 and 2.06 etc depending on which version of the Accord is being written about; its beginnings, its full consensus, and its final shift into quantum space where there are no Malthusian limits on its growth. This software type numbering is either amusing or irritating depending on your point of view.

As to the bare bones of the plot, Barakh has an affair with Priscilla, the wife of leading politician Jack Burnham, who finds out and kills Priscilla but Barakh gets the blame. Priscilla is reborn in the Accord from a brain dump taken before the affair happened. Barakh sets up offshoots of the Accord where he tries to rekindle the affair.

Very early on both Barakh and Burnham die in the real world. The rest of the novel – nearly all its 442 pages – is concerned with Burnham’s quest (with the help of other protocol adjustors) to track down Barakh in the Accord and eliminate his presence there completely, to prevent his affair with Priscilla.

I wasn’t entirely clear about just how the Accord “knew” when inhabitants of the real world had died and so were allowed to join but that is a minor quibble.

More philosophically, in fiction there is a problem with virtual heavens, with virtual environments of any sort. Their inhabitants are merely strings of ones and zeroes. Why should we care about what happens to them? This problem is greater with the Accord as when people “die” there they are reborn from their final brain dump – though with the memories they have gained in the Accord since their first uploading. In effect they are immortal.

This might have been an opportunity for Brooke to speculate about whether we in what we think of as the real world are ourselves merely numbers whirring around in a mainframe somewhere; but that is not his concern. Instead, he focuses on what such a form of immortality means for human behaviour. What is the nature of love and jealousy and revenge in these circumstances? The cleverness of his Accord idea is that it to its inhabitants it is so real that to all intents and purposes it feels like the actual world and hence the characters in it are also made real for us.

This is a complex, thought provoking book, with multiple narrators and shifts of tense. Literature tends to concern itself with love, sex and death. The Accord is about the possible consequences for “human” behaviour of removing one of that trinity.

Last week I took a trip “Doon The Watter” (except I went by road rather than boat.)

Birds on foreshore at Greenock

On the shore at Greenock were these birds which at first I thought were oystercatchers but the plumage isn’t quite right and the beaks are too orange. Does anyone have any idea what they are?

I got married.

On a bank holiday (in nineteen hundred and long time ago.) My English-born and raised cousin, who was no stranger to Scotland, came up for the do and when my father mentioned getting the signatures to the registrar afterwards, said, “I thought you said it was a Bank Holiday.”

We said, “It is. A bank holiday. The banks are shut, everything else is open.”