Here are two more pictures I’ve found (on flickr) of the building I started this series off with.

Nice ending to my sentence above, wasn’t it? Not one, but two prepositions.

This is the sort of language that, it is said, up with which Winston Churchill would not put.

Another free Saturday, so a chance to say Nigella Lawson was on TV when I switched it on this morning.

And she mentioned liquorice, which she pronounced more-or-less as “likorish.”

Of course many Southerners do this but I don’t recall ever hearing this way of saying the word until I went to visit my cousins on England’s South Coast in nineteen hundred and long time ago. It’s bugged me ever since.

No-one, for example, says rice with a “sh” sound at the end.

Anyway, Nigella moved me to look the word up and my dictionary (Chambers Twentieth Century, 1972) gives the pronunciation as “lik’ ə-ris (in US also -rish)” so Nigella and all those Southerners are actually saying it the American way.

Why?

(Of course my Chambers was a Scottish publication but it doesn’t give lik’ ə-rish as an English form of pronunciation. It does also give the alternative spelling licorice.)

Jonathan Cape, 2004, 519p

This is the fruit of one of the local library book sales I have mentioned. A previous reader has “kindly” corrected the German spelling in it. Pity they didn’€™t do the same for the English. (The word for floral tributes spelled wreathes, anyone? Flowers called gladiolas?)

Or should that be American? I really resented having to omit the second “€œl”€ in traveller in this post’s title. The edition I read was printed in the UK. Why were British spellings not used? I’€™m quite sure that British novels released in the States are made over for that market. In these days of “Find and Replace”€ it is relatively simple to amend a copy-ready file, surely? Or is it just too easy for the publisher to take the US version whole and make us swallow it?

Notwithstanding that, there is something unsavoury about the whole enterprise. This begins from the cover (see above) which shows, from the waist down, a young girl in a skirt and knee socks, while lying beside her on a blanket on the ground is a man’€™s shirt on which his shoes are placed.

The central relationship involves Clare, who meets her future husband Henry when she is six and he is thirty years older. The catch is he is a time traveller who when she first encounters him is, in her future, already married to the woman she will become. It is nevertheless unsettling to be reading about clandestine meetings between a grown man and a child who is also his wife – even if Niffenegger is at great pains to point out that the affair is not consummated until Clare is eighteen. I don’€™t think this absolves her of the whiff of transgression, however.

Henry does have an excuse of sorts. He does not meet Clare in real time until she is twenty and he twenty-eight -€“ and he has no conscious control over his time-travelling.

Each section is headed with a date and a note of Clare and Henry’€™s respective ages at the time. This is indicative both of flaws in the concept and/or inadequacies in the writing. It is really only a species of information dumping. Such background is surely more smoothly imparted via the narrative. We should not need our hands held in this way. Or, rather, the crutch it offers the author should be eschewed. Each section also begins with the name Clare or Henry to indicate viewpoint. Should we not be able to distinguish different narrators by their individual styles?

While there would be no story without it, the time travelling is itself problematic. The episodes we are shown (we are told there are others) are there purely to unveil the plot. Henry usually travels into the past but can on occasion go into the future. He also sometimes meets himself. Yet we are to take it on trust that he doesn’€™t let his future self know about Clare – the love of his life – until after they meet in real time. And they never try to alter what happens to them (except for Henry, once.) Nevertheless Henry and Clare are not above using his foreknowledge to play the stock market in order to make their lifestyle comfortable. Plus Henry still keeps on his job in a library.

Niffenegger is having her cake and eating it here.

Moreover, the rationale provided for the time travel is inadequate. It is a genetic variation, yet “a bit like epilepsy,”€ as Henry describes it to his boss when two of his incarnations turn up at the one time. Henry is supposed by another of the characters, a medic, to be a new stage in evolution; the first Chrono Displaced Person. And nowhere is the space travel aspect of time travel addressed.

Henry is also a bit of a prick, the sort of man whom Clare would be unlikely to fall in love with or be attracted to were it not for the unusual circumstances in which she met him. There is an implication of predestination here, or self fulfilling prophecy, which sits badly with free will. In the one instance where Henry does affect the future he is also manipulative.

Rid yourself of these quibbles, though, and the novel is a more-or-less engaging love story. But no more.

Forthbank Stadium, 15/12/09

So we got the good result, then. And only three goals would have won it for us.

I’d have taken it before the game but going into the lead twice and losing it both times, the last with two minutes to go, is a bit of a kicker.

I couldn’t face the drive to Stirling so I started “watching” this on the BBC website when it was 1-1 and was immediately apprehensive. Our second goal was a nice bonus. Downer at the second equaliser, though.

But an away draw against the joint leaders can’t be bad. And up to fifth again.

This morning it was pretty dark when I left the house. Well, it is only one week away from the shortest day and the overcast didn’t help. But it seemed much worse than last week and Friday was only three days ago. It was still more or less dark when I got to work and also when I left to drive home. So I’ve barely seen any daylight.

Dawn still gets progressively later over the next week and even though sunset has passed its earliest by now it gets later by a smaller margin so the days still shorten.

Had the clocks not changed in October I would already have had a month or so of travelling to work in the dark (with daylight only appearing around ten o’clock) and there would have been little or no lightness in the evening to compensate. Plus after the New Year another month of the same grind to get through.

(I’ve heard that people in Norway who only get one hour of daylight at this time of year don’t bother with it and just keep their curtains closed.)

As it is the mornings will be brightening from the beginning of January. And there’s a holiday season coming up. Reasons to be cheerful. Maybe.

I might give the game tomorrow night a miss, though.

Here’s yet more proof that Aberdeen does have Art Deco influenced buildings.

Among its claims to fame are a floor sprung on steel springs and that the Beatles played the final gig of their 1963 Scotland tour there.

This link shows a close up of the nice detailing above the doorway.

There’s a more general view here and a nice panorama plus some interior views at Scottish Cinemas.

This one is from a distance inland.

I got the following months ago from Aberdeen City Council website. I haven’t corrected the grammar in its second sentence:-

‘The building presents a low elevation to the promenade but, on entering, the visitor descends the main staircase from which the full height and space of the domed octagonal ballroom can be appreciated. The interior reflect the glamour and Art Deco style of the 1930s whilst the sprung floor of Canadian pine, enjoyed by generations of Aberdeen dancers is still intact. The extension on the seaside of the building was designed by the City Architects Department in the early 1960s.’

Their site has been updated but there’s still an orthographic error on the new page about the ballroom.

The Rock, 12/12/09

I take the goals against predictor off for one league game and what happens?

We revert to early season type.

And it allowed Peterhead to climb above us on goal difference even though they lost.

Methinks the cup games have been too much of a distraction.

We’ve now got two difficult games against top four opponents to come. I’m not looking forward to them at all.

So: do we need to score four on Tuesday night to get a win? (A draw will be a good result.)

*Edited to add:-
Thanks to onebrow for letting me know I originally had the score wrong. (0-1. Must have been wishful thinking.)

Dell, 1978, 286p

Pangborn died over thirty years ago, in 1976. So it goes. This is a collection of short stories which he himself brought together just before his death. All are set in the post-catastrophe world of his novels Davy, The Judgement Of Eve and The Company Of Glory which I read soon after publication. His non-SF novel Wilderness Of Spring is virtually unobtainable and I only managed to buy a copy of Still I Persist In Wondering very recently.

A Twenty Minute War and a Red Plague in the late Twentieth Century, along with hugely risen sea levels, have left few human survivors. They struggle on in reduced circumstances, trying to make the best of them. The stories in the book span in sequence the centuries after the fall from a time when the inhabitants of Katskil still recall technology with varying degrees of fondness till the days when tales of the Old Time have achieved the status of myth and legend, alloyed with a kind of dread.

It cannot be said often enough that SF is not about predicting the future but merely to ask the question what if?……. So, despite the fact that the world Pangborn describes has not in fact come about – smallpox is still a killer here – these stories are alive in a way that verges on the transcendental.

Not much tends to happen in any particular story but that is almost irrelevant. When it does, as in The Witches Of Nupal, it occurs with a dreadful inevitability.

One in four births in Katskil and Adirondack Island is of a mutant. The Murcan Church teaches these “monsters” are to be killed. The growth of this faith can be traced interstitially through the book. We meet its progenitor, Abraham Brown, in the first story “The Children’s Crusade” where his forthcoming martyrdom is presaged, but he is a less than omnipotent figurehead. The new religion (same as the old religion?) comes into sharper focus in the next to last story “My Brother Leopold” the tale of the circumstances surrounding the sanctification of an itinerant dreamer/visionary, with a “Companion” only he could hear, tried for heresy and burned years earlier. Here is where the book’s title is found as Leopold’s brother Jermyn includes in a letter to his clerical superior the sentence, “And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.”

This comes to the heart of what is instantly apparent about any of Pangborn’s writing; its humanity. His empathy for the characters is striking. Not that he is reticent about folly, tragedy or death overcoming them.

The last tale “The Night Wind” is quintessential Pangborn. Narrated by a homosexual, fleeing from a stoning after his proclivities have been discovered, he nevertheless tarries to aid a recently bereaved, bedridden near neighbour who assures him, “any manner of love is good if there is kindness in it.”

Pangborn’s projected world, like all the best fiction, is instantly believable in a way that is somehow beyond truth. You feel he is describing things just as they are – or would be. It is a pleasure to be immersed in his vision. That immersion, however, is never a cosy experience.

For some time now The Royal Society of Chemistry, which is obviously a British organisation, has recommended the use of sulfur as the spelling for sulphur. (This has the knock on effect of also meaning using the forms sulfate and sulfite for naming compounds containing respectively the sulphate and sulphite ions; or hydrogensulfite and hydrogensulfate for what before more systematic naming came about used to be known as the bisulphite and bisulphate ions.)

I have now learned that the SQA, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, (my italics) – again domiciled within these islands – will also be taking up this egregious practice.

The imposition is of course an American usage and is I suppose being introduced on the grounds that sulphur is easier to spell this way. But is it?

I agree that Americans – and increasingly we Brits – do write fantasy for phantasy but on this side of the Atlantic we do still tend to cling on to phantasm rather than fantasm.

Yet do Americans write of fotografs or fotons? They seem to manage those all right while using ph.

What is so special about sulphur that singles it out for this treatment?

And why not go the whole hog, here, and spell it sulfer to make it more like it sounds?

I do admit some people confuse it with silver – though since silver is a greyish metal and sulphur a yellow non-metal I can’t for the life of me see why. I think the “new” spelling will only make such confusion worse, though.

But whatever next?

Will we be forced to adopt aluminum?

Can we perhaps look forward to spelling the main ingredient of carbolic soap as fenol? Or the acid-alkali indicator as fenolfthalein?

Will element number 15 be known in the future as fosforus? (No, of course not. Its symbol is P and it only ever gets confused with potassium – which for historical reasons has the symbol K. F is in any case already taken as the symbol for fluorine.)

It’s all nonsense. Stop it.

Now.

I for one will not be changing my spelling practices.

Accept no substitute. Stand up for ph.

The Rock, 8/12/09

Another welcome home win and it takes us above Peterhead to the dizzy heights of fifth.

It was a good result as they have an excellent record against us at our place; and at theirs come to that. (That link will be updated with last night’s result sometime I presume.)

It was probably a hairy second half, with only one goal as a cushion.

The club website says the penalty was dodgy. We’ll take it, though.