The Hollies were frequently referred to by Jimmy Savile in his Top of the Pops introductions as “the groups’ group,” meaning that other groups admired them. They started off quite “pop”py but just before Graham Nash left for CSN(Y) began to produce more interesting stuff like King Midas In Reverse and this one which was a particular favourite of one of my schoolfriends.

Once again we have what looks like a promotional film. ( More proof these were not vanishingly rare before videos came along.)

The Hollies: Listen To Me

Little, Brown, 2009. 404p

Despite being published without the M in the author’s name – except in the US – this Iain Banks novel features parallel worlds, and flitting between them, and has as a plot point the existence or not of alien intelligences somewhere out there. As such it can scarcely be described as mainstream. But then early Iain “no M” Banks offerings (Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Canal Dreams) were suffused with SFness and/or sensibility (The Wasp Factory.)

Transition does, though, signal its literariness from the outset – its strapline is “based on a false story” and the first words of its prologue are, “Apparently I am what is known as an unreliable narrator.” There is, too, a high degree of characterisation throughout even though, with the aid of a drug known as septus, most of its main characters can flit from one body to another. In typical Banksian fashion there is a shadowy organisation – here known as l’Expédience, or the Concern (which last is a pun) based on a world unusually known as Calbefraques rather than Earth – in charge of the use and distribution of septus and of recruitment to and training for the transition process.

I did notice that while at one point it is said that there has to be a recipient body for transitioning to take place – the one left behind has only rudimentary function as a husk – later transitions to uninhabited worlds do take place without added explanation.

The narrative is divided between various viewpoint personalities, Patient 8262, who is in hiding in a hospital in a country where the local language is not his own, The Transitionary, who may be an earlier incarnation of Patient 8262, Adrian, a former drug dealer turned hedge fund manager, Madame d’Ortolan, foremost member of the Concern’s ruling council, The Philosopher, a legal torturer, and occasional others. The Transitionary’s is a first person present tense narrative, others are past tense, sometimes first, sometimes third person. The most intriguing character is the rather prosaically named Mrs Mulverhill – who is not married, merely likes the name.

In the sort of inversion beloved of SF authors one of the parallel worlds has a set of Christian fanatics pitted against the state and indulging in suicide bombings and the like. The scenario gives Banks the opportunity to riff on how proportionate a response society ought to have to terrorism and on the (in)efficacy of torture. One of his characters also skewers “the invisible hand.”

Devotees of Iain M Banks will probably find this a treat. Followers of his M-less namesake ought also to find enough in it to satisfy them.

Quite a lot of years ago now we holidayed with the boys, as they were then, in Yorkshire. On the way down we went through Corbridge. The town is now bypassed east/west by the A69 (it wasn’t then.) There was/is a lovely wee square in the centre where we stopped for a picnic lunch all those years ago.

Back then we had noticed a sign to Roman remains so checked it out. We didn’t have time to stay long so only peeked in to the site over the hedge.

This year, on the way from Durham, the good lady and I (on our own now) took time to visit and go round the site. We like to do a bit of culture. The entrance fee included the hire of a handset that gave descriptions of the various areas. After strolling through the very informative museum we went onto the site proper where the handsets were very useful.

The area is quite extensive and I took a few pictures. The first is from the museum. Then from northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest. You can see the museum building in the third and fourth photos. There are extra information boards scattered here and there.

The original fort grew to become a town. There were two large granaries. Their remains are just in front of the museum.

These are both from the north.

Closer to musuem

To left of above

There was apparently a strongroom towards the south of the site. These are thought to be the steps down to it.

The excavated remains are under the aegis of English Heritage and well worth a visit if you’re into history.

2005

This season covers the build up to and aftermath of Pres Bartlet’s re-election. In the course of it, as a result of a freak result in a congressional district where a candidate died during the campaign, Sam Seaborn is detached from the West Wing to stand in his place and is replaced as speech writer by Will Bailey. We also get a substitution of the pet republican by a new one – whose first day is eventful as he uncovers Vice-President John Hoynes’s love affair. This episode started with the revelation of Hoynes’s resignation and then flashed back to the circumstances which brought it about. The tension that could have been built up by this scenario was dissipated by the fact that we knew what was going to happen from the outset.

In this season the writers seem to have made a conscious decision to try to inject humour. Bailey’s appointment is followed by a mass resignation of subsidiary speech writers and so he has to make do with the help of interns whom he finds indistinguishable from each other. There is also some by-play with the glass window between his office and Toby Ziegler’s and with a pigeon that pecks at Donna Moss’s window.

The running theme is that Bartlet has ordered the assassination of a foreign leader and the ramifications of this (both domestic and foreign) are worked through – especially as the reporter Danny Concannon has sniffed out the story.

I wonder whether the writers felt they had to have Bartlet doing something underhand/constitutionally illegal – as opposed to his earlier concealment of his MS – in order to assuage criticism about him being too well intentioned to be true.

We have a cliff hanger at the end when the President’s daughter Zoey is abducted. He stands down temporarily to avoid a conflict of interest and, there being no Vice-President due to Hoynes’s resignation, the Speaker of the House (played by John Goodman) is sworn in as President. In a further illustration of the bizarreries of the US constitution he has to resign as Speaker first though. (Logically doesn’t that then render him no longer next in line?)

The Easybeats had a few more singles after Friday On My Mind but didn’t trouble the British charts overmuch.

The Music Goes Round My Head wasn’t a big hit (if it was a hit at all.)

It did however bear a resemblance to a slightly later hit by the group which launched Peter Frampton (the Face of 1968 as I recall) into the world, The Herd.

The Easybeats: The Music Goes Round My Head

The Herd: I Don’t Want Our Loving To Die

Apart from the suffix on my previous Durham post you knew this was coming anyway. I can’t seem to go anywhere without seeing Art Deco/Modernist buildings.

Somehow though and despite my experience in Chester last year, I thought pickings in Durham would be small.

Yet entering the main square in Durham the first building we came across was Boots.

There was construction work going on in the square which is why the photo is cropped tightly. Down a narrow street leading off the square there was this:-

I forget who the tenant of the building is now but the Burton’s shop in Durham at the moment is actually the other side of the street from this.

This is the view from the window of the car park we used.

I took this photo because of the roofline of the building just across the river which reminded me of the former Raith Cinema.

Just for contrast here’s one of the River Wear from below the Cathedal (and without any Deco.) There’s a weir stretching from the building on the left diagonally across the river and one of Durham’s bridges in the distance.

On the way out of town I pulled into a cul-de-sac to check the map. The street was full of thirties houses!

The third semi down still has its original Critall windows.

SFL Div 2, The Rock, 14/8/10

I wasn’t at the game… but it’s not looking good.

From the BBC report it looks like another eccentric Chapman selection.

Four games in (two in the league) and we’ve scored only three goals – two of them from penalties. Old failings not remedied.

And two away games coming up.

*I haven’t changed this even though we only lost two today. Given last week goodness knows how many it might have been if they’d stayed at eleven men.

The British and the Afrikaners 1815-1902. Blandford Press, 1988. 176p

After coming across two memorials to the “South African War” on my recent trip down south (see two of my five previous posts) I decided to read this book at long last.

While purporting to be a complete guide to the Anglo-Boer disagreements of the nineteenth century, which mainly focused on the differing attitudes of Boers and British to the rights of the majority population of the Cape, Barthorp merely sketches the early history and does not devote much space to the First Boer War – for a good account of which see the book of that title by Joseph Lehmann – and concentrates mainly on the military aspects of the Second rather than the political (which is explored more fully in Thomas Pakenham’€™s The Boer War.)

Both of the conflicts were characterised on the British side by the usual early lack of troops, muddle, disorganisation and, typical of the colonial era, underestimation of the enemy. In both wars the courage of the rank and file British soldier was never in doubt while the Boers were always adept. The political will at Westminster to carry on in the first war was lacking and so peace – with independence for the Transvaal and Orange Free State – came quickly.

Due to the influence of Cecil Rhodes and Sir Alfred Milner the same was no longer true in 1899 and the second war was prolonged. After initial reverses the British began to prevail when Lord Roberts – not long from his triumphant march from Kabul to Kandahar (some areas of conflict never change) – took overall command. Eventually the greater weight of British numbers and materièl as well as increased ability to deal with their more mobile enemy pushed the Boers into avoiding set piece confrontations and to rely on guerilla warfare – at which they were particularly effective. Even Kitchener’€™s blockhouse system failed to contain them.

In this context Barthorp mentions the collection of Boer non-combatants into camps and the subsequent toll of disease and death but does not see this as a great influence on the morale or effectiveness of the Boer commandos, though it was a propaganda calamity for Britain. He notes the eerie similarity of the battles of Majuba and Spion Kop in the two wars – both eminently avoidable battles for the British and both bloody defeats. He also gives General Buller more credit than I have seen him afforded elsewhere.

The book has occasional maps but a few more would have made certain of the troop movements clearer than the text manages.

Like some Boers a few British officers fought in both conflicts. Many of those engaged in the second war (French, Rawlinson, Gough, Ian Hamilton, Smith-Dorrien, Allenby, Mahon, Haig) and one of the Boers (Smuts) went on to have prominent roles in World War 1, though perhaps failing to learn fully the lessons of the up-to-date weaponry employed. A photograph of the British dead in the enfiladed trench at Spion Kop is reminiscent of one of the sunken road at Antietam in the American Civil War. 21,000 of the 450,000 Empire troops who were engaged overall died (62% from disease.) This explains the war memorials. There were 52,000 other casualties. Estimated Boer troop numbers vary from a curiously precise 87,365 to a rounder 65,000, with some 4,000 dead. An additional 20,000 Boers incarcerated in the camps also died.

While gaining independence in 1881 and then losing it in 1902 the Boers could curiously be said to have won in the second case also since in 1910, a scant eight years after the treaty of Vereeniging which ended the Second War of Independence, as the Boers called it, the Union of South Africa (including not only the Transvaal and the Orange Free State but also the erstwhile British dominated Cape Colony and Natal) was granted full independence within the Empire. The Boers swiftly came to dominate it and in 1948 completed the process by leaving the Commonwealth.

Barthorp notes a final irony. That while the Boers’€™ attitudes remained unchanged those in Britain who were most against fighting them in the nineteenth century had political heirs who were most forward in condemning the Republic’€™s policies regarding the black population in the latter twentieth century. (The book was published before the release of Nelson Mandela and majority rule.) He fails to point out the corollary, though. Those in favour of fighting the wars had political heirs who were against any interference with, or even criticism of, the apartheid state.

This doesn’t fit the arbitrary rules of the category as it wasn’t a single but it would have made a much better choice from the album To Our Children’s Children’s Children than Watching And Waiting which was issued as a 45 and, while atmospheric, doesn’t have the grabbing effect of Gypsy.

It features Justin Hayward at the height of his powers.

The Moody Blues: Gypsy (Of a Strange and Distant Time)

I heard on the news yeterday morning of the death of Jimmy Reid.

He came to notice as one of the leaders of the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the early 1970s during Ted Heath’s government. His speech to the workers was unforgettable, “There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying,” for the world was watching.

That last bit is true. The world was watching. The good lady was in Germany at the time on an exchange visit. (I hadn’t met her yet.) She saw the speech on German television and heard the laugh when bevvying was translated into the German equivalent in the subtitles.

It is the word bevvying which makes the sentence resound. Without it, and Reid’s emphasis on it, the speech would probably have been less remarked. In retrospect it was a very Calvinistic piece of oratory for someone who was at the time a communist.

That in the end, despite a tactical victory in changing the government’s mind, the campaign to save all the UCS yards failed – they are all gone I believe and only Yarrow’s remains building ships on the Upper Clyde and that depends on Royal Navy orders – does not detract from the essential nobility of the effort to maintain the dignity of employment and prevent a descent into joblessness and the blight that follows. It was perhaps the last grand hurrah of the trade union movement.

Reid was the great example of the intellectual from the working class, possibly largely self taught. I remember him on a television chat show relating the typical argument between two such Glaswegians. As one is thumping the other he is saying, “Ah telt ye. There are 45 islands in the Indonesian archipelago.”

As a result of his new found fame he was elected rector of Glasgow University. I was a student there at the time and this was the one and only occasion till a local election some five years ago that my vote ever helped elect anybody.

Jimmy Reid 9/7/1932-11/8/2010. So it goes.