William Hill Scottish Cup Round 3, Glebe Park, Brechin, 19/11/11.

We dominated the early stages of this without looking like scoring. Then Brechin took the lead after a deflection meant Jamie Ewings could only parry the ball and the rebound fell to an attacker player. For the rest of the first half we weren’t in it.

The second half wasn’t much to write home about either, and we only threatened when David Winters brought out a splendid save from Craig Nelson in Brechin’s goal. Brechin’s second clinched things and our penalty award was only ever going to be too little too late. It turned out not even to be that as Mark Gilhaney’s penalty was too near the keeper. Brechin then added insult to injury by scoring a third right at the death.

Without Jamie Ewings it might have been 6-0 as we pushed up looking for an equaliser and were left stretched at the back – but then without Nelson in Brechin’s goal Winters might have scored to make a game of it.

It was alarmingly obvious in this game that our creativity and goal scoring threat depends too much on Scott Agnew; suspended for this game.

But at least now we can concentrate on the league.

The day after Braintree we took in the nearby village of Silver End. This was the first time we’d been there as for all the years we lived in Essex we didn’t have a car.

We were looking for the housing estate designed by the architect Thomas S Tait who I see from the link submitted an unsuccessful plan for Kirkcaldy Town Hall. Among other accomplishments he was the architect of St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh which I have featured here and here.

We knew we were on the right track when we came upon this in Boar’s Tye Road:-

It’s needing a bit of TLC I would say.

The next junction takes you into Silver Street. Every building is one of Tait’s.

This was taken from the other end of the street after we had parked.

This is the junction of Silver Street and Broadway which also contains many Tait houses.

There must have been around two hundred flat roofed houses in the deco style over the two streets.

A few had some extra deco flourishes like the triangular columns with windows in this photo where you can also see the connecting walls between them which house the gates to the rear gardens.

Kirsty MacColl’s delivery of a song was unusual. I’m tempted to say it was lacking in emotion but the overall effect was actually the opposite of that. Her style may have been due to vocal limitations but if it was she used them to great advantage. It was They Don’t Know that first brought her to my attention. I vaguely recall that some problem at the pressing plant meant copies could not be got out speedily and so consequently it never became a hit for her.

The song was later covered by Tracey Ullman – who couldn’t hit the high note at “Baby!” after the instrumental break so MacColl provided that as well as singing backing vocals on Ullman’s version.

Kirsty MacColl: They Don’t Know

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 13/11/11, this is the Butterfly Nebula.

It could be a lovely translucent hour glass.

Serpent’s Tail, 2006, 241p.

At the start of Belonging Jack McCall is a janitor come handy-man at a remote set of luxury flats in the Swiss Alps. One day in the middle of winter a middle aged male resident arrives with a young woman called Thérèse. The next morning the man is dead, having slipped on the balcony during a snowstorm which has cut the site off. Jack has to help deal with the body and he and his girlfriend Anna look after Thérèse till the police arrive.

Due to a disturbed childhood and regular psychoanalysis Anna over-interprets things and constantly questions Jack about the reasons for his actions. She also desires to settle down. Three months after the incident she persuades him to go back home to Edinburgh to get married. En route, at the Gare Du Nord in Paris, Jack has cold feet, slips off the train and seeks out Thérèse. He takes up with her and finds she is a child of divorce. The dead man was in fact her estranged father whom she had only just sought out. She blames herself, through her revelation of their true relationship, for her father’s death. Jack and Thérèse subsequently travel to a remote location in Spain where a small group of people live a very basic life in not much more than huts. At this point the novel loses its way a little as the motivations of the various characters are obscure.

All of this is played out to an occasional backdrop of overheard news of the Iraq War and the July 7^th and Madrid bombings which is not germane to the plot and does no more than locate the story in time.

Unlike Butlin’s earlier The Sound of my Voice or Night Visits, both of which employed second person narration – wholly or in part – Belonging is a thoroughly conventional first person tale, narrated from Jack’s viewpoint. Both of those earlier novels were more tightly focused, with fewer characters. Though Anna is displayed in all her annoying smugness, Thérèse’s motivations remain opaque – her parents’ divorce and mother’s remarriage aren’t really sufficient to explain her malaises – and some of the bit players are not as well delineated as might be hoped for. The climactic event was certainly unexpected but the novel seems to dribble away afterwards, taking what felt to me to be a wrong turning as Jack’s life reassembles.

Belonging is nevertheless finely written, just not as satisfying and meaty as Butlin’s previous novels.

Interzone 237 has been published.

This has within it my review of Lauren DeStefano’s Wither.

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 10/11/11, this is a stunning (false colour) picture of the traces of an exploded star. It shows interstellar gas heated by the expanding supernova shock wave at X-ray energies (blue and green) and interstellar dust radiating at cooler temperatures in infrared light (yellow and red.)

The beauty of some of these modern astronomical images is amazing.

Two more War Memorials from our recent trip down south. It is Remembrance Sunday after all.

The first, on the left, is in Great Dunmow, Essex, a village I used to travel through on the bus twice every workday when we lived in Braintree. The memorial is triangular in cross section which you can’t quite make out from this photo.

The second is in Saffron Walden. It is located at the top of the main street, which dips down away from it. I had to stand almost in the middle of the road to get a decent angle but unfortunately must have shaken the camera as it’s a bit blurry. Both of these are elegant, restrained and prominently situated at road junctions.

Antonis Papadopoulos Stadium, Larnaca, 11/11/11

This looked pretty uninspiring in the first half with Cyprus getting in amongst our back four too often for comfort and only a great tip onto the bar by Allan McGregor preventing us going behind. That was before Kenny Miller struck with a goal that, had it been struck by a Brazilian or a Spaniard we would never hear the end of. Just after, Cyprus hit the woodwork again.

Jamie Mackie looked lively but tended to take wrong options until he wormed his way into the box in the second half and scored a beautifully engineered and taken individual goal. Shortly thereafter the defensive frailties showed themselves again as poor covering by Phil Bardsley allowed Christofi in to pull one back.

Scotland missed Darren Fletcher when he was substituted. The play wasn’t as fluid after he went off; but we seem to have a lot of options up front now.

And an away win is nothing to sneeze at.

Mind you, Cyprus are 120^th in the FIFA rankings; 69 below us.

In Braintree we parked as close to our old house as possible and strolled up to the town.

The route took us past the War Memorial.

Just over the road is this deco Masonic Centre.

And next door to that is an Art Deco house.

From the above angle you cannot see the curved balcony but looking in by the gate you do.

The old Woolies in the town centre was/is deco in style.

There used to be a Critall window factory in Braintree but that seems to have been demolished and replaced by modern housing.

When we lived there the traffic in the town was horrendous. The queues to get in on a Saturday from the north were enormous. So were the ones in the supermarket; they stretched from the tills all the way to the other ends of the aisles.

The town has long since been bypassed both north/south and east/west and so was relatively tranquil. Mind you we got there about five o’clock.

There is also now a retail park and an outlet centre off the bypass. Considering that, the town centre looked more thriving than you might expect.