A Son of the Rock

I discovered yesterday that SF/Fantasy writer, John Crowley, has died.

I have read seven of his books, the novels The Deep, (Bantam, 1975😉 Beasts, (Orbit, 1976;) Engine Summer, (Methuen, 1979;) Little, Big, (Methuen, 1981;) Ægypt, (VGSF, 1987;) Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, (William Morrow, 2005) plus the collection of novellas Novelty, (Doubleday, 1989.)

Each (in their own various ways) was a delight.

The first five of those were well before my blogging days but you can see my thoughts on Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land here and on Novelty, here.

Also on my shelves, to be read, are The Translator, (Perennial, 2002) and Four Freedoms, (Harper Perennial, 2009) and there are others I haven’t yet bought to look forward to reading.

John Crowley: 1/12/1942 – 8/8/2026. So it goes.

New signage at the entrance to Dumbarton FC Stadium, The Rock:-

Artwork by Lewis Deeney in concourse:-

Elephant and castle (as on the club badge) with trunk changing into a path –

Goal being scored with the ball turning into a sunrise over Dumbarton Rock –

New artificial pitch:-

St Michael and All Angels Church, Haworth, contains the burial vault of the Brontë family. Patrick Brontë was the perpetual curate there from 182o-1861.

A side chapel commemorates his incumbency:-

Also inside the church are three war memorials/rolls of honour to remember the men of Haworth and Stanbury who died or served in the World Wars.

Great War Memorial:-

Roll of Honour for both World Wars:-

Wooden board Roll of Honour (for those who served?)

SPFL Tier 4, The Rock,* 8/8/26.

Well; this was better. At times we looked like a football team. We even had three shots on target in the first half.

Still, every time they got up the park my heart was in my mouth.

They had several efforts during the game which squeezed past the post but I don’t actually remember Aidan Rice having a save to make until late on. However, I thought they were going to equalise when a cross begged to be buried at the back post but the guy headed it over the bar.

Like last week we also did a lot of faffing around at the back, playing the ball between the centre halves and keeper. I know the manager wants them to do this as it supposedly creates space up the park but players at our level are too prone to mistakes to make this anything but a nervy experience. It could have cost us a couple of times when they were closed down quickly but we managed to get away with it.  The ball usually ends up lumped forward anyway – or else out of play.

Throughout the first half they committed niggly foul after niggly foul but with no consequence. The first two yellows went to Sons players, captain Mike Doyle and then loanee Owen Hartington. Not until some time after we had scored did they got one.

Their keeper, Jay Hogarth, formerly of this parish, did have a great save earlyish in the second half from a Doyle header. Not long after that we got what turned out to be the winner. Leighton McIntosh tied their defence in knots and looked to have been fouled in the box but the ball rolled free to Scott Honeyman, who duly did the needful.

Thirty minutes of purgatory followed as they naturally pressed forward and we made fewer forays forward, before the ref finally blew his whistle.

Josiah Sowa was a bit more effective than last week but I wish he’d get a cross in earlier. Owen Hartington and David Craig were good in midfield too but Leighton McIntosh deserved his Man of the Match award for his tireless work.

It’s looking to be a tight league. After two games nobody has won twice and only one team has yet to gain  a point. Scary really.

*Now the stadium’s official name. Huzzah!

The Brontë Parsonage Museum contains several items of apparel relating to the Brontës.

Charlotte Brontë’s wedding dress:-

Charlotte’s wedding bonnet and veil:-

Charlotte’s cotton bodice:-

There are other items of memorabilia.

Sealing wafers and Charlotte Brontë’s writing desk:-

Charlotte on a plate:-

Brontë handwriting:-

Brontë possessions:-

Statue of the three Brontë sisters in the Parsonage garden:-

A world-wide no 1, 2 or 3 – except in North America (and Finland) – from a band with a slightly cheeky name.

Due to the recurring lyric its title is frequently misquoted as What’s Going On?

Four Non Blondes: What’s Up?

Polygon, 2025, 145 p, plus 25 p Afterword and 1 p Acknowledgements.

The sixth in Birlinn’s Darkland Tales series, this is the story of the murder in Liniclate on Benbecula of three members of his family by Angus McPhee. as told in retrospect by his brother, Malcolm who, with his sister Marion, was out gathering seaweed when the fatal events took place.

Angus had always been a reluctant worker on the family croft but had spent time on a neighbouring island and on return shown signs of mental problems. The local community had thereafter had such concerns at his behaviour that they had him examined for possible confinement in a lunatic asylum but family pride and a reluctance to pay for such provision precluded this.

Life in Liniclate, as in much of rural Scotland in 1857, was harsh, more or less hand-to-mouth. It provokes in Malcolm that dour attitude to life exemplified by Calvinism’s Scottish expression. “Hope serves only as a buttress to misery. It is better all round to accept one’s lot in life and not entertain notions of a less onerous existence.”

Malcolm also has a cynical view of human nature. “I do not suppose that many among you would have the least interest in the incidents I have thus far related were it not for the fact that they serve as a prelude to violence. When a tale promises bloodshed no one leaves their seat.”

The murders blighted Malcolm’s life. The remaining family was all but ostracised by the locals and Marion and youngest brother John left the island (though Marion wasn’t seen to board the ferry,) while Malcolm withdrew into himself. He harbours dark thoughts about the Mrs MacLeod who comes in weekly to see to his welfare and ensure he bathes every month or so. Such is the tone of his reflections that the reader wonders if Malcolm has not succumbed to madness himself and, indeed, if his account is reliable in any sense.

This is another well written addition to the Darklands series but its resemblances to Burnet’s earlier novel His Bloody Project make it seem less original than the others.

Pedant’s corner:- in the Afterword; “none of whom were married” (none of whom was married.)

The Brontës were not just writers. They also painted.

Portrait of Anne Brontë by Charlotte Brontë:-

Sketches by Charlotte:-

Charlotte’s paintbox and three works:-

Engraving of Geneva by Anne:-

Portraits by Branwell:-

Portrait of Charlotte by J H Thompson:-

Portrait of Brontë siblings:-

Penguin, 1996, 254 p.

This evocation of the late 1960s and early 1970s is narrated from the perspective of her later life by Carmel McBain and charts the relationships between herself, her childhood companion Karina, and later school and college friend Julia(nne) Lipcott over those years.

Every weekday Carmel accompanied to school her close neighbour Karina, the kind of good girl other mothers held up as an example, but whose parents had a tragic background in the then relatively recent Second World War in Europe. Karina may not be quite what they think, though, as Carmel observed her hanging round with rough boys at the bus station.

Carmel’s mother, prompted by a teacher at Carmel’s school, became fixated on her daughter gaining a place at the Holy Redeemer, a school no-one from her neighbourhood has yet attended. However, Karina also sits the entrance exam – and sails through.

Carmel’s Catholic background is always a nagging influence. At the Holy Redeemer she imbibes the thought that “bodies are encumbrance, a necessary evil.” Of Bonfire Night, she tells us, “If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.”

Most of the story, however, is set at Tonbridge Hall, the college the three girls attend after leaving the Holy Redeemer, and an institution plagued with dire, unappetising food. This is an intense environment where the young women converse about who is engaged, who is on the pill, or pregnant, or thinks they might be pregnant, or has just discovered that she isn’t pregnant. This aspect of the novel did remind me of the May of Teck Club in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. The climax of An Experiment in Love also bears some comparison with that book. Mantel is a much more lucid writer than Spark, though.

However, being of their time, most of the students are preparing for life with a husband.

Partway through the novel Carmel says this is a story about appetite – “in its many aspects and dimensions” and that women carry the faculty for love into later life. “Men will never understand it until till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never.” Carmel tells us she loves multiple women, but not in a sexual sense.

The whole is infused with a forthright feminism. “There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.”

“When men decided women could be educated, they educated them on the male plan” (schools with mottoes and school songs, muddy team games, collars, ties) but always inferior. “Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it…… Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.”

The Secretary of State for Education visits the college – and the food suddenly becomes palatable. The lady “leant forward and smiled, and her hair moved with her, as if it were not just hair but a hat made of hair,” a feature not uncommon among women politicians at the time. But, “She turned her head in my direction; she opened her lips to speak, and shards of glass fell out.” No need to mention the Secretary’s name.

Carmel’s reaction to a southerner’s comment is waspish. “I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.”

Mantel’s literary skill, which was manifested so magnificently in her Wolf Hall trilogy, is in evidence here, fully formed.

Pedant’s corner:- “thorn in Jesus’ crown” (Jesus’s,) “was now sewed with a name-tape” (was now sewn,) sunk (x 2, sank,) swum (swam.)

SPFL Tier 4, Forthbank Stadium, 1/8/26.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; or, it’s déjà vu all over again.

This panned out more as I feared than as I hoped. The similarities to a lot of our displays of last season are disquieting.

We were okay for the first ten minutes or so but never troubled their keeper. When they got the ball we looked distressingly open, though. One of their players was booked quite early and almost immediately committed another yellow card offence but wasn’t shown it. He should have seen red.

If we hadn’t given away the penalty (it looked a foul certainly) things might have been different I suppose but we always looked vulnerable. Just before half-time one of their players was shoving ours at a corner and things got fraught with several joining the melee. He was booked as was Mike Doyle for us. While the ref was noting things down their player started up the shoving again and got away with that. Stirling were thereafter diving at every opportunity and the ref was frequently conned into giving them fouls. Frustratingly, exactly the same sorts of challenges by them on us were not punished.

Not that we really deserved anything from the game. In the second half we only started playing after their second goal went in, far too easily for them.

Too many of our players were looking like square pegs in round holes, Deryn Lang and Leighton McIntosh up front were living off scraps.

David Craig in midfield looked sound, Aidan Rice in goal had no chance with the goals and made a great save at 2-0. Josiah Sowa on the left had pace and some tricks but his touch was often awkward (his brain seemed unconnected to his feet) and he went up blind alleys when he did have the ball. New loanee Owen Hartington  at least showed for the ball but, sadly, bore no comparison to Smudger  (Alexander Smith) late of this parish, who thoroughly impressed at the same venue when he came on and changed the game for us last season.

Things need sorting out quickly. Performing like this against Clyde next week could see us endure a thumping.