A Son of the Rock

SPFL Tier 4, The Rock, 11/4/26.

We knew a win would keep us safe in the division for next year. So job done. Well done, lads.

Not that it mattered as Edinburgh City lost again which would also have confirmed us as safe.

We weren’t at all convincing defensively though. Depite us having most possession they had two great opportunities to score early on, both from Josh Todd losing the ball in midfield. He’s been good since he rejoined us but was off the boil today. One of those required a very good save from Aidan Rice to keep us level at 0-0. Mark Durnan was also prone to mistakes today and was let off by wayward shooting from Stirling.

We began pressing well later in the first half and had a load of corners which we didn’t make the most of, one led to a stramash similar to that after Stirling’s first corner but neither resulted in goals.

A great Leighton McIntosh pass led to Scott Tomlinson (who had been tearing them apart down the right flank) beating his man, this time on the left wing, cutting in and getting his shot past the keeper from an acute angle.

It was strange, then, that Tommo was substituted at half time with Jack Duncan coming on.

The referee by the way was woeful. Stirling centre forward Russell McLean spent most of the game diving and complaining about non-existent fouls which were nevertheless given.

They equalised on 54 minutes when we appeared to stop defending. They more or less walked through our right hand side. I was never confident in our defending all game to be fair.

Smudger (Alexander Smith) had another great game. His ball control and work rate are phenomenal. When we finally got a free kick of our own – mysteriously given as indirect when their player had just about halved Kristian Webster – Smudger’s shot from the ball tapped to him was spiled by the keeper and Scott Honeyman got to the rebound first to dispatch it.

A slightly nervy ten or so minutes plus added time followed, punctuated by late sub Kai Kirkpatrick being sent off near the end. I didn’t see what happened but it seems he landed a punch on Russell McLean.

Still three games to go but we can now look forward to next season.

Penguin, 2019, 126 p. Translated from the Japanese 光の領分 (Hikari no ryōbun,) by Geraldine Harcourt. First published in 1978-1979 as a series in the literary monthly Gunzō.

The book outlines in first person narration the life of an unnamed woman recently separated from her husband, Fujino, in the year following his leaving. They have a two-year-old daughter, also unnamed, who begins to react badly to her new life after mother and daughter move into an apartment on the fourth floor of a building which has mostly offices below. Its large windows flood the interior with light, hence the book’s title.

Over the course of the year we see the daughter’s behaviour deteriorate; she throws objects out of the window onto a roof below and gets into trouble at her daycare centre.

This is paralleled by her mother’s increasingly difficulty to cope with her life, turning up late for her job in a library, having a one-night stand with the father of another child at daycare.

There are parallels here with the other of Tsushima’s novels I have read, Child of Fortune.  whose protagonist is also separated from her husband (but in her case divorced.) The absence of Fujino, like that of Hatanaka in Child of Fortune, is core to the narrator’s sense of drift. This is an indictment of the men involved, though, not of the women they have left.

The book’s origins as a series of twelve monthly instalments in the magazine Gunzō (群像) lead to some repetitions in later chapters of information the reader already knows and which would have been unnecessary to include in a novel per se.

I note as an aside that the living space in Japanese dwellings is described in terms of how many tatami mats the rooms can accommodate.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) a similar missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence.

In terms of chart position this was the second biggest of Del Amitri’s hits. No 13 in 1992.

Del Amitri: Always the Last to Know

American University of Cairo Press, 1987, 256 p, including vii p Introduction by Trevor le Gassick. Translated from the Arabic Zuqāq al-Midaq by Trevor le Gassick. First published in 1947.

The back cover blurb describes this as probably Mahfouz’s most popular work. Set during the Second World War – there are mentions of air-raids and the British Army – it depicts life in the titular alley, in a poor area of Cairo, and features a variety of colourful characters each with a distinctive trait and several of whom have chapters devoted to them, some several chapters. It occurred to me while reading it that this may have had an influence on Mahfouz’s fellow Egyptian Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.

Perhaps the main character is Hamida, an orphan who was adopted by Umm Hamida but suckled by the wife of café owner Kirsha, whose son Hussain she was nursing at the time. Kirsha himself has a taste for teenage boys. Umm Hamida arranges marriages and her landlady Saniya Afify makes use of her service in this regard. Dr Booshy isn’t (a doctor that is) but has parlayed his reputation into providing dentistry, sourcing the gold teeth he offers his clients (but unbeknownst to them) from the mouths of the recently buried dead. The unkempt and filthy Zaita makes his supplicants into cripples so that they can make a living through begging and thereafter exacts a toll from them. Retired teacher Sheikh Darwish is fond of quoting English words and spelling them out. Abbas, the young barber, wants to marry Hamida but doesn’t have the money so takes himself off to work for the British Army. Salim Alwan is a wealthy businessman getting on a bit who imbibes a special concoction to stimulate his sexual appetite. Tiring of his wife, he proposes marriage to Hamida but has a heart attack before any arrangement can be made

Then Hamida comes to the attention of one Ibrahim Faraj, who habitually gazes on her from a seat in the café. At once attracted and repelled, Hamida eventually falls under his spell but his intentions for her are far from honourable.

Midaq Alley is one of those books which represents the world in microcosm. If not all human life is depicted in its pages then certainly a good deal of it is.

Sensitivity note. A character uses the phrase “nigger-black face.”

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Mahfouz’ (x 5, Mahfouz’s.) Elsewhere; translated into USian, “piaster” (several times, piastre,) “reflexion” (reflection, used later,) “Tell-el-Kebir” (several times, usually spelled Tel-el-Kebir,) “struck a responsive cord in the boy” (responsive chord,) “Abbas’ face” (Abbas’s,) a missing comma after a piece of dialogue embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) such a comma placed after the end quotation mark not immediately before, similar placing of a question mark – and of a full stop, “abcess” (abscess,) both “jewelry” and “jewellery” appear in the text, “and bid them welcome” (bade them welcome,) a missing opening quotation mark on a piece of dialogue, “by her sexuals instincts” (sexual,) “Hedjaz” (usually spelled ‘Hijaz’.)

The Seaton family at Seaton Delaval Hall had their own chapel. It now acts as the Parish Curch of Our Lady, Delaval.

Entrance:-

Side:-

Other side:-

Interior. Lovely carved arch:-

Altar, behind another carved arch:-

Prince of Wales window. A Victorian stained glass window dedicated to Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII:-

This year’s BSFA Awards (for works published in 2025) have been announced.

Best novel:- When There Are Wolves Again by E J Swift.

Best shorter fiction (novellas, novelettes):- The Apologists by Tade Thompson.

Best short fiction:- Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike by E M Faulds.

Best translated fiction:- Liecraft by Anita Moskat, translated by Austin Wagner.

I’d like to add special congratulations to my friend Neil Williamson who, as editor, won in the Best Collection category for Blood in the Bricks.

Marion Boyars, 1983, 163 p.

A company called PAX has been developing various projects to improve crop types and yields over the world. This culminates in a product known as freefood, which promises to make human existence easier. It is widely welcomed nearly everywhere – a notable holdout is the indigenous Australian community of Murngin in Arnhem Land, North Australia, which has achieved a kind of independence.

Like in Mitchison’s other Science Fiction forays there is in the narration a high degree of telling not showing. Most of the story concerns itself with the scientists involved and interactions among the people running PAX and the reading experience is somewhat dry. Very little of what would be the social ramifications of such an innovation as freefood is explored. War has apparently ended because, as one character says, it was fought for food.

(Well, to a point: water too, and resources, but let’s not forget in these troubled times personal aggrandisement.)

The ‘future that never was’ that bedevils older Science Fiction stories is illustrated by Mitchison’s characters’ long distance communication methods (video calls) anticipating Skype or Zoom but not, of course, the internet or email.

There is an implicit racism – reflecting the times of 1983 but perhaps not Mitchison herself? – in one character referring to ‘Abos’ saying, “‘They could be a no-good mob,’” but admitting, “they got treated in a no-good way in Queensland,’” plus another use of ‘Abos’ in an unflattering context.

The promised paradise of hunger being banished from the world is disturbed when deaths start to occur among some of those using freefood. This is due to a compound called dioscorin which is found in yams and usually removed by the processes of preparing and cooking. Freefood production has omitted these steps.

Mitchison’s writing is usually perfectly agreeable. Her other (ie non-SF) fiction does not suffer from the flaws I have noted above and before here and here – even though some of it is set in such alien (to us) societies as Ancient Greece or Rome. That tendency to didacticism apparent here is missing from those.

Pedant’s corner:- In the inside cover blurb “polictical” (political,) skillfully (skilfully.) Elsewhere; a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded within a sentence (x 3, one without a capital letter at the beginning of the dialogue,) “fresh lime, nimbupani” (fresh lime nimbupani,) a switch into a different font size and back again (x 2,) an end quotation mark in the middle of a piece of dialogue, Bangla Desh (nowadays spelled Bangladesh,) Campuchea (nowadays spelled Kampuchea,) Quazulu (nowadays spelled Kwazulu,) grand-parents (nowadays spelled grandparents,) “none of them were any longer newsworthy” (none of them was …,) “nobody would be allowed to turn in into money” (to turn it into money,) Djuvalji (elsewhere always Djiuvalji,) “a dangerous precendent” (precedent,) peole (people.) “‘Still and on’” (isn’t the phrase ‘Still and all’?)

Colonnade:-

Basement corridor:-

Wall of eyes and mirrors:-

So-called “Civil War” coat. This is of course a “Wars of the Three Kingdoms” coat:-

Hand puppet Kasparli, made by a World War 2 POW:-

China cabinet:-

Portraits of Henry VIII and Catharine Parr:-

Little Brown, 2018, 428 p.

This is the fifth outing for Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, at the start here still trying to come to terms with the death of her romantic partner, Phil Parhatka, unable to sleep until she has walked herself to exhaustion in the streets of Edinburgh late at night.

She is juggling three cases, two hers, one not. The HCU is working on a series of brutal rapes from the 1980s whose perpetrator’s make of car they have a new lead on when a murder in Wester Ross, linked to the burial there of two Indian motorcycles left behind by the US Army after World War 2, turns up. Karen also has a peripheral involvement in a murder case she takes an interest in after a conversation between two women she overheard in a café twitched her police instincts.

Her hopes at the replacement of her old boss by the new one being a woman – female solidarity and all that – are swiftly extinguished. Assistant Chief Constable Ann Markie has saddled Karen with a new DS, Gerald McCartney, mostly in order to spy on her. My suspension of disbelief at this second boss in a row wanting rid of Karen was not quite assuaged by the reasons given for it, which seemed altogether too programmatic. But fiction is all about conflict. And Karen’s approach to her work is unconventional and occasionally confrontational, if not downright bolshie. Not qualities likely to endear you to a boss sensitive to public and political scrutiny.

There are ongoing updates on Karen’s background, the café Aleppo she helped Syrian refugees to establish in the previous book has been a success and her assistant DC Jason ‘the Mint’ Murray is growing into the job while the tedium of some police work is not ignored.

But the duty of the detectives in a novel is to set the world to rights by finding the perpetrators and calling them to account. So job done. Inasmuch as a murder can be set to rights.

Pedant’s corner:- “River’s voice was a clear as” (was as clear as.) “There were a handful of Lanarkshire towns” (There was a handful,) scoffed (various characters do this at various times; e g ‘Jason scoffed.’ Scoffing usually requires further elaboration,) “a pair of gin and tonics” (the main noun here is gin; it is that which should be plural: ‘a pair of gins and tonic’.)

I saw in the Guardian on Wednesday that Chip Taylor has died.

Though he was a performer in his own right he is better known as a songwriter; perhaps best remembered for Wild Thing, a song The Troggs had a huge hit with and was then taken up by Jimi Hendrix.  The Troggs later recorded Taylor’s very different Any Way That You Want Me but in the meantime Taylor composed Angel of the Morning,  brought to prominence by Merrilee Rush and later a hit in the UK for P P Arnold.

I must confess that until I read Taylor’s wiki page  I hadn’t realised that he was a brother of actor Jon Voight (and therefore uncle to Angelina Jolie) nor that he had co-written I Can’t Let Go, a UK no. 2 for The Hollies in 1966.

The Hollies: I Can’t Let Go

James Wesley Voight (Chip Taylor): 21/3/1940 – 23/3/2026. So it goes.