A Son of the Rock

By the entrance to Brodie Castle in Moray there is a Pictish Stone:-

Reverse:-

Information Board:-

I spotted this one when driving through Nairn. Has deco touches.:-

Collins, 1953, 318p, including 2p Note, 2p Contents and 2p list of characters.

This is the fourth in Barke’s Immortal Memory novel sequence on the life of Robert Burns. This instalment mainly concentrates on his taking the lease at Ellisland Farm, some miles north of Dumfries, a town which he does not care for, and his angling (the Scots word would be ettling) for a job with the Excise. There is though, a brief journey to Edinburgh where he finally settles accounts with his publisher William Creech and also with Jenny Clow, the mother of one of his many children, on whom he makes a settlement.

When we start, the house at Ellisland where he is to live with Jean Armour and his family, is in the course of being built and he has to live in a small, bare room nearby while Jean et al stay in Mauchline (still spelled Machlin by Barke.) Even when his new house is built, after many delays by the Dumfries builders, the walls are too damp with plaster drying out to be healthy.

The breaking in of Ellisland is an arduous task and Burns recognises it will not provide enough of a living hence his seeking of the Excise job. This is also arduous, involving many long miles on horseback in all weathers – and Burns was always prone to chills and fevers.

There is still time, though, for him to fall in with Anna Park, niece of the wife of a Dumfries innkeeper. She is portrayed as equally, if not more, willing than he is to consummate their passion and the inevitable occurs. (Reading these books it sometimes feels as if Burns only had to look at a woman to get her pregnant.) Her lying-in more or less coincides with that of Jean Armour’s latest and Jean selflessly agrees to treat Anna’s child as her own.

Within the text we are treated to a full rendering of Burns’s draft of Tam O’Shanter, a first reading of the poem given to his family assembled by the fire one night.

In an exchange with his strait-laced brother, Gilbert, Burns says, “the Scotland o’ saints and scholars and country squires is nothing but hypocrisy. Not one o’ them can square their beliefs with their practice,” adding that his reading of history and the Bible tells him “morality has ever been a snare and a delusion.”

Jean is well aware of Burns’s tendencies, earlier telling Rab’s sister Nancy that being jealous would do no good, and that she couldn’t deny him other women, so long as he loved them.

In an observation that reads a little too much like an authorial projection of future knowledge onto the past, Francis Grose, an author-antiquarian from London, tells Rab he admires the Scots peasantry, “the best educated in the world,” but not the gentry, with their aping of English foppery, yet considers the Scots nation as defeated, and “‘the English will beat and tame half the world before they’re done – especially the coloured races…… And dang me if they won’t get the Scotch to do all their dirty work for them and fight all their bloodiest battles.’”

Off-stage, the pre-Terror French Revolution rumbles away in the distance, with Burns privately expressing support, something an Exciseman could not do explicitly.

Apart from that performance of Tam O’Shanter none of the poetry makes it to the page this time, though Burns’s efforts in collecting and publishing Scots songs – without payment, a point which disquiets Jean – earn a few mentions.

The book’s title refers to the peak of Burns’s achievements, which Barke considers to have occurred around this time.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘You wrang to judge him’” (You’re wrang.) “It was the Burns’ fate she feared” (Burns’s,) “urgent breasts” (of Anna Park. Urgent?) “But it was a pity that necessity had compelled his to allow” (compelled him to allow.)

And so to the much anticipated World Cup, which after Scotland’s long wait of 28 years, starts for us in less than 24 hours.

I realise for some people this is a new experience and it is eagerly awaited. That euphoria of the qualification night was perhaps justified. There were three memorable goals (plus a scrappy one.)

However there was a sense of unreality about it all. It was the most surreal qualifying campaign I can recall. The 0-0 draw in the first game at the Parken Stadium in Copenhagen was deserved – in fact we might have snatched a win. But the wins against Belarus – both of them – were nervy affairs and we were maybe lucky not to drop two points against them at home. As for the home game versus Greece, we were never in it. How we managed to score three is beyond me. And Greece were way better than us for most of the away game. Indeed there is an argument that says Greece were actually the best side in our group. Belarus getting a draw at the Parken saved our bacon and set up the decider versus Denmark. Even on that night they got back to 2-2 and if they hadn’t had a man sent off…. But they did and so here we are.

I must admit it was a professional performance against Curaçao in the Hampden warm-up friendly (again helped by a red card for the opposition) and the one in the States versus Bolivia was simply very unScottish in its efficiency. I was left wondering just how good – or should that be bad? – Bolivia are.

The game against Haiti gives me the fear. These are the sorts of matches where we traditionally fall down. I’ll not be watching it live, it’s too late at night. I’ll take a win – any kind of win – though, and hope that would be enough to take into the knockouts, which really will be something to celebrate. No matter what, points gained versus Morocco or Brazil will be a bonus. We can hope.

However, those of us who are long in the tooth fear we know how this ends. With Scotland it’s usually in tears.

Another in memory of Brian Wilson. See here and here.

Two minutes thirty seconds of perfection.

The Beach Boys: Friends

We drove through Ardersier (located on that arm of the Moray Firth which leads to Inverness) on the way to see Fort George – which was shut.

Like the Memorial at Resolis this is a column with carved crossed sword and rifle enclosed by a wreath, all surmounted by an urn:-

Front view:-

Dedications and names:-

Great War names:-

This carries the main line north/south to/from Inverness over the River Nairn. Another of those magnificent Victorian engineering achievements, the longest masonry viaduct in Scotland. I can count at least seventeen arches, but apparently there are 29.

It seems to be called the Nairn, Clava or Culloden Moor Viaduct.

I photographed it from the road leading to Clava Cairns:-

If you carry on up the main road from the car park at Clava Cairns you reach a further much smaller cairn site accessed by a footpath. This is Milton of Clava Cairn.

Looking back to main site from road:-

Milton of Clava Cairn (and standing stone) from path:-

Milton of Clava Cairn:-

In response to its 100 best novels list I posted about here, on Saturday last the Guardian published its readers’ list of their 100 best novels.

I must admit I did not send in my contribution so have no grounds for complaint but again I note the absence of Sunset Song.

I did better with these, 44 (47 if the Neapolitan Quartet counts as 4; or 43⅓ if the Tolkien is taken as a whole.)

Since I copied and pasted from the Guardian website the links are theirs.

93=  Animal Farm by George Orwell

Love in the Time of Cholera  by Gabriel García Márquez

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

80= Dune by Frank Herbert

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

75= Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brideshead Revisited  by Evelyn Waugh

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  by John le Carré

73= The Unbearable Lightness of Being  by Milan Kundera

70= Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

To the Lighthouse  by Virginia Woolf

63= Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante  (Isn’t this actually four books?)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

62 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

60 Possession by AS Byatt

57 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

52= Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Emma  by Jane Austen

49 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

46  Watership Down  by Richard Adams

41 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

39= Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Stoner by John Williams

37 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

31 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

29 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens  (Also at 29 was Huckleberry Finn which I may have read when very young but can’t actually remember doing so.)

26 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

21 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

20 Beloved by Toni Morrison

19 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

16 Persuasion by Jane Austen

14= Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

8= Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (I’ve now started this.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

7 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

6 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

5 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

1 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (I’ve only read The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the trilogy.)

Picador, 2019, 41 p. lllustrated by David De Las Heras.

This, like The Christmas Truce, is one of Duffy’s Christmas poems. It is inspired by the frost fairs that took place on the River Thames in London during the Little Ice Age when people erected tents, stalls and even set fires on the frozen river during winter.

Duffy’s female narrator disguises herself as a man and wanders through the town describing the scenes she sees and eventually ventures onto the ice (not without initial mishap) to immerse herself in the goings-on, before spending the night sleeping on the river.

Usually the three lines at the end of the irregularly sized stanzas are rhymed.

David De Las Heras’s illustrations could be described as cartoonish, consisting as they do of blocks of colour, but they are effective in conveying the atmosphere and their crowd scenes in particular are reminiscent of Brueghel.