I noted that the book Kings of Space by Capt W E Johns which I reviewed last week had some colour illustrations. These were credited to an artist named only as Stead.

Here are four of them.

The Solar System:-

The Spacemaster takes off:-

Spacemaster in flight:-

The Moon:-

SPFL Tier 4, Meadowbank Stadium, 2/5/26.

Oh dear. What a way to end the season. We simply weren’t at the races.

Mind you that’s the way it’s been for much of the past ten months.

We made Edinburgh City – bottom of the table and who hadn’t even scored a goal for two months – look like Real Madrid.

If you were charitable you could say it was an illustration of the reason for the change to ten-team divisions in 1994. Before that there were many so-called ‘end of season’ games (ie dead rubbers) where neither side had much to play for towards the end of the season.

But I’m not in the mood to be charitable.

We were just awful. They waltzed through us at will. And Brett Long in goal, while he made a few saves, didn’t cover himself in glory for two of the goals.

Mind you, the ref killed the game when he showed Kai Kirkpatrick a straight red for a late challenge at 1-0.  There was no malice in it, and no force.* Any chance we might have had vanished at that point; especially when they scored their second a minute or so later. That’s two reds for Kai in successive games he’s played in. Maybe he’s got himself a reputation. Or maybe the ref just wanted to show himself off.

City have won ten games all season. Four of them were against us. That’s 40% of their wins. (To put it in perspective, we only won ten as well but we didn’t beat anyone four times.)

I’m not overly encouraged that manager Frank McKeown is the right man for the job. It was noticeable that most of the exhortation coming from our bench area (curiously audible in a way such shouts aren’t at the Rock) was tantamount to abuse. And he made some very odd substitutions yesterday; not for the first time.

He now needs to make good signings who are considerable upgrades on most of what we had here – and improve his tactical nous.

But I fear it could be another long, hard season.

*Edited to add: I’ve now seen City’s highlight footage and Kirkpatrick’s foot was high: higher than I remembered seeing it in real time. The red card was fair enough.

See previous posts of Moderne and Art Deco buildings in Arbroath.

Art Deco pillars at Victoria Park entrance :-

Sea and wall at Arbroath:-

Arbroath Harbour:-

Nedra Talley of the Ronettes has gone.

This is unseasonal I know but I’ve already featured the group’s two biggest UK hits, here and here. Taken from Phil Spector’s Christmas Album  – actually named A Christmas Gift to You from Philles Records and the less said about Spector the better – it’s also one of The Ronettes better known songs and was their third biggest, no 15 in 1963.

The Ronettes: Sleigh Ride

Nedra Yvonne Talley (Ross): 27/1/1946 – 26/4/2026. So it goes.

A Story of Interplanetary Exploration

Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, 181 p, plus 6 p colour illustrations, 1 p Contents, 1 p List of Illustrations (by Stead) and 6 p Foreword.

The author was, of course, the creator of Biggles, Great War fighter pilot and thereafter general man of action. In the 1950s he took to writing science fiction for younger readers and it was in the children’s section housed in the basement of Dumbarton Library where, after I had consumed all their Biggles books, I started on those. It is due to Johns, then – along with the similarly aimed books written by Patrick Moore – that I developed an abiding interest in science fiction as a genre.

The foreword here sets out Johns’s purpose in writing such books, to inspire young people with the sense of adventure, while also pre-empting possible criticism of inaccuracies by emphasizing there was much not known about even the Solar System those 70 years ago. (He specifically mentions Jupiter’s eleven moons. At last count there are 115 of those.)

Now to the story.

Retired Group Captain Timothy Clinton and his son Rex have been stalking deer on a Highland mountain when the mist comes down towards the end of the day. Eventually they spot five red lights in the form of a cross and stumble across a house whose door contains an immobiliser. This is where a Professor Brane stays along with his butler (and factotum) Judkins.

The Professor is partial to coffee and caramels (which he took up since smoking represented too great a danger among the flammable materials he was surrounded by in his lab) and accepts flying saucers are real. He has also invented a spaceship he calls the Spacemaster, which is powered by cosmic rays. The red cross is a navigational aid to finding his way back home. Naturally he invites Clinton and Timothy to join him – and Judkins – on exploratory expeditions beyond Earth.

Various trips see them have a close encounter with a flying saucer, find life on the Moon, dinosaurs on Venus – a planet on which the Professor wants to take the opportunity to empty Spacemaster’s rubbish bins! – a Mars with no mountains but signs of humans; the last of whom are entombed on Phobos, before returning to Earth where they get the better of some foreign spies alerted to the possible existence of a spaceship by newspaper reports of strange apparitions in the Highland skies.

The whole thing is firmly of its time and ineluctably male but for what was back then called a juvenile (nowadays YA) spends very little time focusing on Rex.

Pedant’s corner:- “the stars would be overheard again long before they could reach their lodge” (overhead again,) “before a rough, overgrown track, guided them” (doesn’t need that second comma,) the word ‘professor’ appears within sentences both capitalised and uncapitalised seemingly randomly, “poor Judkins’ great anxiety” (Judkins’s,) “‘water, which is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen’” (Er, no. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would simply be that, a mixture of two gases. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Compounds have totally different properties from the elements needed to make them,) “the rudder, insert vertically in the exhaust thrust just below the nozzles” (inserted,) diaphram (diaphragm,) “level with he top of the gorge ” (with the top,) “everywhere there where little flecks” (everywhere there were little flecks.) “The affect of this on the human body” (The effect of this,)  “for the most part outlines were spoiled” (for the most part its outlines were spoiled,) the Professor says stray particles of hydrogen might have been caused to ignite by the ship’s velocity (for hydrogen to burn oxygen is also required,) gasses (gases – which appeared later,) the Professor says petroleum is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen (see above for water. Petroleum is a mixture, yes, but of differing compounds of carbon and hydrogen,) acclerated (accelerated,) “the same state of nuclear fission as the Sun” (nuclear fusion that would be,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

More from the Vaughan bequest transfer (see last post.)

Fittingly, this one is of Edinburgh:-

The West Gate, Canterbury:-

Shipping:-

The Doge’s Palace and Piazetta:-

Storm at the Mouth of the Grand Canal:-

Bellinzone, Switzerland:-

Ostend Harbour:-

Plymouth:-

Every January the Scottish National Gallery in Princes Street, Edinburgh, displays its bequest of works by J M W Turner. The terms of the bequest by Henry Vaughan dictated that these works could only be shown in January in order to protect them from damage by light.

In 2025  there was a variation to this practice in that the Edinburgh Gallery swapped its collection with that of the National Gallery of Ireland.

The day we went there was a long queue to get in (in normal years there isn’t) but we did we get to see a lot of Turners new to us.

Clovelly Bay North Devon:-

Chatel Argent above Villeneuve:-

Beech tree:-

A river in the Campagne:-

Old Dover Harbour and Shakespeare’s Cliff:-

SPFL Tier 4, The Rock, 25/4/26.

So the last home game of the season ended with a loss.

To be fair, apart from a stramash near their goal line in the second half I don’t recall us troubling their keeper – though a Mark Durnan effort from outside the box in added injury time might have had him beaten, but it flashed past the post.

Their goal came when Adam Livingstone tried to beat his man just inside our own half. When he lost it they had an overload which they exploited.

They just seemed a bit quicker and keener – more streetwise too. But then they had more to play for.

The referee though. Some of his decisions were utterly baffling. And most of them went EK’s way.

One more game (away at Edinburgh City) and then it’s anticipating next season. The squad will need a bit of upgrading if we’re not to flirt with relegation again.

New Central Park is the home of Kelty Hearts FC.

It’s a tidy traditional Scottish football ground.

The photographs are from the day of Sons’ first visit to it on 9/11/2024.

Entrance:-

East side of ground:-

South side looking west from entrance:-

North from entrance:-

Looking west at north end:-

Looking south From northwest corner:-

From northwest corner:-

Dave Mason, co-founder of the band Traffic, has died.

His career with Traffic was by no means smooth (and he later went on to play with various luminaries) but he wrote and sang their biggest UK hit, a No 2 in 1967.

Traffic: Hole in my Shoe

Mason’s song Feelin’ Alright became something of a standard with many other artists covering it. 

Traffic: Feelin’ Alright

David Thomas Mason: 10/5/1946 – 19/4/2026. So it goes.