Brydekirk is a small village in Dumfries and Galloway, north of Annan.

The War Memorial is a granite cross with an embossed sword and inscribed, “Their Name Liveth for Evermore.” Below is, “1914-1918,” plus names from the Great War, “Our Heroic Dead” and, “France, Salonika, Dardanelles.”

From east. Inscribed, “They died that we might live,” names for the Great War and, “Italy, Egypt, Mesopotamia.”

From west. World War 2 names:-

Quartet, 2012, 244 p.

This is the second of Massie’s Bordeaux quartet, set in that city during World War 2. The first, Death in Bordeaux, I reviewed here.

It is now 1941. Partly due to the compromising deal he had made in Vichy in the previous book Police Superintendent Jean Lannes’s son Dominique has returned from a POW camp in Germany, to his mother’s intense relief. However, his daughter Clothilde is still enamoured of the German billeted in the flat above and his son Alain is wondering how best to resist the occupation. Dominique is of the opposite persuasion, swayed by the thinking of Vichyites. Lannes’s wife Marguerite has thoughts only on how to protect all her family.

The investigative element of the book arises when Professor Aristide Labiche, a communist, is found in a bush, murdered. This is little more than a perfunctory nod to the norms of the crime genre. The book’s focus is on the wider situation, the compromises and difficulties inherent in occupation, the dangers of trying to be a good man (Lannes is a man, the women here don’t have much agency) in bad times. Labiche’s murder, like the one in Death in Bordeaux, is resolved but again without any prospect of the culprit being held to account, though in this case not for political reasons.

Massie invokes the sense of claustrophobia of life in such times and circumstances well and as in the earlier book the text is coloured by the attitudes of many of the French locals to Jews. Mentions of the Institut des Questions Juives add to the sense of foreboding.

Leutnant Schussmann’s attraction to Alain’s homosexual (and Jewish) friend Léon leads to a member of the French security services calling himself Félix, forcing him into a plot to blackmail the German, who opts for the only honourable way out for him and brings the anger of the occupying force down on Lannes’s department.

Meanwhile Alain gets himself into a group calling themselves ‘The Musketeers’ (which is fly-posting drawings of the Cross of Lorraine around the city and talking of joining De Gaulle in the UK) and Clothilde forgets her German friend when she forms an attachment to a French boy whom Lannes knows is unsuitable.

Massie’s Scottishness shows in the use of the – admittedly apposite – Scots term ‘thrawn,’ pretending a dialect word from the Landes has that meaning.

In all though, Massie’s pudding here is over-egged. I know a novel cannot encompass the whole world and has to represent it in microcosm but too many of the characters in Dark Summer in Bordeaux have too many connections with each other. In particular the possibility revealed here that Lannes’s father was not the man in whose home he was brought up but instead a prominent character from Death in Bordeaux, stretches credulity too far. As too does the author’s knowledge of the actual history and eventual outcome, where it is allowed to bleed into interactions between characters. At the book’s end there is the faint hope that the launch of Operation Barbarossa means the Wehrmacht may have bitten off more than it can chew in Russia.

This is all cleverly plotted but more than a touch involuted. As a portrait of those times in that place though, it’s admirable.

Pedant’s corner:- Lannnes’ (many instances, Lannes’s,) “‘au voir‘” (that last single quote mark is reversed: ‘au voir’,) Lanes (Lannes,) Aramis’ (Aramis’s,) Mirian (Miriam,) Dumas’ (Dumas has a silent ‘s’ at the end, its possessive therefore demands the apostrophe, Dumas’s; without it there’s no indication that the possessive applies,) a capital letter after a comma, ‘onto this lap’ (his lap,) litle (little,) “eying up” (eyeing up,) Jules’ (as for Dumas’ above; hence, Jules’s,) agaist (against.)

Another name from the 1960s, Wayne Fontana, died last week. He first came to public attention when fronting Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders with whom he had the unusually named hit Um, Um, Um, Um, Um (though, given the way the band pronounced it, it would be better rendered as “Mm, Mm, Mm, Mm, Mm.”)

Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders: Um, Um, Um, Um, Um

After splitting with the Mindbenders, Fontana had several hits of his own, of which this was the biggest.

Wayne Fontana: Pamela, Pamela

Glyn Geoffrey Ellis (Wayne Fontana:) 28/10/1945 – 6/8/ 2020. So it goes.

Daw Books, 1981, 250 p.

In Variation on a Theme by Beethoven by Sharon Webb humans have developed an immortality treatment but it comes at the expense of their creativity. A reluctant David, who is musically gifted, is plucked from his boyhood life on Vesta to be taken to Renascence, on Earth, to be trained for sixty lunar months before deciding if he wants to be immortal or creative.
Beatnik Bayou by John Varley is set in his future where medical modification of the human body is commonplace and sex changes unremarkable – even desirable. This one deals with what growing up in such a society might entail and the problems with having age-altered personal tutors as constant companions. Tonally the narration is not consistent.
Elbow Room by Marion Zimmer Bradley is one of those confessional stories within which the narrator becomes riddled with self-doubt. She is the director of a Vortex station, institutions which oversee wormholes and had a history of their operators committing suicide or else murdering one another. So a system was evolved in which only a few people would inhabit the stations meeting only occasionally so as they have elbow room. The narrator therefore has her own cook, her own gardener, her technician, her personal priest; even perhaps her own male whore. The crisis comes when a malfunctioning ship arrives at the Vortex and she has to board it, thereby encountering strangers.
The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop finds Paul Lindberl, biology assistant at the University of Texas, setting out on a wild bird chase after a woman on the bus refers to seeing in her childhood the “ugly chickens” he was looking at in his book of Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World.
Prime Time by Norman Spinrad is a take on the future of entertainment where people retire to Total Television Heaven able to access tapes (how soon the future becomes obsolete!) containg their favourite programming and real-time-share them with their nearest and dearest or not-so-dearest as the case may be. The story also has a rather conventional view of the lineaments of male and female desire.
Though typically well written George R R Martin throws a lot of SF tropes into Nightflyers – cloning, telepathy, ancient star travellers, holograms, telekinesis, a backdrop of an extended time-line, the mad woman in the attic (or in this case, a spaceship’s control systems.) Karoly d’Branin has assembled a crew of xenobiologists, linguists, a xenotechnologist, a telepath, a cyberneticist and an ‘improved model’ human to find the almost mythical volcryn, said to have cruised the galaxy at sublight speed for millenia. The ship’s captain, Royd Eris, is secretive though, never emerging from his quarters, appearing only as a hologram. Things begin to go wrong when the telepath feels a stange presence before dying violently.
The first sentence of A Spaceship Built of Stone by Lisa Tuttle is reminiscent of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias but the scene it describes is occurring in a dream. The dreams, apparently of the stone-built city of the ancient Anasazi culture, are being experienced simultaneously by many people round the world. Narrator Rick comes to suspect they are a softening up exercise for a quiet alien invasion.
In Window by Bob Leman, an experimenter on telekinesis has disappeared, along with his work cabin, and been replaced by a transparent cube one hundred feet to a side. The scene it shows, of another reality, looks idyllic. Then, during the brief time there is an interface, one of the obsevers steps through.
The Summer Sweet, The Winter Wild by Michael G Coney is one of the very few pieces of fiction to be written in the first person plural. (Another is my own This is the Road.) Here the We of the narrator(s) is a herd of caribou, some of whose members a while ago developed the telepathic ability to make the Herd and other animals feel their pain when they were injured or attacked. Wolves then back off, also humans (thought of by the Herd as ‘You’,) hence the weak and ill of the Herd do not die, therefore go on to breed.
A disillusioned artist wanders a beach in Achronous by Lee Killough and finds he has stepped into a bubble in time, with people from the far future taking refuge from the end of their world. It gives him new inspiration.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Table of Contents; Killiugh (Killough.) Othjerwise; “a series of performance halls were displayed” (a series … was displayed,) “wasn’t what what he’d be doing?” (wasn’t that what he’d be..,) “a muttered tympani” (a muttered tympanum,) “angle-length maternity gown” (ankle-length,) Argus’ (Argus’s,) tepee (tepee is the preferred spelling,) “‘I thought what happens was…’” (what happened was,) “in the first found” (first round,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “on my master’s” (Master’s,) the Chicksaw Nation (Chickasaw, as used previously,) band-new (brand-new,) “none of the soaps were personalized” (none of the soaps was personalised,) “was, What would …” (either enclose the ‘What would ….’ phrase in quotation marks or drop the comma and the capital W at What,) an opening quote mark where none is required and therefore not subsequently closed, Reeves’ (Reeves’s,) “because that is an instinct. We all have” (due to the plural nature of the narrator and its/their capitalisation elsewhere that should be ‘because that is an instinct we all have’ with no full stop,) grill (several times, grille,) Pometheus (elsewhere Prometheus,) D’Branin (usually d’Branin, but D’Branin at the beginning of a sentence – why?- and, once, within one,) Eris’ (Eris’s,) “‘I have not had much a life anyway’” (much of a life,) spasticly (spastically.)

Corporal J Beattie, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, 27/6/1943, Age 27:-

Sergeant R Wilkin, Air Gunner, RAF, 8/9/1941, 27:-

Sergeant W Fleming, Pilot, RAF, 9/1/0/1944, Age 27:-

M Caviney, Stoker First Class, HMS Ranger, 16/3/1919, Age 26:-

Pilot Officer W Burt, RAF, 1/1/1943, Age 21:-

Private J Matthews, Durham Light Infantry, 28/2/1918:-

Lance Corporal D Tinning, Royal Engineers, 3/8/1942. Age 24:-

David Lewis Willacy, Sgt Pilot, RAF, killed on active service, 1/9/1941, aged 25:-

Robert Squince McCulloch, Lance Corporal, Highland Light Infantry, died of wounds in France, 21/2/1917, aged 21 years:-

I just love this.

Then again, as a chemist you would expect me to.

I got to this Periodic Table via Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) for 9/8/20. It shows the origins of the chemical elements as percentages of how the total number of each elements’ atoms were formed.

Those parts in blue were formed in the Big Bang or by nuclear fusion in stars, green came from dying low mass stars, pink from cosmic ray fission, yellow from the explosions of massive stars, purple from neutron stars merging, light grey in exploding white dwarf stars.

There are areas of darker gray. The elements these refer to are mostly not found naturally – Technetium (Atomic Number 43,) Promethium (Atomic Number 61) and all the transuranics (Atomic Numbers greater than 92) can be made artificially in particle colliders or nuclear bombs and reactors, though I note that Neptunium (93) and Plutonium (94) seem to be produced by merging neutron stars. All elements with Atomic Numbers greater than 82 are radioactive and so decay away over time which is why the transuranics are not found on Earth and only some atoms of elements 82-92 are.

Quite why the version of this table that appears on APOD also has elements numbered 84-89 plus 91 in dark gray puzzles me a bit.

Football? What football?

Saturdays are empty at the moment, no trepidation in the run-up, no joy or despair at 4.45.

It seems an age since I posted news about Dumbarton FC.

Still, Sons’ opponents in this year’s League Cup (Betfred Cup) have been announced.

Kilmarnock, Dunfermline Athletic, Falkirk and Clyde make for pretty stiff opposition.

Something to look forward to, though. (Or perhaps, dread.)

Annan Cemetery is on a minor road leading north off the A 75 just to the west of the town. It contains a fair number of Commonwealth War Graves.

There is a line of 22 quite near the entrance. One of these is for a Czechoslovakian airman:-

I photographed these in blocks hoping to make out the individaul names but in most cases the lighting makes that difficult. They all seem to be Second World War graves, RAF, Royal New Zealand Air Force, Royal Canadian Air Force or Royal Australian Air Force:-

To the right here is the grave of that Czechoslovakian, Karel Dosva, RAF, 20/10/1908-21/1?/1943.

Penguin, 1984, 266 p.

This is a sequel to Darkchild, and is again set on the planet of Brakrath but here Scyoc broadens out her depiction of the societies there. Events are seen through two viewpoint characters, Keva and Danior, but a third appears in the Epilogue which sets up another sequel.

Keva has been brought up in the warmstream among the fisher-people by Oki. But Keva’s dreams are dominated by thoughts of fire. While seeking a poison antidote in Oki’s stash she finds a blue cloth which sings to her when she touches it. She finds Oki has lied to her about her origins and that her memory of a bearded man on a horse is real. She is the daughter of Jhaviir, one of the clones of Birnam Rauth – a Rauthimage – from the earlier book, and of a barohna now dead.

Danior’s mother was also a barohna (Khira from Darksong) and his father was The Boy from that book. Since barohnial inheritance comes through the female line Danior sees no place nor future for himself in the barohnial palace.

Both Keva and Danior set off on their own, Keva to attempt to find her father, and Danior to make his own way. Jhaviir – as the Viir-Nega – has collected together some of the desert people to live in a settlement but they are constantly at war with those who still roam. This pastoral existence and the wanderings through the plains reminded me of Phyllis Eisenstein’s In the Red Lord’s Reach, but perhaps hunter-gathering/partly settled societies are all similar.

When the nomads discover that a barohna has come to the settlement it provokes them to form an alliance to attack. Despite her reluctance Keva is forced to use her barohnial powers as mediated by her sunstone to defeat them.

The vast majority of this novel deals with the situation of the desert clans. The background to Scyoc’s trilogy remains resolutely that – background – for the most part. Little of the Rauthimage inheritance both Keva and Danior embody is referred to – except for the glimpse of Birnam Rauth, as tramsitted via the white cloth Jhaviir possesses, experienced by Danior as he touches it. This presages the third book in the trilogy.

Bluesong can be read on its own. No knowledge of the previous book is necessary and it reads as not merely the second part of a series but works by itself as a novel.

Pedant’s corner:- lightening (lightning.) “‘She’d dead.’” (She’s.) “It made her feel no better than he drew back at her tone” (that he drew back,) dispell (dispel,) vaccum (vacuum,) “instead the Nathri-Varnitz” (instead of the Nathri-Varnitz,) “three pair of eyes” (pairs,) a missing full stop at one paragraph’s end, an end quote mark at a paragraph break where the next continued the same speaker’s dialogue. “The Viir-Nega brows rose” (Viir-Nega’s brows,) “for constance” (constancy,) insured (ensured,) he ask uncertainly (asked,) “she needed to the think now” (no ‘the’ needed.)

This week’s contribution to Judith’s meme at Reader in the Wilderness.

So, I hear you ask, is it old books or an old bookcase?

Well, it’s both.

This is known in our house as, “my Dad’s bookcase,” (or, depending on who is speaking, “your Dad’s bookcase.”)

The top three shelves contain classic books, some of them leather-bound, and poetry collections; the lower two have reference books and military history.