There’s some nice 50s style pierced brickwork on the gable end of this lawyer’s building in Kirkcaldy.

But it’s the company sign itself which made me do a double take the first time I saw it.

They can’t be that bad, surely!

Just down the same street (where the Sheriff Court can also be found) is this mob.

It would be as well not to fall foul of the law in Kirkcaldy, then.

I’ve just noticed this on the BBC Scottish First Division webpage.

Raith Rovers 2-0 Livingston

Striker Iain Russell scored his seventh goal in as many games as Livingston defeated Raith Rovers.

Spot the deliberate mistake….

It’ll probably be fixed soon.*

*Edited (10/3/13) to add:- the website has the correct score now.

For those of you who don’t know of her Ms Davidson is the Conservative Party’s Scottish leader. She has the distinction of being the first leader of a political party in the United Kingdom to be openly gay. Not bad going for a Tory.

Something about her demeanour has always nagged at me, though. She carries herself with a certain swagger, almost an arrogance. While watching Sunday Politics Scotland on BBC 1 one week I got it. The way she moves is exactly like Benito Mussolini.

I now keep expecting her to cross her arms over her chest and begin to nod as if sagely.

Not a bad date for a birthday.

Except I’m not 24.

It even works well in USian (12/24/12.)

Happy St Nicholas Day to those of you who celebrate it.

I was in Alloa last week and spotted this law firm.

I didn’t know Alloa was quite so wild!

I liked this set of connections between modern art movements laid out as an underground map in Saturday’s Guardian Review.

The article the map accompanied is here.

One of the interesting aspects of living in Kirkcaldy is the ever changing view out to sea. There are usually quite a few ships either at anchor or moving up and down the Forth.

For the last week one in particular has been prominent. Here it was along with another about a week ago.

As you can see the one on the left has a peculiar shape. The good lady remarked that it was the shipping equivalent of a Swiss Army knife what with all the bits hanging off it.

Here is a crop of the above.

The ship is still hanging around and I finally looked it up on a shipping movement website. It turns out it’s the Solitaire, the largest pipe laying vessel in the world.

I don’t know if it’s actually been laying any pipes.

This is a picture from the ships and harbours photos site.

I noticed from my blog stats that I had had a spike in visitors a few days ago. The main search term was Glebe Park, Brechin.

Now why would people be searching for that?

It took me no time at all to realise, of course. And this link explains it further.

I suppose all these bemused punters were searching for information because they’d never been to Brechin before. Welcome to the lower leagues!

You may have noticed on the clip from 1975 of The Sweet’s Action I posted a week or so back that at no 27 on the charts that week was a duo called Windsor Davies and Don Estelle.

The song concerned was Whispering Grass and since the act featured someone dressed up as a sergeant-major and a diminutive soldier in a solar topee it would seem to be one of the unlikelier hits of that – or any – year. The song, though, reached number one and stemmed of course from a TV show; the sitcom, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. Unlike Dad’s Army, with whom it shared the writing team of Jimmy Perry and David Croft, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum does not benefit from constant repeats but mention it to anyone who watched British television in the 1970s and they’ll be able to reel off the characters’ names instantly (or the major ones anyway.)

The show featured:-
Bearer Rangi Ram
Gunner (later Bombardier) Beaumont, aka Gloria.
Sergeant-major Williams, “Shuuuuut Uuuuup!”
Gunner Parkin, aka Parky. (“You’ve a fine pair of shoulders there, boy. Show ’em off. Show ’em off.”)
Mr Lah-di-dah Gunner Graham, aka Paderewski.
Gunner Sugden, aka Lofty.
Colonel Reynolds.
Captain Ashwood.
Char Wallah Mohammed.
Punkah Wallah Rumzan.
Gunner Mackintosh, aka Atlas.
Gunner Clark, aka Nobby.
Gunner Evans, aka Nosher.
And from the first few series, Bombardier Solomons, aka Solly.

It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum was an ensemble comedy on the usual Perry and Croft lines (not only Dad’s Army but also Hi-de-Hi and You Rang M’Lord; Croft also co-wrote ‘Allo ‘Allo) and featured the (mis)adventures of a Royal Artillery Concert Party in the Far East during the Second World War.

The casting of Michael Bates as Rangi was criticised even at the time as people felt an Indian actor would have been more appropriate. Yet Michael Bates was born in India – and spoke Hindi before he learned English – and was well versed in Indian culture. The paucity of Indian actors in Britain at the time is shown by the few who regularly turn up in bit parts: some actors playing several different characters over the show’s eight series.

That the show has not been repeated ad nauseam in the way that Dad’s Army has is perhaps due to the fact that it is now held to be racist, or at least non-pc. Indeed even as late as April of this year BBC bosses have decided that the show will never be re-run for that reason. Yet given its setting (Deolali, India, 1945, and later up the jungle in Burma) racist language or attitudes are hardly to be wondered at.

The 1940s were not pc. The Raj was not pc. Quite how this supposedly excessive racism can be squared with the fact that the British are uniformly ineffectual – the officers are idiots, the concert performers woeful except for the singing of Gunner Sugden, the sergeant-major is a bit thick and continually frustrated in his efforts to make his charges soldierly – while the Indians, especially Rangi and the Punkah Wallah, who has perhaps the best lines in the show (most contributed by Dino Shafeek who played the Char Wallah) are obviously more intelligent and frequently get the better of their colonial masters, is difficult to fathom.

An irony here is that one of the original performers of Whispering Grass was the group The Inkspots whose name is itself arguably racist from today’s perspective.

Another factor in the long, and now seemingly permanent, absence of the series from the small screen may be that sergeant-major Williams frequently refers to the concert party under his charge as “nancy boys” or “poofs,” mouthing this last in the closing sequence and, from series 3 on, even in the opening titles. Again, a sergeant-major in 1945 would undoubtedly have done this. To represent it is only being true to the historical record.

Confession time. The good lady and I ordered the full series set of DVDs of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum as a Christmas present to ourselves and are steadily working our way through it. We’ve reached series 6. I have to say it’s still funny.

If you want to check them out various excerpts from the show are available on You Tube.

Anyway, here are the said Windsor Davies and Don Estelle from the Christmas Top of the Pops of 1975.

Sing, Lofty!

Windsor Davies and Don Estelle: Whispering Grass