Old Burntisland Swimming Pool:-

It was apparently an outdoor Lido style pool:-

The photos are from Love Kirkcaldy!’s facebook page

In June we took a walk along the seashore of the Firth of Forth from Kirkcaldy towards Seafield Tower. There’s always some wildlife around.

This cormorant was sunning itself against the background of old sea wall blocks:-

Panorama of rocks and seals:-

Basking seals:-

On the way back the tide had come in a bit:-

“Do not disturb” sign. It’s a bit sad that there is felt to be a need to put up a sign like this:-

Video:-

On this video you can hear the seals’ howls:-

Some planting at Kirkcaldy Memorial Gardens to mark the 100^th anniversary of the end of the Great War.

The central portion of Kirkcaldy’s War Memorial pictured above (plus see original post here) has on its other sides bronze plaques referencing branches of the Armed Services.

Naval service:-

Dedication to all those who served and Aviation services:-

Army services:-

I remember seeing very similar plaques on Plymouth’s War Memorial when I was there (many years ago, well before I started either photographing War Memorials or blogging.)

Ducks on pond:-

Fountain:-

Circumference path:-

Yesterday I spotted in a charity shop in Kirkcaldy the legend, “Theives will be prosecuted.”

My immediate thought was, “So do thieves get away scot-free, then?”

On Monday I saw in the Guardian that for the first time there would be an episode of Doctor Who on New Year’s Day this year.

No. That would already have happened. The clue is in the name. New year.

The episode will actually be broadcast next year.

The Carnegie Library in Dunfermline was undergoing refurbishment for a long while. It reopened last year with exhibition and museum spaces alongside the library files. At least they didn’t get rid of the old library bookshelves in the way that happened at the main Kircaldy Library when it was refurbished a few yaers ago.

From one of the upper exhibition spaces at the new Carnegie there is a great view of Dunfermline Abbey (through glass.)

There is also a gardened area right beside the Carnegie Library with figures of Tam O’Shanter and Souter Johnnie in the circular seating space at centre here:-

The box hedging gives way to a grassed area with intervening espaliered trees:-

More espaliered trees finish the garden off:-

Harper, 2010, 569 p. First published in 2003.

I probably wouldn’t have read this – I wasn’t particularly taken by the author’s The Wire in the Blood – but the good lady had just finished it and mentioned it was set partly in my old stamping ground of Kirkcaldy and partly in St Andrews (which I know well.) So I thought I’d give it a go. The locations in the book aren’t restricted to Fife, it does stray to Edinburgh, Stirling, Glasgow, and even Seattle but the main events take place in what the locals like to call “the Kingdom.”

The prologue lets us know of a Fife Police press announcement of a cold case review and a shadowy figure haunting a cemetery before Part One plunges us into the 1978 discovery of the dying body of Rosie Duff by four students at St Andrews University (schoolfriends calling themselves the Lads Fi’ Kirkcaldy) taking a short cut back to their flat after a party. One of them is a medical student and tries to save her life but fails. As discoverers of the body and covered in blood they naturally become suspects. The investigation cannot summon up evidence even to charge them and the case is unresolved but they are still subjected to suspicion, threats and violence – especially by the dead girl’s brothers. McDermid makes a lot of this finger of suspicion and the effect it has on the four and their relationship(s). Part Two sees the resurrection of the case and its reintrusion into the four’s lives. But in the intervening twenty-five years the main evidence from the victim’s clothing has been lost and there seems little hope of progress. But the review has stirred the old suspicions and someone has the four firmly in the frame.

McDermid’s prose is certainly efficient but rarely rises above the workmanlike. The book’s structure, too, made it slightly odd. Part One was more or less scene setting, involved a lot of information dumping and therefore dragged somewhat. McDermid makes passing reference to the fascistic fringe and government encroachments on citizens’ rights in the late 1970s. (That sort of thing has become even worse of late with intolerance having been adopted into the political mainstream and governments eager to seize any excuse to restrict citizens’ rights.)

I would have said that it was cleverly executed except that the resolution was disappointing. It has more holes in it than Stoke City’s defence and depends too much on the prior withholding of information from the reader. In the last (tie-up) chapter it is revealed that one of the four Lads had a piece of information that would potentially have pointed to the murderer but never told the other three – nor the Police – during all those twenty-five years of suspicion. We can only suppose this was to create an artificial sense of suspense and it kind of obviates the point of the book (no matter what reason he might have had for his reticence.) Moreover the murderer seems to have been able to carry the body up a hill to where the Lads stumbled upon it without seemingly getting any blood on himself, even though the victim had a gaping wound.

McDermid has a wide readership. I assume they don’t like taxing their brains overmuch.

Pedant’s corner:- the main drag (St Andrews has a main drag?) Roger Waters’ (Waters’s. And I know he wrote Shine On You Crazy Diamond but did he sing on it? Wasn’t that David Gilmour?) “[Kirkcaldy’s] Town House looked like one of those less alluring products of Soviet architecture” (is more than a bit harsh. It’s a fine buiding.) Raith Rovers’ (Raith Rovers’s,) Brahms’ (Brahms’s,) “had strode” (stridden,) “‘Gonnae no dae that’” (is referred to as if it were a catchphrase from the early to mid 1970s. It wasn’t. Chewin’ the Fat, where it originated, was first aired in 1999.) “‘We lay low’” (we lie low – but it was in dialogue and the character had lived in the US for years and they can’t seem to get the lay/lie thing correct over there,) Soanes’ (Soanes’s.) “The sky was clear, a gibbous moon hanging low in the sky between the bridges.” (sky….sky,.) Sainsburys (Sainsbury’s.) Plus several instances of “time interval later”.

In November we visited Beveridge Park in Kirkcaldy again.
At least three of the cygnets were almost fully grown:-

Or was it four?:-

I was in Beveridge Park, Kirkcaldy last month and the swans have seven cygnets this year.