Cowdenbeath Great War Memorial

The memorial, an obelisk embossed with a sword above a square plinth, was originally dedicated for the Great War, the dead of which it commemorated, and stands on a hill with a view down Cowdenbeath’s High Street. There is also a dedication to those who fell in the Second Word War but their names are on a separate memorial in the town.

Cowdenbeath Great War Memorial South Aspect. Names: Adams – Davidson:-

Cowdenbeath Great War Memorial South Aspect

East Aspect. Names: Ferguson – Lister:-

Cowdenbeath Great War Memorial East Aspect

North Aspect. Names: Lockhart – Scott. Cowdenbeath High Street behind:-

Cowdenbeath Great War Memorial North Aspect

West aspect. Names: Scott – Young:-

Cowdenbeath Great War Memorial West Aspect

A Great War 100th Anniversary Bench and Soldier lies at the end of Cowdenbeath High Street below the hill where the War memorial stands:-

Cowdenbeath Great War Anniversary Bench and Soldier

I featured Cowdenbeath’s Second World War memorial here but took this photo of it with added Great War soldier outline and Great War anniversary bench just after I photographed the above:-

Cowdenbeath World War 2 Memorial

Reelin’ in the Years 243: Another Girl, Another Planet

I was reminded of this by a piece in the Guardian during last week, so I thought I’d use it here.

The Only Ones: Another Girl, Another Planet

 

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid  

Polygon, 2024, 140 p, including iii p Glossary and i p Acknowledgements.

This is one of a series of short novels Birlinn (Polygon’s owner) has commissioned from modern Scottish authors under the rubric Darkland Tales: “dramatic retellings of stories from the nation’s history, myth and legend.” The good lady picked it up from the local library and I thought I might as well read it too.

An author’s note prefaces the tale with a note saying that Shakespeare – like people today – knew little about life in Scotland just over a thousand years ago now and his “Scottish play” about two power-crazed tyrants was an invention (actually taken from Hollinshed’s Chronicles.)

McDermid’s book – like Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter – is an attempt to restore the balance and has two strands; one in the present of Macbeth’s wife Gruoch as she tries to evade capture by Malcolm’s followers (specifically MacDuff) some time after Macbeth’s defeat at Lumphanen by sheltering in a monastery on an island in Loch Leven and the other (printed in italic) her memories of her life when she met and fell in love with Macbeth while in a dynastic – and on her part loveless – marriage to the Mormaer of Moray, Gille Coemgáin, the man who had killed Macbeth’s father Findlaidh. The whole is a love story in which McDermid conjures up late tenth century Scotland admirably.

Macbeth here is not the Earl of Orkney of Dunnett’s imagination but has a power base on the isle of Mull and a prickly relationship with Gille Coemgáin until he takes revenge for his father and establishes his rule by adopting Gruoch’s son Lulach, whom this account asserts is his son anyway.

Within the text there are several sly references to Shakespeare’s play – the handle toward my hand, to the sticking place, untimely ripped etc – but McDermid gives it her own spin.

On the whole I found Queen Macbeth more interesting and writerly than McDermid’s crime fiction. This is Gruoch as a living, breathing – feeling – human being.

Pedant’s corner:- “quantities of ginger and peppermint tea” ( I wondered when ginger came to Britain. It was known in the 11th century so that’s fine. Peppermint was apparently only identified in 1696 but its use will certainly predate this.)

 

Barnaby Martin’s The Quiet

My latest book for review has arrived courtesy of  ParSec.

 

It is The Quiet by Barnaby Martin, published by MacMillan. Rather refreshingly it seems to be a work of Science Fiction rather than fantasy.

 

The author is another who is new to me.

The Locked Room by Paul Auster  

In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [The Locked Room, 1987, 116 p.]

The third in Auster’s New York trilogy, this is as awkward a read as the previous two. There is something distanced about the narration; too much is told and little is shown. It is the tale of a man effectively haunted by his childhood friend Fanshawe, who suddenly left his wife but also left behind several manuscripts and instructions to have the narrator sift through them to see if they were worth publishing, and, if so, to try to accomplish this.

That word Fanshawe is a problem, embodying the sense that what we are reading is a construct. Surely nobody ever refers to their childhood best friend by their surname? (Outside the bounds of fiction it would be unusual in any situation where referring to an acquaintance is required.) We readers know perfectly well that any short story or novel is a construct – but we don’t need our faces rubbed in it.

Though the connection seems tenuous – apart from the fact that I was reading these between the same covers – characters from the previous two books in the trilogy like Quinn and Stillman, reappear here. And the narrator mentions City of Glass and Ghosts as if he is the same as the person who wrote those. (Of course he is. He’s Paul Auster. And we know that. But to be reminded of it is annoying.)

There are some sentences where Auster’s writing climbs into wider relevance, “No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself” explores the impossibility of ever truly knowing anyone else – or even oneself. We are told “The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle” (to say goodbye to something.) If the story isn’t in the words why are we wasting our time? More problematically, one encounter leads the narrator to the thought that “Sexual desire can also be the desire to kill.”

Sensitivity note; Fanshawe’s manuscripts are said to contain “an instance of nigger-baiting.”

Pedant’s corner:- kudos, though, for no entries here.

Second World War Memorials, St John’s Kirk, Perth

Plaque dedicated to the men of St John’s Kirk:-

St John's Kirk, Perth, Second World War Memorial

Burma Star Association flag and plaque. The plaque bears the Kohima Epitaph:-

Burma Star Association Flag, St John's Kirk, Perth

Upper memorial for the Scottish Area Women’s Royal Army Corps and lower one for the Royal Army Service Corps in both wars:-

War Memorial Plaques, St John's Kirk, Perth

Parachute Regiment and British Special Airborne Forces Memorial:-

Parachute Regiment and British Special Airborne Forces Memorial, St John's Kirk, Perth

Tapestry Memorial to 51st Highland Division:-

War Memorial Tapestry, St John's Kirk, Perth

Dumbarton 1-1 Alloa Athletic

SPFL Tier 3, The Rock, 1/2/25.

Well. It’s not like us to score early (instead of conceding early) but we did Jinky Hilton doing the honours.

Then we lost an early goal in the second half.

It wasn’t a good day at all what with Annan winning at Kelty.

We’re down at Annan next week. Failure to win there and we’re definitely not going to overcame the 15 point deduction.

War Memorial, St John’s Kirk, Perth

War Memorial alcove, St John’s Kirk, Perth:-

War Memorial Window, St John's Kirk, Perth

Great War Memorial (to left above):-

Great War Memorial, St John's Kirk, Perth

Below the memorial are two Rolls of Honour. The first below takes in Perthshire and also covers World War 2 as may the second:-

Perthshire Roll of Honour, St John's Kirk, Perth

 

St John's Kirk, Perth, Roll of Honour

Great War Memorial to men connected with St John’s East Parish Church:-

Congregation War Memorial, St John's Kirk, Perth

Masonic Great War Memorial:-

Masonic Great War Memorial, St John's Kirk,Perth

Friday on my Mind 240: Come and Stay with Me and Live It Up 125: Broken English

I saw Marianne Faithfull’s death announced last night.

She first came to prominence in 1964 due to her association with The Rolling Stones (Jagger and Richards wrote her first hit.) She had a sweet but almost insubstantial voice suited to soft pop songs but by the mid 60s her singing career had stalled, in part due to a drugs scandal. She took up acting with some success though but mostly fell out of public consciousness.

Here’s Faithfull’s version of a Jackie DeShannon song that gave her her highest UK chart placing (no 4 in 1965 as compared to the no 9 achieved by As Tears Go By the year before.)

Marianne Faithfull: Come and Stay with Me

 

The song below is from her 1980 “comeback”* album of the same title, which is widely regarded as her best, not least by herself.

*Even if Dreamin’ my Dreams had intervened in 1976

Marianne Faithfull: Broken English

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull: 29/12/1946 – 30/1/2025. So it goes.

Ghosts by Paul Auster

In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [Ghosts, 1986, 64 p.]

I read Ghosts, the second part of Auster’s New York trilogy, in September and thought I had published my review here but I was seeking to link to it in my review of the third in his sequence and couldn’t find it when I searched the blog; so it seems I didn’t. So here it is, four months late.

In 1947 New York a man called Blue is employed by a man named White to spy on a man called Black, and write regular reports on him. Blue cancels his date with the future Mrs Blue to undertake the commission – a commission which will keep him going for months. (To the understandable frustration of his intended who when they next meet on the street berates him for the lack of contact. But by then she has moved on. Not that Blue can, though he had pondered getting in touch but decided against it on the grounds that “The man must always be the stronger one.”)

Everything has been set up for Blue with an apartment across the street from which he can monitor Black’s activities. All Black appears to do though is write. And read.

It is a curious and distancing feature of the book that except for the real life people mentioned, such as Washington Roebling and Jackie Robinson, every character’s name is a colour. As well as Blue, White and Black we also have Gray, a bartender named Red, another called Green. The only woman who is given a name here (the future Mrs Blue isn’t) is called Violet. I note that that is a first name whereas the men’s in this story are not.

Blue becomes so bogged down in his task that he wonders if White and Black are one and the same and if he himself is being followed. The paranoia of a man who is so focused on what he is doing that he loses touch with reality? This has echoes of the previous book in Auster’s trilogy, City of Glass. Eventually Blue goes beyond his remit, contacts Black and tries to find out who White is.

In a discussion of Hawthorne, Black says to Blue, “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.” Blue replies, “Another ghost.”

The narrative is peppered with references to magazine stories, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially where a man took off on a whim and only years later (after being presumed dead) returned to his house and wife and knocked on the door. Whereupon the story ends. In that sense Ghosts reflects it. It doesn’t end so much as stop, albeit with being seen from a perspective of thirty years later.

What is Auster trying to do here? Is he subverting the detective story? Demonstrating the inexplicability of existence?

Ghosts is easy enough to read, and short at only 64 pages, but it all seems a bit pointless.

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