This is that rarity, a detached house in the Deco style, in Kirkcaldy.

Note the white rendering, flat roof(s) and cylindrical staircase. The windows seem to be original still.

Here’s the view from the right, where it looks a bit more boxy.

This side view shows a long narrow window. This looks to have been “poked out” with modern double glazing. The one on the opposite side wall is similar.

I don’t know if the front windows are subject to a preservation order, but they look like original Critall ones to me.

Proof that the word Raith has/had a wider use than just for the name of the local football team.
This was the Raith cinema and is now some sort of church. It’s situated in Links Street in what is known as Linktown, which maybe once was a separate entity from The Lang Toun but now there is no gap between them and it’s just another part of Kirkcaldy.

The curly flourishes on the entrance are about all that makes this Art Deco, but their Eastern influence is one of the hallmarks of Deco styling (cf the Hoover Factory and India of Inchinnan.) Those apart it’s a pretty bog standard barn of a cinema building.
I’ve no idea what it looks like inside or if there were any Art Deco detailings in the interior.

Do you suppose that when folk exited the cinema after watching a musical they were dancing in the streets of Raith?

See a similar photo at the Scottish cinemas website.

Curiously just along the same street from the former Raith there is another unusual religious building; for Scotland that is. A Coptic church. You can occasionally see the priest in Kirkcaldy High Street, in his full beard, ecclesiastical hat and black robes.

No, I don’t mean those who frequent the pubs and clubs.

It being a nice day* I and the good lady took a stroll along the shore path from Kirkcaldy to Kinghorn. Along the way we spotted some seals basking in the sun. I had the camera!

First attempt. The seals were too far away really. I don’t have much of an adjustable lens.

One of the seals was in the water. I think you can just about make it out in this photo. The previous ones are still perched on their rocks to the left of shot.

Just to left of centre in this picture (it’s the shiny bit) is a seal who’d dragged him or herself out of the water.

This is probably the best shot. A longer ridge of rock with several basking seals.

*I think I might have used the Ablative Absolute (see this post) in this phrase.

This is a street where, along with some more traditional stone properties, there are a few houses that must have been built in the 1930s as Art Deco external features and stylings abound.

Block of four buildings; semi-detached villas.

Rough cast/pebble dashed semis. Were these once flat-roofed? The one on the left seems to have the original window styling.

Pair of semis; flat-roofed; eyes poked out.

More flat-roofed semis.

Pair of semis with nice Deco detailing but replacement windows.

White painted rendering cracking up a bit.

Fifth pair of semis: eyes poked out.

Nice entranceway detail on a thirties house.

Two more semis.

Yet more. These are on the opposite side of the street to the others.

Someone else has noticed the strange book sale policy of Fife Libraries.

I was there again on Saturday morning (21/3/09) but this time didn’t find anything I hadn’t already got.

I did notice that they had an unread paperback copy of Richard Morgan’s Steel Remains* which unlike the version here on Amazon had no cover art. On the front instead there was a written passage from and puff for the novel. It was also stamped on the fly leaf – not with “Kirkcaldy Libraries – Withdrawn” but, “Waterstone’s, High Street, Kirkcaldy.” Bizarre!

Was it perhaps a review copy?

*The hardback is on my to read list.

It seems the lists of scored off names on the electoral registers used at the polling places for the Glenrothes by-election have gone missing, possibly in Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.

So; no-one can now check the total votes counted against the numbers who actually turned up to vote.

While it is unlikely that anyone would take the risk of being found out in such an enterprise the loss of the lists is an embarrassment to say the least and opens the possibility of ballot boxes having been stuffed with papers for whom there were no voters. It’s not beyond the bounds of thought to suppose that Fife Labour were so scared of losing that they would do something like this.
But it is Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court we’re talking about here.

Conspiracy or cock-up?

Take your pick.

I used this phrase to describe my latest short story acceptance. The ITN newscaster Alastair Burnett also said it on air one night after a Raith Rovers victory over someone or other.

Lots of people castigated him for this as, of course, there is no town of Raith. The Rovers, as they are known, are the senior football team of Kirkcaldy. Their ground is only a couple of hundred yards from Son Of The Rock towers.

There is a Raith estate nearby, though, after which I believe the club was named; so the announcement was perhaps warranted – if only in a small sense. They may, after all, have danced there that night.

Nevertheless, Burnett (English people pronounce his surname Burn-ette. It is of course more properly rendered as Burn-it) was Scottish and a football follower. He would have known well enough there is no town of that name. I think he was being ironic (as I was) – or even taking the piss out of people who didn’t know it, like his fellow newsreaders.

(Stands back and waits for pelters from Kirkcaldy folk.)

Unlike the two previous Kirkcaldy buildings I have featured this is an Art Deco structure built for commercial purposes. Because the company’s presence on High Streets arose mainly between the wars many Burton’s premises are Art Deco. They took advantage of the site here (on a corner in the High Street) to incorporate a sweeping curve.

It looks like the original windows to me. Pity about the street furniture (Belisha beacon, parking regulation notice and CCTV camera pole) spoiling the view of the frontage a bit.

The detailing between the upper and lower windows is very nice.

The tops of the pillars are more like Art Nouveau than Deco. What commercial property nowadays would bother with playful frills like these and the circles above? Modern shop buildings all tend to be functional and architecturally bland; cuboidal boxes. And they’re all on out of town Retail Parks.

The edging on the pediment is a lovely Art Deco embellishment. You really have to be looking at the building to notice this.

Today Woolies in Kirkcaldy ran its shutter down for the last time.
A fixture on the British High Street for nearly 100 years, a lot of Woolies’ shops were in Art Deco style buildings. Though the Kirkcaldy store shut for a while (its location was at the “wrong” end of the High Street, which ironically has recently undergone something of a regeneration: that’ll probably Credit crunch to a close) it reopened in 1998 in a mall location, The Mercat, which runs off the High Street and back round again to the rear of Marks & Sparks.
I remember the Dumbarton and Helensburgh stores fondly from my youth. They had fantastic wooden floors, their bon-bons and rum and butter caramels were a delight to my young sweet tooth and more recently it used to be good for buying cheaply singles that had recently fallen out of the charts.
I can’t say I made the Kirkcaldy store a destination every week but it was good to have it available for all those things it sold that nowhere else in the town centre did and it held a better selection of sweets than the local Tesco.
It was sad to see the state to which the administrators reduced it in its final days – ugly reduced posters plastered everywhere, as many laundry hooks as you could ever wish for (plus hundreds more,) empty spaces galore on the shelves.
I think it could have been viable but the latest high-ups allowed no leeway to local managers and as a result some of the items for sale verged on the bizarre (though it wasn’t actually in Woolies I saw racks of England tops for sale in Kirkcaldy.)
It will leave a big gap in the Mercat.
Doctorvee has recently posted about Woolies history and has another post planned.

Since before I started this blog, June 2008 in fact, I have been on a diet. The early few pounds fell off easily. Progress then slowed but I persevered. Up until Christmas I had managed to lose nearly 1½ stones (20 lbs to be precise) to end up around the lower border for reasonable weight for my height as opposed to the upper border. As a result few of my trousers now fit properly and a belt has become a necessity. I suspect I am slimmer than I have ever been since I became an adult. I feel much better for it.

There was no great secret to it, no magic bullet to losing weight. I merely ate sensibly and more or less normally, but cut down – no nibbles between meals – and went for walks over an hour long nearly every day. One of the local parks is just over the railway from Son Of The Rock Towers and is almost ideal for walking – there is also an incline to negotiate on the circuit of the park. Kirkcaldy promenade is handy too, and over a mile long (Kirkcaldy is not called the Lang Toun for nothing,) but you sometimes have to dodge the waves fountaining over the sea wall when it’s a bit wild, or even when it’s relatively calm!

One of the main contributors to cutting down was having only one sandwich for lunch at work instead of two. Changing to a smaller lunch box helped with this.

The trick will be not to get back into the old eating habits when I stop dieting, which I haven’€™t really, (stopped dieting that is.) But Christmas and New Year won’€™t have helped.