Former Liverpool and Scotland footballer Ron Yeats has died.

His arrival at the club, along with Ian St John, was credited by the legendary Bill Shankly as being the turning point to propel Liverpool to the top of the English game in the 1960s. Prior to their signings Liverpool had been jogging along as a middling Second Division club. So impressed was Shankly by Yeats that he immediately made him captain. Promotion followed straightaway, then two Championships sandwiched Liverpool’s first ever FA Cup win. Such was his stature that he was nicknamed “The Colossus”.

Given all that it now seems surprising that Yeats was only ever capped by Scotland twice.

Ronald (Ron) Yeats: 15/11/1937 – 6/9/2024. So it goes.

I only discovered yesterday that Tom Nairn, the Scottish historian who came up with the memorable phrase that “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post,” has died.

He is most famous for his critique of the British state which he dubbed Ukania for its monarchical resemblance to a Ruritanian archetype, anatomised in his book The Break-Up of Britain.

An advocate of Scottish independence, his Republicanism and Marxism, though neither Trotsykist nor Stalinist – his sojourn in Italy led him to lean towards Gramsci – probably did not help his career.

Thomas Cunningham (Tom) Nairn: 2/6/1932 – 21/1/2023. So it goes.

I haven’t posted any of these for quite some time.

So here are three views of the North Cascade and Tower at the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, 1938, held in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.

First one of Brain Gerald’s art-drawn postcards:-

This is a very similar view but is a colourised photograph:-

This one, also a colourised photograph, omits the fountain:-

It goes without saying that what is happening in Ukraine is terrible and totally unjustified.

Sadly it does not look as if it will end any time soon.

As in the law of unintended consequences, Vladimir Putin’s intention to prevent any further expansion by NATO has been thoroughly undermined by his unprovoked attack on a neighbouring country. As a result Finland has pivoted to being amenable to joining NATO and even Sweden, the neutral country par excellence, is thinking about it.

What Putin hoped to achieve by attacking Ukraine and killing its citizens is incomprehensible. What is certain is that he will now have made Ukrainians implacably opposed to close ties with Russia, still less to incorporation into it. I am reminded of the English King Edward I’s campaigns to subjugate Scotland, the single most important factor in forging a sense of Scottish nationhood, and still relevant over 700 years later. Something similar to this will be Putin’s legacy. From now on, no matter the outcome, Ukrainians will not trust Russia or its intentions for a very long time indeed.

On Charles Stross’s blog there is an appeal from the writing community in Ukraine for everyone to make their best efforts to help Ukraine and to inform Russian citizens of the true situation.

Scots are not generally given to flag-waving from their properties.

Exceptions come when the national football team qualifies for a major tournament; as it did for Euro 2020 (due to Covid, played in the summer of 2021.)

Maybe there was an extra excuse this time because the previous occasion when Scotland graced a big tournament was in 1998!

The flags have long gone now.

Euro 2020, Group D, Hampden Park, 22/6/21.

Well we know this is how it goes. A gallant effort but this was knowhow – and class – against inexperience. Their control, passing and movement made it look like men against boys.

At least we got a goal.

It’s hard to resist the thought that – notwithstanding they’d never beaten us before – the Croats targeted this game. They certainly played way better than in their previous two outings. They never looked at all bothered or likely to lose and in Luka Modrić they had an outstanding player who totally bossed the game and scored a superb goal. And Ivan Perisić wasn’t far behind.

Maybe Scotland’s players will have relished the experience and it motivates them to want to have it again – whether at Qatar next year or in the next Euros.

We can hope.

But it’s the hope that kills.

Euro 2020, Group D, Wembley Stadium, 18/6/21.

Well. The first thing you have to say is that Scotland deserved at least a point. It was a great performance by the players – perhaps unlucky not to get the win. But for that you have to put the ball in the net. We were never convincing about the ability to do that.

A win against Croatia ought to see us through. But they’ve got quality in midfield and upfront and it will be a very difficult game. The other thing that worries me is that they’ve never beaten us. That run has to end sometime.

And we know how this goes. Scotland put in a gallant effort and somehow still contrive to muck it up.

On Tuesday evening Croatia will burst our bubble with about ten minutes to go. Watch through your fingers.

Euro 2020, Group D, Hampden Park, 14/6/21.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

This is how it goes with Scotland.

No luck, their keeper making at least three very good saves – the one where he prevented the sclaff from his own defender going in being superb – hitting the bar, losing goals at the wrong times – though there’s never really a good time to lose one – with one of them a brilliant piece of execution from the sort of forward player we lack.

I refused to express any hopes for a good outcome before the game but hope nevertheless stirred early on. Fatal, fatal.

Still, it would be just like us to get a result* against England on Friday now.

Then a plucky display against the Croats before going out on goal difference again.

*Not a win obviously.

Creative Visions and Critical Reflections on Scotland’s Space Futures. Editors: Deborah Scott and Simon Malpas. Foreword by Ken MacLeod

Shoreline of Infinity/The New Curiosity Shop, 2019, 179 p.

Ken MacLeod’s wittily titled foreword “Steam me up Watty” (though he was not the first to it, Watt being apparently one of Birmingham’s finest, according to the Birmingham Mail) sets the scene for Scotland’s entitlement to a share in space endeavours while the editors’ Introduction explains the project’s genesis.

The main body of the book has three sections, each with a story specially written for the book, and academic essays complementing or critiquing the points it brings up.

Scotland and Mars has Pippa Goldschmidt’s Welcome to Planet Alba^TM!, set on the eponymous vistor centre next to a launch pad somewhere in the north of Sutherland, where tourists can experience a VR sensation of walking on Mars at a time when the first humans are actually on their way to the Red Planet. Narrator Ali is of Arabic extraction and spent some time working in the US. The story is about loneliness, rootlessness and fitting in. Alastair Bruce’s essay Mars: There and Back Again relates the hows and when of getting to Mars and the latest plans for that. Sean McMahon discusses what colour Mars really is. (Spoiler: not red – in fact it’s a mixture of browns, beiges and orange with the (very) occasional blue sunset or -rise.) Elsa Bouet in Red Journeys: ‘Welcome to Planet Alba^TM‘! and the Martian Literary Imaginary assesses Pippa Goldschmidt’s story and its themes among the history of Mars in fiction, Wells, Bradbury, Robinson et al.

Fringe in Space begins with Laura Lam’s story A Certain Reverence which is larded with Scottish words and usages. It’s narrated by Blair Orji. She is part of a Scottish contingent, either scientists or entertainers, to a tidal-locked planet orbiting Proxima Centauri b where aliens (who have already given humans access to all-but-light speed technology) are waiting to be exposed to Scots culture. In Life, but not as we know it: the prospects for life on habitable zone planets orbiting low-mass stars Beth Biller considers how we have identified such planets, their nature and how to tell if they are habitable. Tacye Philippson, senior Science Curator at National Museums Scotland, in Alien collecting: speculative museology, assesses what aliens might consider worth collecting from Earth and from Scotland in particular.

Scotland at the end of the Universe starts with Russell Jones’s story Far, in which an (almost literally star-cross’d) love story is blended in with an Inflation Drive which allows a newly independent Scotland to be transferred across the universe. The appearance of the story is notable for its layout which resembles that of modern poetry at times (unsurprisingly as Jones is a poet) but also for the brightly coloured illustrations of drinks glasses and what looks like microwave background images plus a few diagrams and the word ‘Yes’ rendered in blue in the font used for promoting that result during the 2014 Independence Referendum. In The Multiverse Catherine Heymans explains how cosmic inflation (which describes how the early universe must have expanded, its signature left as the cosmic microwave background,) violates Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity but how an Inflation Drive could indeed be a way of travelling faster than light – except for the problems involved in switching it off. Vatjaz Vidmar’s Of Maps, Love Stories and the Universe describes both fiction and science as kinds of maps delineating connectedness and that bonding in this way (as within or between atoms) may be the universe’s resistance to its own demise by heat death.

Colin McInnes’s Afterword notes that the first person to give a description of rocket propulsion (in 1861; well before Goddard and Tsiolkovsky) was a Scot, William Leitch, from Rothesay, and that Scotland is well to the fore in modern space technology, Glasgow now manufacturing more spacecraft than any other European city, a possible proving ground for the exploration of space both fictionally and in reality.

Pedant’s corner:- Jones’ (Jones’s.) “The tourists area” (ought to have an apostrophe; tourists’,) McFadyan (unusual spelling of McFadzean, though presumably pronounced the same way,) “Susan and me carefully wriggled through” (Susan and I,) a missing quotation mark before a piece of direct speech, “about half the diameter Earth” (of Earth,) Marts (Mars’s,) “one variant of these are ion thrusters” (one variant is – even if the ion thrusters are plural they are still the one variant,) Wells’ (Wells’s,) tinging (tingeing,) censors (sensors.) “Scotland’s always dead set on doing it on our own aren’t we?” (either ‘We Scots are always …aren’t we?’ or, ‘on its own, isn’t it?’) “because a shipful of dead humans arrive is likely” (because if a shipful it is likely.) The binary star of Alpha Centauri blaze in two, tiny pinpoints” (stars,) “as we bowed and rose back up, still panting. The humans…” (as we bowed and rose back up, still panting, the humans ….) “Only happened once a millenia or so” (once a millennium,) Anglada-Escud é (Anglada-Escudé,) electronic shocks (electric shocks.) “This class of exoplanet have temperatures…” (This class has …,) “metamorphised limestone” (metamorphosed, or, since this was marble, ‘metamorphic’,) a missing full stop (x 2,) “now the vote and die has been cast” (plus marks for ‘die’ but that ‘and’ makes the verb’s subject plural; ‘have been cast’,) sat (x 2, sitting,) “their owner” (x 2, each time it was a dog, so ‘its owner’,) Heymans’ (Heymans’s,) “using the same physics that can predict the original temperature of your cup of tea 13.8 minutes after you brewed it” (not ‘predict’, it’s already happened; ‘calculate’,) “very epicentre” (epicentre means off-centre; ‘centre’, if you must aggrandise it use the word ‘hypercentre’,) miniscule (minuscule,) the moon (the Moon.)

Warner Books. First published 1982. In The Finlay J Macdonald Omnibus, 1988, 174 p.

This is MacDonald’s memoir of growing up in Harris, (which is known as the Isle of Harris even though it’s only the southern half of an island: ditto the Isle of Lewis, the northern half.)

Between the Twentieth Century’s two great wars the south of Harris was being repopulated with the aid of a Government intiative but this was still a harsh time when there were few amenities in the temporary turf-roofed dwellings the families occupied while they built their own stone ones – and not many in those – though the remains of the houses whose occupants had been cleared several generations earlier were a stark reminder of worse. There were no inside toilets – the great outdoors sufficed. Water for drinking and cooking was drawn from a nearby burn. In the times Macdonald is remembering the more convenient Tilly lamp superseded paraffin lighting and its whiter light was a source of regret. Electricity and gas were not even a dream.

The book embeds a history of Harris as the author explains his family’s circumstances and delves into the customs of the islanders while the delights of Toffee Cow (McCowans Highland Toffee, now sadly no more) become one of the author’s pleasures as he grows.

A lot of the narrative describes MacDonald’s schoolroom reminiscences, especially the initial tribulations of being solely a Gaelic speaker till he attended school (whose medium was of course exclusively English -inevitably the tawse features at times) and despite this not being published till the author was in his fifties he still manages to retain (or simulate) a child’s perspective. “Gillespie and I had long since learned to distrust adults when they were trying to sound reasonable.” He also comments on the curious circumstance by which the education all the parents desired for their children would most likely ensure that those children would leave the island in pursuit of the opportunities which that education had brought.

The coming of the Great Depression brings further hardship as the Harris Tweed trade declines. (Its use of human waste to fix the dyes require for colouring the tweed obliging everyone – visitors included – to avail themselves of the pee-pot when nature called is matter-of-factly described.)

There are several moments of humour, the new schoolteacher’s Word Game foundering on the definition of an organ, the kilted Dr MacBeth misunderstanding the question asked of him by a new father – this last had me giggling for about half a minute; not the usual response to reading tales of bygone Scottish life.

Like many a Scottish novel this autobiography is another of those laments for a past time, of the loss of a way of life, a documentation of things past. MacDonald certainly has an eye for it, and a way with words – even if they are in his second language.

Pedant’s corner:- Port Sunlight in Lancashire (it’s in the Wirral peninsula, not traditionally considered Lancashire,) “ ‘grace and favour ” (this opened quote was never closed,) while pages later we had “ away down in the south’ ” (a closing quote mark for an unopened quote,) bye-blow (by-blow,) “having failed to illicit information” (elicit,) another end quote that had not been opened, another opened quote remaining unclosed, “until we were hustled off the bed” (off to bed,) liguistic (linguistic,) “to smoothe them” (smooth them,) “even the Prince of Wales wears it” – the kilt – “whenever he ventures north of the Caledonian Canal” (I don’t think Balmoral – or Braemar – are north of there,) goloshes (my dictionary gives this as an alternative spelling but it was always galoshes in my day.)