See previous posts of Moderne and Art Deco buildings in Arbroath.

Art Deco pillars at Victoria Park entrance :-

Sea and wall at Arbroath:-

Arbroath Harbour:-

Nedra Talley of the Ronettes has gone.

This is unseasonal I know but I’ve already featured the group’s two biggest UK hits, here and here. Taken from Phil Spector’s Christmas Album  – actually named A Christmas Gift to You from Philles Records and the less said about Spector the better – it’s also one of The Ronettes better known songs and was their third biggest, no 15 in 1963.

The Ronettes: Sleigh Ride

Nedra Yvonne Talley (Ross): 27/1/1946 – 26/4/2026. So it goes.

A Story of Interplanetary Exploration

Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, 181 p, plus 6 p colour illustrations, 1 p Contents, 1 p List of Illustrations (by Stead) and 6 p Foreword.

The author was, of course, the creator of Biggles, Great War fighter pilot and thereafter general man of action. In the 1950s he took to writing science fiction for younger readers and it was in the children’s section housed in the basement of Dumbarton Library where, after I had consumed all their Biggles books, I started on those. It is due to Johns, then – along with the similarly aimed books written by Patrick Moore – that I developed an abiding interest in science fiction as a genre.

The foreword here sets out Johns’s purpose in writing such books, to inspire young people with the sense of adventure, while also pre-empting possible criticism of inaccuracies by emphasizing there was much not known about even the Solar System those 70 years ago. (He specifically mentions Jupiter’s eleven moons. At last count there are 115 of those.)

Now to the story.

Retired Group Captain Timothy Clinton and his son Rex have been stalking deer on a Highland mountain when the mist comes down towards the end of the day. Eventually they spot five red lights in the form of a cross and stumble across a house whose door contains an immobiliser. This is where a Professor Brane stays along with his butler (and factotum) Judkins.

The Professor is partial to coffee and caramels (which he took up since smoking represented too great a danger among the flammable materials he was surrounded by in his lab) and accepts flying saucers are real. He has also invented a spaceship he calls the Spacemaster, which is powered by cosmic rays. The red cross is a navigational aid to finding his way back home. Naturally he invites Clinton and Timothy to join him – and Judkins – on exploratory expeditions beyond Earth.

Various trips see them have a close encounter with a flying saucer, find life on the Moon, dinosaurs on Venus – a planet on which the Professor wants to take the opportunity to empty Spacemaster’s rubbish bins! – a Mars with no mountains but signs of humans; the last of whom are entombed on Phobos, before returning to Earth where they get the better of some foreign spies alerted to the possible existence of a spaceship by newspaper reports of strange apparitions in the Highland skies.

The whole thing is firmly of its time and ineluctably male but for what was back then called a juvenile (nowadays YA) spends very little time focusing on Rex.

Pedant’s corner:- “the stars would be overheard again long before they could reach their lodge” (overhead again,) “before a rough, overgrown track, guided them” (doesn’t need that second comma,) the word ‘professor’ appears within sentences both capitalised and uncapitalised seemingly randomly, “poor Judkins’ great anxiety” (Judkins’s,) “‘water, which is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen’” (Er, no. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would simply be that, a mixture of two gases. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Compounds have totally different properties from the elements needed to make them,) “the rudder, insert vertically in the exhaust thrust just below the nozzles” (inserted,) diaphram (diaphragm,) “level with he top of the gorge ” (with the top,) “everywhere there where little flecks” (everywhere there were little flecks.) “The affect of this on the human body” (The effect of this,)  “for the most part outlines were spoiled” (for the most part its outlines were spoiled,) the Professor says stray particles of hydrogen might have been caused to ignite by the ship’s velocity (for hydrogen to burn oxygen is also required,) gasses (gases – which appeared later,) the Professor says petroleum is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen (see above for water. Petroleum is a mixture, yes, but of differing compounds of carbon and hydrogen,) acclerated (accelerated,) “the same state of nuclear fission as the Sun” (nuclear fusion that would be,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

More from the Vaughan bequest transfer (see last post.)

Fittingly, this one is of Edinburgh:-

The West Gate, Canterbury:-

Shipping:-

The Doge’s Palace and Piazetta:-

Storm at the Mouth of the Grand Canal:-

Bellinzone, Switzerland:-

Ostend Harbour:-

Plymouth:-

Every January the Scottish National Gallery in Princes Street, Edinburgh, displays its bequest of works by J M W Turner. The terms of the bequest by Henry Vaughan dictated that these works could only be shown in January in order to protect them from damage by light.

In 2025  there was a variation to this practice in that the Edinburgh Gallery swapped its collection with that of the National Gallery of Ireland.

The day we went there was a long queue to get in (in normal years there isn’t) but we did we get to see a lot of Turners new to us.

Clovelly Bay North Devon:-

Chatel Argent above Villeneuve:-

Beech tree:-

A river in the Campagne:-

Old Dover Harbour and Shakespeare’s Cliff:-

SPFL Tier 4, The Rock, 25/4/26.

So the last home game of the season ended with a loss.

To be fair, apart from a stramash near their goal line in the second half I don’t recall us troubling their keeper – though a Mark Durnan effort from outside the box in added injury time might have had him beaten, but it flashed past the post.

Their goal came when Adam Livingstone tried to beat his man just inside our own half. When he lost it they had an overload which they exploited.

They just seemed a bit quicker and keener – more streetwise too. But then they had more to play for.

The referee though. Some of his decisions were utterly baffling. And most of them went EK’s way.

One more game (away at Edinburgh City) and then it’s anticipating next season. The squad will need a bit of upgrading if we’re not to flirt with relegation again.

New Central Park is the home of Kelty Hearts FC.

It’s a tidy traditional Scottish football ground.

The photographs are from the day of Sons’ first visit to it on 9/11/2024.

Entrance:-

East side of ground:-

South side looking west from entrance:-

North from entrance:-

Looking west at north end:-

Looking south From northwest corner:-

From northwest corner:-

Dave Mason, co-founder of the band Traffic, has died.

His career with Traffic was by no means smooth (and he later went on to play with various luminaries) but he wrote and sang their biggest UK hit, a No 2 in 1967.

Traffic: Hole in my Shoe

Mason’s song Feelin’ Alright became something of a standard with many other artists covering it. 

Traffic: Feelin’ Alright

David Thomas Mason: 10/5/1946 – 19/4/2026. So it goes.

Headline, 2022, 287 p. First published 1987.

When originally published the trilogy of which this is the first instalment was titled Xenogenesis. It now seems to be called Lilith’s Brood.

Lilith Iyapo wakes up in what appears to be a prison cell, provided with bland food. She has memories of this happening previously and also of her life on Earth when her husband and child had died in a traffic accident. This was shortly before a nuclear war left the planet uninhabitable (to humans at least.) She soon learns that a few humans were rescued from the apocalypse by an alien race, the Oankali; a species for which genetic engineering is essential.

The first appearance to her of an Oankali shocks her: they are covered in small tentacles acting as sensory organs, and which are attracted by movement. The Oankali have three sexes; male, female and ooloi. All have the ability to sense the biochemistry of genetics but the ooloi can manipulate it and build offspring from their mates’ genes.

Lilith is told a cancer has been removed from inside her and that the spaceship she is being held on is alive. The Oankali find cancer to be an attractive trait for their genetic manipulation purposes. They want to blend their own and human genetics, in part as their biological imperative but also to eradicate hierarchical tendencies from humans. They envisage Lilith’s part in this as to Awaken other humans and prepare them for this gene trade and a return to Earth. Lilith and the subsequent Awakened find the prospect repugnant.

When a sufficient number of people have been Awakened there are problems within the group. Specifically, some are wary of Lilith not only as a black woman but of her closeness to the Oankali and of the capabilities to manipulate the structure of the ship with which the they have endowed her, abilities naturally seen as suspicious by those not so treated.

In Dawn there are early similarities to other works of SF where people have been kept in captivity. The whole, though, depends on the credibility of the aliens and their motivations. I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Pedant’s corner:- “Where had all this been, Lilith wondered” (needs a question mark,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of direct speech, “gasses” (gases,) “had come on to the bed with her and lay down” (and lain down,) “clean shaved” (clean shaven,) “Paul Titus’ wall” (Titus’s. Titus’ appeared again later,) “their own betrayal: No trip to Earth” (colons are not usually followed by a capital letter; ‘betrayal: no trip…’) A paragraph beginning with a piece of direct speech without having an opening quotation mark (I know this is a publishing convention but to me it feels wrong,) repellant (repellent.) “She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away” (is expressed awkwardly.) “It said nothing more, made no sound of its own pain” (ditto,) “she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate as the owner” (she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate, as the owner.) “She waited almost eager for the darkness” (needs a comma after waited,) Ahajas’ (Ahajas’s.)

Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, where the House for an Art Lover is situated, was the site of the Empire Exhibition 1938.

Towards the exit of the House a digital reconstruction of the Exhibition was on display. This one is from YouTube:-

There was also a small cabinet containing some memorabilia from the Exhibition:-

The memorabilia in the picture are: a toasting fork, a bronze model of the Tower of Empire (Tait’s Tower,) a metal badge in the shape of the Tower, the official Guide to the Exhibition, a glass dish on which there is a season ticket for the Exhibition, the book entitled The Empire Exhibition Fifty Years On and a Birrell’s chocolate box. Presumably the structural engineering company whose plaque is also present had a stand at the Exhibition.