Two multi storey blocks of flats which were built in the 1970s were demolished today in Dundee. I walked past them not that long ago and wondered how on earth they were going to manage to get rid of them without damaging St Martin’s Episcopal Church, which stands in between them.
Have a look here if you want to see the demolition, apparently the church was very slightly damaged. But it’s an impressive feat by the experts. The film doesn’t really give you the idea of how tight the space is.
I hadn’t even heard of Holly Roth before I spotted one of her vintage Penguin crime books at the Edinburgh St Andrew’s and St George’s booksale. I find that very few Penguin crime books turn up at sales so I usually snap up any that I see.
This book was first published in 1954 but it’s 1948 when the story begins. Terrant is an Englishman working as a journalist in Berlin, he took up that career after spending four years in the infantry during the war, before being wounded. Berlin is an exciting place to be for a 32 year old bachelor like himself but when he meets Ellen Content he realises that he has found THE ONE.
Unfortunately she disappears after just a few days, and it seems to be linked with nefarious Cold War activities. Two years later Terrant sees her name printed in The Times. It says – “Among the other passengers is Miss Ellen Content of New York, who after a brief stay in England, is returning to America to fill a series of dancing engagements.” Apparently Ellen had sailed on the Queen Elizabeth and Terrant had to follow the lead.
I enjoyed this Cold War thriller and I’ll read more of her books if I ever find any, but I am a complete cynic and really had to suspend my disbelief at the thought of a hard bitten reporter immediately falling in love and pining for years for a woman he had only met a few times. But that’s probably just me, I have very little of the romantic in me, which is a jolly good thing, and I’m sure that’s why we’ve stayed married for nearly 37 years!
Aquilegias are favourites of mine and I’m lucky that they seem to enjoy living in my garden. In fact they are very promiscuous and are seeding themselves all over the place, like joyful trollops of the plant world, popping up in various different colours.
The photo below is of part of my back garden, I’ve been trying to grow various plants around that archway over the years but nothing is keen to clothe it, and quite a few have given up the struggle completely. My latest attempt was with a vine, but it has only grown about 1 inch since the spring. I suspect it’s going to give up too.
And this is the pink oriental poppy which just turned up in my garden one year, despite trying to move her several times she just keeps coming back, her tap root is just too big to get to the bottom of it. She (must be a girlie as she’s so pink and frilly) looks sort of out of place in amongst smaller plants, but she’s determined to stay there.
And here is another cygnet update, as you can see they’re growing fast and are really looking swan shaped now and are happy enough to swim off, away from mummy swan.
What with everything which has been going on in our house recently, getting it ready to put on the market, I haven’t been getting out and about at all, hence the garden and park photos.
I can’t believe how complicated selling a house has become since we last did it. I preferred the old system, as usual. The whole thing is so much more stressful than it used to be, and it was bad enough before. Oh well, we’re getting there – I think.
Most of this book is set in a girls school in the village of Portpatrick in Galloway in the south west border country of Scotland, not a place which I know well, the combination of the two settings meant that I didn’t enjoy this one as much as her other Dandy Gilver books.
Dandy is called by two of the Lipscott sisters whom she has known since she was a young thing, they need her help. The Lipscotts are an eccentric family and Dandy still fondly remembers the time she spent with them in the past.
When she hears that the youngest sister is working as a schoolteacher at a school which has a habit of ‘losing’ teachers, Dandy has to investigate.
I think that Catriona McPherson was smart to make Dandy an Englishwoman, married to a Scotsman and living mainly in Scotland as it gives her ample scope to comment on Scottish culture and traditions, but not in a snide way.
For instance: “I know that the leftover soup from a Scotswoman’s kitchen is not for the fainthearted, given its starting point of rib-sticking heft and the nature of the inevitable barley which works away long after the cooking is done, so that sometimes second- or (I have heard tell of it) third-day soup, can just as easily be eaten with a fork as with a spoon.”
That made me laugh as I always have a pot of home made soup on the go and Jack has been known to say ‘cut me a slice of soup please.’
Fire, Burn is one of John Dickson Carr’s historical crime/mystery books. I did enjoy it.
It begins in the 20th century, the 1950s – but as Detective Inspector John Cheviot travels in a taxi to Scotland Yard he suddenly realises that he is in a horse drawn carriage and by the time he gets out of it he has been transported back to 1829, to the beginnings of the police service and the Bow Street Runners.
Bizarrely, everybody at Old Scotland Yard seem to know exactly who he is, and Cheviot can recognise the historical figures he meets there. When a murder takes place at a dance that Cheviot was attending he gets to work to solve the case.
This book was first published in 1957 and I think Dickson Carr must have enjoyed writing it as it combines murder mystery with history, which was obviously something which he took a real interest in.
At the end of the book there are a few pages headed Notes for the Curious. The second part of which is called Manners, Customs, Speech. He writes about a diary entry of a woman called Clarissa Trant, in 1829 she used the phrase Tell that to the Marines – with her own italics and meaning as we do now that, the thing which she has written about is not at all believable.
I love that sort of thing, often when I read something – a word or phrase jumps out at me as being anachronistic, you know how quickly slang words go out of fashion and seem completely dated when people keep using them after their ‘use by date’. So I was amazed but pleased to see that ‘tell that to the Marines’ was being used way back in 1829. I really thought that it was an American 20th century phrase, mainly because I remember one of Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America featuring the phrase, apparently someone, I can’t remember who, had had their arm twisted by the Nazis during World War 2 and the upshot was that they had to do a propaganda broadcast on the radio. They ended it with words something like: Tell that to the army, tell that to the navy and above all – tell that to the Marines!! Luckily the Germans didn’t see through it.
Such a shame that P.G. Wodehouse didn’t think of doing something like that when he was coerced into making broadcasts in Germany, it would have saved him such a lot of trouble after the end of the war. But then, Wodehouse seems to have been so slow witted that he didn’t even realise that what he was doing was being of help to the Nazis.
Anyway, back to the book, as I said – it was an enjoyable read although that being ‘wheeched’ back in time thing via an ordinary mode of transport does seem a wee bit cliched, but maybe it didn’t in 1957. The last Woody Allen film I watched began in exactly the same way, but I enjoyed that too!
Following the very sad demise of local/Fife author Iain Banks earlier this week, the BBC have aired the Paperback Writer programme which featured him. If you are interested you can hear it here.
You might want to read this Guardian interview too.
I enjoyed this one a lot although it might appeal to me more than to most people purely because of the setting, which is Dunfermline in Fife, a town which I know well.
The setting is 1927 and Dandy Gilver has been called to Dunfermline to search for a young woman who has disappeared. Mirren is the only child of a family who own a department store in Dunfermline. The Aitkens have been in business in the town for 50 years and when Dandy gets there they are busy celebrating their golden anniversary, the town is throbbing with the excitement of the day but it isn’t long before things take a nasty turn and Dandy has a lot of unravelling to do, amongst the three generations of the Aitken family.
Add the Hepburns, the owners of the rival department store in Dunfermline into the mix, and it all leads to a maze of twists and turns which at times I had a wee bit of trouble with, mainly because of all the various family members involved.
‘They’ do say that there are only seven plotlines in fiction and at first this one would seem to be the Romeo and Juliet story, but Sir Walter Scott’s phrase ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive’ from his poem Marmion – best sums up the goings on in this book I think.
Well I think that’s the longest blogging hiatus which I’ve ever had, and it was totally unplanned. I actually couldn’t get into ‘pining’ for technical reasons but I’ve changed my server and hope things will be better from now on.
Anyway, I’ve been visiting the park as usual and as promised, here are the photos of the cygnets as they grow up.
As you can see, the cygnets are able to duck down and pull up the pond weed themselves. There are only five now, so two have disappeared, possibly one of the geese pulled them under, it’s nature red in tooth and claw I suppose.
I thought they had given up on the miniature train rides but as you can see, it was up and running last Saturday and apart from these passengers there was a queue of wee enthusiasts waiting patiently for their turn. Great fun for wee ones and it seems like only yesterday that my boys were on this train but it must have been well over 20 years ago.
I’ve been madly busy the last week or so, sprucing the house up yet more and decluttering which is easier said than done. The death of my vacuum cleaner couldn’t have happened at a worse time, but that’s life isn’t it!
When I did find some time to blog late on last night I discovered that our increasingly dodgy WordPress connection had gone into complete meltdown, so it was no go! However it’s been sorted out now, thankfully.
So, more photos of my garden, after all we might be leaving it soon. This one is of euphorbia Fireglow and a purple blotched geranium which I believe is called Black Widow.
The colour of the moment is definitely blue, I suppose that is what attracts the particular kinds of pollinating insects which are around at the moment. As you can see, I’m not precious about my grass, it can’t be called a lawn because it’s just too rough and is full of daisies and dandelions, but I like them. My mother detested daisies, it takes all kinds!
Amazingly we’ve been having some half decent weather over the past few days and it doesn’t take much in the way of sunshine and warmth to bring the ants out. I’ve just had to put one of those ant trap things which lure them in and poison them, they are all busy doing their thing amongst these plants and it’s a bit too close to my kitchen wall for my liking! I’m not keen on any creepy crawlies but I find ants quite horrific somehow. They remind me of nuclear submarines and are just as scary as far as I’m concerned.
It’s all looking quite lush but there isn’t too much in the way of colour so far. It wasn’t until I looked at this photo that I realised that the bottom branch of the blue cedar has turned brown, not a good omen at all. It was doing so well, and I don’t think the winter weather should have proved to be too much for it, but I suspect it’s on its way out, sadly.
So apart from cleaning and decluttering this week, the only interesting thing which I managed was to go to a book signing at my local bookshop. James Oswald was signing his book Natural Causes, it has just been published by Penguin in paperback. Prior to that James had self published it as an ebook. He is a farmer from St Andrews and seems to be a very nice chap, not at all my idea of a big farming type, which is a plus as far as I’m concerned. Peggy of Peggy Ann’s Post is his biggest fan and I hope to get around to reading his book soon.
