Holidays in the Sun

I didn't post last week since I was in transit from Glasgow to Elgin. I  had booked a few days away before we went back to work, in Sandhead in the Rhins of Galloway.

It was the farthest I'd travelled since Edinburgh in February and I'd scarecely been out of Elgin for a third of the year. I took  trains to Inverness, then Glasgow and Ayr, finally arriving in Stranraer.

Unfortunately, although there was a limited bus service, the weather was lousy for the first two days. My walk to Port Logan was miserable but it really improved, the following day, when I went to a crowded Portpatrick.

I had been anxious about exposure to the virus too. I actually felt more uncomfortable on the shore front at Portpatrick than I did on trains or in the restaurant in my hotel (where the young waiting staff didn't seem to have any PPE).

I broke up my journey overnight in Glasgow but my mum was shielding and I skipped a visit to Forbidden Planet to get an earlier train. Glasgow felt more like a Sunday or Boxing Day.To be honest, it wasn't the relaxing getaway I'd envisaged- especially having narrow windows to make public transport connections.

This was my beach music, in the smirry rain on the first evening: a spectral mix of Gaelic, radio transmissions and songs by 80s stars of the Glasgow music scene, like the swooning, poetic Chris Thomson. The driving rain dissuaded me from exploring too far but I wasn't bored at any point. My other reading and listening matter included:

Giant-Size Fantastic Four 2 (Aug.1974) This is one of the few Bronze Age Marvel giants or annuals I hadn't read before, since it wasn't reprinted in the UK. It's a G.Conway/ J. Buscema collaboration, a charming, campy time travel story with a chapter entitled "The Great Grimmsby". I enjoyed re-reading the unusual Kirby/Ditko reprint that introduced the Watcher (and the Red Ghost) very much.

Many of the stories in Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction 1 ( Jan 1975) were reprinted in the mid-70s UK Planet of the Apes Weekly. Not only the exciting Day of the Triffids adaptation by Conway and Ross Andru but also the melancholy Slow Glass sequences. However, I had never seen Neal Adams' A View From Without and I was shocked by its unfliching horror: the brutal death of an infant in the Viet Nam War. This blistering critique of war is one of the most distressing things I've read from Marvel.

Summer in the south-west always means sword and sorcery for me. I had flicked through The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3 (1977) in the incense-scented Bell Book and Candle in East Kilbride, when I was 15. I finally got it on ebay earlier this year. I had read Lin Carter's Thongor story "Black Moonlight" before ( about five years ago, in the Young Thongor e-book) but I was impressed by the quality of writing in stories by George R.R. Martin "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" and especially by C.J. Cherryh's "The Dark King".

After reading Six From Sirius in late July, I thought I'd try the Moench/ Gulacy graphic novel, Conan the Barbarian: The Skull of Set (1989). It's a standalone, cinematic tale of baleful talismans and animated statues and quite similar to Carter's "Black Moonlight" or even the Golden Voyage of Sinbad, although the bloodletting is quite explicit. I prefer the Thomas- Smith- Buscema-Chan permutations on Conan but I was entertained by this good-looking, oversized comic.

It scarcely feels like three years since I listened to Volume Two in Shawlands and East Kilbride. Now Tim Treloar and Katy Manning are starring in The Third Doctor Adventures Volume Six.

While Big Finish have created a soundscape of electronica reminiscent of Seasons Nine and Ten of early Seventies Who, this box set put me in mind more of Polystyle summer specials.

Poison of the Daleks pits the UNIT family against the Outer Space Robot People in a rather juvenile and predictable adventure that reminded me too much of Tennant's Sontaran exploit The Poison Sky. I was particularly irritated by prissy alien scientist Skwoj ("Squodge"). 

Operation Hellfire was a Pure Historical, revisiting BF's preoccupation with the odious Winston Churchill. While it was ostensibly the story of a Denis Wheatley analogue, it did feel like The Daemons with added Winnie. It was more interesting than the Dalek story but both pieces felt like two-parters stretched to four. I think this one only merits a Three- Day-Week two out of five Talmars,

Now that school has resumed, although it's hugely about hygiene and PPE, I may have to return to weekly posts again. I plan to finish off the Tigra series of posts this month; they really grew arms and legs and became more of an analysis of the treatment of Marvel's female super-heroes in the 80s and beyond. After that, probably more Big Finish reviews.

#BeKind