The man didn't much care for our production so the excitement of a trip to Cupar is off. But the audience seemed to quite enjoy it and we got this nice picture in the Evening News. Their man didn't rate it either, mainly, but not entirely, for the same reasons.

The cast repaired to the pub to drown such sorrows as they had - not many, and even fewer after the first drink, leaving stage manager, director and helper to disappear into the night with the set.

I saw most of the other plays. Some were good, some middling and at least one was dire. Our director was so scunnered at our adjudication that he didn't turn up on the last night to hear the results. That's a bit of an over-reaction in my opinion but there you go. It also left to me the glory of going up to the stage to collect the wee certificate that every entry gets as a sort of souvenir. After all it's taking part that counts isn't it. I'm looking forward to next year already.

Got onto the stage at 9.30 last night for a tech before tonight's performance. All went well so tonight we do our one performance. Of course if we do it well enough we'll have the excitement of taking the show to Cupar Corn Exchange at the end of March. The last time I was in Cupar Corn Exchange must have been in the late 50s for the jiggin.

My brother asked me how we had done in the Bafta/Orange 60 second film competition. I had to admit that we got nowhere but my curiosity was aroused so I had a look at the winning film. It's really good and cleverly adopts the 60 motif. Have a decko.

Just for comparison here's ours. Strange that they both feature candles being blown out. We were surely on the right track.

Anyone who knows me knows that I can't abide litter. A large metal piece of litter turned up outside the front door a few days ago, a LIDL supermarket trolley. It failed to disappear so yesterday I decided to do something about it. My thought was to ring the nearest LIDL store and ask them to remove it. Well they don't list their stores in the phone book and although you can find the stores on the internet there are no phone numbers. I did find a blog for LIDL lovers though. I have one LIDL-loving friend but out there is a whole community. To give them their due the blog is not wholly hagiographic. They do tell you which products to avoid.

No joy with the phone then so I set out this morning to push the trolley down to the store at the Foot of the Walk. I felt a bit of a twat but raised only one comment, which unfortunately I didn't catch, from an inebriated baglady. At least I thought I'll get a quid for my trouble when I slot the trolley into a rank of its fellows. No such luck, the quids had been forced out of all the slots I could see. Clearly there are LIDL haters too.

Work in Progress is the name of a one-act play in which I'm exposing myself this week. It's the Grads entry for the SCDA one-act festival. The play consists of a dialogue between the writer of a piece of detective fiction and his characters. It's being done in the style of the 1940s film noir. Private eyes in those days were cleanshaven thus the exposure.
Roll on Friday when I can start protecting myself against the winter winds again.

Mr. Abu Bakr may not be 100% right about Britain being a police state but the legislation that is meant to keep terrorists and other baddies from moving their ill-gotten gains around doesn't half get your goat.

I've earlier mentioned my difficulty in opening a savings account. It's got worse. They have now asked me for documents which for perfectly good reasons I can't provide. Either a personal cheque drawn on an account in my name with another UK bank. Why would I have another current account in the UK? Isn't that more a money launderer's trick. Or a tax document for the current or the next tax year that matches my application details. Well I haven't got around to telling them that I'm here yet so those documents have a Manchester address which is not one of the addresses in my application.

So to review the situation. I cannot transfer a small amount of money which they are holding in one of their piggie-banks into another of their piggie-banks. This from the bank where I have had an account for over 40 years, a bank where I was once an employee, a bank who lent me money to buy a house and, the final irony, a bank that rang me a couple of months ago when I temporarily had a largeish sum in my account and asked if I'd like them to transfer it into a savings account.

Of course if you complain they shrug their shoulders and say that they don't make the rules, they just apply them. What a pity they weren't drafted in to look after the pallets of 100 dollar bills sent to Iraq.

Whew!

All pictures back in place. That was exhausting.

Various people have told me that they don't see my pictures and I suspect that's because they were stored on another webspace, not on Blogger's servers. So I've decided that when I put them back I'll try to get them onto Blogger's server. That means I won't be able to put them back "en bloc" but will have to edit each post that has a picture in it.

I've started successfully and am working backwards.

I've accidentally deleted all the pictures from this blog today. What a twit. I'll see if I can get them back.

Tangled up in the war against terrorism and money laundering today.

I decided to open a savings account with the bank that I've had a current account with for over 40 years. I went on-line. That needs three separate passwords so you'd think they had some authentication of who I was when I got through. I filled in the form as best I could. Like most computer forms it really needed a box where you could write an essay explaining why the answers you'd given were not quite the answers you'd have given if their form hadn't been modelled on a strait-jacket.

So today I got a letter. OK life can't be paper-free, they need a signature.

The letter also said, and I quote "We are required by law to confirm the identity and address for all new and existing customers. For this application we require one original copy (we are not able to accept photocopies) from each table shown overleaf."

Well no tables were shown overleaf so I rang them. The perfectly pleasant young man having used the lucky thirteen digit application reference number from the letter said that he couldn't quite understand why the system was demanding a proof at all but it was. He asked that in that case, although it might seem a little daft would I be so kind as to enclose a bank statement with my signed form.

Salmon returning to spawn in the river of their birth? Coals to Newcastle? Can this protect us from Osama?

Used my Scotland wide bus pass yesterday to take a trip to Dundee to see a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The journey up was a bit long though it was a nice sunny day to contemplate the beauties of rural Fife. The return journey via Perth and the M90 was much faster, not wildly longer than the train.

The theatre was full to bursting. It took a few minutes for my fear that the show was going to consist mainly of amplified noise to prove unfounded and I settled down to enjoy it.

It was a production with all its innards on show; techies squatting on the stage amidst sound boxes, microphones and mixers, child dummy wiggling its legs with the help of an actor, asm doing baby gurgles into a mike, actors pottering about in the visible wings changing hats and so on and so forth. The text was more currently colloquial and relaxed than ours. It suited the production style, but why change Grusinia to Georgia - an imaginary setting to a real one?. Interesting that in Act 2 at least (with which I'm more familiar) they had chosen to cut it in much the same places as Claire.

The overall acting style was high energy and full frontal. There were some lovely broadly drawn inventive characterisations and a co-ordination of actor and effect which I admired. I'm thinking of the soldiers marching for example or the precise crack as the messenger unfurled her arm to place a letter in front of the governer.

To play the bandit Irakli as a yardie was inspired and I just cracked up in the opening scene of Act2 as the Grand Duke sprayed Azdak with cheese. Bringing the audience in to share the pleasure of his retaliation we could have been at a pantomime and that didn't seem out of place.

On the other hand I thought the final court case where the fate of the child is decided was underplayed and lacked tension. There and in other places too I felt some lines were not delivered clearly, or is that my hearing starting to go?

A great show though with ideas aplenty to borrow.

With Oscars in the offing I'm keen to see as many of the contenders as I can so as to measure my evaluations against those of the Motion Picture Academy. We don't always see eye to eye. Today after two failed attempts I managed to get to The Queen. I was quite prepared for Helen Mirren's excellent performance but not for what a really good film it was. The mingling of fact and conjecture was brilliantly done to produce an interesting, absorbing and at times moving story. Helen Mirren aside, the man of the match for me was Roger Allam as the Queen's secretary. He could have a solid future in deference and tact training.

I well remember the British public's mass display of grief at Diana's death. It so happened that the weekend she was being buried was scheduled for the implementation of system changes that I was managing for a major Scottish insurance company. It was a window that wouldn't reopen again for some three months but we had to go pretty high up in the company to get permission to work, most of British industry and commerce having shut down as a mark of respect. I've absolutely nothing but sympathy for any poor girl who hands in her dinner pail so young but I didn't understand or share that mass hysteria like feeling so I could see where the Queen in the movie was coming from.

Ewan rang me this week to tell me that he had been appointed Vice President. Unlike the American government who have only one, American corporations have several so he is one of a number but it's an impressive title so I'm altering my email and mobile phone records to list him under VP. What's more he's being relocated to work out of the UK so at some stage later this year it should be the case that my two sons and I are living in the same country for the first time in twenty five years or so.