Bags packed, votes cast, off to France in the morning.

For the last wee while my regular tipple has been Rosso delle Marche, a nice little wine from Tesco. My belief that its quality belied its price (£2.99) has been confirmed. The sods have repriced it at £5.99. They may think that I'm hooked but they can think again. I've moved on already in the search for heavenly drink at earthly prices.

They have a weird way with sprouts as well. I bought some loose Scottish sprouts at 59p per kilo. I could have bought the same sprouts with outer leaves removed and wrapped in plastic for £1.62 per kilo. Or if I had been completely off my trolley I could have bought LUXURY sprouts, outer leaves removed, washed and polished, and wrapped in plastic for the modest sum of £4.97 per kilo.

I was quietly watching the Bahrain grand prix on Sunday afternoon when I got a call asking me to repond to a filming emergency. Rather than shiver in the cool of a vaulted cellar in the Cowgate some unprofessional extras had bunked off the set of Staccato to lounge in the sunshine.

Naturally I dropped everything, grabbed my collected works of Stanislavsky and headed for the location.

It would have been better if I'd taken a collection of cables and adapters. One was missing, rendering the camera unuseable. Boxes were searched and re-searched, but....nothing.

Sunday is not the best day for specialist cable purchasing so after a while a party set off to break into the film school. In fact they sweet talked their way past security and returned triumphant and we got started.

For the actors that meant official waiting time began. Shades of the old NHS.

For this film I was part of a crowd watching a Victorian freak show, shouting in German and throwing things at the freak. He was still in make-up and had been from mid morning but we didn't need him for the first couple of shots. When he did appear he was a cross between the Elephant Man and Quasimodo in a nappy. The make-up (which takes about three hours to apply) hid the man but he was being addressed as Nigel and I wondered idly if he he might be silent Nigel from the Caucasian Chalk Circle. It must have been the way he stood there that I recognised, because it was indeed he.

I thought the text being in German had to be a nod in homage to Fritz Lang especially since I had a vague memory of a crowd throwing things at a monster in M. In fact the director's beautiful sister explained to me that it was a device intended to hide an accent. And my memory of M was way off beam. There is a monster but he's not a physical monster just a monstrous serial child killer. Over intellectualised and wrong on all counts!

This film it turned out is more of a Beauty and the Beast story. The actress playing the heroine achieved the difficult feat of crying to camera on cue. But I suppose for a former circus performer turned burlesque dancer and student of Japanese that's small beer.

Anyway I was a crowd in fits and starts throughout the day and at one point discovered that you don't, despite the adage, need three to make a crowd since we were but two.

I caught up with the grand prix when I got home. What a driver this Lewis Hamilton is, bursting onto the scene like a Tiger Woods on four wheels.

You'd think you could get through all the crowd shots you'd need for a fifteen minute film in a day wouldn't you. You'd be wrong. It took most of Monday as well.

This is the mess a pair of magpies have been making to the baskets on my verandah. I assume that the coconut fibre makes the inside of a nest very snug. I've searched in vain for a child's windmill to scare the beasts so have resorted to disguise.
Let's hope the black plastic wrapping confuses them.

I think it's also an aesthetic improvement but I don't suppose they'll see it that way.

For the past couple of days the home page on my website has failed to display with something called an internal error 500. That's happened before but has not persisted because it has been due to a fault on the host's side of things that has been cleared up relatively quickly.

But it's been dragging on so I set out trawl their forums to see if anyone else was experiencing problems and to seek a solution. I learnt that pages are filtered for certain references and not displayed if those references are found.

Now you can understand that they might wish to exclude pornographic references or things that might indicate you were running a business (since they are hosting your site for nothing) but why do you suppose they added hotmail email addresses to the forbidden list? That's what the problem was with mine.

Someone else had their page stuffed because of a URL that contained the text "warmsnow". Well now I can only assume that frolicking in warm snow is disapproved of by Atspace.com. Can't say I fancy it much myself.

Alan was here for Easter and we filled the weekend with fun and frolics.

What used to be the Edinburgh Folk Festival but is now called Ceilidh Culture was on and we went to a couple of events. One was a bit crappy but the other was a great ceilidh band. In a pub basement they even managed to get us dancing.

We fitted in an entertaining lecture at the Science Festival by Raj Persaud on how to be irresistible to the opposite sex. Sadly there's no evidence yet that I've mastered his techniques.

We toured the galleries, put my new car through its paces on a day out in Fife, visited Newhailes House (a recent National Trust acquisition), did Dynamic Earth, enjoyed Il Caimano despite its lowly two star rating in the local press and finished off, thanks to free tickets provided by Claire, at the Whisky Heritage Centre where you get a dram at the very start of the show.

All in all a good weekend.

Overheard part of a conversation in the Portrait Gallery this morning that I've had myself from time to time. A chap was explaining to someone that he spent the summers in France and the winters in Edinburgh. She wondered if this wasn't the wrong way round.

He put forward the fact that in winter in his village snow covered the ground, unlike Edinburgh and that in the summer the sun shone and it was warm, again unlike Edinburgh.

I expect that he continued by pointing out that there is a lot to do in Edinburgh in the winter and not much going on in rural France.

QED