We've now got a movie-maker in the family. Ewan has produced this charming little video starring some of my frequent summer visitors.

A package came through my letterbox a few days ago and by virtue of its timing has been declared a Christmas present and a most unusual one at that.

In the summer of 2006 Chus and Eduardo, Spanish friends of mine, came to France with a group of their friends for a fortnight's holiday in the Creuse. I spent a fair bit of time with them and recorded some highlights in my blog.

But Antonio went a lot further. He has produced 74 A4 pages of text and sketches celebrating those two weeks and that's what Chus has sent me. I may offer you extracts from time to time. For starters here are the drawing that decorates the cover and the paeon to the Creuse that opens the story.

UN PARAÍSO PERSONAL

Del explendor de un bosque,
de unas estacas hiladas,
de un mar de moras
y otro de hierba fresca.
Del explendor de un horizonte azul,
apenas despejado ante las nubes,
de las sinuosidades,
de las curvas del camino,
de aquel recodo de 180 grados
donde no pusieron la cruz
ni las señales amarillas.
Sí, todo da igual.
Pasamos nosotros
entre las piedras grandes,
comidas de musgo verde.

LA CREUSE

Alan came up from Manchester to help celebrate my birthday and stayed on for a couple of days. We visited various exhibitions together while he was here. The show of Joan Eardley's work at the RSA is wonderful. I love her paintings of Glasgow children. From the quick colourful chalk on sandpaper portraits of the faces of individuals to the much more elaborate groups in collages that incorporate elements of their environment you can feel their personalities bursting out.

It's fascinating too to look at the photographs of these kids in the east end of Glasgow that she used to help her portraiture. No wonder the city council wanted to raze those tenements to the ground and build decent homes for the post-war generation.

For something rather different we went down to the Botanic Gardens. In truth we went there to enjoy the gardens but there were a couple of exhibitions on in Inverleith House, the former home of the National Gallery's modern collection. They stick to a modern remit and currently are showing imitation girders mounted at decapitating height in a number of rooms. In the absence of attendants protecting the work (draw your own conclusions) I sneaked a picture.

The show in the basement was much more fun. It consisted of a small display case of odds and ends, a couple of posters and an excellent sequence of music videos inspired by and celebrating the works of a few contemporary artists including Peter Blake and Louise Bourgeois.

A songsheet was available so you could sing along with the video. In one mad moment Alan danced along as well. That may have been in the absence of other punters. We stayed a while but most punters did not dally. A man entered the room as we left it but still managed to catch the same lift as us back to the ground floor.

The Botanics have been familiar to me since we used to take the kids there in the sixties and I still think the best view of Edinburgh is from the lawn in front of Inverleith House. I've snapped it a number of times and did so again on Sunday. Playing with the picture in Photoshop I somewhat serendipitously produced the background image for the title of this blog. I'm rather pleased with it.

All that culture vulturing is hungry work and I'm glad to report that the cafes in the Portrait Gallery and in the Botanic Gardens provided us with excellent sustenance.

My birthday celebrations have always felt short-changed, falling as they do on the winter solstice. This year, the 65th in the series, their share of daylight was indeed short but they were particularly sweet after dark.

My very good friend Claire insisted that she should book a table for the small dinner party that I had planned. Clearly a giveaway that something was afoot since she has to fit things like that into interstices in the working day while I have the leisure to spend hours finding things to do to fill the self same hours.

Part of her plan was revealed when I set about arranging another dinner for a group of old school friends. They it turned out were destined to be surprise guests at the first dinner. Not that they spilled the beans - rather my sons decided that there was a danger of too many dinners spoiling the party.

So when I got to the advertised pre-dinner drinks at the Traverse it was no surprise to see the old school friends but a larger group of Edinburgh based friends had also been called up for service and that was unexpected.

The meal was good, the company was excellent and the surprise though not complete was sufficiently exciting to make this a birthday to remember.

Come out from under that hair Claire and take a bow.

This is one of my favourite walks: the Radical Road in Holyrood Park. It gains its name from association with the disturbances of 1820 that were as close to a revolution as we ever got before Walter Scott wheeled in George IV in his kilt and pink tights two years later effectively turning the spirit of insurrection into cheers for the tartan flavoured monarchy.

I followed it for the first time in ages the other day to get a breath of fresh air. The views were superb, even in the dull conditions that prevailed. Here we are looking over the south side of the city with the Pentlands vaguely visible through the mist and cloud in the top half of the picture. I carried on along the tarmac road that goes up the hill and cut down above Duddingston Loch to the Sheep's Heid for a refreshment.Astute readers will have noticed that the advertised title of the pub has no apostrophe s but it's always added in speech, just as we talk of St. Andrew Square as if it belonged to him.

I had coffee with some friends the other day and collected a box of odds and ends belonging to me that has been cluttering up their house for the last several years. I had rather forgotten it but on being reminded remembered that it held such treasures as a PC keyboard with Arabic characters that I bought in Egypt when I was convinced that nothing much stood between me and mastery of the Arabic language. How wrong I was. It's beautiful, intriguing, fascinating; but I shall always be its slave rather than its master.

One treasure that I had never seen before was a set of six CDs being the second half of a twelve volume set of the songs of Robert Burns that I subscribed to a decade or so ago. The second half pitched up while I was abroad. I've been listening to them with great pleasure over the past couple of days. It was a splendid initiative of Linn records.

I decided at the beginning of the 21st century that physical Christmas cards were old hat and that henceforth I should send only ecards. I've not lived up 100% to this forward thinking decision but I try and have just finished creating this year's card. For those of my readers not in my email address book here it is:

The layout of Edinburgh's New Town incorporated communal gardens for the recreation of the proprietors of the buildings surrounding them. In many of these buildings private persons have long been replaced by office slaves and a good case can be made for making the gardens a more widely available recreational resource.

I was delighted to find that the hard-pressed council tax payer ably assisted by his alter ego the hard-pressed income tax payer has seen fit to apply a few millions to do just that to the gardens in St Andrew Square. The work proceeds apace and will include the obligatory refreshment outlet and what is called a reflective pool, though the capital's youngsters might have preferred a skate-park.

The work has been extended upwards of the gardens to tidy up the 4.2 metre high statue of Henry Dundas that sits atop the column. I understand that the stonework of the statue has suffered a bit from exposure, especially between its legs. We know what damage 179 years of an Edinburgh wind could do to a brass monkey so I shudder to think what condition poor old Henry is in.

The day I didn't have my camera two workers were jauntily perched on the lower levels of this scaffolding. I gazed in some admiration and wondered amongst other things how they got there. The answer is via the staircase in the column.

His mission may have been to crush the rebellious Scots, as I have lately learnt our national anthem enjoins us to do, or to populate the East India Company with his compatriots but pending catching a view when the covers come off the statue here's what the lifesize Henry looked like and for the truly historically minded or those who can't sleep here's a long and detailed article about him.

The latest news is that one of the office buildings in the square is to be converted into expensive flats. The owners, like Henry, will just have to put up with the democratisation of their garden.

Never go out without a camera. I can't bring you a picture of the two newspaper billboards that caught my eye side by side earlier today.
The Scotsman proclaimed "On the trail of eagle killers" while The Record reported "6 Week-old Alexis beaten to death"
Such different news values.

It's taken me a while to find a review in English of "I Do" (Prête-moi ta main) that echoed my enjoyment of the film.

The French reviewers were pleased that it matched what they think is the gold standard of romantic comedy - the British standard. Perhaps that's why they've held onto it for 12 months before letting us have a look.

But TimeOut found it "heavily contrived, undemanding" and deplored "the complacency of the film's subtextual sexual politics". (Whatever that means.) They did admit that it's "often funny" but that seems a criticism in the context of their review.

The Sydney Morning Herald (I never miss an issue) said "Old-fashioned doesn't really describe it: it's the kind of war-of-the-sexes premise that was popular in the '90s, and I mean the 1590s, when Shakespeare was starting to sharpen his quill." Shakespeare old fashioned? Tell that to the RSC.

Film 4 says " Of course I Do is total fluff and nonsense". But like me and unlike TimeOut they think it is bloody good fluff and nonsense and they suggest you see it now before "the inevitable US remake"; unless, they say, Charlotte Gainsbourg crosses the pond to reprise her role.

I'll leave the last word to Miss Marmite in Hamburg and other users of IMDb most of whom, but by no means all, liked it.

Recently the graffiti around here has displayed a degree of sophistication some levels above the "F. the Pope" standard.

One that caught my eye disfiguring a billboard, or enhancing it according to your lights, read "Be bad. Buy nothing new this Xmas."

Strong on combating spoil the planet wastefulness but short on current economic orthodoxy (do we want to return to being hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers?) let alone friendly feelings towards our nearest and dearest.

Today they are painting out a slogan on Tesco's wall. At the moment you can still make it out underneath the fresh paint. It says something like "we've had enough of this red white and blue". I thought at first it was an anti-unionist cry but realised later that those are Tesco's colours so it was probably aimed at them.

I don't suppose Mr Tesco will lose much sleep and it won't be long before another slogan hits the wall. Let's hope it's amusing.