I found myself impersonating a youth the other night.

As I queued up to buy a ticket for an RSNO concert a chap offered to sell me one that was spare because his chum was not going to be able to make it. I assumed that he was selling it at half price in an attempt to minimize his losses. Later I discovered that I had in fact purchased at full price an "under 26" concession ticket.

The fact that I passed the ushers' scrutiny I find most encouraging.

I caught the Grads production of Twelfth Night on Friday and was glad to have done so. It was pretty good although it won't efface from my memory the version in the style of a 40s musical that I saw the students of the American University in Cairo do some years ago. I absolutely adored that one. At the other extreme the most stupid version I can remember seeing was an Italian one in which amongst other nonsensicals the director found an incestuous relationship between Viola and Sebastian.

Gordon didn't go down such a silly path but was quite inventive, if not with the characters then at least as far as the presentation was concerned. I suspect that for some effects he peeped over the shoulders of giants as it were. But where would any of us be without giants. I've certainly found them helpful more than once.

For those of you who missed it click here.

If Shakespearean comedy is not your bag but you like a good laugh check out Burn After Reading. It's a hoot and in contrast to the intellectual who reviewed it for Newsnight I found the plot perfectly easy to follow.

I think even Hugo Chaves would enjoy the Venezuelan joke.

I renewed my acquaintance this evening with Belhaven Best. What a delight after five months slaking my thirst after golf with Kronenburg 1664 and similar bilgewater. There is a chap in the Creuse, an Englishman, who brews what I'm told is a decent drop although I have never got around to tasting it. I shall check it out and if satisfied insist as a condition of renewing my membership that Les Dryades stocks it.

Nursing the first pint of Belhaven I made the acquaintance of Bobo Stenson and his trio, or at least of his music. He plays piano in that jazz marriage made in heaven of piano, double bass and drums. What's more he plays my favourite kind of jazz. I expect it has a name although I don't know what it is. It's the antithesis of trad although it doesn't lack rhythm or melody. Maybe it's the absence of stomping that makes the difference. The sound is crystal clear and clean. I expect you have to say it's modern despite one of their numbers being by Purcell.

Despite loving modern jazz I'm a sucker for costume dramas about the wonderful days of yore when honest yeomen doffed their caps, and butlers and pantrymaids ministered to the needs of the gentry. So visually I adored Brideshead Revisited with its beautiful twenties/thirties costumes and sets and stunning glimpses of gracious living in town and country. But I wasn't so engaged by the presentation of the characters and the story. I'd recently read the book so I was aware of the fact that a few liberties were being taken to condense the whole thing into movie length. No big deal perhaps for a straightforward narrative but Waugh's tale is quite dense and time is needed to allow us to accompany Charles in his journey of discovery through friendship, love, life and religion.

I'll just have to get hold of the highly praised 1981 TV version which I've never seen and which covered the same ground about five times as slowly.

The tooth I had trouble with during the summer was pulled out with much effort last Monday. I was impressed that it came out at all because there had seemed to me so little left to get a grip on. Even more impressed in that my dentist is a little slip of a lady.

The absence of sticking out tooth caused her to spend a lot of time screwing down into the depths of my jaw with the dental equivalent of a bradawl to give access for her pliers. The remains came out a little bit at a time after much twisting and rocking and tugging for each section. As a bonus she took out a little fragment of a previously extracted tooth that an earlier dentist had overlooked but that my tongue has constantly sought for several years.

Thanks to the miracle of anaesthesia I felt more or less nothing but she told me to take painkillers even before the numbness had worn off so I thought I was in for it. In fact it wasn't too bad but it gave me an excuse to sit around for a couple of days in my pyjamas nursing my jaw and occasionally rinsing out the bleeding gap with a salt solution.

During which time I got hooked on the snooker tournament and barely left the telly all week. I did manage to drag myself away on Saturday night to hear Carlos Arrendondo sing the songs of Victor Jara and Violetta Parra as part of Edinburgh's Hispanic Festival, grandly named but only a handful of events over a weekend. Carlos ran a very enjoyable Latin American culture course that I did years ago. He's intensely passionate about Latin America music in general and his Chilean roots in particular and did justice to the songs although I really prefer listening to him singing his own material.

I don't prefer it so much, even as a bit of a Chilephile myself, that I was willing to miss the snooker final on Sunday night in favour of hearing him again though. It's always exciting to see someone who's well behind in a sporting contest get back into contention and Ryan Day fought from 7 - 2 down to nearly drawing level in the 16th frame but John Higgins won it and took the next frame to clinch the match. Great for him to win in front of his home crowd but being more often a plucky loser myself I felt for the Welshman.

Now that's over I've no excuse. Must get on with something.

It looks like that thanks to Gordon I'll soon own 60% of my own money in RBS. That's cool.

Tuesday was a lovely day so I put on my golfing shorts and met some friends for lunch in the open air at one of our favourite trucker stops. In the afternoon on the golf course the temperature topped 25 degrees which is not bad for October.
No-one is lunching on the terrace in this picture taken the following much dreicher day as I drove north and homewards . The weather brightened up shortly afterwards and I enjoyed delightful autumn colours and mild conditions until after eight hours of otherwise tedious driving I got to Dunkirk.

I crossed early yesterday morning by Norfolk Line, who incidentally I see are taking over the Rosyth - Zeebrugge service in the Spring. Good for them. The drive from Dover to Edinburgh was a bit less bedevilled by traffic jams and road repairs than it has been in the past but it still took more than nine hours and I was glad to collapse with a cup of tea before unloading the car.

Waiting for one of Connor's excellent home made Chinese dishes I relaxed with a G&T having been made aware of alcohol by a couple of giant billboards as I came along Seafield. Alcohol awareness week actually ends tomorrow but I think I can be relied upon to keep the faith thereafter.

These French country people have their sayings, one of which is: "it's at the end of the fair that you count the cowpats."

So this being the end of the fair as far as my competitive golf is concerned for the year here's a wee picture of the state of the cowpats.
Thanks to the French Golf Federation's records I can go back on my scores to day one, but this graph starts at the high point of my career, three years ago, when my handicap hit 22.4.

(For the benefit of non-golfers let me explain that the objective is to minimize rather than maximize the number of cowpats so a rising line on a graph is unwelcome.)

Of course I am bound to do much better next year, which thought reminds me of another local saying: "don't count the eggs while they are still up the chicken's ...". Well let's just say "before they are laid."