I have nursed an ambition to play Creon ever since I first saw Antigone with the Ghanaian poet Joe de Graff in the role. So I was disappointed that when a production did come around that I might have auditioned for, it was scheduled for when I would be away. Mind you I’ve never looked as regal as Joe de Graff and time has marched on to the extent that I suspect directors would be more likely to see me as a candidate for Tiresias or Chorus, blethering on about fate and kingship rather than for the king himself.

In any event I spent time yesterday sending emails to people publicising this production in which I am not. Here for non-recipients of my email is the flyer for the show.

The details may be a little indistinct because of the image size. Here they are:
Venue: Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace (Venue 40)
Dates and Time: 17 to 22 August at 8.15pm (1h 20m)
Prices: £8 (£6)
For more information visit www.egtg.co.uk or the show's site and you can buy tickets here.

Another show in which I am not but with which I have connections was also the subject of my email traffic yesterday. It's closely connected to Antigone because part of the action concerns two prisoners rehearsing scenes from that play. By Athol Fugard, the South African playwright, The Island was inspired by Robben Island the prison in which Nelson Mandela spent so many years and is illuminated by his experience and his humanity.

This production though uses white actors and shows how the play transcends its origins to speak out against dictatorships and political incarceration everywhere.

It comes to Edinburgh at the suggestion of Sir Derek Jacobi who presented the production with the Irving trophy for the Best One-act Production at the National Drama Festivals Association All Winners Festival in 2008.

Venue: The Space On The Mile @ The Radisson (Venue 39)
Dates and Time: 7 to 22 August at 8.15pm (1h 10m)
Prices: M T W £5 (£3.50) T F S £7.50 (£5)

For more information and for tickets visit The Space or you can buy tickets here.

I chose a book from Amazon UK the other day and when I went to check out you can imagine my surprise on finding that there were already three books in my basket. Three very good novels by Naguib Mafouz that I would unhesitatingly recommend but which I had not selected. According to the system they had been added on April 9th 2009.

Now unusually I know exactly where I was then and can swear unimaginably dreadful oaths that I did not use a computer that day rendering one of their explanations void. I contacted them you see and got a bland email in return suggesting two possibilities.

One that I had been on the site and failed to close down allowing someone to sneak in and order the books, or two that a family member or friend was aware of my password and had used it. Neither of these explanations is at all credible and in any case surely if someone were that keen to get those books they'd have completed the transaction.

It also seems a far-fetched idea that someone would try to steal a few books in this way. If they did break into an account it would be much more likely that they were after a big ticket item or were trying to get hold of a credit card number with which to steal better things, like cash.

Now nothing was in fact purchased and Amazon point out that credit card numbers are not actually held on the site so I can see that accessing my account for that purpose wouldn't get you very far.

My more prosaic answer, which I offered to Amazon but which they ignored, was an IT processing malfunction. I've seen a few even more bizarre in my time.

But what about the paranormal? I was after all on The Amazon on the 9th of April.

Sunday dawned overcast and cool so I decided that it was not a day for lakeside fun and played golf. My game was poor to middling as usual with just enough good shots to make me think that it’s not yet time to retire defeated. I was particularly pleased to finish the tricky 18^th with an excellent greenside bunker escape and a deadeye dick putt. The pro happened to be watching and my exploit was greeted with a round of applause, but Kevin somehow manages to get a strong hint of sarcasm into his applause.

Before heading off to the golf course I checked my email and found a missive from Skype telling me that to prevent them from gobbling up my credit I must make use of their services pronto. I’m not sure why I ever established this credit because I never use it except to prevent it from being forfeited. Usually I send myself a one word SMS which is hardly much better than just letting them have the money.

But this time I spent 0.0552 pence on an SMS to a friend whose web silence had been troubling me. I need to send another 16,000 or so such texts to use up my credit so it’s a bit unfortunate that she’s broken that silence already.

Despite the fact that it takes me no longer to get to Guéret from here than it does to get to Filmhouse from Dicksonfield, lethargy and wine with dinner frequently combine to prevent me from enjoying such nocturnal delights as it offers.

I was tempted to go down on Saturday to experience some electro-pyjama music, a genre that the summer festival brochure tells me is between disco-funky and rock Play-mobil. Given that the electro-pyjama was the warm-up to a concert by Big Sophie you can gauge the extent of my temptation.

Last night however I kept the wine under lock and key and went to a great concert of Duke Ellington and Count Basie standards by this big band.

I thought they were brilliant. I kept my eyes on the alto sax players but I couldn’t uncover their secret. It was very well presented although one peculiarity was that the numbers were introduced (with a lot of interesting information) not by the conductor but by one of the trombonists. He's the left-most one in the picture and instead of just leaning forward to his own mike he clambered past his fellow trombonists each time to get to the lectern that you can see downstage on the right. Approximately 100% of the names of tunes, players and composers that he had to pronounce were of course American and his English pronunciation was often amusing and sometimes incomprehensible. The one I liked best was when he said Sara Vogan for Sarah Vaughan as though she were a German relative of Terry's.

In the picture below you can see the band being congratulated at the end by the Mayor of Guéret. He’s not the man with the pony-tail.

You can catch their singer Anne Ratsimba on Myspace. She’s worth listening to and watching her sing is no hardship either.

Further delights in this festival are a musical bar crawl tomorrow, neatly dignified as a barathon, from early evening to the wee sma hours with a lunchtime prologue, and a day of open air fun around the lake on Sunday.

I’m tempted even to lay Sunday’s golf aside but maybe it will rain.

Over the last fifty years or so my appreciation of cricket has moved slowly from disdain to delight and nowadays I am if not an avid then at least an enthusiastic albeit occasional listener to Radio 4’s ball by ball coverage. That treat is available to me even here in the depths of rural France thanks to long wave. I had listened to some of the test match commentary during Australia’s first innings and yesterday on returning from the golf course I was glued to my set as England wrestled a draw from the jaws of defeat. It was extraordinary how that draw carried all the impact of a glorious victory.

It was a lot more captivating than the play that closed the Chatelus festival later in the evening. I wouldn’t say it was bad. The three teenagers who performed The Socks by Pierre-Yves Millot put a lot of effort into it and produced some very good moments. At one point when we had been introduced only to the first two characters one of them used an imaginary fishing line to pull the third character out of the front row and on to the stage. It was very much a coup de theatre and played with convincing physicality by the lad on the imaginary hook. But by and large the cast were not in the play but on the stage – look at me, I’m acting! That’s the director’s fault since left to their own devices teenagers (and others) if not shy and retiring will almost inevitably perform thus. Also like many absurdist pieces the play had a problem trying to find a resolution to the situation it had set up making the evening (blessedly short) unsatisfying.

On Saturday there was a book fair. It was not made up of a set of second-hand book stalls (though there was one) but featured local authors and little publishing houses flogging their wares plus a paper-making demonstration by a guy who has recreated ancient wooden presses and employs antediluvian methods to produce echt-medieval paper sheets. Twee? Who? Lui?

I decided not to invest €16 in a re-telling of the 40 murders that have taken place in the Creuse since the year dot or €12 in a tale of growing up in a village that the author assured me would not be found on the map but was surprise, surprise not unlike one she knew well as a child. Instead I gave €1 to a good cause and got two tatty paperbacks in return. Mean? Who? Me?

Châtelus Malvaleix is not a very big place but this week it has mustered all its forces to mount an arts festival. There’s an exhibition of painting and sculpture, a couple of plays, some musical events, a book fair, an artisan market and bizarrely to my mind a country walk.

I’ve seen the first of the two plays and despite the warm appreciation of the public I was not too impressed. It was about people wandering around an art gallery commenting on the works on display – quite appropriate for the occasion - but for a cast of nine to impersonate convincingly several dozen gallery visitors and staff is not easy however many changes of costume they affect. It had its moments though and if it hadn’t been twenty minutes late in starting I might have regarded their efforts more charitably.

I know only one other work by Jean-Michel Ribes and it too involves people wandering around a gallery commenting on the exhibits. It’s definitely not the same play so he must surely be working out some hang-up from a misspent youth.

The jazz concert yesterday was more enjoyable. A piano and trumpet duo who played mostly standards pre-dating Miles Davis. The trumpeter sang as well but his voice was a bit thin and under-powered for my taste although he gave a very nice version of Besame Mucho. At the end we were asked to give a special round of applause for the Creuse’s one and only piano tuner without whom even those lacking perfect pitch might have been plagued by the odd bum note.

Below is a collage of some of the art works. I would not pay €100 or so for the mysterious fluffy things nor €750 for the pretty enough picture of horses but what do I know about art?


On the other hand I was very happy to pay €3 for a tray of sixteen peaches this afternoon despite knowing nothing about fruit growing.

The weather in Aubazine was splendid, the setting delightful, the accommodation and food good, the golf fun. But too many golfers are so obsessive about the bloody game that you could spit, or at least let your eyes glaze over and think about something else.

I looked up a relative who lives thereby and relaxed on his settee with a couple of beers in front of a transmission of Andy Murray's quarter-final match since Peter like most British residents has access to BBC TV. I think that may be bordering on the technically illegal because of all those complicated territorial rights issues and large payments for sporting events that bedevil the airwaves but it's so widespread that it's almost as though a right of way were being established.

Peter is not what you would call a close relative. He's my sister-in-law's sister's husband's brother. Now some languages probably have a snappier word for that just as Arabic for instance doesn't need to say my uncle on my mother's side and my uncle on my father's side since they've got separate words عمّ and خآل.

As far as I know I don't have any American relatives for whom even less snappy expressions would have to be used but in case I do, and for any unrelated American readers here's wishing you A Happy Fourth Of July.