I left my late rising visitors to fend for themselves on Saturday while I practised my scales.

They fended so well that they came back with a bag of groceries and cooked a delicious evening meal. Since Falk is a trained chef it was not only delicious but was presented in five star style, let down a little by our not having been able to borrow any of Holyrood's 3000 piece silver dinner service from which to eat it. I manfully opened a bottle or two.

In what might seem to some a cruel return for such kindness, but which they claim to have enjoyed and why should I disbelieve them, I took them to Sunday's Tempest rehearsal. In preparation I had given them a German translation but unsurprisingly they had not ventured far beyond the plot summary. Shakespeare's glorious text then (all the top people say it's glorious, just because you don't understand the jokes doesn't mean it isn't) was somewhat opaque. But the body language which is hardly ever more than a foot away from your eyeballs and the mellifluous tones of the actors which are hardly ever more than a foot from your earhole no doubt transcended that little problem. As a bonus it rained so they got the full promenade experience getting slightly drookit on the quayside while the cast tried to keep their footing on a wet deck before being shepherded into the next performance space by our version of Shakespeare's sprites and fairies, known affectionately as Ariel's bitches.

The next national glory to which they were exposed (at their own request) was the game of golf. I could see on the driving range after 100 balls had been poked at and occasionally whacked into the air in random directions that a proper golf course would be a step too far so we went on to Bruntsfield Links whose 36 little holes were just dandy for their skill level. My skill as a teacher sadly failed to change Falk's natural inclination to hit the ball more or less as hard as he could irrespective of the distance to be covered and as for sweeping rather than whacking on the green - a pearl that fell on deaf ears. But then there are lots of things that I continue to do wrongly even when I'm reciting the correct method to myself as I swing the club. Who'd be a teaching pro?

We retired to the Golf Tavern afterwards. It's cozy wood and leather interior with little nooks and crannies was turned into a wasteland of a steel and plastic regular cube some years ago but seemed even colder and nastier yesterday. There is lots of golfing memorabilia decorating the walls but somehow it creates no atmosphere. Maybe it's the effect of the half a dozen silent (thankfully) TV screens that hit your eyes every time you lift your head from your drink.