There are no prizes for guessing what this Christmas present is but you might enjoy puzzling over it.  As a clue let me tell you that the right-hand piece fits into the left-hand piece.

I didn't manage to work it out myself but fortunately there was a shop sticker on the base.  Even then I had to be told how to use it. 

I breathed a sigh of relief this morning when I heard in a radio traffic report "services through Haymarket are back to normal after engineering works".

For I had been totally discombobulated last night when my train from Preston after arriving at Slateford chugged off into dark and unrecognisable territory eventually surfacing around London Road and coming to rest in the hitherto unexplored backwaters of Waverley, made worse by the reconstruction around us.

Thank goodness for the homing instincts of my son who led us to the desired exit.

A friend from my Zambian days who now lives in Iceland added me recently to a Facebook group that has been set up for those interested in Kitwe Little Theatre, former members of Nkana Kitwe Arts Society (NKAS) for the most part.

I duly wrote a little post and included a link to the website in which I've recorded all the shows that I had anything to do with in Zambia.  Another former NKAS member now living in Portugal looked through it and wrote me a very nice email.  She also passed the website address to yet another former member who lives in retirement in the south of France. Mike, for that is his name, came across mention of a show called Not Dead Only Sleeping on my site.

I've recorded the fact that I was in it with a scan of the programme as proof but noted that I didn't actually remember the show and could only guess what I might have done in it.  Well Mike produced it but he couldn't remember what I did either. However he kindly sent me this photo of my number and all is revealed.  

It's a Billy Connolly sketch and the body language tells me that it's that point in The Crucifixion where the Roman soldier is about to stick his spear in Christ's side.  It's a great sketch though it did earn me a death threat from an affronted Christian on one occasion.  The hair is not genuine by the way.

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It's that time of year again

It is better to come to the classics late than not at all and this afternoon I spent three hours in an unheated cinema devouring Les Enfants du Paradis.  This wonderful movie was made under the German occupation by a number of French cultural colossi of the time and a digital restoration is currently on release in the UK.

I can tell you about it but all manner of commentators have done the job better so I'll refer you to a number.  The film is explained at length in Wikipedia and here's The Guardian's brief 5 star review.  A previous article in the same paper had rather more to say when reviewing a hundred years of film.

One of the principal characters in the film is Jean Gaspard Deburau, the great mime known on stage as Baptiste and played in the film by Jean Louis Barrault who was one of the greats of French theatre and whose Barrault-Renaud company I'm sure I saw in the Edinburgh Festival many years ago.

My enjoyment of the film was probably enhanced by the fact that I played Deburau in Paris ten years ago in an extract from Sacha Guitry's 1918 play about him in which Guitry himself played the lead.  In our little scene Deburau is testing his son's avowed desire for a life in the theatre by pointing out all its disadvantages but he can't help but be carried away by his own love of the profession.  I can almost remember some of the lines about his feelings when the curtain rises and the audience is gripped by his performance; great stuff and extremely mellifluous French as I recall.

An artist friend of mine was exhibiting at the weekend so I wandered along to have a look.  Judging by the work on display he'd spent the summer on the beach and indeed he told me that there's a beach an easy walk away from his summer residence.  It's one of those manmade lakeside beaches that you find all over France so there are shady trees to sit under with your sketch pad and a handy bar in which to slake your thirst. I like his work and one day I may buy a painting to add to the prints that I bought a couple of years ago but it was not to be this time.

I wandered on to Stockbridge market and bought what turned out to be the tastiest bread I've had since I left France in September and that's counting Manna House breads.  The baker was in fact French but I came home with delicious Scottish products too.  Yummy chutneys from Portobello and Perthshire and succulent lamb from Liddesdale.

There were plenty more food stalls and other goods of interest so I'll be loafing around there again.

The shops and streets were remarkably uncrowded this afternoon thanks it would seem to the windy weather having kept people at home.  Various bus diversions were in place because of fallen railings and one of my neighbours got an afternoon off because her employer feared a scaffolding collapse.  All reasonable enough.

But getting home and finding a message on my phone telling me that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert that I was due to go to this evening had been cancelled because of adverse weather conditions baffled me.  It wasn't an outdoor concert for goodness sake and I doubt that the Queen's Hall has been blown away.

I'm sure the Dunedin Wind Bank, that counts me amongst its members, is made of sterner stuff and that Saturday's concert will go ahead.  It's free as are the post concert refreshments so come along.

I was passing the Old College around tea time and popped in to have a look at the quadrangle which thanks to an anonymous donation of a million quid has been beautifully laid out completing at last a building whose beginnings date back to 1789.

It's lovely, well worth the wait and perhaps in another 222 years there will be a handy tram stop outside.

Here's the commerative brochure published by the university.

Two excellent films in the one evening.  First up was my last foray into the French Film Festival with a delightful comedy that poked fun at many French preoccupations: immigration, wartime deportations, laicity, the war in Algeria, citizenship, bureaucracy, politics.

Our heroine in The Names of Love cries as she joins the rest of the left in voting for Chirac to keep out Le Pen in the shock election of 2002 when Jospin was eliminated in the first round.  She's even more upset when she accidentally votes for Sarko in 2007.

But then she is particulary keen on making rightwingers into better people, but believing in the slogan make love not war that's what she does and a period between her sheets seems to work wonders of political re-education.  And she's happy to marry for identity papers from time to time.

Of course love intervenes when Baya meets a man who seems as staid and bourgeois as she is wacky and revolutionary.  It's great fun.  I can't find a British review of it so here's what the Vancouver Observer had to say.

Then a film about another vivacious woman but one who was much more troubled than Baya.  My Week With Marilyn is not a comedy though there is plenty of humour in it. Marilyn Monroe came to Pinewood studios in 1956 to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier and this is a memoir of that event by the then young third assistant director (whose family affiliations I have learnt thanks to The Guardian review) with whom Marilyn developed a friendship.

It's a lovely film with amongst many others excellent performances from Kenneth Branagh as Olivier and Judy Dench as Sybil Thorndyke and an outstanding Michelle Winter as Monroe.  For me she captured the character entirely, both physically and emotionally and I hope she gets a just reward come the Oscars.

On a day when we are promised paralysis in the public services in pusuit of a comfortable old age it was heartening to see one humble council employee sticking to his post and carrying out his normal duties with zeal and determination.

A view not likely to be shared by the owner of the vehicle I saw being ticketed this morning by one of Edinburgh's much loved parking attendants.  Hope it doesn't belong to a striker.

Happy St. Andrew's Day. 

I'm almost always up for something unusual in the theatre so when Claire invited a number of us to accompany her to The Little Match Girl Passion at the Traverse, described as a combination of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl and Bach's St Mathew Passion, my hand went up straight away.

In the event the invitor withdrew and the other invitees declined so I was alone (apart from the multitude of culture vultures behind me, for I was in the front row) in Traverse One last night for this spectacle.

A dimly lit area whose floorcloth of white tiles each decorated with a black fleur de lis (if memory serves) on which lay a randomly (or maybe carefully) strewn cable of linked light bulbs that glowed dull yellow presented itself on entry to the theatre.  Behind, a dull reddish wall bearing a couple of shelves strewn with unidentifiable bric a brac, above which a screen.  Standing right centre a low music stand, a stool and bathed in a gentle light resting on the stool a cello.

Fade to black and enter the cellist dressed in a mildly military looking silver buttoned grey blue coat to perform the curtain raiser or companion piece, The World To Come. He played for twenty five minutes or so while swirls in various shades of grey appeared on the screen behind him.  It was not quite a cloudscape nor yet a brain activity scan but somewhere in between.  The music was mournful and as I trudged up the staircase at the interval I thought that if that is the world to come I am not too anxious to be here when it arrives.

Everyone trudged up the stairs in fact because Theatre Cryptic whose work it was wanted the auditorium to be empty while they changed the set. I suppose they felt that the impact would be lessened were we to have seen it put together.  

It was not that different in fact.  The screen had gone and a dark void took its place.  The wall now had a flame relief that I don't think had been there before and a higher lighting level allowed us to see that the bric a brac consisted of vaguely scientific Victorian odds and ends; glass vessels, stuffed animal bits, animal skulls.....

That science like feel was echoed in the objects on a desk left centre on which stood also a little xylophone and music stand.  Up right by the wall was a big drum mounted horizontally on a wheeled frame and on the opposite side a set of tubular bells almost off-stage.

The piece opened with the other three actors/singers lined up behind the bass who was poised to whack the big drum, which he did.  They were all dressed in what I would loosely describe as early Victorian outfits though the mezzo's crinoline was drawn up at the front to reveal her garter and drawers in a manner that I am sure would have been deprecated then and the reason for which escaped me.

They sang, moved languidly here and there, sat, stood, grouped, ungrouped.  They played the bells, the xylophone, a chinese bowl, the big drum, what seemed to be a bicycle bell but which probably has a pukka musical name and a set of something or other.  They never smiled, but given that the libretto told the sorry tale of a little girl wandering barefoot in the snow and freezing to death that's hardly surprising. 

They never acknowledged one another nor the audience nor the white clad young woman in the void above, the eponymous match girl, who throughout threw herself hither and thither, whirled, bounced and walked about presumably in anguish.

It was beautifully done, beautifully sung, beautifully set and lit and well deserved the long appreciative silence and subsequent enthusiastic applause that greeted the final blackout.  It made the very pleasant modern dance performance that I had seen at the Festival Theatre the previous evening seem somewhat run of the mill. 

But it was weird.

I've been browsing the programme of Previously...., the Scottish History Festival which has just got underway. 

It's an inspired title and inspiration has not deserted the organisers in setting up events.  I imagine that the Beehive Inn will be stowed out for "Tits, Tassels and Ten Pound Notes", the story of striptease in Scotland.  

On the same night the Edinburgh Spanish Circle is hosting an illustrated talk on Cuba. The lovely lady with the PhD giving the striptease talk doesn't make it clear whether or not that is also illustrated, thus failing to resolve any prurient hispanophile's dilemma.    

This is the Spectator article that aroused my ire and here's my response.  The letter as written was somewhat more nuanced than the printed version, since KK for one took a fair bit of persuasion to demit office and Chiluba's hands seem to have been a bit sticky.

But the thrust remains.

A few days ago I was invited to join a Facebook group that has been set up for those with connections to Kitwe Little Theatre.  It is already populated with lots of interesting stuff for those of us who spent time and energy there.

I was particularily interested in photos of the interior of the theatre, taken not many years ago, showing the stage, the auditorim, the bars etc.  I think anyone can look at the group here although you have to be a member to post. 

Coincidentally in the same week I found myself defending Zambia's honour in the letter pages of the Spectator.  I can't give you a link just yet because they don't add items from the current edition straight away.

Hamlet opened last night and all went reasonably well.  One of the half dozen notes I had to play on the sax had a bit of a squeak to it but on the whole I was satisfied with my first public appearance as a musician.

A&R men in the audience should form an orderly queue and those who weren't there have three more chances since we run till Saturday at St Brides Centre, Orwell Terrace at 19.30 each evening.  Tickets on the door or from The Hub.

One of the things that annoys me mildly is having rung a telephone help line and picked my way carefully through the myriad button pressing options to get to the point where I can talk to a human being, is to discover that the helpline is experiencing unusually high demand.  Since this occurs at whatever time of day or night I ring I am tempted to think that it is a fib.

So congratulations to HMRC who run their operation so well that even at 10.00 on a weekday morning they are not experiencing unusually high demand and not all of their operators are busy.  It makes the business of paying income tax that bit less painful.

I walked down the Scotsman Steps the other day for the first time in years.  I suppose I was aware that some sort of reburbishment had been underway for a while but I was not prepared for the transformation that they have undergone.

Although occasionally smartened up and used for hanging pictures during the Festival they've generally lived in my consciousness as a dank, dirty thoroughfare pervaded by an air at once urine infected and somewhat threatening. 

But now, resplendent in a multitude of shades and patterns of marble, they are quite beautiful.  There are lots of lovely pictures on the Edinburgh Spotlight site and you can hear the artist whose work it is in this BBC clip.

The initiative for the project came from the Fruitmarket Gallery which is only a few yards from the foot of the steps and there is a more arty blurb about the project on their site and a video in which Martin Creed, the artist, sings a staircase song; not to be missed.

For pretty much the first time I didn't feel totally overwhelmed at band practice last night, just inadequate.

I think that's a sign that I'm improving.

Yesterday I could have been back at the Fringe.

I started off with an excellent play at the Traverse; at least the production was excellent though I'm not sure that the text will stand the test of time.  The three actors switched instantly from one character to another with just a change of voice and stance where we lesser lights would have needed an hour's make-up and a new costume.  They were ably supported by a sometimes complex and and always faultlessly executed technical plot.

Then it was off to the Blackadder exhibition.  Judging by the videos shown there and by a radio interview I heard recently she's a lovely lady and the critics say she's a great artist but her vision is not mine although I wouldn't refuse an apron sporting one of her flower paintings.

Despite saying that she's not really interested in acting Tilda Swinton gets the job done well in We Need to Talk about Kevin which I saw next.  But for my money the actors who play the eponymous villain make the movie.  It jumps back and forward a lot in time which is no doubt a device to keep our interest alive since we've pretty well sussed out that it will all end in tears before bedtime by the time the title comes up.

If you go to see it pay particular attention to the final scene in which Tilda says very clearly "I just want you to tell me why". I just want you to tell me what her screen son replies since either my ears, his delivery or a passing jet liner robbed me of the pleasure.

There was no not hearing Prokoviev at the Usher Hall later nor the jazz quartet with which I finished the evening in Bill Kyle's splendid establishment.    

One of my multitude of summer golf prizes was a jar of gésiers de canard confits.  I had friends for dinner this evening and it seemed an ideal occasion to make use of them so I served up as first course a salade tiède made up of various leaves, slices of artichoke and the gizzards, for that is what hides behind the frenchified name of the duck bits.  The whole was doused in a dressing made from the confit in which the gizzards were preserved plus balsamic vinegar, moutarde de Dijon etc.

I did not announce to my guests until they had eaten the salad that they had just enjoyed "the thick-walled part of a bird's stomach, in which hard food is broken up by muscular action and contact with grit and small stones" for fear that it might put them off.   

I had a jolly little party on Saturday to celebrate 50 years of intermittent residence in Edinburgh and clearly overcatered on the scoff front.  I can see myself living on the leftovers for some time.  Not so on the drink front. Not everyone was drinking champagne but those who were got through a bottle each.  Just as well not everyone I invited turned up.

It was great fun to play in a 1500 seat theatre on Saturday; the swooping crane TV camera and the very enthusiastic audience compensating for the fact that most of the seats were empty.

Disappointingly we were eliminated but it's hard to know whether to feel aggrieved or not since we didn't see the other three entries and only heard them imperfectly over a dressing room speaker.  There was very little in the way of adjudication afterwards but according to the cameraman who filmed the judges deliberations it was all very close and opinions were heatedly expressed.  No doubt Sky are happy about that since universal agreement would make a very boring programme.

Niamh Cusack rang us up, presumably from her dressing room in the Old Vic, to commiserate and encourage us, having been told by her woman on the scene that we had done her proud.  She even extended an invitation to give her a ring to talk over any future acting problems we might be faced with.  What a nice woman.

No celebrations were cancelled and we probably rivalled the Trekkie convention that was taking place in our hotel for late night drinking.  I escaped being burnt to death, despite my room-mate giving up on trying to wake me, by the fact that the fire alarm that caused the hotel to be evacuated during the night was a falsie.

So it was back to Hamlet this evening to round off a great weekend.

The little scene from The Cherry Orchard that we are performing in Northampton on Saturday in the quarter final round of the Sky Arts Stagestruck competition ends with the words "senile decay".  Those words are uttered as an explanation of my character's behaviour and it seems that I'm living the part off-stage.

Waiting for a bus after a Hamlet rehearsal this evening I saw from the bustracker screen what bus was due and decided as I often do to jump on it, get off at the bottom of the Bridges and cross to the top of theWalk to wait for a bus going my way.  But before it arrived a 14 turned up and that one goes to my door so naturally I got on.

I'm sure you've guessed what happened.  Fortunately the lights were with me as I sprinted from the last stop on the Bridges, across Princes St. and on to the St. James Centre in time to get back on board the 14.    

Modern dance is always a bit of a challenge and never more so than when it's like jagged and jerky brownian motion performed to a backdrop of randomly flashing lights and a soundtrack that might be music or might not.

What's it all about?  What are they trying to tell us?  Is it meant to be the end of the world or what?  Such were the questions going through my mind at Wayne McGregor's Far at the Festival Theatre the other night.  I eagerly awaited enlightenment from the after show Q&A session led by one of the Grads' stars from 4:48.

But michty me and help ma boab, as my granny would have said, the dancers had no more idea than I had of what it was all about and some of them had been dancing since they were three years old so you'd have expected them to have a bit of interpretative skill would you not.

Well enlightenment turns out to be the name of the game when you read the blurb on the website.  I quote:
"Inspired by the controversial Age of Enlightenment, FAR mines an era that first placed ‘a body in question’. Ten incredible dancers confront the distortions, sensuality and feeling of the 18th Century’s searing contemporary sensibility....." and it was music: "....to a new, haunting score by the critically-acclaimed composer Ben Frost."

I was also hoping for enlightenment when the following day I went to see Last Year in Marienbad at the Cameo, the very cinema in which I saw it as the nouvelle vague swept over us in the early sixties.  The Village Voice, whose review I recommend, says "back in the day.....audiences had great fun pretending to be baffled...".  Let me say it out loud - I wasn't pretending.

Surely now with all the experience of life I've gained since, the then puzzling movie would be as an open book.  Perhaps not quite.  It is still definitely odd.  I now think (though I could be wrong) that there is no meaning.  It's just the filmaker, having somehow got the money together, having fun doing the oddest things he could think of with his actors and his camera.  And it looks absolutely gorgeous.

So the moral is probably that, just because something is seriously weird it doesn't mean it's serious.  I can't wait to revisit Hiroshima Mon Amour.
    

After three years and a reduction of one third in the asking price an offer has been made and accepted for the house in Barbansais.  Failing unforeseen complicatuons it will shortly fall into the hands of the young magpie's family and I will be forced into a change of life though I don't expect to experience any concomitant hot flushes.

I do have the possibility of alternative accommodation in the area but I am looking on this event as an opportunity to do other things.  I don't intend to spend more than a few weeks there next year (so that I can fulfill my golf competition winning obligation apart from anything else) and probably even less time thereafter.

Casting directors may care to note that I expect to be available for the 2012 Fringe.

Only naive and inexperienced Scottish supporters could have thought that even when we were eight points ahead we were going to win.  Glorious defeat is our speciality. 

It's always a relief to see the solution to something which has puzzled one.

The current UK vehicle registration number allocation system uses two digits to define the point in time in which the vehicle was first registered, thus 01 means the first registration period of 2001 and 51 the second.  I've often (well occasionally) wondered how they would cope with 2011, whose first period would clearly be 11 but whose second could not be 51 without confusion with the second period of 2001.

I need not have worried.  Indeed if I had only googled UK vehicle registration number system when first the problem entered my mind I would have found that the 61 I saw on a car the other day was a consequence of  the basic principle behind the system, which is to add 50 to the year digits for the second period.

Thus I would have been able to sleep soundly long ago, except that I'm now wondering what will happen in 2051.  Alas I may never know.

I find myself out of sorts, and out of tune with majority critical opinion, having missed out on two hours of September sunshine watching a childish waste of celluloid.  The Guard is a comedy thriller from which tension is totally absent and where although present the laughs are few and far between.

It has a naive style all of its own which we might christen unmagical irrealism and which I hope for the sake of this cinemagoer is not contagious.

PS I know they don't use celluloid nowadays but that's no excuse.

We are told that if the discovery of neutrinos travelling faster than light stands up our understanding of the time space continuum goes for a burton and time travel into the future or the past will become the new reality.

In the fast moving world of telecoms they are already there.  I got a text from Vodaphone this morning telling me that I had three days left in which to use some bonus they had given me as a reward for having topped up my phone.

Fifteen minutes later by the old Einsteinien  method of reckoning a second text arrived telling me that the bonus had now expired.

Where Vodaphone lead Skype cannot be far behind.  They've just sent me an email saying that a credit I have with them will expire in 30 days, so I suppose I had better get my skates on and make a call before lunch.

What can you say - 13 points to 12 - grr!  And I didn't even have the compensation of spotting Ewan in the crowd.  He was clearly not dressed outrageously enough to attract the camera's eye.

I stood at the bus stop the other day beside a group of young men who were trying to impress one another with their tales of valour, an activity from which I confess older men are not immune.  I was struck by one little fragment that went something like "we wiz the best o pals efter that, hud a couple o drinks........., efter a stabbed im like".

I was glad they got tired of waiting and hailed a cab.

Before I visited Figeac I didn't know that the great Champollion who deciphered the Rosetta stone came from there.  But he did.  They have named a square and a museum in his honour.  Cairo has been less generous in naming only a street after him.

He's also celebrated on various postcards.  I don't know whether the one I bought is telling us anything else about him or if it's just an illustration of how much care went into male grooming in ancient Egypt.  

His great linguistic skills are not shared by all his modern fellow townsmen for when I asked for a postage stamp the shopkeeper offered me one for Belgium.

As a postscript to Vézac I learnt this morning that had I stayed for the prize-giving I would have had something to go with the champagne because my name came out of the hat in the lucky dip of scorecards that always follows the golfing awards.

In between playing golf in the pouring rain on Wednesday and under a boiling sun on Friday I had my one and only day of real tourism this summer.

Humble lodgings

 
I left our humble lodgings in the Château de Salles overlooking the golf course and set off along a now and then picturesque route to Figeac. 

Artisan at work

Narrow lane

It's a lovely little town with a medieval centre of narrow lanes where artisans have plied their trade for centuries.
 

I’m not the first Scotsman to have been charmed by the place although unlike Mr Nicolson I moved on after lunch.

Early Scotsman in figeac

Imposing medieval edifice

 I made a fleeting visit to this imposing medieval edifice a few miles from Figeac.  The fact that I once met the owner’s daughter on a train journey between Edinburgh and Glasgow didn’t seem altogether a good excuse for penetrating beyond the private property notice at the gate.  That’s a shame because I’m sure we could have had a cosy chat over a glass or two about the pleasures and problems of having a second home in France. 

Rodez cathedral

But perhaps not, so I set off on an only occasionally now and then picturesque route to Rodez.  The town has a cathedral which you can see from miles around but otherwise is possibly not worth the detour.  The cathedral is not tumbling backwards by the way.  I don’t know how they get them straight on the postcards.

Big hole of Bouzou

The road back to Vezac was much better value touristically and I stopped off at various spots including one called something like “the big hole of Bouzou”.  I don’t think I’d fancy living on either the edge or beside the fetid stream at the bottom but it was very impressive.

Vezac view

Returning to Vézac I got stuck into a special festive Alligot dinner.  The main course consisted of sausage (remarkably unfatty) in an onion sauce served with cheese rich mashed potatoes.  It was delicious but none of my French friends could explain the connection between the Alligot of the dinner and the Alligoté of the lovely bottles of Bourgogne that I buy now and then.

Golf course view

And the golf?  Well I didn’t distinguish myself and certainly won nothing to go with my champagne but thanks to the arcane juggling that is the handicap system I stayed still.  This means that over the season I have trimmed one neat digit from my handicap, in contrast to the previous five seasons in each of which I have added a digit. 

So it's all (minus one) left to do.

My trophy winning form soon deserted me and my handicap even crept up by 0.2 last week.  After the first nine holes yesterday in my last Dryades competition of the season it seemed that a repeat performance was on the cards, but I rallied on the back nine and turned in a respectable score that at least staved off a further deterioration.

And I came home with two bottles of champagne and admired a lovely new moon so the day was not entirely wasted.


                  I hope the SG4L competition at Vézac this week brings me something nice to go with the champagne.

To encourage someone to believe that crime pays may not be in itself a crime but it is certainly reprehensible and I fear that to my shame I am guilty of it.

I sat in the garden yesterday while the potential purchasers visited the premises.  At one point from the far end of the garden mummy sent her oldest little treasure over to me.  He held out a shiny object and asked if it was mine.

“Ah” said I. “It’s a foreign coin.  It’s Brazilian and I visited Brazil a couple of years ago, so it could well be mine.  Where did you find it?”

“Under our car.”

“Strange” thought I.  “How did it get there?” I continued to think. “The last time I saw one of those I’m sure it was in the top drawer of my desk.” 

But would I be forgiven for at the very least embarrassing, and probably causing to flee, these people who were in the market for a holiday home by crying out “Your son is a liar and a thief”?

“No” I said to myself.  “Think of Sally and David and keep schtoom.” And to his delight I said “Would you like to keep it?”

He raced off happily, no doubt reassured about his career choice.

The gas ran out while I was cooking last night.

We used to keep a spare bottle in the barn but haven’t bothered since we put the house up for sale and are thus doomed to occasional inconvenience.  It’s very occasional since a bottle lasts about two years of summer occupancy.

In this instance I was very little inconvenienced because I was able to complete my vegetable curry and rice in the microwave but the question arises as to whether or not to re-stock given that I have a week to go during which I expect to eat out definitely on four days and probably on a fifth and given that an English family looking for a holiday home spent well over an hour viewing the house yesterday afternoon.

I set out to give the grass a what I hoped would be a final cut on Thursday and I was inconvenienced there as well because the starter cord snapped on first pull.  This was not really a surprise since it has been frayed and bedraggled for a while but it was not handy.

My random collection of spanners didn’t look sufficient to even take the outer engine cover off so repairing it myself didn’t look to be feasible and I couldn’t see Mr. Brico doing the job in time for me to get a cut in before departure so I did the job with the strimmer.

It wasn’t quite as back-breaking as it is when the grass has had the entire season of mellow unoccupancy to get to knee height but it was still a pain and the result looks much like a self- administered haircut but it’s one more closing down task ticked off the list.

This morning I’ve been washing floors.

There was some heavy booted scrabbling going on the other afternoon in the noman's land bounded by the cellar roof space, main bedroom and kitchen wall.

I responded by making wild hunter noises and beating the wall with a broom until the intruder was silenced.  This morning I reckon I saw the culprit in the shape of a red squirrel gambolling happily in the back garden.  He hasn't come back indoors again so far but as the local saying has it - you don't count the cowpats till the end of the fair - so I remain vigilant.

Poisoned chalices come in many forms.  They are not always recognizable as such.  Here is one in the form of a golf trophy which has been consigned to my care for a year as a result of my fine round yesterday in an annual invitational competition at Les Dryades.

The poison comes from the fact that the winner has not only to organise the following year's competition but host the twenty odd competitors afterwards.

Last night we had a very pleasant drinks and snacks evening in a lovely garden setting at last year's winner's fine home.

Barbansais's field like lawns can't compare, my catering facilities are limited and I'm short of about fifteen garden chairs.  Maybe I'll be saved by a sale.

The even more annoying thing about this win is that if it had been one of our normal FFG competitions I'd have knocked a couple of digits off my handicap.

Amongst the cheap DVDs that I’ve bought recently was a movie featuring Javier Bardem and Victoria Abril.  They are the reason I bought it but I suppose even good actors can’t redeem utter rubbish.
  

I was saved from watching the entire film by the fact that the DVD itself was rubbish and froze after an hour to the accompaniment of an endless whirling and whining.

But thank God it did because not only were my cinematic sensitivities saved but when I turned on the radio I caught the most wonderful double piano concert by these two guys:

It was recorded at Marciac a few weeks ago.  Next year I must give up golf for a week and go listen to the music.   

Yesterday was dry and warm, a perfect day to cut the grass.  I wish I had done it.  Continuous rain overnight which lingers even now and is forecast to hang about for a few days means that by the time it dries out sufficiently to cut it will have grown another three inches.

I added three bottles of wine to my small collection of golf prizes yesterday and knocked half a point off my handicap.  I'm now back to where I was at the beginning of the 2010 season.

Three competitions left to undo the losses of the four previous seasons.

It's coming up to the third anniversary of putting our French house on the market so we are celebrating by knocking fifteen grand off the price.

Now, provided you steer clear of agents and come directly to us, this lovely residence can be yours for a measly 100,000 euros.  That's around 90,000 pounds at current exchange rates.

Form an orderly queue.

It’s been a busy golfing week so far with four days on the trot.  I’m having a rest day before taking up the clubs again tomorrow.

I was a bit surprised to be asked for 18 euros instead of the usual 8 to take part in Sunday’s competition and the explanation when it came wasn’t universally popular.  The extra ten bucks were going to the French Golf Federation to help finance the 2018 Ryder Cup (which is being played in France) and there will be a small supplement on the annual dues each registered player pays the FFG over the next few years to the same end.

It’s the mega billionaire status of the guys who play in the Ryder Cup teams that caused a few grumbles I suppose but I have some sympathy with the FFG.  Putting the event together must cost a bob or two and although they will no doubt get good crowds the interest in golf here is not of the same order as it is in the States or in the UK and Ireland.

Even the players make a contribution if my belief that they don’t get paid to take part is correct.  Mind you they get showered with clothes and equipment and I daresay my annual income wouldn’t make much of a dent in either team’s fully expensed travel bill so the sacrifice is limited.  

Ten of us went for a golfing day out at La Jonchère yesterday.  It’s a course I really enjoy playing and it’s no further away from me than Les Dryades but being a member there I don’t go to La Jonchère very often.  Usually we have lunch in the nearby town of Gouzon but since January an English couple have been running a restaurant at the course so after nine holes we ate there in lazy sunshine and played a wine assisted back nine in the afternoon. 

Sporting activity didn’t end there because we went to Pierre’s in Gueret afterwards and played pétanque for a couple of hours and then wound up with a barbecue that went on till ten thirty or so and over which the peccadilloes of the French political establishment were scurrilously examined. 

I’m glad to report that I hit both my balls and my boules with a fair degree of success.

The reign of the rectal thermometer is over, in France at least, and you are not asked to sit up in your hospital bed and clutch a thermometer firmly in your armpit or under your tongue. Technology moves on.  Now they poke a little gadget into your ear and when it beeps they read off the temperature.  What double entendre could Carry On Doctor possibly get out of that I wonder?

I learnt of this advance thanks to being in hospital in Clermont Ferrand for a coronarographie.  I don’t actually know what that’s called in English but it’s where they put you to sleep and pump some nasty stuff through your heart so that they can see your coronary arteries as in seeing the safety pin your two year old swallowed on an x-ray.

I’ve often scoffed at the fact that if you are a registered player of any competitive sport in France you have to present a medical certificate once a year stating that there are no contra-indications to your taking part.  I once asked my doctor in Edinburgh to do it and she was very dismissive of the whole idea.

But now I’m scoffing my words and maybe she’ll have a re-think for at least it means there’s a chance something amiss will be noticed before you fall down dead in the street.  When I saw a doctor here on my arrival in June he told me that my heart was not producing a nice regular thump, thump, thump but was sticking in extra beats here and there.  Now anyone who has danced with me knows that my sense of rhythm is a bit dodgy.  I can put up with that even if it’s a bit hard on my partners but wasn’t keen to let my heart get its time signatures mixed up so I waltzed off to see a friend who happens to be a cardiologist.

He gave me an ECG and an echo sounding thing (I thought that was just for finding U-boats and fish), put me on some pills for a month and checked out how I performed in vigorous rides on an exercise bike during which my blood pressure leapt up off the scale.  I’m not given to exercise bikes in real life so you wouldn’t think it would matter but he felt we might be looking at the need for surgery.

So he rang the hospital and they said can he come in tomorrow and off I went in a taxi (normal practice) on the road and the miles to Clermont.

It turns out that all but one of my coronary arteries are ok and the one that is irregular (their terminology) doesn’t need the scalpel.  Sighs of relief all round but I am doomed to daily pills for some time to come, hopefully into a ripe and active old age like Yusef Lateef (91 next birthday).

As I went to bed at midnight on Monday night Yusef was walking on stage at the Marciac Jazz Festival to perform his set. Now there’s a role model for me.  And Happy Birthday to another old man, Fidel Castro 85 today.

   

 

This jolly map of hotspots shows the admirable work done by a consortium of local authorities to set up a network  of access points throughout this area to provide free wireless access for both residenst and visitors so none of us wandering around with our laptops, netbooks or smartphones should be out of touch with the wider world at any time.

Alas fine words as they say butter no parsnips.  I have tried this out a number of times in the four localities closest to my domicile.  In three of these I have been unable to detect the network.  In the fourth I have confirmed that it is there and even on one occasion seen a welcome screen, but able to connect I have not been.

So it's byte my lip and back to dial up.

I was in Aigurande on Saturday morning having a new silencer fitted to my car.  It was an important day for the town for other reasons as well.  This was the day of their big brocante and vide grenier, or car boot sale to us, when numerous streets were given over the buying and selling of junk.  Unfortunately it was a washout as you can see from the picture.  For most of the time most of the goods were covered by plastic sheeting.  Only the beer stand and the chip stall were doing any business and not much at that.

I can understand why you would want to get rid of junk but who wants to buy a box of corks or a couple of chamber pots, and believe me those were bits of high class junk I thought were worthy of a picture. But brocantes are amazingly popular.  There's a booklet you can buy that lists them all.  It's a nice yellow colour reminding me of the Scotland's Gardens scheme booklet that list all the garden open days throughout the year.

Back home the rain eased off a bit in the afternoon so perhaps it did so there as well and let the chineurs begin to chiner.  You see there are even special words for junk browsers and junk browsing.

I'm just back from shopping at Carrefour.  One of the things I've always disliked there is that you have to weigh your own fruit and veg and stick a price ticket on them.  I still dislike it but I must admit I'm impressed by the technology they've put in place this year.

The weighing machine works out what you've put on the scales.  I suppose there must be a wee camera in there focused on the weighing platform.  You place your whatever it is, more often than not in a plastic bag, on the platform.  On the screen appear pictures of one or more items that it thinks you are weighing.  You touch the right one and it prints out a price ticket.

If it doesn't come up with the right item, which in my experience is very rare, you can scroll through pictures of fruit and veg to find it or if all else fails there's an alphabetic search.

I don't suppose these machines are cheap.  Maybe that's why their loyalty card gives you next to nothing.  Often it's a chit entitling you to a miniscule reduction on something provided you spend X amount of dosh on a given day.  Today my card gave me a reduction of 5 cents on one of the 37 items in my trolley and added 5 cents to my loyalty account, which is now groaning under the weight of a grand total of 76 cents.

For a couple of floors in a hotel lift this morning I was in the company of a young American lady.  She enquired about my health - as ye do.  I replied that it was excellent - as ye do.  She then said "You smell great."

Fresh from the shower though I was I suspect that it was not my manly odour but the fragrance left by a previous passenger that had excited her nostrils.

But you never know.

It's not every prison that has an 18 hole golf course in its grounds but I've just spent three days in one.  Mind you it took them 137 years from when the reformatory was built to create the course, but way back in 1848 the inmates were kept fit by labour in the fields.  Now the young people serving time there are in fact employed by the hotel/holiday centre that the reformatory has become.

This touching little memorial to the bad boys and girls who were locked up there is at the end of an imposing entrance alley of trees behind which stand the wardens' houses where we had rooms.

The text reads " To the memory of the children imprisoned in St. Hilaire and deprived of their childhood, and to those who fought for the establishment of proper legal protection for young people."

The reform agenda centred on teaching agricultural trades and the place is awash with barns and farm buidings, most in a state of dilapidation.  I was particularly struck by the pig sheds but I forgot to take a picture.

Instead here are a few that I did take.

The entrance alley

Wardens' accommodation

Inmates' quarters

The modern welcome sign

My saxophone practice has suffered this week.  I dropped the mouthpiece at the weekend and the tiled floor took a chip out of it.  It's only a small chip but the result is that the reed is off the rails and much of the air that should be going down the tube is going down the tubes.

But I'm off tomorrow for three days golfing near the Loire (let's hope the rain stops) and am then away again for a few days so should have a new mouthpiece in place by the time I'm free to resume serenading the neighbours.

Fortunately the rain did not continue into Thursday and spoil the Fête Nationale.  We celebrated with a team competition in Chapman format (I shan't bother to explain that, suffice to say that it combines the talents of two players).


My partner and I scooped the prestigious third prize. Thanks I like to think to a prodigious 7 iron shot of mine.  Because of the lack of rain over recent months many of the ponds on our course are waterless seas of mud.  My partner put his drive straight into one of them where it nestled comfortably on the muddy surface leaving me the task of recovery.  As I sank slowly into the mud I whacked the ball 120 metres out of the pond, over a few trees and onto the green where we sank it for par.

That was not my only contribution , who could forget my delightful birdie chip, again with my trusty 7 iron, but truth be told my partner was the mainstay of the team.  Tomorrow I'm on my own.

I was injudicious enough to comment in an email yesterday on the warm dry summer we were having here.  In the evening it started to rain and it hasn't stopped since.

With a hint of pink as the paint manufacturers describe some of their off whites is about the extent to which I was tickled in the town hall on Saturday night.

The first play featured the devil suffering from depression because there was so little evil in the world.  She (for it was an all female troupe) summoned three minions who each proposed a course of action.  In the end the devil decided to saddle the world with thinkers.  Since the author is by trade a philosopher I guess this was his little joke, no doubt received with appreciative chortles in intellectual circles.  This audience appreciated it as well but more noisily. 

 

The piece undoubtedly had potential but the production was a bit stolid.  The three minions were dressed identically which I suppose is reasonable but they each stood stock still and delivered their radically different suggestions in the same somewhat wooden way. That was boring.  The devil laughed falsely a lot of the time which was also boring.

The second play, called Inventions for Two Voices, was a string of little playlets or long sketches that had nothing in common except – you’ve guessed it.

The potential was better realised here but not consistently.  One of them, interestingly presented in shadow play behind a white sheet, would have been much better had it not been for the fact that one character was a prisoner on all fours chained like a dog, with the result that no-one behind the front row saw more of her than the occasional bobbing up head as she thrust forward against her restraints.

Two hairdressers manipulating their clients’ heads as they discussed the suicide attempt(s) of mutual friends was a good laugh and I caught the punch line explaining that the result of their wrapping themselves in stripped cable and sticking the ends in a socket was only to blow the fuses.

Unfortunately despite the best efforts of the actress in another piece to allow wildly enthusiastic applause to die down before she delivered her exit line I missed it.  The applause showed that the audience favoured what we might call a very broad style of acting.  The style fitted the sketch though.  It involved a flippers, snorkel and facemask wearing couple, the male half identified by the actress wearing a pair of Speedos and adopting a manly posture, who have agreed to dive simultaneously into the water on a given signal.  They never do of course and wobble precariously as in a silent movie while they find a new excuse for not diving each time.  They stagger about on their flippers and come to blows etc etc.  All good clean fun.  But I’ll have to buy the script to get that punchline. 

At last a point shaved off my handicap and a bottle of champagne gained to boot.  Not only champagne but a jar of foie gras and several of gelatinous fluids containing various bits of duck anatomy.  These will make delightful tit bits for those enjoying my Red Army choir DVD at Christmas.

These trophies were won at Aubazine, a lovely little spot in Corrèze where I've played a few times in the past.  We had excellent weather and lots of jollity including, for half a dozen of those spending the night on site, a post dinner hack around their nine hole pitch and puttish course where I put down a marker for the following day's competition by scoring nothing but pars till light stopped play.

Play stopped before the light vanished at Trent Bridge on Wednesday.  I had the Radio 4 ball by ball commentary on throughout although I only sat and listened attentively in bursts.  But as England swept vigorously to victory in the evening I found myself unwilling to leave the game to attend one of the infrequent entertainments going on in Châtelus that I'd had in my diary for a couple of weeks.  I musn't be distracted tonight though but make the 21.00 double bill curtain up.  I don't know either of the plays being performed and hope to be tickled pink.
 

The American professor who blogged about seagulls and refuse sacks in Edinburgh's New Town has had a European adventure.

My regular email from the Cameo tells me that not only am I missing Senna for the second time but I won't see Life in a Day either.  I've got a little bit of personal interest in that one since the cameraman on A Lifetime uploaded some footage of its filming as part of his day.  I'd love to see whether any of that has survived the distillation of the 4500 hours submitted down to the 95 minutes being screened.  Though I won't be surprised if it's been bumped in favour of the animal slaughter the Cameo warns us that the film contains.

The director of Similar Lily, one of the student films I worked on a month or two back, had some distillation done for him when someone stole the camera with the last day's footage in it.  Despite what must have seemed at the time to be an artistic bodyblow the remaining footage has been edited into a coherent and entertaining short film that you can watch here provided you have or are willing to open a Facebook account.

A treat for anyone visiting me around Christmas was plucked from the Lions Club golf competition scorecards at Sully-sur-Loire on Saturday.

Prizes for those displaying prowess on the course included computer printers, golf paraphernalia of all sorts, cases of wine and other costly goods but still left a handy 30, 000 euros or so (not all from that one day) for the children’s cancer charity the Lions were supporting.

For the less successful with club and ball  there is always the leftovers draw and the innocent hand doing the dipping pulled me out a sleeve of three golf balls (always useful) and Jeane Manson and the Choir of the Red Army’s 2006 Christmas DVD.  There’s a medley of carols and Ave Maria and a French version of A White Christmas amongst other goodies that will have my friends vying for an invitation to my flat over the festive season.

Though further encouragement to come over is hardly needed, let me tell you that not only did Jeane Manson (an American resident in France since the seventies) represent Luxembourg in the 1979 Eurovision song contest but was Playboy’s playmate of the month in August 1974.

Perhaps inspired by a need to avoid such excitements I turned in a score of 36 Stableford points at home on Sunday to qualify as a proper prizewinner and, this being a competition enjoying Spanish sponsorship, was rewarded with a bottle of Ribera del Duero and a pound of Manchego cheese.