In the 1969 film True Grit John Wayne wears a patch over his left eye, leaving the right one in action, possibly as a wink in the direction of his political views. I don't believe he expresses any polital views in the film but I'm sure what he does say is clearly heard by the audience. His successor, Jeff Bridges, has his right eye covered instead and his mouth might well have been for all I was able to make out of his dialogue at times.

That apart I enjoyed the film. It looked beautiful: the heroes were rough and tough with hearts of gold; the baddies were properly nasty, and the girl who accompanies the marshal through the badlands in search of her father's killer is a splendidly forceful young lady. The Western is such a satisfying genre. You can rely on a good story with plenty of action and if not always a truly happy ending then a morally just one.

Morality gets an outing in Nixon in China to which the Metropolitan Opera did justice in their simulcast last night (tiny annoying sound transmission glitches excepted), not least in at last getting around to mounting a production nearly a quarter of a century after it premiered in Houston (Texas not Renfrewshire). It only took Edinburgh twelve months after all.

I've often listened to the music since that Ediburgh production but could remember only two or three scenes clearly so it was like seeing a new work, albeit depicting not the present day but a moment in history.

Can that moment when Nixon attempted rapprochement with China have helped turn the country that the opera portrays with its lauding of heroic peasants and soldiers into today's capitalist giant sucking up the world's resources?

If so he must be sitting in the afterworld echoing one of Chou En Lai's final lines from the opera - "how much of what we did was good?" - probably with the odd expletive deleted.