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.