For me Murray's epic five hour struggle stretched over more than seventeen hours.

Before he made it to the semis I'd fixed a lunch in Glasgow and since I hadn't seen Bob for a couple of years and he was leaving the city at the weekend I watched what I could, which turned out to be the first two sets, and then set off for Glasgow taking the pricey train instead of my usual free bus to be able to make my appointment.  I had hit the record button at the start so was confident of seeing the rest on my return.

We lunched at the recently opened Martha's.  It's a fast food joint done out in a cheery bold coloured Cbeebies style distinguishing itself from the likes of MacDonalds by the healthy nature of its food.  A strange choice for me you might think and when I tell you that it's also unlicenced your astonishment will know no bounds. But I have not become a health freak and signed the pledge.  The head chef/manager is the son of a school friend.

To undo the damage that abstinence is well known for we repaired to the Drum and Monkey and shared a bottle of exceptionally pleasant New Zealand pinot noir and later to Princes Square to rendezvous with Mrs Bob who was taking a medicinal coffee between shopping bouts.

I got back to Straid Banrìghinn around 5.30 (via a sheet music shop now gone out of business) expecting to catch the 6 o'clock only to learn that 6.30 is the earliest off-peak service back to the east.  When did that happen?  Since that train wouldn't get me to the Usher hall for 7.30 I purchased an upgrade raising the rail over bus premium to even more dizzying multiples of infinity.  My cursing the cost of inter-city travel was somewhat assuaged on learning from Caroline, currently travelling daily between our two great metropolises and who I met on the train, that an on-peak day return sets you back 20 quid if you are not the privileged owner of a senior railcard.

So a brisk walk from Waverley (translate that into Gaelic if you will) saw me settled into seat AA30 in excellent time to enjoy a ravishing programme of Debussy, Prokofiev and Roussel under the always cheerful and chatty Stéphane Denève.  He'll be sorely missed when he hands in his RSNO baton in May.

On my way home I shared the top deck of a 22 with a bunch of cheerful and chatty chaps and chappesses whose banter was as witty as you might expect from the watering it had clearly received.  By 10.15 I had rustled up a can of beans on toast and was comfortably esconced ready to resume the match thanking my lucky stars that I had managed to avoid inadvertently learning the result.

I fast forwarded through the first two and a half hours and was gripped by the terrific third set.  As Murray's last victorious whack of the tie-break died away everything stopped and BT Vision declared that my recording was done.  I don't really blame BT.  Their gadget is not quite clever enough to cope with the Beeb switching from BBC2 to BBC1 to allow a regular noon time programme to run.  But I do blame the BBC.  Would it not have been more sensible to let the match run its course on BBC2 and show the noon time programme on BBC1 thus annoying only one group of viewers rather than two, not to mention recorders.  I insert here another gripe of mine.  They never hesitate to consign Saturday afternoon's Jazz Record Requests to outer darkness in favour of transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera instead of giving it a decent regular slot and padding out the schedule with one-off programmes when the Met doesn't need a 5 o'clock start.

Back to Melbourne.  I then struggled for 20 minutes or so trying to get the iplayer to run the match on my telly.  Getting it up and running was in fact very easy.  The problem was getting it to the start of the fourth set.  It spluttered and wheezed and stopped and started and flahed up mysterious whirling helices till I was driven demented.

I switched off the telly and powered up the laptop and within a short time saw Murray lose the first few games of the fourth set and thus for all his brilliant recovery in the fifth lose the match.

By a quarter to two his struggle and mine were over.

Oscar nominations were announced today.  I've seen a few of the contenders but by no means all of them so I'm in no position to give you any tips for a winning bet.

One I haven't seen is The Descendants.  I've seen the trailer several times and have decided that it's too schmaltzy even for me so I'll abstain on that one.  I did see The Artist and enjoyed it.  I think it stands a good chance of Best Picture because of its hommage to the very industry whose practitioners form the electorate.  The only other one of the nine nominations for Best Picture that I've seen is Midnight in Paris  which I very much liked and since I can't see myself getting through the others I'll give it my vote (virtual of course).

We are being very badly served by the BBC this year with respect to coverage of the Australian Open Tennis Championships.

Last year there was wall to wall coverage at all hours but this year only three matches are scheduled to be shown live and our only guarantee of seeing Andy Murray play is if he makes it to the final.  They don't even have a daily highlights programme.  As an innovation doubly to be deprecated we are offered an on-line text commentary.

All to do with saving money apparently.  Perhaps they could have shaved a bob or two off the synchronised swimming at the olympics instead.

A friend who wasn't there expressed an interest in hearing the recordings made at the Dunedin Wind Band Christmas Concert. So since she's gone back to Germany I spent some time this evening setting up a website to hold the music.

It's simple but looks rather nice I think.  The idea was to click on the title of a piece to hear it.  But clicking any of the titles whisks you away to a fee paying file hosting site.  My website host clearly doesn't extend the kindness of its free service to mp3 files.  I wish I'd known that before I started on the work.

Reporting on one of the many fatuous and generally self-interested research studies that insult our intelligence every other day BBC Radio Scotland declared that, thanks to competition, retail prices in Scotland were 5% lower than in the rest of the Eurozone.

I don't know about them but in this part of the Eurozone I use the Pound Sterling.

In reviewing The Well Digger's Daughter the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says "You will need a slightly sweet tooth for this movie...".  Well my tooth is undeniably sweet and I loved the film.

Bradshaw makes the obvious parallel with Tess of the D'Urbevilles but thankfully that miserable and tragic tale this film is not.  Indeed one is hard pressed to imagine such a history taking place in the warm golden sunshine of Provence though I suppose that at times life there is just as dreich and dismal as in Hardy's Wessex.  Think more of the Bennets and the jollities and contretemps of Jane Austen's lovers but set in a much humbler social milieu.

This is Daniel Auteil's directorial debut and the question arises as to whether his excellent performance is a result of his fine acting or his fine directing.  He has other very fine actors in his cast so we may have to wait for his second outing to resolve the issue.

In the meantime give your emotions a treat by going to see the film and if you have an ear for French accents there's an extra treat in store.

A chance car-park encounter yesterday morning led to a very pleasant afternoon.  I had arrived to play golf by myself when a lady unloading her clubs at the same time as me told me of a Sunday social competition for which she is the organiser.

Called the winter mixed the deal is that you turn up at 11.30 on a Sunday morning and teams of four men and/or women are put together at random to play a four ball competition.  Each player puts in a quid and the winning team split the pot.

It was a blustery day but rain free and not too cold.  Such cold as there was was mitigated at the halfway stage by a wee swalley of rusty nail from a hip flask handed round by one of the friendly three I played with.  We didn't win but I was more than happy to have contributed a couple of holes to our combined score.

It was good to play 18 holes instead of the 12 that the seniors stick to and there was a nice half hour's chat in the bar afterwards so I have pencilled it in for the next several Sundays.

The penny has dropped, all the way into the abyss of language history.  For yesterday I heard a Radio 4 news reader declare that something or other had gone up or down by one pence.  After the endorsement by such an authority of a singularity that I have noticed in the vox publica in recent years the OED will surely put in its tuppence worth and decree that one p, one penny and one pence are but three sides of the same coin.

Can less instead of fewer be far behind?

I've lost sight of exactly when the bus tracker in Albert Place went out of action but we are talkng three or even four years.  I've tried every so often to jolt someone into fixing it, from Lothian Buses through the City Council to TIE and have been fobbed off with more excuses than you could throw a stick at.

So amongst the select few New Year resolutions that I have made is to continually harass the powers that be in an effort to make 2012 the year of the Albert Place bus tracker restitution.  I fired my first salvo today.

I await a reply with impatience. 

Fun and games in Edinburgh yesterday.  Quite literally because a number of games formed part of the Hogmanay festivities.  Claire and I managed to take part in two, stealing ribbons from the minotaur as we stole quietly through his maze inside St Giles and throwing paper aeroplanes in the Hub to cause an invisible electric band to burst into music.

There were two other major games and lots of smaller things like hoopla that we didn't find time to do and despite our best efforts our team, the Uppies, were beaten by the Doonies.

It was a great idea which I hope they will repeat.

Fun and games later on in Dicksonfield where three fire engines were called around midnight to deal with a fire in a binstore.  You might think that's not a major event but the binstore in question is underneath someone's flat so the fire-raiser could well have been a widow-maker.  Preventive measures have already been set in motion by the ever vigilant DORA committee.