They're running out of time to meet the promised deadline of the end of February for the restoration of our bus-tracker at  Albert Place.  You'd think that after all this time (somewhere between 3 and 4 years) they could spare a man with a shovel and a screwdriver for a few hours from the teams currently tearing up York Place for the umpteenth time, relaying George Street, footering about along the entire length of Princes Street and laying waste yet again the Princes St., Shandwick Place, Queensferry St. junction.

But no; the reserves are in training for the promised tearing up of the east end starting Saturday.  That's the sort of promise they are able to keep.

I seldom leave a cinema part way through a film but even as the title sequence faded away and our heroine was carried screaming and twisting into Dr Jung's clinic I sensed that A Dangerous Method would try my patience.

And so it proved.  A few minutes into the action is Jung's first interview with the patient and we learn that the precursor to the psychiatrist's iconic couch was a bentwood chair.  This is a perch well suited to the sequence in which Keira Knightley contorts her body, twists her arms, tenses her throat, sticks out her lower jaw in simian style and answers the probing question "to what do you attribute your behaviour?" with the stranglingly grunted news that her father beat her.

Problem solved then.  We leap forward a couple of years to Jung's encounter in Vienna with Freud when we learn that Keira is now established as a medical student and doing jolly well.  The two psychs have a nice thirteen hour chat during which Freud analyses Jung's dream.  We see that this psychoanalysis business is as easy as falling off a log.

Someone, was it Gertrude Stein or perhaps Brendan Behan, said "a rose is a rose is a rose" but in the dreamworld a log is not a log is not a log.  No prizes for working out what Freud logs it as in his little notebook.

During the journey back to Zurich Jung assures Keira that she has the makings of a psychiatrist.  A new patient, himself a medical man, then enters the scene popping pills and making lewd suggestions as to how Jung should treat his female patients.

At this point my impatience with the film reached breaking point and I left.  Thank God it was a Cameo silver screen presentation so that I at least got a coffee for my £2.80.  

I was waiting to cross the road at the east end of Princes St when a tourist asked me how to get to Market St.  The easiest way I thought is to go through the station.  Just pop down the newly re-opened Waverley Steps, along the walkway and emerge through the back door into Market St.  So I told her.  Then I want to go to the High St. she said.  Thinking to myself that the best way there was up the North Bridge to the traffic lights, turn either left or right and you're in it I asked if she had business in Market St. or did she really just want to go to the High Street.

At this she pulled out a mini google map print, pored over it and explained that her enquiry was to enable her to rendevous with a coach early tomorrow morning in Castlehill.  Why she hadn't asked for Castlehill in the first place I can't imagine but I then sent her along Princes St., up The Mound with a right kink in front of the Assembly Hall to the top of Castlehill.

I expect the coach will in fact be parked on the Castle Esplanade but she can find that out for herself.

Yesterday was a beautiful day to be on the golf course.  My putting was on fire which made it even more beautiful.  Four pars and two birdies.  Pity about the other twelve holes.

All week I managed to avoid finding out the result of the African Cup final although I caught a glimpse of a suggestive tag line on a newspaper photo.  Today I sat down to watch the recording and at the end of half an hour of extra time when the score was still Zambia 0 Ivory Coast 0 up popped the news that the recording was finished.

Frustrating or what.  I found the penalty shoot-out easily enough on Youtube but couldn't avoid seeing the score as I searched.  But even knowing that it would end 8-7 in Zambia's favour it was edge of the seat entertainment.

What a good competition it has been and what good sportmanship has been displayed.  Not like much of what we see in Europe.

There was a hoolie on Thursday night with various groupings doing their party pieces.  I featured in one fast and funky number.  I think there were nine of us and my part was labelled easy alto.  It was mostly, although there were a few bars that stretched my fingers.

After the ukelele sing song finale we repaired to the bar for an hour or three and then wrapped up on Friday with lunch after two playing sessions.  I was definitely the least experienced and the least able player there but I had a great time and I've signed up for next year when I hope to be better able to cope.

My next major musical moment is the World Saxophone Congress in July.  I shan't be playing in any of their concerts though.

An extra tutor came in on Wednesday and for the evening session the four tutors formed a standard saxophone quartet (i.e. soprano, alto, tenor and baritone) and held a workshop on quartet playing that turned into a superb concert.

The following morning the new chap, Alastair by name, held a session designed to introduce basic jazz ideas.  I listen to a lot of jazz but have no idea of the musical structure behind it and the idea of improvisation has always seemed mysterious so I was very interested. He gave a spiel on some of the various scales and chord structures used and demonstated a few common jazz rhythms complete with demos.

Then he declared it was our turn.  He launched a blues backing track and said he would point at people as it played for them to improvise using  the techniques he'd described.  He pointed first at some guy who's been playing jazz for twenty years (don't know why he was at that session) and then horror of horrors he pointed at me.

I suppose you could say that the half dozen carefully rehearsed notes that I played in Hamlet was my first excursion into jazz but this was throwing in at the deep end stuff.  I didn't drown but you couldn't say that I swam an entire length before climbing out of the pool.  I'll be diving in again though.

Thanks to Peter Shaffer's wonderful play Amadeus we all know that Salieri was fiendishly upset by Mozart's take over of the musical pole position wherever it was in the Austo-Hungarian empire they plied their trade.

Having played some Salieri this morning I can understand why he was so miffed because his music is really lovely.  The piece (Armonia per un tiempo di notte) looked somewhat daunting at first glance but fortunately it was designed to be played at a tempo within my range and I didn't feel that I let down the ten piece band I was playing in.

The range of tempi that I'm comfortable with doesn't extend much beyond a metronome marking of 100 and not at all above 120 so in the slavonic helter skelter dash by Dvorak that we went on to, marked at 240 I was tempted to surrender.  However I ploughed on and waggled my fingers about somewhat aimlessly during the excruciating runs up and down and the wild leaps from low to high and down again.  I took the frequent key changes in my stride mostly by ignoring them but had the great satisfaction of  hitting the longish notes that occurred every few bars at the right time and ending the piece triumphantly on the right note and at the same time as the rest of the band.

There are 29 people on this saxophone week that I’m attending.  Twenty eight of them have not only been coming here for years but regularly attend similar events in other parts of the country.

A friend who lives in this area and who knows the venue from professional events said that however the music went I could rely on the quality of the food.  She was right about that and the bar is well stocked and the people who run the place and my fellow musicians are very friendly so it will be a pleasant week.

It’s just a pity that for most of the time I’m out of my depth musically.

There are four one and a half hour sessions a day.  For three of them we play in groups of different sizes; trios, quartets, septets or whatever.  The fourth session takes place after dinner and involves everyone.  Last night that seemed hard to me but it was as nothing compared to this evening.  The Dunedin Wind Band repertoire is a piece of the proverbial in comparison.

But I dare say I’m learning something, like how far I’ve got to go.

Loud music and noisy TVs in pubs I have long regarded as a scourge.  On the other hand a silent TV when an important looking news item is being shown is frustrating.  So if there is a TV I like it to be one where the dialogue or commentary appears as text on the screen.

The bonus ball is that like machine translation, speech recognition software frequently offers unintentional humour.  I particularly enjoyed a report I saw last night when an Argentinian spokesman accused Britain of miniaturising the South Atlantic and our response to the further complaint of having deployed a slinky new destroyer was that the vessel previously on station was getting cold.

Amusing, but I hope the bugs are sorted out before voice controlled vehicles are let loose on the roads.

An exciting match ended in a 1-0 victory over Ghana to take Zambia into the final of the African Cup of Nations.  They play in Libreville on Sunday night.  I won't be around to see it but given the non coverage by of the event by the UK news media I can probably record it and rely on not hearing the result during the time I am away.

For somone who is not a football fan I'm enjoying this competition a lot.  I suppose it's because I feel I have a team to support and that team is winning. 

Another Scottish rugby disaster.  I had been multi tasking during the first half so pausing and restarting.  When I switched my telly back to real time I rejoined the match not quite in time to see England's try but to see the celebrations.

I headed off then in a slightly depressed mood to have it lifted in Kirkcaldy by the mellow tones of a Scottish musical success.  Joe Temperley, a boy from Lochgelly who made it good in the big bad outside world and who at 82 still holds down a baritone sax chair in New York, was playing with the Fife Jazz Orchestra at the Adam Smith.

It was a terrific concert of classic big band nunbers in which Ellington's music predominated which, quite apart from its status in the genre, is not altogether surprising from a man who played in that scene. 

I got home at midnight and watched as things got worse in the second half.  Thanks God I had the highlights of Zambia's 3-0 defeat of Sudan to cheer me up before I went to bed.

In contrast to the snowy weather which has afflicted the south the sun shone over the Pentlands yesterday afternoon adding to the pleasure obtained from my round in Lothianburn's winter mixed series.  I've been part of a winning combination the last two weeks but yesterday I played in a trio whom luck deserted.

The evening saw me back in Fife for more jazz.  This time it was Kyle Eastwood in Dunfermline.  This was a totally different genre, even the one 40s number they played as an encore was given an up to date cutting edge treatment.  Apart from Kyle himself who wrung wonderful clumps of notes from a cello sized electric double bass and a piano player whose hands were literally a blur at times the star for me was the trumpet player.  He got amazing sounds out of the instrument from hair-raising screech to lullaby coo.  It's a mystery to me how you can get such a multitude of music out of those three little valves.  

I had another late sporting night; this time catching up on Ivory Coast versus Equatorial Guinea.  I'd hate to watch "live" on ITV4 since they seem to manage as many extended ad breaks as American football.  Zipping through a recording on the other hand gets you all the game and none of the pain.         

The sale of the house in Barbansais finally became fact a week ago and co-incidentally my ownership of the domain name www.barbansais.com came up for renewal this week.  I have let it lapse and some time today my pretty little website will no longer pop up onto the screen when you enter that name into your address bar.

Pretty little things are on show at GoMA.  I paid a post-prandial visit yesterday and particularly liked the lampshade tower, the photo of the pish balloon and the video of the alien disguised as a human being; for the modern art lover there are lots of other treats including some fluorescent tubes by Martin Boyce that I saw in a fashion show video on Youtube just a few days ago.

As is usual in galleries there was a chap keeping an eye on visitors and exhibits but unusually (I imagine) he turned out to be something of a modern art lover and indeed proselytiser.  He chatted to us knowledgeably about the exhibits and the development of modern art since the beginning of the 20th century.  Not only was it impressive but it made me look at the stuff with kinder eyes.   

This is a very exciting month for me since, apart from going off on a saxophone holiday, I was promised when last I complained that the Albert Place bus tracker would be back in operation by the end of February.