The university residence where I'm staying provides an excellent and fortifying breakfast for which I'm thankful since trying to catch as many events as I can I've found time for only two restaurant meals all week and have survived by snacking between shows.

Today looking for something hot in a rainy lunch hour I avoided the establishment offering leak (sic) and potato soup (there could be something quite nasty in that) and got a delicious mugful of lentil and vegetable in another shop where the lady who served me told me that coriander is another word that presents a spelling challenge to the local takeaway food industry.

The Tailend fish and chips shop, whose product quality reaches the same high standard as its confrère in Leith Walk, has provided a tasty nibble or two for me and for  a goodly proportion of the congress delegates just as the grass in the museum grounds that I've walked through every morning provides an enormous number of rabbits with their daily bread.

I've heard a lot of what you might call old music today (Debussy, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Dukas) but a mountain of new pieces as well including the world premiere of Edinburgh composer Helen Grime's Shadowplay for soprano saxophone and piano played by my teacher Rocio Banyuls Bertomeu and Audrey Innes. It's one of those avant garde pieces that the man who enjoyed Sting would not have called music.

As well as Rocio, the tutors who run the saxophone week that's likely to be a regular feature of my winter have played and/or conducted here so I feel I'm in more than capable hands and probably have a chance of becoming a better saxophonist than golfer.  However that's not setting the bar particularly high so don't put money aside to buy the debut album.

Thanks to a bit of silliness by the French I can even claim with absolute truth to have performed at the 16th World Saxophone Congress here in St Andrews in July 2012.  The saxophone ensemble of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Dance de Paris gave a concert this evening in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy.  Why is no one here from the conservatoire by the Clyde I wonder?

Anyway leaving that aside the concert featured Sent from my iFaune - for ensemble ad lib and interactive audience.  In this, while the ensemble played the audience were invited to switch on their phones at maximum volume and ring other members of the audience who were not to answer the calls but let them ring.  If you happened to get a call from someone not in the audience during this time you could answer it and politely explain that you couldn't take the call because you were playing in a concert.

Daft but I played my part so there I am - a world premiere performer.