I enjoyed a super dance show the other night.  It is vividly described here so I won't say more except that one of the things I enjoyed about the first item was that I could almost imagine myself doing it despite my two left feet.

I didn't need to imagine myself doing Dr Faustus, which I saw the following day, because I had done it in the Fringe.  This was a recorded transmission of the Globe's production and it was terrific.  The whole thing was done with great verve and energy and inventiveness.  I've very seldom seen productions of plays that I've been in or directed and it's fun to see what other people have come up with.  Given the constraints within which we operate I think our production achieved a great deal but wouldn't it be nice to be able to produce something this.

Just down the road this week is happening the Edinburgh Independent and Radical Book Fair and I attended the opening event, a talk by Richard Gott about his new book Britain's Empire.  The Commonwealth and Empire Annual was a staple of my Christmases in the 50s and from it I learnt no doubt the history of the daring do Empire builders and the great good that the British had brought to the previously benighted peoples of our colonies at that time morphing into the Commonwealth. 

Gott's book focuses on an entirely different aspect of the story, the resistance and revolts of the colonised peoples against the coloniser.  It promises to be an absorbing read (I bought it of course).

What might be an absorbing parallel read would be those annuals of my childhood and some are available on Ebay so I'm tempted to get one and wrap it up for Christmas.   

For unknown reasons, no doubt deeply significant psychologically,  I have long longed for a thermometer on my balcony.  I even went to the extent of adding one to my Amazon wishlist but several Christmases passed without anyone taking the bait so I bought one.

I chose one with a nice big display that I would be able to see through the French window and that was described as being for interior or exterior use.  The accompanying leaflet however gave a more nuanced description.  When used outside it must be in a dry situation because it's only splash proof.

Thus the little shed made from a Quality Street jar carefully cut open to ensure that the gadget doesn't sit in a micro climate but which will I hope offer the necessary degree of protection from driving rain.

Now although I have getting on for a dozen different packets of scews lying around in my DIY oddments box none of them have a head small enough to fit the hanging holes on the back of the theremometer.  Thus the ingenious engineering solution of picture hook and cork worthy of inclusion in a Heath Robinson drawing.

       

I've been trying to catch up on the various exhibitions that have been running all summer before they close and the one that really grabbed me was devoted to a painter I'd never heard of, Giovanni Battista Lusieri.  He did the most meticulously detailed landscapes in watercolour.  They are absolutely lovely.  The exhibition (which runs till 28th October) also features a large number of drawings for paintings that he never got around to completing.  There's a quote from him somewhere saying that he enjoys colouring in so much that he gets lost in it and hasn't time to get on with new work.  So he was storing up colouring work for later but got involved in various enterprises such as helping Lord Elgin get his marbles and died before he could get around to it.

The thought of death wasn't far from my mind in the Cameo the other day.  After sitting through 15 minutes or so of ads and trailers, just as the feature was about to start, the man at the end of my row left the room.  An annoying time to be caught short I thought but as time went on and he didn't return my eyes wandered to the shadow beneath his seat wondering whether it was in fact a shadow or something more sinister.  If it was it failed to explode so no harm done.

The film was Ruby Sparks.  It's a silly story about a writer who dreams about a girl and then writing about her she materialises in real life and by writing he can make her behave however he likes.  The transition from thought to reality works surprisingly well and you can almost believe it's not such a silly story after all.  But it is.  However it's entertaining and amusing and touching and all that stuff so if for example you've been made redundant and need cheering up then it would fit the bill.

Last night's SCO concert had a bit of silliness in it too.  I seldom if ever buy a programme and often have forgotten what music is going to be played so I arrive without preconceptions and just take it as it comes.  The first piece had various oddities in it.  I was sitting by the percussion so had a good view of the striking of a gong that was semi-submerged in a bath of water (well it looked like water but I suppose could have been gin).  That made the saw-playing by another percussionist unexceptional and the short shouting match in French between a trumpeter and a horn player run of the mill.  I was irritated in quiet passages by a low background noise that I took to be the hall's central heating but since it didn't occur during the other pieces must have been part of Mr Zender's soundscape.  He being the man responsible for turning some pretty little piano pieces by Debussy into this slightly daft fifteen minute experience.  

There's a lot to admire in Sex and God; elegant writing, excellent and moving performances, a spare but eye-catching set, atmospheric lighting and subtle sound, but I'm seldom entirely happy with a format in which the characters on stage don't interact but deliver their separate (albeit connected) narratives directly to us.

I suppose that here you could say that the lack of interaction underscores the plight being described and heightens the message being delivered that woman's lot has not been a happy one (surely not a universal truth).

The lot of the eponymous heroine of Haunting Julia, who never appears on stage except perhaps to the seventh sons of seventh sons, was certainly not a happy one.  Burdened by a creative gift, suffocated by loving parents and abandoned by the man she loved she took her own life.

That may not sound a very cheery tale but the play entertains in a solid old-fashioned way as father, ex-boyfriend and psychic argue amongst themselves about the truth of her death while her ghostly presence makes itself felt.  It was a very good production and the stage management in particular rose admirably to the challenge of having a ghostly presence sweep across the set.

I slightly reluctantly agreed, being at a looseish end at the time, to answer a few questions on the phone for a study into lifestyles and alcohol being carried out by the University of Stirling.

Having readied myself to undergo their forensic probing into my drinking habits I was not a little miffed to be eliminated when I answered "none" to their second question, viz.  "how many people aged between 16 and 65 are there in your household?"

Don't they care about the senior citizen?

I've got all three phones cheeping now which is quite a noise but not as noisy as Shostakovich's 11th Symphony with which the RSNO's new man, Peter Oundjian, opened the season.  It's a long piece full of tension and excitement, and although it's not all loud it works up to a crash bang finale where one wee percussionist who's been sitting quietly for an hour at last gets out a hammer and bashes his three anvils for a minute or two until the last notes ring out.

At the Usher Hall on Friday the changing moods of the symphony were underscored by changes in stage lighting culminating in a blackout as the music crashed to an end.  It was somewhat more restrained and subtle than the full pop concert extravaganza of swirling coloured beams and smoke effects but who knows where this will lead over the next few months.  

It's long been annoying that when I'm busy in the kitchen, the cooker hood sooking noisily and the radio playing, I can't hear the phone.  Every time I've missed a call, and it's surprising how many calls seem to come then, I've declared that I must install an extra handset in the kitchen.

So missing a call the other day I decided enough was enough, went straight to ebay, found what I needed and bought a handset.

Not much later the same day I saw that the answerphone had a message.  But I'd been sitting reading for a couple of hours and couldn't possibly have missed a call unless....yes the damned phone's ringing mechanism was broken.

So back to ebay for a new base station.  Now I've got a phone that rings amd an extension in the kitchen that also rings but from the previously noisy one beside my bed not a cheep.  

I got onto the golf course today for the first time since I got back from France, having been prevented by rain and wind last week and by indolence the week before.  Had my partner not lost a ball at one point we'd have got into the clubhouse before the rain but as it was we got a bit drookit on the 18th. That apart the weather was quite pleasant.

The new piste at the ski centre is coming on apace but something else has sprung up which I couldn't work out.  It looked like a set of runs for sledges or toboggans.  Checking on-line afterwards I find the runs are for something called Zorbing that it will take a braver man than me to have a go at.

However I must do some straightforward skiing there over the next few months because after many winters saying to myself that I must go skiing again I've booked a week in the Italian Dolomites in March.  Given that it's ten years since I had a ski on my feet I feel I shall be in need of a little preparatory work to recover the ability to fall over without hurting myself too badly.