This is the university blowing its own trumpet while renovating a large bit of Chamber's Street.  One of the more curious boasts is that it won more Olympic medals than any other university. 

Richard The Third is over at last and here's a pretty picture of the cast to celebrate the fact.

I enjoyed my first Sunday night off for months by going to a splendid concert given by the Edinburgh University Chamber Orchestra.  This group is made up not of music students but of students who happen to play an instrument and I thought their playing was magnificent.

They had the benefit of professional musicians as conductors and soloists but the 40 odd players rose to the challenge of working with them without putting a foot wrong as far as I could tell.  The Reid Hall was the perfect venue and was filled with wonderful sound from the opening bars of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto to the closing notes of his Seventh Symphony. There were some particularly lovely moments from the wind section and the girl who played first flute was deservedly singled out by the conductor at the end.

Earlier in the day I'd been to another concert given by wind soloists from the SCO.  As an aspiring woodwind player I feel I should have enjoyed that more than I did but, pleasant as it was, the six players, quite naturally, couldn't summon up the enveloping mass of sound that the orchestra did.

I'll be trying to summon up a bit of sound myself shortly in the Dunedin Wind Band's St Andrew's Day concert.  Do come. 

The amdram talent contest I was in last year finally started its run on Sky Arts this week.  Not being a Sky subscriber I didn't see it but I am told we featured briefly and will also appear in further episodes.  Someone is recording it so fingers crossed the cast will get together at a future date, crack open a bottle or two and enjoy the experience again round a tv set.

In the meantime I have to be contented with my photo in the Edinburgh Evening News.

I had some friends from Belgium staying for a week.

They had a great time.  They did the obvious things like the Castle and Holyrood Palace and being keen sailors they also fitted in the royal yacht.  I sent them to a Scottish music and dance show at the St James hotel.  I wasn't able to go myself but I've seen it (or rather a previous version because it's probably 30 or 40 years since I was there).   They loved it, as well they might.

I was in fact at another dance show which was wonderful, despite the demonstrating crowds outside the theatre and the slogan shouters who popped up inside from time to time.  More about that later perhaps.

We also caught some warlocks and witches in a dance, which was the only part of the Beltaine Fire Society's Samhuinn Festival that I could make head or tail of as I strained on tiptoe to see what was going on in Parliament Square on a bitterly cold Wednesday night.  I thought I was going to lose my nose to frostbite but happily managed to get to a Laphroig relief point in the nick of time.

On a superbly sunny day we went off on an excursion.  We stopped first in South Queensferry to admire the bridges and indeed the town.  The main street is lovely.  Then we drove through Fife to St Andrews where, both being keen golfers, a stroll over the Old Course was a great treat. 

We had visited Lower Largo en route to admire Alexander Selkirk.  Patrick was not only familiar with Treasure Island from childhood but had trodden the soil of the Juan Fernandez islands where Selkirk was marooned.  Anstruther was another stop on the way but we didn't have time to fit in a visit to the fisheries museum as I had hoped to do.

One of the things that pleased me most about their visit was how complimentary they were about the various restaurant meals they had.  Continentals can be a bit snooty about British cuisine so it was nice to know that a favourable impression will be going back across the Channel.

I've often wondered whyThe Mousetrap continues to pull in the punters (it's now been going for 60 years) and having finally seen it in a packed King's theatre this week I'm still wondering.  It pulled me in out of curiosity about that longevity but surely the vast majority of the audience were there because they expected to be right royally entertained. 

I'd suggest that if they wanted to see a show about a number of people trapped by inclement weather in a country house waiting for one of them to be murdered by one of the others they'd be much better off  petitioning the management of the King's to bring to town Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound.     

It's not that The Mousetrap is bad exactly.  It's just that it's bland, unexciting and creakingly old-fashioned.

By contrast The Cone Gatherers, a play drawn from a novel written in the 50s and which deals with landowners, their almost feudal relationship with their servants and the disdain both feel towards the lowest class of society didn't feel in the least old-fashioned. It received an excellent production and first class performances.  It's a long time since I read the novel so I'd forgotten the plot completely.  Thanks to Maurice Lindsay's History of Scottish Literature I can tell you that the play doesn't end in quite the same way as the novel but I don't think it traduces the author's intentions.  

It deserved a much larger house than it got, as did The Artist Man and The Mother Woman. The story of a mother's boy art teacher who decides he must find a wifie (that's not a mis-spelt communications network by the way) is billed as a black comedy and the description is well justified.  It's very well performed and has some very funny lines though they are a bit too ripe to reproduce here.

That was at The Traverse.  The Lyceum's current offering is A Midsummer Night's Dream,  You'd have thought that after 400 years all possible changes must have been rung on this well loved comedy.  But you'd be wrong.  For a start this production sets the action in the winter.

It's a lovely production, brim full of clever touches.  I've seen the play often and I'll probably see it many more times but I'll be surprised if I see a version that's more imaginative.