I heard recently that when Christmas trees were first introduced into Britain they were crowned with flags of the Empire rather than with angels.  Not having any Empire flags handy I've had to improvise.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

 

Although I was at the Cameo to see Falstaff at the weekend it had been a while since I'd been there to see a film.  The end of my Tuesday class for the term opened up the possibility of enjoying their silver screen session this week when for £2.80 I could see a film with coffee and biscuits thrown in.

I daresay that was what drew me to Saving Mr Banks since although I knew it had something to do with Mary Poppins I've never read any of the books nor seen the film and only recognize vaguely a couple of the better known songs.  I had no idea who Mr Banks was or why anyone would wish to save him, let alone make a film about it.

But what a lucky choice.  It's a super film. The story of the tussle between Walt Disney and the author of Mary Poppins, P L Travers, over making a film from her book is a fascinating one to start with.  Then Saving Mr Banks is beautifully shot in period, two periods actually since scenes from Travers' childhood in pre first war Australia are intercut with the progress of the 1961 Los Angeles script discussions.  Then it's superbly acted with Tom Hanks as avuncular Disney, Emma Thompson as frosty buttoned up Travers, Colin Farrell as Travers' wastrel father and an excellent supporting cast. Then it's moving, heart-warming, redemptive - you name it.  A great movie.

My only slight reservation has nothing to do with the film but with the Cameo's restored screen 2.  It used to be a long thin room with a not very big screen at one end.  It's still a long thin room but the seating has been swung round through 90 degrees and a substantial screen installed.  The result is that even in the backmost row the picture loomed pretty large and pretty bright.  My eyes were not very comfortable. 

But then I am used to what is thought of nowadays as pretty much a miniature TV screen.

Edinburgh's Christmas and New Year celebrations have changed this year.  The town looks lovely but some old favourites like the torchlight procession have gone and pretty well all that made it an individual and interesting place to visit in the way of street theatre and participative games has been replaced by commercial entertainment and augmented opportunities to eat, drink and spend money on more of the same tired old cheap jewellery, funny hats, wooden grotesques and healing Christmas candles.

A haiku  lamenting their failure of imagination should be carved into the skulls of those responsible.

There was no failure of imagination in how the conductor used his whole body to sweep the whole orchestra along in Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra.  He waved his arms, bounced his head back and forth, threw his body from side to side and actually leapt in the air with arms stretched above his head as he brought the work to a conclusion.  He wasn't a young man either. 

I'd never heard this music before but I loved it and can see Lutoslawski rivaling Shostakovitch in my desert island selection.  One of the gems glittering in the silver lining that lies under my not having been recycled into August: Osage County is that I won't have to forgo the Shostakovitch concert I've a ticket for in May.

There was another musical treat for me last night when I saw the transmission of Verdi's Falstaff from the Metropolitan Opera.  This larger than life character was played by the very large Ambrogio Maestri who was wonderful.  The show is a riot of comedy and in this production the scene that culminates in Falstaff being toppled into the Thames from a laundry basket was simply stupendously staged and performed.

Maestri is obviously a keen eater but he's also a keen cook and his risotto was wheeled on during the interval entertainment.  Even more entertainingly he misunderstood the interviewer's request to try some and picked up a spoon ready to dig in himself.

I enjoyed a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor last night with the added benefit afterwards, thanks to a group of fellow concertgoers on the 49 bus, of hearing about the imperfections that my cloth ears hadn't picked up.

One of their number was vigorously in favour of original instrument performance of such baroque masterpieces and if you are of the same mind you can catch one here.  Youtube tells you it's from the 2012 Proms but fails to credit the band.  The BBC archives reveal all. 

The Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra gave big band favourites a lusty outing at Summerhall at the weekend.  You might think that music is not old enough for more modern instruments to have crept in but they did have a keyboard instead of an acoustic piano. The bus man would surely have forgiven that.

Tommy's senior band, the SNJO, in their search for authenticity in their tribute to Duke Ellington go so far as to reproduce the microphone placings of the era as well as using an acoustic piano. It wasn't the one man, one mic democracy of today.

Grappling with self-assembly furniture has left me with this nice little pile to dispose off.  The half dozen bin bags full of polystyrene padding and other wrappings have already found their way to landfill.  This lot will need a special journey to the dump.  There is no way it will fit into our recycling bins.

I'm hoping to be recycled myself after this evening.  No sooner is one production over than the next gets on the road and tonight I'm auditioning for May's show.  It's an American play that won the Pulitzer prize in 2008 and was very well received when it crossed the Atlantic.

A film version of August: Osage County starring Meryl Streep opens in the States on Christmas Day and should arrive in the UK some time in January.  I've watched the trailer and it looks fun, although naturally our stage version will be even more fun, at least for the people taking part. 

Despite Julius Caesar taking up a lot of time I've managed to get to a few concerts in the last couple of weeks.  The RSNO did Britten's War Requiem which was a pretty impressive undertaking, needing a chamber orchestra, a full symphony orchestra, the organ, two choirs and three soloists.  You can imagine the amount of sound they were able to produce.

Another RSNO concert that I enjoyed very much featured the alto saxophone in a lovely melody played early in Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, after which the player had nothing to do except listen to the music.  Much better that way round than waiting for half an hour before blowing your first note.

On St Cecilia's Day there was a lunchtime concert in her very own hall in the Cowgate.  An eclectic selection of pieces played on acoustic guitar by Edinburgh born Adam Brown.

It was a small crowd at the first night of Julius Caesar but a good few more were in last night and both audiences seemed to enjoy the show.  There's a review here which I think is quite a fair one.  From my own point of view it was nice to have a complimentary comment on my performance especially since I haven't been so much as mentioned in a review since 2007, even though I've appeared in more than half a dozen since then.

Road to Perdition is a film I remember for two reasons.  One is that it looked superb.  Indeed it won an Oscar for cinematography.  The other is less complimentary.  I couldn't believe how much money, effort and talent had been applied to not very much at all.

Although most critics liked Feral on the Fringe its revival at The Traverse evoked much the same reaction in me as RtoP.  Planning and executing the show called for a great deal of thought, inventiveness, ingenuity and dedication.  But to what end?  To illustrate in a toytown fashion the dubious thesis that shopping centres lead to the destruction of civilization?

Running alongside Feral was Ciphers.  It wasn't Shakespeare but it was cleverly constructed, well written, well staged and well acted entertainment set in the world of spying. The actors did a great job, having in some cases to converse in Russian and Japanese.  I don't speak either of those languages but it sounded pretty kosher.  It would be straining credulity to say that an hour or two in GCHQ and a brush with a strange Foreign Office department gives me any insight into espionage but the story didn't appear too far-fetched.  Entertainment aside there was food for thought in how pressure might be exerted by "the authorities" on the man in the street in furtherance of so-called national security.

The second tranche of my salsa course is now over and I still can't dance it with any degree of confidence or skill but that's never stopped me enjoying the Gay Gordons so look out you Latin ladies. 
    

I've jigged around from time to time to salsa music and Claire managed to get me more or less doing some proper steps in this wonderful place, but I'm now launched on an intensive salsa beginners course.

The first tranche of three hours was on Saturday morning in Broughton High School.  It was a brand new building when I was last in it to play badminton circa 1973 and it's been rebuilt since.  So it's doing better than my alma mater of KHS whose "new school" dates from the 50s and looked pretty seedy the last time I passed it.

Like Drummond where I do another adult education class Broughton was a hive of activity and I'm sure presented a much livelier and friendlier atmosphere than prevailed in the schools of my time.

That corner of Edinburgh shelters Fettes College and the playing fields of various schools.  They were all in action and it was jolly hard to find a place to park.  When I go back for the second tranche, for there is more, I'll take the bus.

In the meantime I have a wee CD with a man shouting out instructions to practice with.

I also enjoyed a quite different musical experience over the weekend, two actually, or even two and bit if we count the little radio play about Philip Glass and Steve Reich's two men and a van post Julliard experience.  I don't know just how true that was but it was an interesting insight into their different characters.

The RSNO did one of their Naked Classics concerts in which before hearing a piece time is spend telling you something about the composer and the work, illustrating points by playing extracts and so on.  I actually enjoyed that more than I did listening to the performance of Vaughan Williams' 5th Symphony that followed.

The SCO's concert on the other hand was super.  A brand new piece by Peter Maxwell Davis (who was present) was followed by an exhilarating piano concerto by Bartok.

I've been a Bartok fan ever since as a teenager I lay in bed and heard his weird and wonderful  Music for strings, percussion and celesta coming out of a radio just like this powered by batteries just like these.  I'd no idea what a celesta was then and am not much clearer now but the music doesn't sound nearly so weird and it's still a favourite.

Stravinsky is always associated for me with the jagged, even dissonant tones of The Rite of Spring but his Symphony in C which closed the concert was sweet and tuneful, in fact a bit bland for my taste.

There was a degree of upheaval in our production of Julius Caesar when it became clear that Mr Caesar was not going to be able to learn the lines in time.  So he got the bum's rush; Lepidus had his lines wiped out and became Cicero; Cicero (that was me) became Decius (that's now me); and Decius became Caesar.

Opening night two weeks tomorrow will see us word perfect - no sweat.

And finally here's Connor in the Scottish Amateur Poker Championship in which he came a thoroughly respectable 14th out of 140.

I am indebted to Classic FM for the reminder that today is World Saxophone Day, being the anniversary of the birth of its inventor, but their schedule is unforthcoming about how they intend to celebrate.

I imagine they'll choose a tune that's a little more cheery than this melancholy étude.

This is a cause close to my heart and sometimes it seems that all that litter is close to my house. Go to Clean Up Britain and help the country save money and look better.

I slept through most of Monkey Bars and given what little I did see have no regrets.

A glimpse of a smashing weekend in Spain

The Colombians, whether innocently or duplicitously, didn't put a best before date on this sachet so I don't know how old it was.  It must be some time since Ewan was last in Colombia though.

I used it anyway and it wasn't too bad.  However, on the whole I prefer non instant coffee.

The way the Richard Alston Dance Company swing themselves joyously around to Scott Joplin in the final piece of their current show, having already expended lots of energy in the almost obligatory nod to Britten in this his centenary year, they must have refuelled on coffee as the show progressed. 

Lots of energy went into Crime and Punishment but it was pretend vodka (I assume pretend) fuelling that one.  This is an excellent production that brings to vibrant life Dostoyevsky's novel about the destitute student who posits the idea that any crime is justified if it is for the greater good.  Not a few dictators have thought along those lines.

I like Quentin Lett's review in the Mail and am pleased to see that my reaction to the Brechtian presentation makes me less of an old fogey than him.  Rush to see it at The Lyceum.  Judging by the attendance the day I went you'll have no trouble getting a seat.  Shameful.

I may not be an old fogey but I fear I am more the gullible old fool than the wordly-wise sceptic if my reaction to Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner is any guide.  This is another absolutely excellent piece of theatre but when you get the programme at the end of the show you realise all is not what it seemed. How could I have been so blind?  I'll be helping Nigerian bankers free up their millions next.  Get to Summerhall by the end of the week and see how you get on.

It could have been better attended too, as could last night's SCO concert.

There was some Britten and a wee bit of his teacher Frank Bridge but it was probably the brand new Sally Beamish piece for soprano and chamber orchestra, Flodden, that kept the crowds away.  I find that I rather like contemporary music and Sally Beamish for one keeps turning out stuff that I enjoy.  Both her Saxophone Concerto that I heard at the Sax Congress last year and her Percussion Concerto played at The Queen's Hall last season were great.  I think if more people came to hear work like hers they would find that they can enjoy it.

Flodden was of course commemorating the great battle of 500 years ago and started off with a gut wrenching wave of sound from the singer interspersed with the ringing tones of a bell or a triangle.  This was described as a wordless lament in my neighbour's programme notes at which I cast a cheeky eye.  When words did come for the most part I couldn't make them out.  Whether the band were too loud or the singer not loud enough or the music too heavily scored I don't know.

Nonetheless I enjoyed the music but it would have been nice to know what was being sung.

The conductor abandoned his baton in favour of a violin to lead the orchestra in the final piece.  Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss.  It's powerful and tragic tones fitted like a glove the concert's billing as The Pity of War.   

I was sent a survey the other day, about what is not important, and was intrigued by the very first question.

It was "Do you identify as A) male or B) female?"

This I assume is the politically correct way to ask who wears the trousers.  It would make more sense to me grammatically if it said "Do others identify you as A) male or B) female?" 

Ewan was here recently preparing his flat for renting out and from the debris being thrown away I acquired various foodstuffs including some of this

Despite its best before date of December 2006 I prepared a cup in the hopes of recapturing the taste of bygone days when it was our instant coffee of choice, the choice being this or nothing.

I may well have recaptured the taste but it wasn't very pleasant. Let's be charitable and say it was stale with age.

The same could not be said about Ian Rankin's début play Dark Road. It was brand new after all but I found it pretty stale and old-fashioned.  Maybe the legions of admirers of his detective fiction had a great night.

Most reviews tried charitably to find good in the play.  The FT found a lot of good and gave it four stars and the Daily Record enthused.

Others were more restrained.  Thom Dibdin thought it "intriguing but imperfect". Mark Fisher in The Guardian talks about "implausible corners of the plot" and "clunkier passages of exposition".  The Independent quite likes it but finds a lot of the script stuck in novel mode that doesn't work when spoken.

Finding less to like was the Telegraph's Mark Brown who found the play "a criminally misjudged experiment".  Rivalling Mark Brown in dislike for the play is Joyce Macmillan who concludes in The Scotsman that after this "silly, sensational mess with nothing to say" it is "time to lower the curtain and move on."

Moving on to The Traverse later in the week Couldn't Care Less was a touching little two-hander about a daughter coping with her mother in the early stages of dementia and Translunar Paradise was a superb piece about memory and love.  It dispensed with words and was played by two actors who used masks, movement and mime.  They were supported by an accordionist whose music was integral to the action of the play.  

When I bought tickets for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet's appearance in Edinburgh I was advised that the show contained scenes of a sexual nature and semi-nudity.  The tickets bore the same message printed in capitals just as modern fag packets tell you that they will kill you one day.

Well we can only conclude that New York audiences are significantly more easily upset than Edinburgers.  There was nothing in this show that I would not have been content for my maiden aunt (were she not deceased) nor my servants (had I any) to have seen.

It was indeed a super show and since I am unable to provide a knowledgeable analysis I refer you to the Guardian's review.

You wouldn't have thought that Greek tragedy was much of a laugh unless you had seen Spymonkey's Oedipussy at the Traverse this week.  It's a fast and furious slapstick version with the cast of four constantly involved in inventive antics and lightning costume changes.  I particularly admired the change from Corinthian shepherd to Theban shepherd performed as the actor ran from one side of the stage to the other. The show is full of gags and even a modicum of audience participation.  I enjoyed singing along to "leprosy isn't fun at all" as disaster struck Thebes.

But despite the knockabout, as Joyce Macmillan points out in her review, the tragedy is not lost to sight nor is the show devoid of emotion.

Emotion in spades was on view as Sol Gabetta bestrode her cello and gave an intensely powerful performance of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 with the RSNO last night.  I'm a big fan of Shostakovitch and have listened to this piece frequently on record but was absolutely mesmerised hearing it live.  If I were not already committed to the delights of modern dance this evening I'd be on my way to Glasgow to hear her play it again. 

The rest of the programme consisted of another nod to Britten with his jolly Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and Dvorak's 7th Symphony which the sleeve notes on my recording dub "sombre and austere".  That may be but who wants to be jolly all the time.

I thought on Saturday it was really nice to have a quiet evening at home, a little something to eat, a glass of wine, listen to the radio etc.

I discovered today that I should have been at the Traverse.  There was a ticket magneted (a handy neologism?) to my fridge but the event had not made its way into my diary.  I can't even blag my way into another performance because Saturday was the last night of the run. 

What a pain.  It was a show with a Fringe First too.

There's a little table in the corridor outside my front door that I put there to act as a stand on which to display beautiful houseplants.  So far it has proved something of a challenging spot, inimical to flourishing growth.  Indeed it seems to be a deathspot for plants.

This is just the latest drooping its way to oblivion.  I watered it regularly and even fed it.  Though decades old Baby Bio could have turned toxic I suppose.  I've thrown it out now and installed a new plant.  Floreat! 

I enjoyed three very different but excellent musical events this week.

I heard Branford Marsalis play a modern classical piece at the sax congress in St Andrews last year but at the Queen's Hall he was back to his jazz roots with the SNJO for a celebration of Wayne Shorter's music.  The highlight for me was the encore in which Tommy Smith and Marsalis soloed together, first one then the other in a call and response manner. They kept it up for ages getting more and more inventive and more and more hectic till the final shared climactic chords.

In principle the four bar exchanges I do from time to time with my teacher should build up to that but the world will end before I get that far.

Fiddler on the Roof was a show in which many cast members acted, danced and played an instrument all at the same time.  One poor girl even had to play the clarinet while lying on her back.  That made fiddling on a roof look straightforward.  It's terrific entertainment although you could sneer a little at its sentimentality if you were feeling out of sorts, for even though the harsh context of Tsarist rule and anti-Semitism adds a little salt it is a sugary confection.  Perhaps the stories on which the musical is based are more acidic.

The RSNO opened their season with a little bit of Britten, the first of several to come, in honour of the centenary of his birth and for the main dish The Planets. I like The Planets and most of all in the suite I like Mars.  I first heard that when on holiday at my aunt's house in Liverpool in the 50s, not as a concert piece but as theme music to Quatermass.  It was great then and even without alien invaders still great at the Usher Hall on Friday.

The UK premier of James Macmillan's Third Piano Concerto was the jam in that sandwich and rich and tasty jam it was.  I loved it and was delighted to hear it a second time thanks to the following night's Glasgow concert being broadcast.  The Herald says it is a masterpiece and who am I to disagree. It can be heard here for the next few days. I'm listening now.

From my Commonwealth Games application for six sessions I was allocated five.  That you would think is pretty good.  And so it is but I started off by deciding I'd like to see a couple of gymnastics sessions.  The rest were in a sense just make-weights and of course the one I didn't get was a gymnastics event.

But all is not over.  I understand that the tickets of those who applied for more than their bank accounts can cope with will be re-offered shortly. 

This has been the first thing to meet my eyes in the morning for the past few days. One of those colours is destined to cover my bedroom walls. If only I can make up my mind which.

Filth is quite fun.  It's a pretty nasty story in many ways but a wonderfully exuberant film and it has a moral centre.

It was a relief to enjoy an outing after disappointment two weeks running at the Traverse.  The Collection was a mildly promising drama about loan sharks that lost its way after the interval.  The Baroness, about a relationship between Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame and a young poet, went on and on in a seemingly endless repetition of her saying what magnificent promise he had if he would only shape up and him asking what she wanted of him.  It was Denmark's play of the year in 2011 so their boredom threshold is clearly higher than mine.

For the sake of exposing myself to Italian (I'm doing a course to brush mine up) I went to see La Grande Belleza.   This was a yawn inducing excursion into the boringly decadent lives of rich Romans.  Luckily I found a few moments of entertainment and the Italian sounded lovely so it was not a complete waste of time.

I took in a case of wine for a neighbour who was out.  After ten days she turned up to claim it and gave me a bottle for my non trouble.  That's what I call neighbourly.

Neighbourliness cropped up earlier in the month when I was re-elected nem con as secretary of DORA (nobody wants to relieve me of the post) and when I went to Stirling to attend the AGM of Neighbourhood Watch Scotland.

That was quite fun in its way.  I learnt for example that there is such a thing as a Deliberate Fires Reduction Officer and picked up a free loan shark highlighter pen from Trading Standards, having lost out on their giveaway pink piggy banks.

That's one festival free week over and it's back to normality.

In my case that has involved the DORA AGM, my first rehearsal as Cicero in the Grads' production of Julius Caesar due to be presented in late November, a day in Glasgow and a birthday party(not mine).

In Glasgow I paid my first visit to their botanic gardens.  The gardens were neither as extensive nor as attractive as their Edinburgh counterpart but the hothouses were brilliant. Apart from wonderful plants one building shelters a number of statues including this intriguing one of King Robert of Sicily with a monkey on his lap.  There's a story there that I'll leave you to find out about on your own.

 A degree of normality has been restored to Edinburgh's buses too with the re-opening of York Place.  We will have to get used to going to stops we haven't frequented for yonks and whilst it means that progress is being made on the trams there's always a little downside.  My choice of six buses to get me home from Waverley has been reduced to two.   

Berg/Wedekind's Lulu is a seductress and I was seduced into trying American Lulu in the hopes that a novel version would warm me to a piece which I've tried to like a couple of times before.

But like seduction the result isn't guaranteed.  I didn't like it.  I didn't like most things about it; the music, the libretto, the story, the addition of civil rights speeches with no apparent connection to the action.

The staging was lovely though.  I liked the twin curtains of golden threads through which the cast flitted and onto which images were projected but that's not enough for a worthwhile evening in the theatre.

Much more satisfactory was The Diary of Ann Frank.

After its Fringe run Theatre Alba's production was appearing for one night only at the Brunton.  In my opinion a much more suitable venue for a story about people hiding in an attic for two years than in the open air at Duddingston Kirk.

It was a fine production and the scenes of joy at the news of the allied invasion and anticipated freedom followed by discovery, transfer to the camps and death were extremely well played and moving.

The rather sad sight of George Street's glorious eating and drinking arena being packed away. Roll on August 2014 and let's hope the sun allows as much open-air munching as it did this year.

Not everything has been put away yet. This is a shot of the so called mediaskins that have stood outside the Usher Hall displaying kaleidoscopic aerial views of parts of the earth.  A Scottish invention - the kaleidoscope that is, we owe the mediaskins to Korea.

I'm not having much luck with the fashion events that I booked. I did see the kilts and they were terrific. But I put the dancing hats against the wrong day in my diary and now Jaggy Nettle has cancelled.

I'd had my eye on Miles and Coltrane Blue (.) for a while. The other night was their last show so after band practice it was then or never.

(What's that dot in brackets for?  Who knows.)

Sadly I was a bit disappointed.  The music was fine but the story they wove around it was pretty weak.  Everybody did well what they were called upon to do but they were not called upon to do much of interest.

I didn't recognize any of the music and this chap has probably hit the reason on the head.  He has more nice things to say about the show than I have but hey, the end of the show was fun.

This was the last of 24 consecutive performances and boy were these guys pleased and ready for their flight back to North Carolina in the morning.  They fooled around singing and dancing as they dismantled what there was of a set. Even their techie got into the act, deserting his post in the box to deliver a poetry and dance routine.

You'd be well and truly knackered if you did 24 consecutive performances of the RSNO's City Noir concert.  That piece in particular has one of the most energetic climaxes you could hope to hear but the rest of the second part of the concert was equally rumbustious with Christopher Rouse's The Infernal Machine ("this energetic whirlwind leaves the listener breathless at the end of its five minutes" according to one programme note that I reproduce by kind permission of the composer) and the world premiere of Festival City by Tod Machover.

The latter, commissioned by the EIF, is made up of sounds of Edinburgh submitted by anyone who cared to, snippets of some of the many pieces that have been played at the Festival since its inception, new music by Machover inspired by the sights and sounds of the city and contributions from a small number of RSNO players who devised ways of using their instruments to imitate natural sounds.

All of that was shaken and stirred to produce an absolutely fascinating listen.  I was lucky enough to hear it twice since there was a short afternoon session describing how the piece was created with examples showing how the raw sound was manipulated and layered with music.  The session ended with a performance of the entire work.

By comparison the first half of the concert could be regarded as tame, but playing the overture from Verdi's La Forza del Destino and Bruch's Violin Concerto would still help you work up a good sweat. 

After the dance show I was feeling very enthusiastic about celebrating the last weekend of the Fringe so I dug out the Summerhall programme.  It's a venue that has hosted lots of interesting looking stuff of which I have seen very little.

I worked out that between noon and midnight yesterday I could see the last performance of seven shows and the last day of two exhibitions.  But as Sunday morning wore on my enthusiasm waned.  It was a lovely day with warm sunshine pouring through my balcony door and the attractions of relaxing with a book, listening to music, sipping a glass or two of wine with lunch and for exercise sorting out my window boxes grew, pushing Summerhall into the background.

I had a stab at substituting one Book Festival event for my seven plus two but that was sold out according to the website so a day of rest it became, as befits the seventh day.

I didn't entirely escape the Fringe though.  A year or two ago I saw there The Tailor of Inverness.  It was a play written and performed by Mathew Zajac telling the story of his father's wartime experiences in eastern Europe with the Polish, Russian and German forces ending up attached to British forces and eventually settling in Inverness.  Now Mathew has written a book telling the same story within the framework of his own journeys to Poland with his parents as a child and his discoveries there as an adult.  It's a very good read.

There is still the last week of the International Festival to go.  I have a couple of things booked and will no doubt find myself drawn to others as I was this morning to a concert at The Queen's Hall.

It featured the music of Mozart and of George Crumb with a starring role for the glass harmonica. That's not a form of mouth organ but a set of differently sized crystal bowls mounted on a spindle that turns continuously and is played by laying on wetted fingers.

The glass harmonica appeared three times.  Once it was overpowered by the other instruments playing alongside but in this fine work it is allowed space to shine and here is the solo piece we heard played by the very man who played it this morning.

Mozart's oboe quartet that started off the concert was delightful.  Crumb's two pieces were full of what we might call modern classical sounds.  In the duet the piano wires were played directly as well as via the keys.  The violin was plucked and its case drummed with bow and fingers. The piece had an undercurrent of tension and threat and its silences were of equal importance to its noises.

His Vox Balaenae that closed the concert is played by a trio; flute, piano and cello.  For some reason it's played in semi darkness and the players wear masks.  (To put them into a whalelike setting?)  We had a bit of amusement when the flautist slipped his on and the elastic broke.  The poor chap was a bit embarrassed but he managed to retie it and gamely got on with the job.

I thought it was lovely.  A recording is not a substitute for hearing it live but try this one.

If you want to compare the music with real whales check out this site.

Here's a slogan I came across in my Festival wanderings that will appeal to many readers.

And here's a restaurant that rivals the tram project for delay.




I took a short break from Festival wandering to visit the Lake District and snapped one of its beauties.
 

Back in Edinburgh I popped into the Livingston exhibition at the National Library.  One of many bi-centenary year exhibitions and events in Scotland and Africa this one concentrates on pictorial representations of the Livingstone story.  The little white blob nestling in the Atlantic to the west of the then dark continent is Scotland to the same scale as the map of Africa.  The head and shoulder picture of Livingstone may not be to the same physical scale but its size reflects the importance of the man.

Millepied is a wonderful name for a dancer and choreographer and it's a name well known to us all since Black Swan.

He's here with LA Dance Project, an American company he heads.  Their triple bill includes one of his own works, Moving Parts.  It's a fine piece of lyrical beauty quite different from the challenging darkness of Merce Cunningham's Winterbranch and the joyous vibrancy of William Forsythe's Quintett (despite its genesis).  The combination of these three works makes for a stunning evening.

To say my memory of Eugénie Grandet was hazy when I saw a dramatisation of the novel listed in the Fringe programme would be to endow it with a clarity it didn't have, but I knew I'd enjoyed the novel so I put the play on my list.

I'm so glad I did.  The director admits that you can't hope to fit the whole book into 80 minutes but this is a production that flows smoothly through the story, necessarily leaping over great chunks of time, but nonetheless giving space for characters to develop, in particular for Eugénie's growth from naive innocent girl to strong independent woman.

This is accomplished ensemble acting and sensitive direction.  An entire chapter of the novel is expressed in one over the shoulder look from Nanon the servant.

I loved the staging and its elegant transitions from one scene to the next. For example Grandet père is leaving the stage.  He stops, turns and looks back contemplating the action just completed.  His shoulders droop.  He clutches his chest. Nanon steps into the scene and without pause as she passes a walking stick appears in Grandet's hand, he has a blanket over his shoulders and is painfully moving forward to where she is already busy at the table; now an old man.

Teatro Máquina from Brazil present another 19th century piece but in an altogether radically different style.  It's Georg Büchner's play Leonce and Lena which they perform highly energetically.  They run.  They leap. They make wonderful noises.  They do marvels with bubble wrap.  They throw confetti.  Music pounds. They laugh.  They weep.

It's absurd.  It's great.  Only seven of us had the good fortune to be there.  That's a shame.

Beijing People's Art Theatre on the other hand more or less filled the Playhouse with their version of Coriolanus.  OK it has the prestige of being in the International Festival rather than the Fringe and it's a big scale show with vast crowd scenes and it's the mighty Shakespeare and maybe it was declaiming not shouting and maybe if there had been only one heavy metal band not two and maybe if I hadn't had to keep taking my eyes off the action to read the translation to right and left of the stage and maybe ...... but truth to tell for half the price I got twice the enjoyment from the Brazilians.

One of the cast of Mammoth takes a seat in the audience at one point and declares "This is the worst play I've ever seen."   It's by no means one of the worst I've seen but it's certainly one of the oddest.

At the start Jessica explains that she's made a mess of bringing up her son (not that he's a mess, she is) and that with a webcam in operation for his benefit (which husband pops off stage to sort out now and then) they are going to perform a play in which they set off to the woods as a family with her mother playing her son and accompanied by her therapy dog, to get lost.  This she sees in some way to be a re-enactment of their actual life as a family.

So far so odd.  The dog runs off after a rabbit early on and returns later covered in mud but minus his doctor's coat (he is I think her psychiatrist) to demand sausages from the husband who is not lost thanks to his mobile phone and GPS and has popped home to get a tent, a barbecue and some sausages.  In the meantime mother has wet herself in her role as son, goes off and comes back drunk dressed as The Phantom (a cultural reference that escaped me but which I have looked up since).  Jessica in the interim has a panic attack and demands help from the technical crew, demands that they lower the lights and play some music but not, definitely not some particular thing which I think may have been by Mammoth Life  (another escaped cultural reference) but that gets played anyway and Jessica rolls about on the floor a lot till husband returns.

So it goes on until husband, who has been taking Jessica back in time (a bit of psychotherapy) while she, mum and dog frolicked in the tent, collapses the tent.  Jessica emerges with a tail.  The dog is starkers again by this point and embraces Jessica.

A member of the theatre staff tells them their time is up and that's pretty much that.  It may have been a nod to the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (another post hoc cultural discovery for me) or it may not have been.  I certainly didn't come out with a clue as to what it was about but it was fun.

Circa: Wunderkammer is much more straightforward.  Acrobats standing on one another's shoulders, doing amazing stunts on a vertical pole, whirling hula hoops from every limb, cartwheeling and tumbling all over the place.  They have however a disconcerting need to take lots of clothes off.  Do I really want to see a man strip down to a posing pouch in the course of a trapeze routine?

The SNJO remained fully clothed throughout their excellent concert at The Queen's Hall, though Brian Kellock freed himself from his bow tie at one point no doubt having worked up a bit of a sweat at the piano.  The concert was called In The Spirit of Duke and there is a CD for those who missed it.

My personal favourite was the duet between Tommy Smith and Brian Kellock played as the band's first encore.  It was warm and melodic and drew lovely, soft, melancholic tones from the tenor saxophone.  Here it is on piano alone played by the Duke himself.

The earliest occurrence of "you can't judge a book by its cover" noted in the Oxford Book of  Proverbs was in 1929 but was probably untrue then in its literal sense and was certainly untrue when Penguin started in the 30s and colour banding told you what category of book you were looking at; orange for general fiction, green for crime and so on.

Covers have moved on a lot since then and their importance in attracting attention and sales is probably enormous.  I say probably since I haven't come across any quantified reporting and didn't manage to get that question in at the talk about how a cover for the paperback edition of Far Rockaway was achieved.

 It came from a competition at Edinburgh College of Art. The artist, Astrid Jaekel, produced a work from which the publisher's inhouse design team developed the final cover and endpapers.

Coincidentally on my way to the talk I walked along Rose Street where more of Astrid's work is on view decorating the windows of a rather drab building with a poem by George Mackay Brown.

There's an article and pictures here  and this is a little sample
 
Standing around for an hour in the kitchen of The Freemasons' Hall may not sound like a bundle of fun but that's site specific theatre for you.  And indeed it was a well nigh perfect setting for Pinter's The Dumb Waiter.

It's a little gem of a piece, puzzling and tension ridden and this production largely does it justice.

From my window I can see Arthur's Seat and from the mountain you can, according to the late 19th and early 20th century climber Caleb Cash see twenty of Scotland's peaks.  Unlike Munro and Corbett he hasn't lent his name to any category of mountain but thanks to what sounds to be a most interesting book we can now talk of the Arthurs which is how the author of Caleb's List, Kellan MacInnes, has christened them. His book is part guide book to the twenty mountains, part biography of Cash and part memoir of recovery from Aids.

It's now on Brian's list of must reads.

21st Century Kilts and Iona Crawford combined forces to provide a splendid fashion show at The City Art Centre last night.

This was preceded by a little refreshment and a tour of the fashion photography exhibition that's on there.  The exhibition contains photographs from Condé Nast publications from the earliest years of the 20th century to recent times.  The tour was led by an old theatre acquaintance of mine and focused on pointing to how the photos sat within the social and cultural landscape of their time.  Not just pretty pictures according to Ernie and everything he said rang true, but is it not a bit of an affectation to talk of bijouterie when you mean jewelery, even in the context of haute couture?

After another break for refreshment the catwalk show was launched.  The women's wear was attractive but it was the glorious range of kilted outfits that I was there to see and that caused passing pedestrians to take time out to peer through the gallery's large windows.

Once again I had only a cameraphone with me so didn't bother trying to take pictures.  Check out the websites for a peek at the goods that were on display. 

Introducing the show Howie Nicholsby the kilt man said his models weren't models but ordinary guys since that's what his stock would fit.  I got into conversation with one of them afterwards when we were encouraged to finish off the ample stock of refreshments.  He turned out to be the drum major of the Los Angeles Scots pipe band here to take part in the world pipe band championships in Glasgow.  A little less than ordinary I'd say.

Like many people I find maps fascinating.  I've got two framed historic maps on my living-room wall and on my bookshelves a couple of dozen one inch OS maps from the various parts of the country I've walked in.  So Mapping the Nation was an obvious choice from the Book festival programme.

We got a fascinating review of how Scotland has appeared on maps from long ago to Google with a particular focus on four atlases from the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries respectively.  A project to reproduce them has recently been completed.

Amongst many titbits I learnt of the existence of Open Street Map which is the wikipedia of the map world. Anyone can update it and make his mark.

Man has been making his mark on the landscape for millenia and that's the subject of  The Firth of Forth: An Environmental History.  The decline of the oyster beds, reclamation of mudflats for farming, the pollution that kept salmon out but fed Icelandic ducks and all sorts of other interesting topics are covered.

The lead author, T C Smout, lives in Anstruther and relates how on one busy fishing day in the 19th century over 3000 telegrams were sent from the local post-office by fish merchants to their customers concerning that day's landings.  Today the well known and much lauded local fish and chip shop gets its supplies from Peterhead.

Gavin Hewitt is a well known BBC journalist and hundreds turned out to hear him talk about The Lost Continent.  It's a sweeping review of the European crisis and how it arose with lots of entertaining anecdotal asides.  Questions from the audience mostly centred on Britain's relationship and were dealt with optimistically on the whole.

Britain's relationship with Europe may be troubled but it's not a patch on the Israeli Palestinian nightmare.  The Ballad of the Burning Star is a fast-paced very physical theatre piece led by a cabaret style not quite MC drag artist.  You can see from that sentence that it's hard to pin it to a category.

It's a brilliant show that gives us the Israeli perspective leavened by satirical gibes and sharp portrayal of paradox and parallels between Jew and Arab. Notwithstanding its humour (as an example the one musician is addressed as Camp David) it ends in tragedy.  How else could it?

Back at the bookfest at the end of the day the good people who make Isle of Jura whisky take over the spiegel tent (one of the many that has sprouted since the first was planted not that many years ago) and provide free entertainment and a mini dram of the craitur to boot.   Last night some islesmen took the stage and sang a few songs.  The whisky helped me enjoy them.

I was also delighted to receive a festival bookshop £5 voucher in return for ticking a few boxes on a survey form till I got home and discovered I need to spend £40 to get £5 off.  I can do better than that if I buy from you know who.

2121 is Susan Greenfield's first novel and is informed by her experience as a neuroscientist.  According to this review in The Guardian it is her scientific work in another wrapper and all the worse for being so.

I'm not terribly interested in the novel but I did enjoy hearing her air her views on how the brain's great plasticity is reacting to new technologies and about her work on Alzheimer's.  In response to questions about how to keep dementia at bay she suggested exercising the brain by vigorous debate could be helpful.  Afterwards, gathered round a table outside, I heard a group doing just that.  Their debate was about how much rubbish Susan Greenfield had just expounded.

I followed the brain theme at a lecture by Suzanne Corkin.  She worked for over 40 years with a chap who had large chunks of his brain chopped off in an attempt to cure his epilepsy.  It did help with the seizures but the downside was that he essentially lost his ability to remember anything.

His loss was science's gain.  He became a very willing collaborator in numerous experiments aimed at gaining an understanding of how memory works.  He continues to help post mortem having allowed his brain to be sliced into over 2000 sections for further study.

Permanent Present Tense, Suzanne's book about the work is one I will definitely borrow from the library.  If I remember.

It's common currency that signals from the brain control movements of the body but no-one has as yet satisfactorily answered the question of who, what or how the signals are decided upon.  It's all in the mind.  Well what's that when it's at home?

You can't see it but you can see it at work.  In choreography for example.  All sorts of strange signals are flowing from brain to muscle in the Booking Dance Festival Showcase, in which half a dozen US dance groups give a taster of their work.

That work varies from the pretty pictures made by free-flowing colour soaked costumed dancers through jerky urban encounters accompanied by a heavy beat to a spotlit Mr Universe type rippling his muscles.  It's well worth seeing.

Music and art are other mind body phenomena and they came together last night at The National Gallery of Modern Art in Martin Kershaw's Hero as Riddle.  This is music inspired by the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, some of which is only yards away from where the music was being played.

A short cacophonous introduction that made me think of Paolozzi's jumbling together of disparate elements is followed by an eight piece suite and images of the artworks that inspired each piece were projected behind the ten man band as they played.   The music is a riot of colours, tones and tempos reaching high and plunging low.  It's at times stirring and at times restful but never less than absorbing.

Alas like the sax gig I was at the previous night it's a one-off and it's five years since it was last played so you'd be best searching out the CD rather than wait for  a reprise.

"Do it again with an air of paradox" is a line delivered to the actor portraying Adam Smith giving a lecture at Glasgow University way back in 17whatever in Adam Smith, Le Grand Tour at The French Institute.

Two actors romp their way against a filmed background on a tour of Adam Smith's life and work.  They jump in and out of the film which includes vox pop interviews with tourists and locals beside his statue in the High Street and culminates in the laying of flowers on his grave in the Canongate Kirk.  While very entertaining and quite humorous it's an intellectual play (as befits one written by a professor of economics) and in trying to get to know Smith the paradox they explore is his appropriation to the position of great God of the free market obscuring his stature as a moral philosopher and arguably against the balance of his thinking. 

How To Be A Modern Marvel, also at The French Institute, struck me as a bit of a paradox.  It's nicely done in an informal staging that simulates being in someone's living room.  We are presented with the induction of someone into a sales sorority and when the product is revealed to us it's tupperware type plastic goods. This is an exploration of the way in which women were able to move from housewifery to employment in the 50s and 60s without putting in jeopardy their ability to get the kids to school and have their husbands tea on the table at the right time. 

Now I know that one of the things that British retirees living in France extol is how close to the golden days of British yore is the French way of life.  The play is satirical but surely even in France in this day and age it's purely a historical satire.  For the sake of French girls I hope so.

Yvonne Guilbert was a belle epoque caberet artiste who had that Je Ne Sais Quoi and the show of  that name, again at The French Institute, is a delightful medley of many of her songs.

Those three shows are in English by the way and even the songs, necessarily sung in French, have super titles.

Last but certainly not least yesterday was The Scottish Saxophone Ensemble and Guests at Summerhall.  This was a one off concert so however good it was, and it was very good, you've missed it.

The day after leaving London I found myself Leaving Planet Earth in the company of three busloads of theatregoers attending an EIF hot ticket event from Edinburgh's Gridiron Theatre.

Fitted with electronic wristbands we were playing the part of migrants from a dying Earth to New Earth where humanity would have a second chance.  Our on-board mentor with due seriousness filled us in on what was to come and equally serious videos built up an appropriate atmosphere.  Here's one of them.

We debussed at the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena where we were to go through the New Earth acclimatisation process.  We were led through this amazing building from one little vignette to another culminating in a bit of son et lumiere in the main arena.

It's a wonderful show which must have taken an extraordinary amount of work to develop.  Reading the programme you learn about the technological collaboration with universities and business in its development never mind the theatrical challenges.

I enjoyed the various bits and pieces but the illusion was constantly broken for me every time we moved from A to B, while a friend declared it to be the greatest immersive theatrical experience he had ever experienced.  Immersed to what end?  I suppose there is a bit of a message in that you see a hint that the wonderful future is going to repeat the errors of the past but on the whole I can't see it as more than a very elaborate children's game.  But then I'm no fan of Dr Who.

The Book Festival has been going for 30 years but until yesterday I had never attended any of its events. I heard three authors talking about their books

Alexandria by Peter Stothard - about the city, about Cleopatra and about the author - recently serialised on radio 4 some of which I had heard.

The Robber of Memories by Michael Jacobs - a dangerous journey up a Colombian river full of encounters with fascinating people.

The Golden Thread by Ewan Clayton -  writing and human civilisation by a calligrapher and former monk - Tom Gourdie didn't have enough time with me at KHS to do much for my handwriting but his calligraphic skills and knowledge influenced Mr Clayton.

The problem with the Book Festival is that having spent a tenner on a talk you are sorely tempted to lash out 25 quid or so on the book.  I'm resisting.  Either wait for the paperback or rely on the library.

In between books I was entertained by Worbey and Farrell who play duets and throw in a bit of comedy.  That description sorely undervalues their show.  It's terrific.

There was more music to end the day at The Okavango Macbeth.  This has all the simplicity, imagination, creativity, artistic and emotional impact that gets five stars in my book.  See it if you can.

On the first night of the Grads shows I was doubling as audience and front of house helper and focusing on the latter forgot to take my tickets.  Fortunately my word of honour was accepted so I was allowed in to see Romeo and Juliet and Agnes of God.  There were excellent performances in both plays.  I felt that the constraints of the venue made it a little difficult for R&J to deploy its large cast to full effect but I appreciated the efforts that had been made and was mightily relieved that I wasn't one of those having to wave a sword around.

No such problems for Agnes and the clever settings allowed the three woman cast to act their little socks off in comfort.  It's a powerful piece that gripped the audience throughout.  I just wish the Scottish government would bring the on-stage smoking rules into line with England so that we could be spared pretend puffing.

I then abandoned the festivals temporarily, though not the theatre, to shoot off south to a Golden Wedding bash in deepest Sussex.

En route I went to The Globe to see A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I've long wanted to see a show there and the Dream is perfect for that arena (and vice-versa).  It was great fun, though the pesky pillar in the picture hid from my view 99% of what was clearly a hilarious take on Pyramus and Thisbe.

 

   
From the quintessential olde worlde English theatre I went to the quintessentially olde worlde English village,

near which the bash took place in head-burning weather - my fault - I had a hat but didn't wear it.  It was a lovely event with old friends to catch up with and new friends to encounter.

Back in the great wen the following day I took in Liolà by Pirandello at the National Theatre.

A reviewer of a production of mine once expressed surprise (and that negatively) that one section of my cast spoke with Irish accents while the characters they represented were in fact Spanish. (I had my reasons!) So you would expect me to be sympathetic to Richard Eyre's choice of Irish for this tale of Sicilian peasantry. Since they were harvesting almonds and grapes he clearly hadn't reset the story in Ireland, which one could well do.  No harm done but I couldn't see a reason.  The main effect seemed to be to make it more difficult for the audience to make out the words.

Those of us who did understand the brogue enjoyed this little tale of a lusty young man who fathers at will and a rich old man with no child to leave his money to, but there must be better plays out there longing for a production.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart was a big hit for The National Theatre of Scotland when it first appeared in early 2011.  For some reason (she knows who she is) I missed its various touring appearances in 2012 so was delighted to discover that it was on under the auspices of The Royal Court while I was down south.

Not in Sloane Square though but in a loft like hall up a close in Peckham Lane, set out cabaret style with tables and chairs.  It was a great venue for this anarchic romp through academe, border balladry and hell.  Our enjoyment was enhanced by the free tot of whisky and the close up of an actor strutting his stuff in his underwear on our table.

I got to the Pompei exhibition at The British Museum, spent some happy hours in the V&A and rounded off the trip at a family barbecue starring my twinly pregnant niece.

Saturday's crop.

I'm With The Band - Traverse. Not bad.  A band called The Union made up of a Scotsman, a Welshman, an Ulsterman and an Englishman.  The Scots guitarist wants to leave the band.  You get the point I'm sure.  It's a neatly worked analogy but dragged out for an hour and a half it lost its charm for me.

Ciara - Traverse. Very good.  A one woman show, beautifully written, beautifully staged and lit, beautifully performed.  The life and times of a Glasgow criminal's daughter, criminally married but legitimately running an art gallery.

Survival of the Fittest - Sweet at Apex Grassmarket. Fair.  Six dancers throw themselves around energetically in two pieces. Nature versus nurture, problemette being I couldn't tell which was which, then a more straightforward narrative in which a gazelle is attacked by two lions and a buffalo (your guess is as good as mine as to which was what), is rescued and the rescuer perishes. A bit tame and lacked any sense of terror, relief, sadness.

Cadre - Traverse.  Having fought for freedom where are the fruits?  I expected the play to deal with events post Mandela but it was all flashback to the bad old apartheid days unless I closed my eyes for longer than I thought.  Disappointing.

The Events - Traverse.  Mmm?  There's been a shooting - of members of a choir.  The choirmistress survived.  The play deals with how she deals with it in an imaginative set of dialogues between her and various people including a psychiatrist, her partner, a friend of the shooter and ultimately the shooter himself.  Interspersed is the singing of a choir and a complex tapestry of words, music and emotions is created. Alas I wasn't engaged.  

Hot on the heels of the Jazz Festival come The Fringe, The International and The Book.  All of them will receive my patronage: some shows are already booked, some will be grabbed on the wings of good reports, some will be stumbled over by chance and others sold out before I can get to them.  What a treat.

Brief reports on seen so far.

Quietly - Traverse.  Excellent.  Meeting between two men from opposite sides of the Irish troubles. Confrontation yes.  Truth yes. Reconciliation maybe.  A future world without prejudice not likely.

Grounded - Traverse. Very good. Great acting from one woman cast. A bit long. You might say it drones on.  Thought provoking.

Fight Night - Traverse. Excellent. Great fun.  Audience participation and improvisation with a difference.

Have I No Mouth - Traverse. Mmm. Didn't quite live up to the heartbreaking poignant strapline for me but the mother and son argy bargy bits struck a chord.

Long Live The Little Knife - Traverse. The set and opening moments were promising.  The actors worked hard.  I wanted to like it and the audience as a whole seemed to love it but I wasn't too thrilled.

Preen Back Your Lugs - Pleasance Dome.  Brilliant show.  Clever. Comic. Talented cast of six do miracles with a handful of props and a dozen wooden boxes.  A must see before the referendum.      

That washboard takes some punishment as this band blast out a combination of newly invented New Orleans jazz and great old standards like Basin Street Blues.  They had feet tapping and bodies swaying in their seats in the Tron Kirk yesterday and I've no doubt a late night audience would have been up dancing.  I may check that out during the Fringe when they play some midnight gigs in a one time favourite nightspot of mine.

At the other end of the jazz spectrum trumpeter Sean Gibbs headed a quintet playing contemporary pieces, many being his own compositions.  It was an excellent set and sadly no CDs were available otherwise I'd be listening to it again.  But some previous pieces can be heard (and even purchased) here.

A different sort of music greeted me at the Fashion Festival runway show later.  Played insufferably loudly on top of a grinding throb throb throb I was so glad that I had earbuds in my pocket and could block out a fair bit of it.  I couldn't have stayed for more than ten minutes otherwise but no-one else in the room seemed in the slightest discomfited.  Either deaf already or going that way.  It can't be my sensitive ear.

The show itself was quite fun.  There were no seats.  The audience stood around a marked track through the gallery that the models followed and the numbers were low enough to ensure that everyone had a front row view.  Unfortunately I had only a phone camera and its out of focus, dim images caused me to quickly give up snapping.

It was adequate to capture this headful of hats amidst a small number of static displays though.

I voiced my admiration to the lady who makes them and expressed disappointment that she didn't do men's hats as well.  Sorry, she said, but depending on how flamboyant you were prepared to be you could wear one of these.  She must have had that quiet beige one in the top right-hand corner in mind.  If you're that flamboyant here's her website.

Passing Parliament Square earlier this afternoon I saw a wedding party having their photo taken against the imposing background of our old legislative chamber.

There were the bridesmaids in lovely long dresses clutching colourful posies.  That was surely the mother of the bride, the lady with the largest, flounciest hat I've seen for a while.  But where was the bride herself?

Showing just how not up to date am I with modern mores it took me a minute or two to realise that the two chaps in identical kilts, sporrans and Prince Charlie jackets were the happy couple.

When I got back from the North I headed for Muirfield on the last practice day of the Open Championship.  It's a good day to be there.  The crowds are much smaller.  You can get near to the play and the golfers are mostly pretty relaxed.  Some are even accompanied by wives, girlfriends or children as they go round and don't mind exchanging a few words with the spectators.  The weather was excellent as well so it was a nice day out.

For the competition days I sprawled out on a settee getting the best possible view from the telly.  I kept the balcony door open so as not to miss entirely the fine weather and did a bit of whooping, hollering and clapping to replicate the atmosphere.  Saturday was in my opinion the best day.  There was more tension and excitement than on the final day when Westwood's slide seemed pre-ordained as did Tiger's failure to catch up.

With the golf over I managed to get up and about a bit just in time to enjoy some treats from the Jazz Festival.  A new venue they've brought into use this year is the Tron Kirk.  It's an excellent space well laid out with a little stage in a corner, a bar along one wall and tables and chairs spread about.  The back door leads onto a little outdoor seating, smoking, drinking area perched handily on top of the Hunter Square public toilets.  You can judge how handy that is when I tell you there are no toilets inside the venue itself.

There are conventional gigs there in the evenings but an innovation is that you can lounge there all day supping a beer and nibbling on a pizza and enjoy four one hour sets from different artists all for a mere tenner.  The variety of music on the day I did that was great; big band, boogie woogie/ragtime  piano, vocalist singing standards with piano backing and a guitar double bass duo in the singer songwriter mould.

Looking forward to more of that and to seeing what the Free Fringe will put on there. 

Not many Shetlanders to be seen on the beaches last week.

I imagine many of them set off  to drown their sorrows here because the heatwave that has swept the country by and large bypassed the Northern Isles.

 Or settled themselves in front of a wee peat fire in the croft.

 Or even snuggled down in a comfy box bed ben the room.

Down in Orkney the Old Man of Hoy was unmoved however, despite the weather being even worse there.

And the Orcadians got on with the business of bringing home the bacon, or mutton in this case.

Great tennis over the last few days and what a relief to see our man get through.  It was the sort of sporting triumph that will ensure there will be dancing in the streets of Raith as well as Dunblane tonight.

Arty Anne is one of the brilliant set of shorts from the QMU degree show for which I've been able to find some trace on the web.  It's a lovely and moving documentary which like so many really good documentaries tells the story by letting the protagonists speak for themselves.  Arty Anne herself was sitting only a few seats away from me and seemed despite her poor vision to be thoroughly enjoying the show.

There was fiction as well as documentary and I loved a quirky little comedy that featured a young man who dressed up in the top half of a suit every morning and pretended to be a busy office worker while conducting an on-line flirtation.

And what about this juggling epic, isn’t it fun?
Back in the world to which I suppose most of those students aspire I saw Michael Douglas’s performance as Liberace in Beyond The Candelabra. It was a great performance, very convincing and quite out of what I would have imagined to be his comfort zone. He must surely get an Oscar for it. The film is a glorious riot of kitch with wonderful clothes and interiors to gasp at and bling that puts my one little silver ring firmly into the shade, although it’s ultimately a sad tale of love gone awry.

Things go awry for the characters in The Bling Ring.  It's a thin story about a group of Los Angeles teenagers who break into celebrities' houses while they're away and help themselves to clothing, shoes, handbags, jewellery, cash and in one case almost a dog.

It's said to be based on real events.  It seems barely conceivable to me that these well-heeled Angelinos wouldn't have had alarm systems connected to a response centre or at the very least that would make a loud noise, yet these kids burgle away to their hearts content for some time without being disturbed.

They have a whale of a time, post pictures of themselves and their booty on Facebook, do a lot of dancing, drinking, snorting and teen speaking till inevitably they are caught.  Not a lot of contrition is shown and the film ends with Emma Watson's character rabbiting on about the stress of being imprisoned next door to one of the celebs whose stuff she'd nicked.  I don't recall what the celeb had been banged up for.

Stick to Liberace if you fancy bling. 

It was an eventful week at Wimbledon and I'm glad to say I caught most of the major moments live on the telly.  Clearly that meant I wasn't outdoors all that much and yesterday when there was no play it was a toss up between breaking my duck at the Film Festival on its last day or taking the air.

I decided not to coop myself up in a cinema.  My first taking the air step was to take a coffee out onto my little balcony.  I settled down behind the window boxes with jauntily covered and protected pate to enjoy the sunshine.  The wind got up.  It buffeted my hat.  I clutched at it.  My coffee cup was jossled and coffee spilled all over me.  Shirt and trousers straight into the washing machine.

In fresh shirt and trousers (no jacket, no brolly) I later set out in the sunshine for a stroll.   As I reached the top of Leith Walk on my way home the rain came down and by the time I got home yet another set of fresh shirt and trousers was called for.

I should have gone to the pictures.

La fête de la musique is a modern tradition that at midsummer celebrates music with free events all over the world.  As its name suggests its origins are French and in the little corner of France that is L'Institut Français d'Ecosse Friday night was music night.

Since I play in a wind band the visit of a rumbustious Belgian outfit who dress up in medical outfits and bust a gut with wild blowing and dancing was the main attraction.  My band is decorous to the point of anaemia in comparison.
 A band of a different stripe were my entertainment the following night.  I don't know how usual it is for a band to launch a new album with a play but that's how The Stantons placed Le Cirque de Muerta before the public.  Some of the band members are theatre friends, all the actors were known to me as were many in the audience and the author/director was a particular friend so it was a very chummy evening which continued into the early hours in licenced premises a stone's throw from the Scottish Parliament.

The play was built around the songs but fortunately it was entertaining on its own account since I find it quite difficult to pick out lyrics from most music other than very slow and quiet numbers.

Part of the story told of the disappearance of children who went off in a bus led by a circus clown and for me a masterstroke of the drama was the child at the end of the show. Thank goodness I'd stuck the programme in my pocket unread and didn't know Ian was in the cast.

Hear the music for yourself here. (And check the lyrics>)

This is not a crowd fleeing from an alien spacecraft but spectators leaving the tennis show that's in town this week.  It's the ATP Champions Tour which allows tennis stars of the past to earn a crust by fooling around with ball and racquet in front of an indulgent public.

The temporary court erected on the Accies ground is an impressive structure and gives a great view of the game but you wouldn't want to ask whoever labelled the stands for directions since the east and west stands were the wrong way round.

The tennis is supplemented, and perhaps for some people was supplanted, by the eating and drinking opportunities that were spread around the playing field.  I was quite surprised that there were almost no merchandising stalls.  You couldn't come away clutching a souvenir Henman hat or McEnroe muppet.  The most you could do was buy a racquet or a sleeve of balls or subscribe to David Lloyd's tennis clubs.  I'd spent enough on my ticket to not even buy a programme never mind buy a souvenir, so maybe that was the organisers' calculation too.  (Question - would the attendance have been better if the prices had been lower? )

As to the tennis although I greatly admired the skills on show there was a bit too much tomfoolery for my taste.  I admit to being entertained by at least one bit of comic business though.  In the Henman Ivanisevic encounter there were naturally cries of "come on Tim", "come on Goran" etc.  As Ivanisevic prepared to serve at one point one wag added "come Nadal" to the mix.  Without a moment's hesitation  Ivanisevic went into Nadal's well known ritual, adjusting the back of his shorts, tucking his hair in, wiping his nose on both sides.

It was very funny and after all there's Wimbledon soon if you want to see serious tennis.