Safely back from my first ski trip in ten years.

There wasn't a great deal of the hoped for Spring sunshine and blue skies but two days in the middle of the week were quite pleasant and I took my camera out.  Before that there had been mist and drizzly snow to add an extra layer of discomfort to the pain and suffering that my thighs were undergoing.

It didn't take very long to get the mechanics of skiing going again although I wasn't skiing with a great deal of confidence for the first  two or three days and I kept away from anything too steep or too narrow for the entire week.  That didn't ensure that I stayed on my feet all the time though. 

The week started off with a last minute cancellation of band practice because of fears that should the conductor get into town from the snow stricken wastes of West Lothian she might not get home again.

So I went to the pictures.  I had a choice between Shell and Side Effects, chose the latter and wished I'd tried the former.  Not that it was bad but it didn't live up to the hype in the programme (do they ever?) and it wasn't any more cheerful than Shell promised to be from what I had heard of it.

That was followed by a much more enjoyable evening at a Scottish Dance Theatre show.  Not many people were there which is a crying shame.  The evening started with our being told about technical problems delaying things.  I was quite taken in and launched into conversation to fill the gap but was summarily and sharply cut down by my more streetwise companion who knew that this was a wee spoof and the show was actually under way.  There was some great crowd forming and menacing stage crossing that I've marked down as just the ticket for conspirators approaching their assassination target and a brilliant trio duel (can you have a three person duel?) in which each dancer took charge by performing an action that caused their piece of music to be played instead of someone else's.  It was like playing three dimensional scissors, paper, stone to music.

The second half of the bill was a tongue in cheek Scandinavian/Russian angstfest with a hint of Greek tragedy in which dead birds were thrown around and a stag (also dead) was dragged across the stage. Blood dripped into a bucket, a woman with a blood-soaked bandage where her eyes should be wandered around, shots were heard and various melodramatic scenes were athletically danced.

The story of Novecento the baby found on a transatlantic liner who grew up on board and played the piano as it crossed and recrossed the Atlantic seemed almost normal in comparison.  A French translation of this Italian play was presented by a Belgian duo at the French Institute.  Although they were two one was a non-speaking pianist.  This is actually a monologue, very hard to do well and this actor was very good.  He moved convincingly between his role as the narrator (a trumpet player on board the liner) and other characters and did a great job evoking a storm.

It's been a popular play over the years and has been made into a film but critical reaction has varied from those who think it's drivel to those who think it's transcendental art.  I've seen it twice and am somewhere in between.

Ma Vlast is probably given the transcendental tag by Czech nationalists if by no-one else and I thought I liked it but was underwhelmed by hearing it tonight complemented by giant images of Czech countryside, townscapes, woods, concentration camp inmates and other things  projected onto screens above the orchestra.  These were said to be illustrative of the feeling of the music rather than directly programmatic but I found them by and large distracting.  

The last of the current pie, play and a pint season was written by a stand-up comedian, whose first play it is.  Well done for a first effort I guess would be my verdict on this comedy with a serious message in which a drunken Glaswegian painter spars with his posh art dealer.  The message is to do with the waste of life in war and I shan't spoil anyone's enjoyment by giving away what happens.    

The concert went pretty well on Friday and afterwards some friends came back to the flat for a drink.  I'd laid in some nibbles in anticipation of this.  Amongst them was a packet of crisps that proved surplus to requirements and on Saturday I thought I'd munch through them while watching the rugby.

Now one of my frequent moans is that the food industry can't leave well alone.  No sooner, for example, had the British public developed a taste for meusli than the industry started mucking about with it.  There are shelf-fulls of variations; with chocolate chips, with tropical fruit, crisp and crunchy etc.  You are lucky to find a straightforward bag of oats with some nuts and raisins and sultanas mixed in.

The same is true and even worse with crisps.  A good honest plain crisp is hard to find.  Dashing along the supermarket aisle scanning the packets, rejecting tomato and beef, barbecue, mexican chilli and so on and so on my eyes alighted on pepper and salt.  I grabbed it as likely to be the closest to plain that I would find without spending half an hour on the job.

My scan had unfortunately missed the adjective "popped".  I had never heard of a popped crisp.  They are apparently not baked, not fried, just popped.  On examination you can see bubbles on the surface and they are thicker than normal crisps.  They have a sort of woolly texture in the mouth.

They do not taste at all like potato crisps, unless crisps that have popped their clogs.  This is not surprising when you see that the principal ingredients are "potato flake (??), rice flour and salt".

Unfortunately we have not yet received our promised food waste recycling facility so these have gone to landfill.

So far this winter I have been exceptionally lucky and have avoided the least suspicion of a cold. This Friday however I'll have a red nose and be wheezing away.

Yesterday's snow has made a mess of my primulas and pansies but didn't get through the window to damage this beauty

I thought my Spring plantings were looking rather pretty in the good weather at the weekend

High Society is the complete antithesis of Werther; though just as we know from the start that Werther will top himself for love we know Cole Porter's heroine Tracy will end up back with her ex-husband Dexter.  Not even a bit of skinny dipping with Mike on the eve of her projected wedding with George will get in the way.

It's a brilliant product of the American musical theatre, although it started life on film, and this touring production rattles along merrily from the razzle dazzle of the opening title number where the numerous flunkies in the Lord household strut their stuff and Tracy dances through an extraordinary number of lightning fast costume changes, to the final happy curtain.

On the way endearing Uncle Willie sings a song in praise of gin and does as much inappropriate bottom pinching as he can get away with . The young Bolshevik writer sings Who Wants to be a Millionaire without a trace of irony while relaxing with a glass of champagne. Younger sister Dinah gets into the action whenever she can and with the help of a glass or three Tracy is reconciled to her reprobate father and dull old George eventually does the decent thing.

What a swell party they have and how we all enjoyed sharing it.

Expatriates upset at being denied their say in next year's referendum may find a small degree of solace by joining residents in participating in Edinburgh's consultation on its transport strategy.  I am sure that the views of occasional visitors would be welcome too.

The review of Scottish Opera's production of Werther that best approximates my reaction to it comes from The Scottish Mail On Sunday -

" this new production makes for a wonderful , albeit wonderfully miserable, evening out, with the downbeat storyline offset by memorable vocal performances and dazzling playing by an orchestra (conducted by Francesco Corti) at the height of its powers…"

Fair enough to be gutted that your love is not (apparently) returned and then when you realise it is but cannot be fulfilled, to be even more gutted but suicide is a bit extreme.  However you could see he was making such a meal of the whole damned thing throughout that he wasn't going to pull himself together and look for another fish in the sea.

It didn't make for a jolly show and I would have preferred a bit of light relief after the dose of contemporary music I had taken in the afternoon. My sax teacher had organised a course at Stevenson College on up to the minute crash, bang wallop saxophone and piano playing and there was a little public concert in association with it so I thought I should show some solidarity and go along. 

It was all very new music and although I try to listen to everything with an open mind it can be quite hard to appreciate this sort of stuff.  Here's a taste.  I enjoyed this piece.  It was played on the tenor rather than the bass so the sound is a bit heavier here.  If you listen carefully you may spot the occasional almost tuneful little riff and you'll notice that the pianist never leans inside the piano to whack the strings or the case which was a feature of a number of the pieces they played.

     

In the depths of Englandshire last weekend I crossed a narrow hump-backed bridge and realised as I passed a skinny sentry box containing a little old man that it was a toll bridge.  Not wishing to run the risk of ending up in a foreign jail I stopped and walked back a hundred yards to regularise my situation.

The little old man thanked me profusely for my upright conduct and I paid the 5p toll.  Can there be a heavy enough stream of traffic going over this bridge to make that economic or it is maintained by a jolly band of volunteers who form Ye Olde Toll Bridge Preservation Society?  Whichever it is they probably don't have number plate recognition cameras so I could have sped off with impunity and spent the 5p elsewhere though I can't think of many things you can get for 5p.

I had another interesting financial moment when I proffered a Clydesdale Bank tenner in a branch of Tesco.  The cashier expressed doubts as to the acceptability of the note and summoned a supervisor.  She said oh yes, as long as it has sterling on it it's fine.  So there's what to do with any old notes from faraway places that linger in your holiday clothes.  Overprint STERLING in nice bold letters and nip down south to a remote branch of Tesco.

I had been away to play the saxophone in the company of others in two different places.  One I had been to before is a local authority institution where all sorts of courses are run year round and where there is a full catering staff.  There were about 30 of us and I played in groups from two in number to the full strength and played a great variety of music.  In our last session for example we played music ranging from a Glen Miller medley to the finale of Dvorak's New World Symphony.

The other place was a large farmhouse rented by the couple running the course.  They do the same thing in other parts of the country and abroad and not only do the music but the catering as well.  That seems to me quite a challenge which they managed successfully, so the dozen or so participants were well fed in both regards.  There was more of an emphasis on individual performance here so you spent a certain amount of time preparing something to play in front of the others.  That helped the organizers get on with the domestic side I guess.

The others in this case were not all saxophonists. There was a flute contingent and one clarinettist who floated between the saxes and the flutes.  

Now in between these two courses I had a weekend and rather than bounce up and down I stayed in the area, did a bit of tourism, went to the theatre and visited some friends whom I hadn't seen for some time, in one case for over 20 years.  In preparation for all this whizzing about to places I'd never been or hadn't been to for decades I bought a sat-nav, something I've resisted for years.  But it proved very useful, to the extent that on leaving a multi-storey car-park in Northampton in the dark I didn't even bother to think whether I should turn right or left but just went with the flow and let it sort me out.  Its one weakness would seem to be a failure to issue warnings on approaching 5p toll bridges.