On the last evening of the saxophone week at Knuston Hall participants are invited to entertain their fellow players and this year I was involved in a couple of performances.

For one of those someone pointed an ipad at us and this is the result.

Stuart, in the pork pie hat, knows what he's doing but the rest of us are taking a leap into the unknown.

Personally I think the video is better viewed with your eyes shut.

Looking at this picture you may well feel that the arrangement would have benefited from a greater degree of symmetry.  Should that tall green thing on the right not have been balanced by a similar green thing on the left.  And by Jove there's a planter it could have gone in.

Up until Saturday night your aesthetic sensibilities would have been satisfied but during the hours of darkness the leftmost plant walked.  A few dead leaves lay strewn by the lift door on Sunday morning and the plastic inner plant pot lay forlornly in the lift.  But of the plant inside or outside the building there was no trace.

Now it wasn't a Triffid so it didn't walk of its own accord.  I suspect that one of those joyful inebriates who thinks it's a jolly jape to put traffic cones on the heads of statues emerged from a neighbouring flat and swiped it.

If I get my hands on him (or her don't let's be sexist about this) I'll take pleasure in planting its twin just where it hurts. 

Taken in Tayport,on a visit to the "ootermaist boonds o Fife".

I am convinced that a poem exists containing that phrase but it draws a blank in Google and its anglicized version leads only to a 2009 post in this blog.  Does anyone know?

My visit to Tayport and other faraway spots helped fill an hour or two before a lunchtime concert in St Andrews, one of the dozen or so places in Fife hosting the Fife Jazz Festival.  In the past I've just nipped over to Fife and back but this year there were a number of gigs in St Andrews or thereby that attracted me and not relishing a journey home starting at 11pm I stayed over for a couple of nights.

The expedition was well rewarded with stomping New Orleans numbers from Chris Barber.  That's the music he loves best but he's added strength to the band to equip it to move forward a decade or two and play Duke Ellington.  There was even one daring foray into the late 50s for a Miles Davis tune.  But New Orleans is where his heart is and who would wish to deprive him or his fans of the pleasure of its music.  Still gigging at 84, he deserves a medal.  Actually he's probably already got one.

Alison Affleck and Vieux Carré according to their blurb on Soundcloud are "true to the whimsical, evocative and slightly cheeky attitude of the late 1920s" and "offer up a hearty and delicious good cheer performance".  That's pretty accurate but she did throw in a few downbeat numbers, which aren't hard to find when you're singing Billie Holiday.

In Biggar a few years ago I heard Colin Steele play Chet Baker's music in the intervals between a telling of the trumpeter's life.  It was a great show so I was looking forward to Remembering Chet that again featured Colin Steele on trumpet but with the accent on Baker's vocal legacy.  I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy it.  The performances were excellent but the songs tended to be all on the one level and were downbeat to the point of being soporific.

You couldn't have slept even in the very comfy armchairs of the Byre Theatre Studio where the very loud and lively modern jazz of Strangeness and Charm, led by Richard Ingham on saxophones and wind synthesizer provided a necessary counterweight to the abundance of more traditional music on offer.

There were other gigs I'd love to have gone to but you can't be in two places at once.  It was very gratifying to be in the place I was in, since the Byre closed suddenly about a year ago throwing much into disarray.  I'm told that this weekend didn't herald a permanent reopening.  It will be open again for Stanza, the poetry festival, in March. After who knows.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Something else was threatened with closure last year but is still open, the St Andrews botanic garden.  It was new to me despite having been to the town umpteen times.  It's lovely and I'm very glad that it's still open.

There's another light show in town.  It ends today so rush to the Old Quad to see the terracotta warrior lanterns that graced the Beijing Olympics.  Try to get there at dusk because only the bodies are lit internally so the heads disappear a bit in the dark except for a few that are spotlit.

The only adjective that describes A Long Day's Journey into Night is bleak.

This drama of drug addiction, drunkenness, illness, miserliness, failure and disintegration spans a day in the Tyrone's summer home by the sea in Connecticut.  In the background mist rolls in from the ocean to the forlorn boom of the foghorn.

It doesn't make for a fun night out but the Lyceum do this masterpiece of the American theatre very well.

In contrast, although the sea was pretty frisky at Portobello earlier in the day and the clouds lowered and the rain fell, the atmosphere in the Dalriada Bar was jovial as the U3A Jazz Group jammed it's way through a dozen or so standards.

I'm a recent recruit to this ensemble and despite not having much of a clue about what I'm doing am enjoying the experience.

Blink and you'll miss it is not generally true of the display of major art works but almost invariably I find myself doing a last minute rush.  So it was no surprise to find that I was kissing goodbye to Rodin's chunk of marble on its last day in Edinburgh.

En route to the gallery I passed through St Andrew Square and discovered that lights were being planted.

The planter told me that the lights would be switched on the following night so after band practice I wandered home via the square and pitted my little camera phone against the darkness, no doubt to the amusement of those with seriously big cameras on tripods. 

Here's roughly the same view with the lights on:

It's not wildly exciting I admit but you're not getting the full picture. Yet.

Tonight I was at the National Library listening to a talk in which much lyrical prose and poetry was spilt in praise of Arthur's Seat and Calton Hill.  One speaker expatiated on the landscape and drew a picture connecting the mythological beliefs associated with the hill to the progress of enlightened and radical thought exemplified by its various monuments.

He found it particularly interesting to think of how the statue of James Clerk Maxwell gazing from the end of George Street to the hill on which he had played as a boy stood for that continuity and progress.

Now far be it from me to rudely, self-importantly and childishly correct a distinguished speaker (and I didn't) but I was pretty sure that James is looking the other way.  And indeed he is as I verified on my way home.

However I might just pass this information on to the distinguished speaker since it strikes me as an even better story to describe him as turning his back on the old beliefs and truths of his childhood to venture out into the brave new world of electromagnetism that underpins the modern age.

Handily I was at the St Andrew Square end of George Street and even more handily I had a camera with me (pre-planned I confess) so I wandered through the lights and took a few snaps, not really much better than the phone snaps in fact, but then it struck me that the perfect spot to get the whole picture would be Harvey Nicks.  So I whizzed up to the bar/restaurant on the fourth floor (wittily called the Forth bar) and here's the result.

Naturally I felt impelled to justify my presence and mitigate the sin of displaying a John Lewis plastic bag by making a small purchase so I had a glass of a rather tasty Gewurtztraminer.  It came all the way from Chile which is not really surprising given the large part that Germans played in the European settlement of the country.  Indeed my Chilean friend of Danish ancestry was educated at a German school.  But it's the first Chilean that I've tasted.  Not likely to be the last.

If you want to know more about the artist behind the light you can buy his book at Harvey Nicks for a mere thirty five quid or a mini book for a little less than half that. 

It's pretty unusual, not to say unknown, for me to watch a match of any sort when I already know the outcome.  When James Ward went down two sets to one in his Davis cup match I thought I knew the outcome and went off disappointed to bed.

So I was intrigued to wake up to the news that he had won and felt impelled to get onto the i-player and check it out.  Despite my now foreknowledge I was gripped and on the edge of seat as he drove his way to final victory.

What a great match and what a great lesson.  I'll stick out tonight's doubles to the end.