I am not a gambler but I couldn't resist hazarding all the sterling I had in my pocket, which wasn't much, on buying a ticket to win a shiny red JAG as I passed through Edinburgh airport.

This car and ten grand to fill the tank with all for nine quid.  What a bargain - but I thought it was a straightforward raffle and instead there turned out to be a spot the ball element.  Given my history of locating the ball a million miles from its proper place in the Evening News my hopes are effectively dashed.

Some pictures from a weekend in Wester Ross 

I had the pleasure of hearing myself namechecked on French radio yesterday.

I'm a relatively frequent listener to their weekday programme Open Jazz.  They often run little competitions related to the theme of  the broadcast and you are invited to email in an answer.  Thanks to the wonder of the www the answers to questions about which you haven't a clue can be found and then it's down to getting your email in quickly enough.

A biopic about the Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund opens in France today and she was the theme of yesterday's programme.  There were in fact two competitions.  Since the prize for the first one was tickets for the film I ignored it but I was all organised for the second.  I had the email set up with only the answer to stick in.  I had Wikipedia's entry for Monica open.  I had the IMDB page for the film open.

Came the question...where was the man who plays the pianist Bill Evans in the film born?  Quick as a flash I got the actor's name from IMDB, googled him, found a biog and bingo, plugged Anchorage into my email and hit send.

I can't claim to have awaited the result on tenterhooks.  In fact I was busy on the computer paying more or less no attention to the programme when I heard "nell".  That's me à la française.  Checking on the podcast I found I was the tenth of ten winners of the CD Sky/Lift by Randy Ingram, the actor who not only played Bill Evans but played the piano as well.

Isn't that great?

The theatre has offered up something of a variable feast for me recently.  Some shows that did well in the Fringe are doing the rounds as you might expect and I saw two of them at the Traverse.  I didn't like either of them and turned to the reviews of their successful beginnings to try to see what I'd missed.

In Gym Party we the audience are asked to vote for one of three contestants on the basis of their performance in games of a sort.  The three are dedicated to winning at any cost and losing results in nasty treatment.  The Guardian whose review gives it four stars compares it favourably to Fight Night, another show in which the audience decide who wins through.  For my money Gym Party was Punch and Judy knock about compared to the subtle manipulation displayed in Fight Night.  It was juvenile and brutish.  I didn't like it.

The eponymous protagonist of The Confessions of Gordon Brown didn't get enough votes to keep him in office and the show didn't get my vote either.  The Telegraph gave it four stars which is more praise than it ever gave its subject and they were wrong in both cases in my opinion.

I was looking forward to vigorous political satire along the trail blazed by That Was The Week That Was, Yes Minister, In The Thick Of It and the like.  But this was weak humour stretched thinly over an hour and forty minutes without respite.  It's tough for one man to move around a stage for that length of time without a degree of repetition but I screamed internally as he prowled pointlessly for the nth time upstage right almost but not quite leaving the set only to turn on his heel and come back.

My third outing was to another play that took TV talent shows as its model.  In Mama, quiero ser famoso the audience are the audience in a TV studio and vote on who should be proclaimed famous.  Strangely enough the people whose antics on stage we were treated to were not those who were subject to the audience's vote.  We were asked to choose between three audience members selected apparently at random by their ticket numbers on the basis of their response to the question why do you deserve to be famous.   They were plants of course but remarkably ill prepared.  Is that because this was a Spanish play presented by the Hispanic Studies department of the university and they were roped in on the night?

A student production it may have been but it was very well put together and hugely enjoyable despite the fact that a fair bit of the dialogue passed me by.  The cast acted with great energy and commitment especially one girl who sang about churros and strutted her stuff with aplomb.  She struck me as definitely talented.  And no company could have wished for a more enthusiastic audience.

Eternal Love is a play in which theological discourse and sexual passion play equal parts.  Abelard and Heloise are renowned as archetypal lovers and the play tells both their story and the story of the  struggle between faith and scientific enquiry that continues to this day.

An excellent production which was well received with an especial appreciation from both cast and audience for the understudy Kevin Leslie who came on for the indisposed Sam Crane.

Now it's the turn of Danish womanhood.

Outside the library this morning three Danish schoolgirls canvassed my opinion on Scottish independence. They told me they had come over to do this as part of a school project.

When we studied the economic geography of Fife at secondary school I think it was up to us individually to suss out whether the sugar beet fields described to us actually existed or not.  To be fair the school organised some trips.  We went to the Rothes Colliery which must have been all of ten miles away.  We went further afield one Easter holiday to spend a week near Abingdon studying (sort of) West Side Story and Salad Days.  

But this Scandinavian venture seems much more ambitious.

Sipping a coffee quietly between events at Stanza I was accosted by two young American girls who asked if I'd like to hear some poetry.  Following my acquiescence one treated me to poems by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti while the second girl recited a piece of her own.  It was a good piece I think but can't remember a word of it.

I thought this must be some form of busking especially as one girl was clutching a paper cup that could have been a collecting cup.  She didn't thrust it at me but held it close to her body.  Assuming this to be from maidenly reticence I asked what was expected of me in return for their efforts. "Why! A poem" they said. 

Now I could have mustered a verse or two of Ode to a Haggis or made up a wee limerick on the lines of - There was a young girl at Stanza/who promised the boys a bonanza...

You get the idea.  But fortuitously I had just purchased a book of poetry by a poet I'd heard earlier so I whipped it out, leafed through and found something that seemed quite appropriate at the time though I'm not sure now that "Ululate my angels..." was entirely suitable.

Of course this turned out not to be busking but an integral part of the festival and I was recited to on two further occasions.

Of the half dozen events I went to I most enjoyed a session on World War I poets.  Kitted out in plastic replicas of tin helmets the young Dundee student members of Joot Theatre and a definitely more mature member of the company with flowing beard and khaki beret performed poems of the war.  A girl in period costume did all the lovelorn lass at home, weeping widow and encourager to take up arms bits. 

All the poets you might expect were featured; Sassoon, Owen, Brooke and so on.  But new to me and not featuring in this list of 25 poets of the First World War was Joseph Lee.  A Dundee man he was apparently well regarded in his time but the voices of others have drowned his out since.  He's well worth looking out for.  Here's a tiny but striking sample.

Every bullet has its billet;

Many bullets more than one:

God! Perhaps I killed a mother

When I killed a mother's son.

The loud bits of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique would have covered some of the throat clearing, coughing and snifling that beset me a few days ago but I decided at the last minute to give the concertgoing public a break and stayed at home with a hot toddy.

You could have cleared a hundred throats during Glasgow Girls at The Citizens the following day such was the amplified volume of what were already pretty loud numbers.

Half a dozen talented young women acted, sang and danced their way through this story of schoolgirls banding together in support of asylum seekers housed in Glasgow and whose children they were at school with.  Their special target was the so called dawn raids in which families were turfed out of their beds without warning in the early morning and hustled off south to detention and subsequent deportation.  

A serious subject but it made a great show not at all devoid of humour.  The two actors who played all the adult characters in the tale slipped from one personality into its polar opposite and back again within a heartbeat and with terrific skill.

Rain never seems to me to be in short supply by the banks of the Clyde but the Glasgow Girls umbrella twisting dance number relied on the rainy impression given by lighting in stark contrast to the real water cascading down on a similar number in Singin' in the Rain. That's a light and frothy show but had excellent singing and dancing and well....you have to admire all that water business.

Dick Lee and David Vernon on clarinet and accordion respectively were a pretty loud but enjoyable accompaniment to dinner at Vincaffe where a number of Sunday night events are scheduled. I was there with one of my U3A jazzmen and a group of his friends.  It was a foot-tapping evening in which delicious pasta was washed down with a nice Montepulciano.  I nobly foreswore dessert in anticipation of Austrian puddings to come.