I should have been at the theatre tonight but I was unwilling to hit the record button and leave watching the conclusion of Murray's match until I'd come home.  In the event I wouldn't have seen the end because the match was suspended at seven all in the fifth set.  Murray should really have finished it off in the fourth but he served two double faults in a row and his game collapsed.

It was a great match though with almost as many ups and downs as that fascinating 19th century French cause célebre, the Dreyfus affair.  Robert Harris's fictionalised account, An Officer and a Spy, which I bought at the recent Historical Fiction Festival is a cracking read that has kept me up late a couple of nights.

Apart from giving us an insight into the prevailing anti-Semitism of the time and the strain put on the French  army's self-respect by its defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 the story of the unravelling of the case is quite gripping.  I suppose it added to my enjoyment that while I lived in Paris I was in a show that featured Dreyfus's degradation and that I've seen with my own eyes Devil's Island where he was incarcerated.

Here it is, seen from Isle Royale the main island in the little group it belongs to off the coast of French  Guiana.

This may look like a souvenir of my holiday in Austria last month but it is in fact a snap from the recent Keswick Mountain Festival where amongst other treats there was a Tyrolean evening.  We were serenaded by these young chaps while munching our way through goulash soup, wienersnitzel and various Austrian puds.

While beer of the country was available there was a complete absence of Austrian wines.  A very acceptable French Muscadet stepped into the breach and proved an excellent lubricant for communal yodelling. 

My first day on a golf course since Lothianburn went bust last autumn.  It was a lovely afternoon - at first.  Then the sky started to darken and as I came off the seventh green the thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed, the rain pelted down and I left the course in a hurry.

Much to my surprise I got there and even more surprisingly I was able to buy a ticket for the very session that I failed to get when I first applied.

My only gripe now is that having been charged £4.50 postage for the first lot of 5 tickets (which haven't been sent out yet) I'm being charged another £4.50 postage for this 1 ticket.

I left my computer in the queue when I went out.  When I got back there was no sign that it had got to the front and then been bumped for doing nothing or that it had fallen asleep and made no progress.

So I started again.  After two and a half hours of telling me that I had less than half an hour to wait the reducing time bar was tantalizingly close to disappearing when I had to go out again.

Once more on my return there is no sign of anything having happened.  I'm making one more attempt and goodness me but the system says I'll be there in less than half an hour.

The last remaining tranche of Commonwealth Games tickets went on sale at 10 this morning. I was there in the hope of getting a ticket for the gymnastics event that was the one out of six events that I failed to get a ticket for first time round.

I logged on before 10 and as expected went into a queue. The reported wait slowly went down from over an hour to between 30 and 60 minutes, then to between 0 and 30, ha! ha!

Over thirty minutes later at approximately 12.20 my internet connection, which since I upgraded to BT Infinity has been 99.9% flawless went down.

Panic stations followed by ineffective fiddling followed by it's self-righting followed by my getting back onto the ticket site placed me as you have no doubt guessed further back in the queue.  I have to go out before the forecast puts me at the front and I suspect it's an optimistic forecast and there's no guarantee of a ticket being available if and when I do get there so I am not holding my breath in anticipation of success.

You wouldn't think a weather forecast could keep you gripped and entertained for over two hours on a Saturday night but Pressure does just that, as is so well explained by Claire here.  Only the snooker final comes near it.

I took up playing jazz saxophone about 50 years too late to profit from this research finding.

When I came out of The Forbidden Experiment I dallied over some Ivor Cutler CDs and agreed with the Traverse chap manning the stall that The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler was well worth seeing.  "What about the show I'd just seen?" he asked.  "Unbearable" was my reply.  Mark Fisher in the Guardian was more sympathetic but certainly puts his finger on one of the main reasons why I found it so unsatisfactory when he  says  "...but its real problem is that it's not fully integrated into a coherent whole."  I'm not sure that it's even integrated into an incoherent whole.

 I can't say I was ever particularly an Ivor Cutler fan but I did find that his deadpan humour generally made me smile, and then shake my head at its absurdity.  My favourite piece is "Who tore your trousers James?" but I can't find a freely available recording of that so try this one as a taster.