The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil took Scotland by storm in 1973 and played all over the country.  I didn't see it.  There was a TV version.  There was a radio version.  I didn't see them.  The show was revived to great acclaim in a tent on the Meadows in the 90s.  I didn't see that.  Nor did I see any of the occasional amateur productions that have taken place.  Well, I didn't know about them.

So when I opened the i in the train on my way to Oban and read that Dundee Rep were about to put it on I was delighted.  Here at last was a opportunity that I was not going to let pass to see what had become a legend of Scottish theatre.  I checked seat availability from the Mull ferry and was so busy emailing potential companions for a trip to Dundee that I didn't notice we had docked at Craignure and had to fight my way at speed through a swarm of boarding passengers for fear of missing the bus to Tobermory.

Emailing disappointingly resulted in a party of only three to attend the final matinee and indeed we were three but not the original three.  The play is performed within the setting of a ceilidh and to heighten that illusion a number of tables were set up on the stage and occupied by audience members who also had the opportunity to buy a wee dram from an on-stage bar.  Now this was very jolly and atmospheric and what not and I deliberately chose to sit there but really I'd have had a much better view from the auditorium.

It began with singing and dancing as a ceilidh would and then in a mixture of pantomime, satirical cabaret and morality tale it worked its agitprop way through the clearances (nasty landowners), the sporting estates (those nasty landowners again) and the oil boom (nasty foreign capitalists and local speculators).  Jeremy would have loved it.  The PM and his pig was too good a joke not to find a place as one of the few updatings and I suppose it fitted in with the general idea of the moneyed classes enjoying high jinks, though in that case no teuchters appear to have suffered.

While the show is extremely entertaining its hard message is that over centuries the land and its resources have been alienated from the people. By coincidence I had just finished reading The Poor had no Lawyers which is an excellent book about land ownership in Scotland from the Middle Ages to the present day.  The author, Andy Wightman, puts forward a number of legal and social changes that he argues are needed to reduce the concentration of land ownership in a small number of hands that continues to prevail in Scotland despite some transfers to community trusts and the like.

I imagine that when John MacGrath wrote The Cheviot he wanted to change things in favour of the common man rather than just illustrate his plight.  I fear that despite its succès d'estime it has failed in that respect. No matter, I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed also an open air meal after the show at the DCA in these unusually balmy Autumn days.

Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour was one of the big hits on the Fringe that I missed.  It's now on tour and I caught up with it in Kirkcaldy.

It's a simple tale of a group of convent schoolgirls down from Oban to the big smoke of Auld Reekie to take part in a choir competition.  In the time they have free before the gig they cast off such inhibitions as they may have had (though it doesn't seem they had many) along with their school uniforms and go on a bender.

I recently read an article about the teenage brain that says amongst other things "What is clear, however, is that it is absolutely essential to al1ow adolescents to make mistakes, and to allow them to do so in a safe environment which enables them to get things wrong and learn." 

Drink, drugs and dangerous liaisons; these girls make mistakes all right.  Nobody dies so I suppose the environment of bars, nightclubs and dodgy flats in which the action takes place might just qualify as safe.  But have they learnt anything by the end?  I'm not sure, but it didn't seem to me that they were now set on a life of hard work and ladylike speech.  (The language is astonishingly filthy throughout.)

It's a high octane production whose cast of six perform with great energy and commitment.  They are superb in their ability to switch character in a trice with a change of voice, of posture or manner.  We are never in any doubt as to who they are at any point and there are many switches.  It's not a cast of thousands but the six actors do have to play quite a few parts.  And they have to sing.  They are a choir after all.  They sing a capella in serious choir mode but there is an excellent little band of three for the letting down of hair moments and the pop music soundtrack.

I admired every aspect of the production: staging, lighting, music, performance and pyrotechnics but I think I'm too old or too insensitive to find an adolescent coming of age story quite as thrilling as the critics did.

As well as being the first British man to win Wimbledon for however many decades, Andy Murray has now secured GB a place in the Davis Cup final in which we have not featured since 1978 and haven't won since 1936.  He had help from his brother in the doubles against Australia but it's essentially a one man team. 

This has made tennis fans here very happy but Belgian fans are surely delirious.  Their team won the other semi-final getting them their first final place since 1904 when they were beaten by GB.  The match will take place in Belgium and if the ticket prices are similar to the semi (most expensive 38 euros, about 30 quid) then a Ryanair flight plus a tennis ticket will probably come in at not much more than the £65 I paid in Glasgow for the cheapest seat.

I missed seeing the doubles either in the flesh or on the tele because I was at Pitlochry Festival Theatre with a group of chums to see A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim.  I'm not much of a Sondheim fan and was there primarily to be sociable but I liked the production if not the product.

Sunday night saw me back in Glasgow for a SNJO gig featuring saxophonist and composer Benny Golson.  At 85 he's still a powerful player and the orchestra did full and immaculate justice to his compositions.  He's also a great story teller and every tune was introduced with an entertaining anecdote.  He talked so much in fact that I caught the 11pm train home when I'd anticipated catching the 10 o'clock.  But it was an excellent evening well worth the late finish.

The weather forecasts suggested that the relatively pleasant and dry conditions would vanish after the music course finished but in fact Sunday dawned in a most acceptable manner and improved as the day went on.  I had booked to go whale watching but they hadn't got enough customers to make it worthwhile so I had to do something else.

I chose another boat trip and set off in a minibus for Ulva Ferry from where the boat to Staffa and the Treshnish Islands sails.  It's not a very long journey but was sufficiently choppy to make you feel you'd ventured quite far into the Atlantic.

Staffa with Fingal's Cave on the right

On top of the island - very flat

After a wander around we moved off to head for the Treshnish Islands to look for Atlantic Grey Seals and more particularly seal pups who should be appearing at this time of year.

Boat coming to collect us from Staffa for next stage

En route we saw lots of shags like the group below.

Bird Rock

There are a lot of little rocky lumps making up the Treshnish Islands and we pottered in and out of them in search of the elusive pups until the boatman declared that here was one.  As is usual with my wildlife pics the creature is not much more than a dot.

In this case it's the light brown slug to the right of the gull at the left hand side of the picture.  According to the boatman it was only a few hours old given its size and the fact that the gull and one of its chums were pecking at a bloody snack that he reckoned was the afterbirth.

Treshnish Seals

Tasty snack

The following day I went on a landbased wildlife hunt and the first thing we saw was more seals, but these were a different sort - common seals. The way to tell the difference between Atlantic and Common is said to be that one has the face of a dog and the other of a cat. Which is which? Search me

More seals

 Apart from those seals I saw otters, red deer, dolphins, golden eagles, two other sorts of eagle and lots of different birds but I have no pictures because mostly I was looking through binoculars or telescopes.  Just as well because otherwise I'd have seen nothing.

But I did see lots of scenery with the naked eye and took some pictures of it.

I'm just back from having a nightcap or three after an excellent dinner in the Mishnish restaurant in the company of the sax players assembled in Tobermory for a few days of making music and having fun.

I'm doing a bit of wildlife tourism at the end of the week, of which more later but in the meantime here's a shot of beautiful Tobermory from where I walked this morning.

I've managed to find a photo of the fireman dressed to attack our wasps' nest in Barbansais.

Something of a quiet time culturally since the festivals packed up and the town lost much of its colour.  To compensate somewhat the weather has perked up, sufficiently indeed for me to sit on my balcony sipping a Campari and soda before lunch.

While there I noticed wasps buzzing in and out of a little space where my roof meets the wall so I guess there's a nest in my loft.  It's probably been there at least a year because I remember thinking last autumn that there were an awful lot of wasps flying about.  They don't seem to be as interested in my window boxes this year.  They are flying higher so I didn't feel threatened as I sipped.

When we had a wasps' nest in the roof at Barbansais the fireman who came to clear it donned what looked like a chemical warfare suit before he climbed into the loft so I'm in no hurry to get close to the nest.  I'll look for a professional when I come back from my saxy week on Mull.

I set out to see the Picasso/Lee Miller exhibition which has been running in the Portrait Gallery since April.  (It's my habit to get around to these things in their final days.)  When I got to the gallery I discovered that the two fire engines that had lumbered past me on Leith Walk lights a flashing and bells a ringing had been heading to the same exhibition.

The building had been cleared pending the blaze being doused or the false alarm being declared so I couldn't get in.  I went off to catch the Liotard (excellent pretty pictures) and the Kantor/Demarco (six hours of weird videos that I had time only to glance at) leaving the Picasso to another day.  But that day never came so I've missed it.

To ensure that I did not miss the NT Live screening of The Beaux Stratagem, scheduled for a date on which a DORA committee meeting was planned, I booked for the encore showing in Kirkcaldy.  Annoyingly the committee meeting was cancelled due to the report to be discussed not being ready.   I suppose I could have taken a punt on that happening but anyway off I went to Kirkcaldy a few days later where there was a miserably small audience for the event.  I'd be surprised if they covered the cost of keeping the lights on with the receipts.

The good burgers of the lang toun missed a treat.   The Telegraph reviewed it in May and said it needed more zing and last night there seemed to me to be plenty of zing.