The hot sunny weather did come back and I headed off to Le Cinque Terre for the day.  This is a group of five little fishing villages that were once accessible only by boat or by mountain goat.  Nowadays the train between Genoa and La Spezia stops at all of them and they are very touristy.

At this time of year there are not too many tourists.  That's pleasant but it also means not too many eateries are open.  The best I could do for lunch was squeeze myself into a tiny bar and sit on a tiny stool at a tiny table in one of the tiniest of the five towns and have a sandwich and a glass of plonk.  Both were delicious.

Then I set off on the energetic bit of the excursion.  There are tracks between each of the villages that are popular with walkers.  Some stretches are closed at the moment because of landslides.  That gives you an idea of the terrain.  I did only one section.  It took me a couple of hours and my knees were happy when it was over and I relaxed with a freshly squeezed orange juice.

Here's a shot of the scenery.  The village in the background is where I started the walk.

Still waiting for that eating out weather to come back.

It's been a cold and miserable day in Genoa.  Not like Saturday when I lunched al fresco in Santa Margarita Ligure.

Nor like yesterday when I took this skinny selfie after a very civilized Sunday morning sing song by the Simone Molinari choir.  It was roughly equivalent to our Play, Pie and a Pint, being Music, Prosecco and Focaccia.

The concert was appropriately Christmas music from mediaeval motets to modern compositions via The Boar's Head Carol, something I'd never heard of but is apparently a traditional Oxford dining ditty.

When after tumultuous applause they dashed back on stage and launched into an encore I heard "cinque, cinque, cinque" but realised when the tune got going that it had been "jingle, jingle, jingle".

Another week another concert or two and en route a pleasant dinner with friends in Morningside marred only by too generous a hand on the whisky bottle from the host and too willing a mouth from the guest.

That led to skipping an engagement the following evening but every cloud and so on because it meant I was on hand to help sort out a ticketing problem that's too complicated to explain here.  But all is well that ended well.

And the week ended well lunching in Queen Charlotte Street with Claire newly returned from Australia. No whisky, nor even wine but super soup and capital coffee.

And the weekend started well with blue skies, sunshine and mild verging on warm air on my arrival in Milan.

In wandering around near my hotel I went into a park where there was a wee bit of a Christmas fair.  I snapped this seasonal variation on what in my youth we called the scenic railway.

A couple of days later I am lunching in the sunshine in the port of Genoa.  Who said retirement would be easy?

Peter Maxwell Davies had a long association with the SCO and they were to present the world premiere of his accordion concerto last week.  But he died earlier this year, presumably not having completed the work because they changed the programme.

That was a shame because there can't be many accordion concertos around and because the replacement work, one of his Strathclyde Concertos, was a bit of a heavy listen.  Of course the accordion piece might not have been to my taste either.

There was some lovely Sibelius and some Bartok and then the pièce de resistance by Maxwell Davies to finish the evening, An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.  That's an entertaining quarter of an hour. Here are the SCO playing it at the 2014 Proms with an introduction by the man himself.

Verdi's Requiem which I heard the following evening is miles away in spirit from An Orkney Wedding but is very much to my taste.  It's probably because I can't sing a note that I enjoy those large choral works so much.  This one is definitely aweinspiring to boot. The final pianissimo "libera me" hits deep down in the guts.

The castle lit up in blue for St Andrew's day last night.

Their lights were working.  Not so for The Street of Light which is what I had gone up town to have a look at.  As part of Edinburgh's Christmas festivities a section of George Street has been given over to a series of arches through which you can wander gazing in awe at the pretty lights while your ears are bathed in music from the likes of the RSNO or Blazing Fiddles.

Last year it was in the High Street but I only ever caught a glimpse while going up the Bridges.  I decided to have a closer look this time.  It's a free event but the publicity advised that it was necessary to obtain a ticket on-line.  Since when you get there you can wander along the pavement beside the construction and there are no barriers to prevent you popping into the body of the kirk I can only surmise that this is an elaborate ploy to harvest email addresses and phone numbers.  I hope to have given them the slip by unticking the boxes that would have given Underbelly and its "carefully chosen partners" permission to junk bomb me.

This is what it looked like when I got there.  A brave little saltire above a part illuminated castle like trellis.  Bear with us a loudspeaker said.  We've got a wee problem and hope to get underway pretty soon.  This mantra was repeated at intervals until finally they said the show was cancelled but they'd play the music.  So I wandered along while a choir sang and lights flashed on and off in sporadic spasms.  

 

Spasms are challenging for a digital camera to cope with.  Click when the lights are on and by the time the electronics have reacted it's dark again. This is about the best camera and photographer managed to achieve.

After a while a pre-recorded message announced that things were over, enjoined us to leave carefully since exits might be crowded etc. but added that we were welcome to stick around to enjoy the lights (whose then state is shown in the photo above) since they would stay on till half past seven.  Could have done with a mind at work there.

I went on from the lights to the Grads production of Beachy Head.  There is some very fine acting in the show and its multimedia challenges are well handled but its structure cries out for it to have been a film not a stage play and it scratches at several surfaces without penetrating them deeply enough to reveal much of what lies beneath.

Ballet Rambert are celebrating their 90th year and touring amongst other pieces a revival of Ghost Dances by Christopher Bruce.  It's wonderful.

When the curtain rises we see three macabre figures standing stock still, looking into the distance, dimly lit and silhoutted against a backdrop that suggests we are in a cave looking out onto a plain interrupted by rocky peaks.  They begin to dance in a silence broken only by the susurration of an increasingly bitter wind.  Their dance is sinister, wild and fearsome.

When music does come it is the plaintive lilt of Andean pipes, the clear notes of the guitar and Spanish song accompanying the entry of a group of men and women who are perhaps come to celebrate the day of the dead.  They dance in various combinations.  The three spirits watch and from time to time join their dances. 

Ultimately they leave the stage and the three ghost dancers return to the silent contemplation with which the piece began. Lighting, costumes, music, choreography and superb physical skills had given us thirty unforgettable minutes.

Not so the other two pieces on the programme. Tomorrow starts with a single dancer in a beige coloured shift oozing herself out from a slot in the back wall and dancing jerkily downstage.  She's joined by quite a few others, dressed similarly and dancing in much the same fashion.  I had them down as mechanical toys.  Perhaps this was a new take on the Nutcracker or Coppelia.

They kept themselves to one side of the stage while on the other people dressed in black tops and trousers strode about, left the stage, returned, pointed up, pointed across, gathered in groups, raised imaginary glasses, slit throats and so on.  They were obviously telling a story but I couldn't make it out.  At one point a chap came on and removed some imaginary headgear and I thought maybe he's a king or maybe a motorcyle courier.  But frankly it was a distraction from the perfectly pleasant though unclear as to its meaning dancing going on stage left.

It wasn't till I got home and glanced at the flyer that I learnt that I'd been watching Macbeth.  Witches cavorting on one side while the play was being performed backwards on the other.

If I'd read and watched all the stuff here before seeing it I would probably have a less uncharitable opinion of the work than I do. But uncharitable I am and will remain.

No mugging up in advance was needed to understand Frames but I didn't much enjoy that either.  Dancers came on with variously sized lengths of aluminium rail and ponced about with them, as single lengths or snapped together in different combinations to make frames in and around which the dancers moved.  So?  A bit like virtuosic piano playing without any emotional content.

The lady sitting next to me had come from Glasgow to see the show and when we exchanged enthusiastic comments about Ghost Dances she said she'd probably go to see Rambert again when they hit Glasgow in February.  I think that would be a good thing to do but I'd spend the first hour and forty minutes in the bar with a good book.

The Good Book was the source of almost all of the libretto of Handel's Israel in Egypt that I saw and heard courtesy of the SCO on Thursday.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.  It reminded me a little of the saying that history is written by the victors.  Words and music throughout enthusiastically revelled in the triumph of the Israelites.  God was clearly on their side.  He smote, he plagued, he drowned those poor Egyptians giving not a toss for their first-borns.  But no frogs were harmed in the making of this epic.

I met a singer friend in the interval who was there to suss it out because his choir are doing it next year sometime.  He loved it but declared that it was quite a sing and thought he might not have the stamina for it.  At 91 and still performing I can forgive him that thought and only hope to match the stamina he's already shown.

A weekend in London provided many pleasures, not least blowing up imaginary balloons for the amusement of my grand nieces.  Or should that be great? The answer may be here.

Another grand pleasure was a visit to the great Cutty Sark at Greenwich.

The intention had been to go to an exhibition about Emma Hamilton in the Maritime Museum checking out the Cutty Sark en route but time spent on board meant it wasn't really worth going to the museum so we pottered about Greenwich before heading to our next port of call, the Merchant Navy Memorial on Tower Hill.  But the part of that we wanted to see was behind locked gates.

We had lingered too long at 0° 0′ 0″ East and West.

So time for a bus to Dalston for Turkish nosh and a bottle of Kavaklidere Yakut before an hour or two of music from Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids.  Described as west coast jazz mavericks they were very entertaining and on the whole I enjoyed their music though I'd have enjoyed it a lot more had there been any place to sit down in Cafe Oto.

The trip to London was originally decided upon so that I could attend the Zambia Society Trust AGM and meet my chum David Powell who I hadn't seen for a few years.  In addition to the standard review of activities and finance at the meeting there was a very interesting talk by a professor of African history who tried to pin down the reasons why Zambia has been, relatively speaking, a haven of peace and tranquility amidst a sea of warring countries both pre and post independence.

Unsurprisingly he didn't find one single reason but an amalgam of several that he felt had predisposed Zambians at all levels of society to value peaceful development over conflict.  Long may it continue and hopefully spread well beyond their borders.

As well as David another old friend was there and his arrival put me in a tricky position.  He was accompanied and greeted me with the question "Do you recognise this young lady?"  I ask you.  It took a moment or two but then the name popped into my head which I thought wasn't bad considering I had last seen her 31 years ago and hadn't heard much about her since.  Mind you it would have been a poor show to have forgotten the leading lady of my final directorial outing in Kitwe.

After the meeting David, Graham, Lynn and myself repaired to a handy tavern and had a good chat about times both old and new until I had to drag myself away for my next engagement.

This was a serendipitously arrived at opportunity to meet another friend I hadn't seen for a few years, a much younger one this time.  Ben did a show with the Grads about ten years ago although he's a professional these days.  Our paths have crossed from time to time and I was delighted to find that he was playing not a hundred miles from my brother's flat while I was visiting.

So on Saturday night we went to see The Worst Was This. It was a great little show played with gusto and skill.  The company hope to tour it next year so we may see it in Edinburgh.  It would be perfect Fringe fare.

A previous winter trip to London was bedevilled by severe train problems that resulted in a bonanzo of ticket vouchers.  This time I was only 75 minutes late going down and 45 coming back so my compensation package is likely to be more modest but handy for the next foray south.

I don't know about you but I was somewhat underwhelmed by the so-called super moon.

Every so often I go to see an opera.  I'm not sure whether that's in order to reinforce my gut feeling that I don't particularly like opera or in the hope of a Damascene conversion.  Scottish Opera's The Marriage of Figaro leant towards support of a take it or leave it attitude.  It was very nice but very long, too long.  The Lyceum despatched the story much more expeditiously when they did Beaumarchais' play a few years ago with the inimitable Jimmy Chisholm as Cherubino.  But then in a play the characters say a line once and move on whereas in opera they have a habit of singing a line half a dozem times before the lights come up on the surtitles again with a fresh bit of text.

Charlie Parker was renowned for the number of notes he could get into a short space of time.  He'd have had no bother getting through Mozart's entire score before the first interval.  The SNJO players at their concert of Parker pieces were up to the challenge.  It was a super gig.  I enjoyed it all but tops was Tommy Smith's solo on My Little Suede Shoes.

Parker was also famous for the amount of time and effort he put into his practice.  That clearly contributed to his success but according to a note in the programme he wasn't always successful in his early years.  At one jam session he had to leave the stage because he lost track of the chord changes while improvising.  It's reassuring to know I have such an illustrious forerunner.  Must point that out to my teacher.

The second play in the Lyceum's season is Jumpy, a woman centred comedy contrasting nicely with their opening woman centred play, The Suppliant Women.  The play revolves around the relationship between fiftyish mother and fifteenish daughter with a supporting cast of man hungry female friend, dull but dependable husband, daughter's boyfriend of few words, his on the brink of separating parents and daughter's teenage pregnant chum plus a full frontal twenty something chap.

Like all the best comedies it's both hilarious and moving. An evening spent watching people stumbling through life and reflecting between laughs on how close to one's own experiences it is is never wasted. 

This is public enemy number one in Leith Walk at the moment, a piledriver beating remorselessly from 8 to 6 six days a week.  Despite its being on the other side of the road with houses and carparks between us and my windows and doors being shut tight its thump is an ever present accompaniment to my saxophone practice. 

We're never short of roadworks and building sites have proliferated in the last couple of years.  The student housing complexes at Shrubhill, by the library and in the former Gateway Theatre seem all to be up and running.  Starbucks and Sainsbury have established themselves in one.  Costa and Morrisons are said to be coming to another.  Local independent traders are not delighted.

We sorely miss that tram with all those young people clogging up the bus-stops in the morning.  Not that I'm often out early enough to be personally inconvenienced.

The piledriver is working on a non-student housing development at Shrubhill and Cala's flats on the old sorting office site look to be more than halfway done.  People are living in them and now that Brunswick Road is open again, the gas main project that closed it having romped to completion in twelve weeks against the forecast of six, the residents won't have to go all around the houses to get home.

Despite having given the road a good going over in preparation for not laying tram lines and thus causing a fair degree of nuisance for a fair stretch of time reasons are constantly being found to tear it up again.  The very useful bus-stops at the top of the Walk have just gone out of commission thanks to the St James Centre redevelopment.  I do hope they are not out of service till that work finishes in 2020 (or 2025 if their forecast is as poor as the gas men's).

The critics were divided over the Branagh Theate Company's version of The Entertainer.  The Guardian wasn't too keen but The Telegraph gave it four stars.  I enjoyed it quite a lot but had I paid £95 for a seat in the Garrick rather than £13.50 for a seat in the Cameo I might have been less generous because my engagement with the production tailed off a smidgeon or three in its final half-hour.

I thought Kenneth Branagh gave us a very good piece of work, as did the rest of the cast though I share The Guardian's reservations about Sophie McShera's high-pitched delivery.  Michael Billington writes enthusiastically about Olivier's definitive performance as Archie Rice.  I didn't see him play the part on the stage but I do remember admiring his screen portrayal.

These live broadcasts to cinemas are excellent.  I saw the National Theatre's Threepenny Opera recently and will see No Man's Land in January.  You may not get quite the same buzz as you would were you in the theatre but it's similar in that respect to watching sports on the telly.  One's interest and excitement is only marginally lessened.  I like them, and the seats in Screen 1 at the Cameo are a lot more comfortable than the seats I can afford to pay for in London's West End.

I got quite a buzz from El Clan.  This is the true story of kidnap and murder in the murky shifting tides of power and influence in Argentina in the 1980s by a pater familias and his sons.  I suppose it's fictionalised to some extent but certainly not romanticised.  The film has the pace and dynamism of a thriller, great performances and kept me gripped to the end. 

If you are keen on mounting site specific productions and the specific site you have in mind is an oil rig in the North Sea you might well feel that the idea's a bit impractical.  But, thought Gridiron, what could we do instead?  It's obvious really.  Build a wee rig in a big shed.

And that's what they did.  In shed 36 in the port of Dundee to be precise.  And that's where I went one dark and miserable Sunday night in the least comfortable bus I've ever been in, fortunately only from the city centre to the port.

The shed was big, very big with a very high roof.  The rig, dinky in comparison with the real live stuff parked in the water outside, was in a corner.  It had a derrick and a helipad and actors in orange suits and hard hats did manly things with pipes and chains and things as we took our seats in a semicircle facing them and wrapped the thoughtfully supplied blanket around our nether regions.

It looked and sounded great and I was full of excited anticipation.  But as we know it is often better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  The show was called Crude.  There was something of a narrative thread throughout centred on a oilworker; his trials and tribulations, the impact of his work pattern on his marriage and family life, the dangers he faced and so on. He even dreams about an oil selkie, an excellent bit of circus work here by an actress. Every now and then a jolly American jumped up to remind us how dependent we are on oil and for how long we've needed it.  His native forebears daubed it on their cheeks as warpaint and now we use it in making lipstick for much the same purpose.  And what about all those plastic bags.

Everything they did was well done and all the little scenes well thought out and woven together into a decent enough show but I didn't find it very gripping nor was I sure what its aim was.  Was it meant to entertain or to provoke despair at the rape of the planet or what.  That wasn't clear to me perhaps because of the very variable audibility of the actors.  Despite being miked up as soon as they turned their heads away from a straight line to my ears it was hard to hear.  Tricky to control sound in such a cavernous setting (with rain pelting down on the tin roof from time to time) but the non spoken sound worked well so I don't understand why handling speech didn't. 

Here's a professional review or two.

Oh for the self-discipline of a Tony Benn and his like who wrote up or dictated their diaries nightly before bed, not to mention Pepys with his quill pen in candlight or Cicero with one of those dinky  little oil lamps.  With every modern tool at my disposal I can't keep my blog up to date.  Must do better.

So a whirlwind tour of the last month.

It kicked off with Jo Butt's funeral.  A longtime member of the Grads he was in the first full length show I directed for them and we appeared together in a couple of shows, once as an old cogers drunken double-act which was much fun to do.

One of the periodic dinners with former colleagues at FI where I am the token man, and very happy to be him, took place in a restaurant new to me.  Badgers in Castle St. is so named because Kenneth Grahame once lived in the building.  I played Mr Badger in Toad of Toad Hall so I await a plaque on the wall recording my having dined there.  The food was excellent by the way.

More eating out the following week with lunch in the National Gallery restaurant with another former colleague who hadn't made it to the dinner and with one who had.  Again the food was excellent.

A local councillor has been helpful to us on a couple of occasions so when she organised a litter pick in the streets around here I felt obliged to turn out.  I also publicised the event on the Dicksonfield website, via my Dicksonfield mailing list and by posters on all the noticeboards in Dicksonfield.  This effort brought forth zero residents.

They missed a pleasant stroll in the Saturday morning sunshine, convivial chat with the small crowd that took part and cold drinks and doughnuts at the end.  They might  also to have earned some brownie points that may stand us in good stead with the aforesaid councillor when we need her.

Over the doughnuts I had an interesting and informative chat with a man from the council's waste department about their collection experiment with bin sensors and collection methods.  Our bins are now being emptied on some apparently random cycle and only full bins are actually tipped into the bin lorry .  I guess this is part of the experiment.

There's been a Spanish film festival.  I saw an absolutely fascinating documentary about a Catalan bandleader who enjoyed a rags to riches life in the States.  His life was extraordinary and the film did it justice with wonderful archive footage and personal reminiscence. Here's Wikipedia's biog and you can catch his music on Youtube.

I also enjoyed  An Autumn Without Berlin and a session of eight short films but while I found The Bride (a version of Lorca's Bodas de Sangre) lovely to look at, those phallic termite mounds were a bit unsubtle as was a rearing black stallion tearing across the desert.  The playing too was rather over melodramatic for a phlegmatic Fifer like me but on the whole it's a film worth seeing.

As is The World Goes On as a Spanish cinema period piece and The King of Havana as an example of what's called" dirty realism".  I enjoyed the former but not the latter.

Before heading off to Pitlochry to enjoy the final week of the Festival Theatre's summer season I went to the Lyceum for the opening show of their season.  It was The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus in a version by David Greig, the theatre's new artistic director.  Claire has written an exceptionally fine appraisal of the production, much better than some of the professional reviews I've read (which is quite appropriate).

In Pitlochry I stayed in a very comfortable and well appointed hotel frequented in overwhelming measure by old people, as I'm afraid was the theatre.  Still, absence of sniveling brats and moody teens is no bad thing I suppose.

I throughly enjoyed all but one of the productions which is a pretty good score.  Thark, a 1920s farce by Ben Travers was to my mind a terminally feeble script although for most of the audience that seemed be offset by the company's excellent set, costumes and performances.  Or maybe, heaven forfend, they thought it was good material.

Carousel, a lovely musical despite its rather twee toying with the hereafter.  Then three good Ayckbourns under the umbrella title Damsels in Distress, This Happy Breed by Coward and a dramatisation of Hard Times by Dickens.

In between shows I toured around in the rain, played a round of golf, visited the Museum of Country Life in Blair Atholl (highly recommended but you'll have to wait till it reopens in the Spring), visited the Atholl Palace Hotel museum (also recommended and open all year round) and bought some bargain price breeks and bunnets.

Scotland's other Nicola justifiably packed the Usher Hall for the first Edinburgh RSNO concert of the season but its a shame that not so many of those eager punters turned out a couple of weeks later to hear Janine Jansen play Sibelious's violin concerto.  I confess that I was there only because I've had to swap dates because of a clash with a trip to London but I'm very glad to have heard her and the piece.

Scotland's other orchestra, the SCO, gave a brilliant performance of L'enfance du Christ by Berlioz in the same hall.  To my knowledge I've never heard this before.  I loved its delicacy, the ethereal off-stage choir and their re-incarnation back on-stage.  I was close to the front which made me feel practically alongside the soloists. I could feel every breath they took and see every quiver of their lips.  The bass was magnificently strong as Herod and in the closing moments you could feel rather than hear the tenor as he exhaled the closing words.

It was terrific. At one point and most unusually the conductor turned to the audience after what I believe is known as the shepherds' farewell and said "I suggest we play that again" and they did.

Music of an entirely different sort was provided by Allegro's production of Sunshine on Leith.  I was there in support of a young man who was in our Fringe show and enjoyed it quite a lot.  No wonder groups like Allegro do only one show a year when you consider what's involved.

I've just come back from Shed 36 in the Port of Dundee but more about that later and perhaps a word or two on the twice yearly Play, Pie and Pint season which is with us again.  I'll leave Claire to describe the supremely talented Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Because I was at a rather unexciting dance show on Friday I had to pop over to Glasgow to catch the SNJO's concert of music by Charles Mingus.  It was well worth the effort.  It's hard for me to keep a bit of music in my head for a few minutes never mind long enough to compare concerts that take place months apart but this was surely one of their best.

The music was lovely for a start.  Arild Andersen guesting as Mingus was super as were the band and the quality of solos was terrific, especially Tom McNiven on trumpet, Allon Beauvoisin on baritone and Martin Kershaw on soprano.

That was my second trip to Glasgow this week.  It poured with rain both times, surprise, surprise.  Not a big deal when nipping up to the Conservatoire from Queen Street but queuing outside the Hydro for ages was less pleasant.  I was there to see Andy Murray Live, a charity event that was good fun.  A semi-serious singles in which Murray beat Dimitrov was followed by a not at all serious doubles.

It started off with the Murray brothers playing against Dimitrov (in a kilt) and Henman.  All four were miked up so there was entertaining backchat to listen to as well as extraordinary play to watch.  Their lightning reactions as the ball whizzed back and forth with all four at the net was simply amazing.  Substitutes were called for and Jamie went off to be replaced as Andy Murray's partner by Gordon Reid the wheelchair tennis gold medallist in what I thought was a stroke of PR genius. 

Other weel-kent faces appeared later but I was off through the rain in the hope of getting home by midnight which I achieved - just.

The weather at other times recently has been much better, at least in Edinburgh.  I spent a couple of hours pleasantly sipping coffee and reading on my balcony which I never managed to do during the so called summer and people were dancing in the open air at the foot of the Mound a week ago.  Here are pictures to prove it.

Mound Precinct Dancers

Dancers and Band

The incomparable Dick Lee on soprano sax

On the morning of the dancing day I took part in a local litter clean-up.  Not many took part and none other than me from Dicksonfield.  Neither my emails, the notice on our website nor the posters which I put up on all our noticeboards roused a soul.  They would claim to deplore litter I'm sure but put up with it nonetheless.

Is that some form of Sour Grapes on my part?  A highly entertaing form of Sour Grapes was a documentary of that name about a wine scam in the States.  A very personable young chap with what appears to have been an encyclopedic knowledge of wine and brilliant tastebuds made millions in the rarefied world of $20,000 bottles before being rumbled.  He's now in clink where I don't suppose he gets many tasting opportunities while his victims are pouring his plonk down the drain.  Silly them I say.

I swallowed a few glassfuls myself at a twentieth wedding anniversary celebration last weekend.  There wasn't any twenty grand stuff on offer as far as I know but everyone seemed very happy with £9.99 prosecco.      

We had the Dicksonfield Owners and Residents Association AGM last week and my position as secretary was unfortunately not contested so I'm in for another year not having the heart to leave them in the lurch.  The Grads have just entered the lurch secretary wise but I have been able to harden my heart against being sucked into that one.

I'm a bit of a Woody Allen fan and his latest film,  Cafe Society,  appealed to me greatly.  The costumes, settings and cinematography are super.  Performances and direction are excellent and the romance at the heart of it provides a very moving ending. I'd have given it four stars against The Guardian's three but that's fans for you.

I have to give plenty stars to Tickled, a documentary that delves behind the public face of the niche sport of competitive endurance tickling.  A New Zealand journalist came across some videos of young men tickling a strapped down fellow apparently in some bizarre competition and thought it would make a good subject for the cookie documentaries that he makes his living by creating.

Well as soon as he started digging lawyers letters and threats started arriving warning him off.  Three men flew in from Los Angeles first class to persuade him to drop the project.  Of course he didn't and has made a very enjoyable and interesting film of his search.  It would be a shame to reveal the end but have a look at the trailer and catch it if you can.

The windband term has been underway for a few weeks but other commitments had kept me away until the playaway day on Saturday.  I was the only alto sax there so was a bit exposed but survived and thankfully at Monday's regular practice there was another alto to share the load.

On a different musical note entirely I was with Claire and Siobhan at Lennoxlove on Sunday morning to hear a delightful concert by the Marian Consort under the title of Secret Singing.  The secret referred to was the continued practice of Roman Catholicism in post reformation England and it was the music associated with that by Byrd and others that they sang.  Such singing happened mostly in the stately homes of the Catholic aristocracy so the barrel-vaulted great hall of Lennoxlove was the perfect setting and our proximity to the singers added greatly to my enjoyment.  

Claire treated us to a lunch afterwards that featured scrumptious roast potatoes and delicious homemade apple pie.  The lunch stretched through the afternoon at which point my legs were stretched dog-walking in the Figgate Park which I must say was looking splendid and well cared for.  Indeed better cared for than it was when I lived on its edge.  

The end of the festivals has not heralded the end of cultural activities on my part.  For a start I've got back to the cinema where I had not been for ages.  I saw a reasonably interesting Latin American film called Desde Alla.  It told the story of a middle-aged guy who sought out the company of younger men in Caracas.  There was a homosexual element to it but it seemed mostly to be about his need for friendship, perhaps related to a difficult relationship (unexplained) with his father.

At one point in the film Armando (the older guy) tells Elder (the younger guy) that his father is alive but he wishes that he were dead.  As the friendship develops Elder declares that he will kill the father.  Armando makes no protest and Elder kills the father.  Subsequently Armando betrays him to the cops.  That didn't seem terribly fair to me.

But perhaps I missed a few nuances.  Elder asks at one point why Armando talks funny.  He explains that he was brought up elsewhere.  To me they both talked funny so it was a relief later the same day to see Julieta in which everyone spoke a vey clear and understandable Castilian.

Almodovar is a lauded film-maker and I've generally enjoyed his movies while at the same time feeling they were a bit odd.  This one is so straightforward I loved it.

Unlike The Shepherd Beguiled.   This was Theatre Alba's Fringe show presented at The Brunton for those who had been unable to or chose not to brave their open air performances.  I thought it might have been a production of theirs which I had seen and enjoyed years ago.  I don't think it was. At least I hope it wasn't because I thought it was pretty dire stuff unredeemed by the quality of performance.

Fringe shows apocryphally garner audiences of one or two.  The Jazz Romantics gig, while not a Fringe show, fitted this stereotype well.  The promised guest saxophonist hadn't made it so we had a band of four and an audience that for the most part consisted of the bass  player's wife or girlfriend and me.  Some others drifted in and out as the evening progressed but at its peak the audience consisted of no more than five.  Nonetheless it was an excellent gig and I hope to be there at their next outing on September 30th.

Now that I've written up the backlog here are a few brief words (primarily as a reminder to self) on the last few events that finished off my Festival going.

Islam in the Mediterranean - drawn to this because of my various wanderings around Moorish Spain.  It's always impressive and not a little humbling to see how much an academic specialist knows about their subject.  Amira K Bennison gave an interesting and enjoyable presentation of the work that has brought forth The Almoravid and Almohad Empires, a book whose ninety quid price tag will keep it off my shelves.

The Toad Knew - one of those shows in which people dash about, grapple contortionally with others, do funny walks pinched from silent movies, swing and birl on stage machinery and indulge in other no doubt highly inventive and skilful pranks that leave me cold.

Humble Brassica - hard to know why I went to hear a talk about a novel called The Cauliflower which is a fictionalised account of the life of Sri Ramakrishna, a Hindu spiritual master.  The author was a perky and entertaining speaker so I quite enjoyed it though I can't see myself reading the book.  Stuart Kelly writing in The Guardian reckons she's a genius so maybe I'll try her golf novel, The Yips.

Richard III - I suppose there was a lot of good stuff in this production from Berlin but I found it irritating, not least the bulky microphone and cables that hung down centre stage partly obscuring the translation panel. 

I took a day off from Festival going on Saturday to attend Bob and Caroline's golden wedding celebration in Glasgow and had a thoroughly splendid afternoon.

Raw - billed as a work for young people and adults this dance show from Belgium was as odd as most modern dance is but checking the blurb when I got home I seem to have undestood its main messages.

Gurrelieder - the final concert of the EIF is generally a large scale work and you couldn't get much larger than this.  Between orchestra, chorus and soloists there must have been around three hundred people on the Usher Hall stage.  I enjoyed the big noisy bits but some of the more reflective passages had me shifting my bum around to ease the numbness. 

The Impact of Flemish Immigrants on Scotland - quite an interesting talk but I've already forgotten almost everything that was said.

Fireworks Concert - I've frequently thought of attending this, the final final concert of the Festival and now I've done it probably will never do so again.  I went in good heart having had a glass or two in St Andrew Square with some of the Midsummer Night's Dream cast and found a reasonably dark and convenient spot more or less behind the Ross bandstand which gave a pretty acceptable view of the fireworks.  I should I suppose have splashed out on a seat at the front but there I think you suffer a bit from all the light emanating from the bandstand and its surrounding infrastructure.

Anyway I snapped madly away for a little while with my phone camera.  None of the pictures are very good but here's one as a souvenir.

The show's been over for ten days and was a commercial and critical success. The latter assertion is based on the words of citizen critics because the professional who came on opening night didn't get around to publishing a review.  We should make him pay for his ticket next time.

I've seen lots but have been too busy and maybe too lazy to write them up here plus having had a computer on the brink of being thrown out of the window.  I've managed to get the machine running a bit better, considerably better actually but the backup software I use can't complete a run and maintains this is likely to be the result of a hardware error.  So I'll have to engage with Acer support who will doubtless insist I go through various hoops before they agree to check the physical state of the machine, assuming it doesn't break down irretrievably in the process.

Anyway I have a little bit of time to spare this evening having left a world music gig after half an hour because I believe that my hearing is worth a lot more than the twenty quid I paid for the ticket.

Working backwards here's what I've been to.

Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan - super presentation of a wonderful sounding book.

Darien by John McKendrick - fascinating account of Scotland's attempt to found a colony in the centre of the Spanish empire.  England didn't help but it was our own damn fault is the conclusion.

GRIT in the EIF - this sounded fun and it was though the adulation with which the orchestration of a kind of modern folky album by a youngly dead guy I'd never heard of was pretty incomprehensible to me.

The Seven by Ruth Dudley Edwards - myth busting straight talking unromantic look at the leaders of the 1916 Easter rising in Dublin.  An unnecessay event in a democracy she maintained as constitutional change was underway and would inevitably have led to home rule if not more after the war.

Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra - playing one of my favourites, Shostakovich 5th Symphony, that I first heard at an Edinburgh Festival circa 1965 plus a wonderful piece by Villa Lobos.  First up a lad of about twelve stood in front of conductor, orchestra and huge chorus looking out at a couple of thousand of us in the Usher Hall and undaunted sang the solos in Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

Culloden by Murray Pittock - another myth buster and deromantiser but I'll need to read the book to get the full story.  About Prince Charlie he remarked that if one lost one's whole raison d'etre at 27 and lingered on for decades in exile one would be hard pushed to keep off the sauce.  I can but agree.

Paris Spring by James Naughtie - an immensely entertaining conversation between Naughtie and Magnus Linklater about his second spy novel whose background is the events of May 1968.  They strayed far enough from the book to give Jeremy Corbyn and others a wee mention.  Determined not to load up with books I thought I'll read this when it comes out in paperback and blow me it's been published simultaneously in paper and hardback so I bought it.  I compounded this lapse in self-control by buying his first novel as well.

World Citizen at home in Paris by Jim Haynes - this was a session full of delightful anecdotes from a legend in his own lifetime who seems to have total recall from his Louisiana childhood to date.  Unusually he was not trying to sell a book.  In fact everyone in the audience was given a free copy in a pretty little goodie bag.  It's an anthology of various intensely detailed diary like newsletters he's published over the years produced to inaugurate the Jim Haynes Living Archive to be hosted by Napier University.  He turned down approaches from American institutions to join his fellow Traverse founder Richard Demarco in housing his bits and bobs here for posterity to trawl through. 

The 101 Greatest Plays by Michael Billington - admitting to his choice being totally subjective and admitting to second thoughts post publication Billington and Joyce McMillan held a spirited and enjoyable discussion about what was rightly in his book, what was in it that shouldn't have been and what wasn't that should've.

Dirt Road by James Kelman - the extracts he read encouraged me to think that I should put aside the difficulty I've had in the past trying to read his work and have a go at this one.  When it's in paperback of course.

Auld Reekie's Makars discussed by two of them, Ron Butlin and Christine De Luca - I've read some of Ron Butlin's work before.  I've even been in a film based on one of his poems but I didn't know Christine De Luca.  What she read of her own poetry I enjoyed very much.  But this event was to celebrate the work of lots of poets who have written about Edinburgh and their choices were excellent even though my own favourite, Kind Kittock's Land didn't feature.

Iphigenia in Tauris - I missed this because the leading lady did her back in during the set-up and the show was cancelled.  Luckily for the company but not for me it was to have been the last performance.  On the plus side it freed me for an enjoyable glass or two at a birthday party instead.
                                     
Before the Hudson and the Liffey - All I knew about James Connolly before I saw this show was that he was born in the Cowgate and executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.  With a combination of songs (many written by Connolly) and readings from books, letter and newspapers his significance in tradeunionism and socialist politics here, in Ireland and in the USA was entertainingly imparted. 

The Glass Menagerie - an excellent production of an excellent play.  I particularly liked the gentleman caller.

1% - Iain Heggie of A Wholly Healthy Glasgow fame in a laidback hour of amusing anecdotes, not all of which can possibly have been true.

Scottish Ballet - two wildly contrasting works: one dark, all male, all violent, all heavy noise and very solid movement; the other lighter with the entire company scurrying around the stage marrying classical movement with the apparent chaos of a hive of bees.  Both were hard to describe but beautiful to watch.

Superwomen of Science - a slightly weird show in which the stories of a number of female scientists were sung to us.  At the end we were given a label with a scientist's name on it and exhorted to google her.

Anything That Gives Off Light - a wild, chaotic and to my mind (thanks perhaps to having been written by a committee) incoherent exploration of caledonian identity and experience that sought to draw parallels with Appalachian mining communities. One woman I met at another show described it as dreadful, another thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  My opinion lies somewhere in between but I can't say that I enjoyed it. Joyce describes it well here.

The World According to Saki - some of his gently satirical tales presented in the setting of a WWI trench with an actor playing the part of Saki himself.  This was a warm, delicate and well-performed piece that gave me and I'm sure all who saw it great pleasure.

Measure for Measure - One of the most exciting shows that I ever saw was Declan Donnellan's production in Russian of Boris Gudonov in an abandoned factory in Avignon so I was keen to see his Measure for Measure (also in Russian).  In Avignon there was a great deal of rushing about, easily enough accommodated within a factory, but more challenging in The Lyceum.  Nevertheless he moved his cast around at a great lick and got the same sort of energy.  With a reasonable grasp on the story and some squinting at the electronic translation boards I was able to enjoy the show despite awkwardly placed stage left activity that was hard to see from my upper circle seat.

Where You're Meant to Be - like GRIT this show dealt with another aspect of modern Scottish culture that I knew nothing about although I knew the name Arab Strap.  There was a film featuring Aidan Moffat (Arab Strap frontman) on a mission to modernise Scottish folksongs and Sheila Stewart (a seventy odd singer from the travelling community) who doesn't want the old songs buggered about with.  Then Moffat and many of his chums who were in the film played and sang.  Most of the numbers were deliciously filthy including his additions to The Ball of Kirriemuir.  Sheila Stewart didn't sing because she has died since the film was made but the gig ended with a beautiful song of farewell that in tribute to her kept its original lyrics.  It was a great show.

Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets - a delightful morning concert in the Queen's Hall featuring the principal clarinetist of the Berlin Phil.

The Collector - dramatisation of John Fowles' sinister novel about the shy butterfly collector who abducts a girl he fancies, shuts her in a cellar, desires only to please her and wants only that she should care for him. It doesn't turn out well.  I thought the opening video montage of stalker shots set the situation up beautifully and as a young man rose from the audience and started to tell his tale I thought we were in for a treat. However despite their efforts the cast of two didn't manage to create the oppressive, on edge atmosphere that the piece needed.  Admittedly not an easy job in the Royal Scots function room. 

Black Comedy  - this play features in Billington's list of the 101 greatest and I remember having found it funny 30 years ago, when it was already two decades old but this production provoked only the odd titter from me.  Not that it was a bad production at all, just that the play seemed at best a feeble piece and my appreciation of its dated humour has faded.

A Tale of Two Cities - I've never found sufficient strength to get all the way through a Dickens novel so I'm very grateful for the work of dramatisers which I invariably enjoy.  This was a case in point.  A thoroughly well acted and visually stimulating presentation of a grand tale of intigue, love and self sacrifice.

Natalia Osipova - lovely to look at, only wish I had a better visual memory to relive the pleasure.

My Eyes Went Dark - an excellent two-hander on a bare set played between two banks of seating just like the good old days in James' Court.  A story of a man who has lost his family in an air accident, the despair and sadness beyond belief that it has left him with and the thirst for revenge he feels towards the person he holds responsible and whom in fact he kills.

The Red Shed - political stand-up leaning heavily to the left.  Enjoyable but is this the best use of performance space for what claims to be "Scotland's New Writing Theatre"?

Shake - a French company under a British born director shake up Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and create an engaging, fun-packed end of pier show.  Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a ventriloquist's dummy, a handful of actors play most everybody else though they charmingly tell us that Maria the letter writing maid had to be cut.  Feste sits in his beach hut doorway and plays gramophone records.  He speaks American English.  Maybe French audiences find that side splittingly funny. 

It Folds - one of those weird Fringe shows that get four stars but leave humble theatregoers like me crying why, oh why.  It wasn't entirely unwatchable though.  I went because Siobhan was in it and without a word of a lie the scene at the end of the show in which she and a dozen or so others came on clad in ghost outfits and sang a high falutin version of Happy Birthday was the best bit.

Simon Keenlyside - a concert in the Queen's Hall series in which Keenlyside laid aside his classical voice to explore Broadway songs and their European progenitors.  He was more than ably supported by a jazzy quintet.

Mozart at Teatime - intended at a clarinet class outing it attracted three of us but didn't feature any clarinet playing.  Whether that was because of an error in selection or later re-programming we will never know.  It was pleasant nonetheless.

In a Forest Dark and Deep - the Grads other contribution to the Fringe.  The play itself is dark and delves deep into relationships, not least between a brother and sister.  The gradual peeling away of the sister's lies and the growing realisation of what has actually happened keeps the audience on the edge of their seats throughout.

¡Saxo Clasico! - the sax and piano duo of Sue McKenzie and Ingrid Sawers in a wide-ranging concert from Scotland to South America, played impeccably as is their wont. 

Vanishing Point's other show in the EIF was much more to my taste.  In Interiors the audience are observers, some might say voyeurs or even peeping toms although in truth nothing sufficiently salacious happens to justify those terms.

We are in undefined northern latitudes outside a house watching as a group of people gather for Peter's customary midwinter party celebrating the start of the steady lengthening of days that will lead to Spring and Summer.  His grandaughter is there. A young man she is interested in arrives.  A lady of Peter's age comes in with a cake dusting the snow off her boots, then a couple, unmarried but close and finally John a newcomer to the district completes the party.

There is no dialogue but some intermittent commentary, first from an unseen source but part of the way through the speaker appears on stage and watches with us as the party pursues the course that all such gatherings do. Food is served.  Drink is drunk.  Little conversational groups combine and dissolve, There is dancing.  There is happiness.  There is disappointment.  Eventually everyone leaves.

It's a warm, affectionate and poignant portrait of everyday human beings living everyday lives and is just lovely.

Just lovely too, and I dare to suggest warm and affectionate has been the audience response to the first two performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The audiences have been gratifyingly large and advance sales indicate that will continue for the rest of the week.  There were reviewers in on opening night but their thoughts do not seem yet to have seen the light of day.  When they do I'll share them here.

I went to my first Fringe show of the year earlier today.  It was completely by chance that someone gave me a free ticket.  The company were papering the house for their first performance.  But I really struck lucky.  It was a great show.  Half a dozen actors, all graduates of the Lecoq school in Paris (famous for mime) played out a number of more or less intelligble scenarios with wooden blocks, figurines, smoke effects, cotton wool clouds, fish heads, balloons, light, sound and music but very few words.  It all culminated in what I took to be an apocalyptic destruction of the world carried out under the watching eye of a man with a tree growing out of his ear.  It was performed with great skill and athleticism and lived up to that holy grail of the Fringe - weird but wonderful.

Get your tickets here.

When you read the reviews in The Scotsman and The Guardian of The Destroyed Room you can see why the International Festival invited Vanishing Point to present the work again in the Festival.  But did they rely solely on the reviews or did they see the show?

If I had read the reviews I would have been even more disappointed than I was. I struggle to see that any illumination or enlightenment was offered to us about the issues argued over in what seemed to me to be an episode of a middle class Big Brother.  You may say that theatre's job is to pose questions rather than give answers but that demands that the play formulates a question which I don't think this did with any clarity.

Rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream are coming on apace despite the problems of absentees, drop-outs and sackings that seem to attach themselves to large cast productions.  But it will be grand.

I've been time-sharing that with the Jazz Festival and the accompanying Jazz Summer School.  The thirty odd participants were split into five bands and our week's work culminated in a great little gig in the Jazz Bar this afternoon.  The band I was in played a couple of classics by Miles Davis and Duke Ellington but the theme of the week was reworking the masters so our versions presented several novel twists including a chorus of Swanee River.  Not for the faint-hearted listener.

Last weekend I saw several concerts and the head out winner was an band called Rumba de Bodas.  They presented a rocket fuelled hour and a half of great music.  Catch them on Youtube or better still live.

Second, in a very different vein was a group led by a New York based Scottish saxophonist who has produced an album of jazzed up Ivor Cutler numbers.  I swore that I wouldn't buy any CDs at the festival this year but I thought his Glasgow Dreamer project was such an interesting and worthwhile project that I shelled out for one at that gig.  I'm glad I did because I think the music comes over better on the CD than it did in the City Art Centre.  The instrumental balance is much better, thanks no doubt to mixing skills and equipment more readily found in Brooklyn than Edinburgh.

I'll pack in a few more gigs this weekend finishing off around midnight on Sunday with some of my favourite local players.

Here is one of the idiosyncrasies of the golf course on Barra.  Every green is protected by an electric fence to keep the cows at bay.  Its other notable feature is the absence of fairways. It's all rough.  The views are lovely though and it's an invigorating hillside walk.

I arrived in Stornoway on a Saturday night so the first full day of my Hebridean holiday was the Sunday.  It rained non-stop.  Even in glorious weather a Sunday in the land of the Wee Frees is quiet but in the rain it's comatose.  I spent the day driving around Lewis trying to spot an islander but they all stayed resolutely indoors and only the tourists were observable asking themselves why they hadn't started their holiday on a Monday.

I exaggerate only a little.  I got to see the standing stones at Callanish if not the inside of the visitor centre and the Doune Braes hotel not far away was open for lunch.

Mind you a young man recently returned to Lewis after a decade's absence did suggest to me that if one had to live on an island dominated by religion it was best to make it a Catholic one since then on a Sunday you could at least play golf.  Which of course I did when I got to Barra.

I played the other four courses on the islands as well. Having just seen the film Tommy's Honour it was clear that I couldn't miss playing at Askernish, a course originally laid out by Old Tom Morris in 1891 and brought back to life ten years or so ago.  It's a brilliant course but played havoc with my feet.  They're still beplastered.

The islands are famous for their beaches and here's one of them on Benbecula.  There's a lovely blue sky in the picture but the wind was blowing raw and cold so there was no danger of me putting my trunks on.

 Apart from golf I did the tourist thing and admired the landscape and visited various spots of interest.  There's an excellent museum on South Uist and not far away the remains of the village of Howbeg which I was interested to see because of a book I read recently called The French MacDonald.  Alexandre MacDonald was the son of a man who left Howbeg for France in 1746 with Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Alexandre rose to be a Marshal of France and was made a Duke by Napoleon on the battlefield of Wagram.  He came to the Hebrides in 1825 to visit the land of his fathers, met various relatives and is said to have taken a handful of Hebridean earth back to France with him which accompanied him to the grave.

These teuchters specialise in romantic tales.  You can see Flora MacDonald's birthplace or at least a cairn where her hovel is said to have been and you can have a dram in Am Politician on Eriskay named after the boat full of booze that foundered there and gave rise to the novel Whisky Galore.

There's a lot of lovely landscape to see and idyllic spots to retire to if you're into peace and quiet.

I didn't hear very much Gaelic spoken over the week.  There were a couple of old codgers chatting by the pier in Tarbert but I think that was it.  However, Gaelic is very much present on bilingual roadsigns and as a linguiphile I suppose I should welcome that.  But I have some reservations about the fact that the Gaelic and English texts are not given equal prominence.  Unlike on bilingual signs on the mainland where the text size is the same for both languages, on the islands English is allocated a significantly smaller one.  Here's an example:

It seems a bit daft to me unless the islanders have poorer eyesight than we tourists.  In the case of the brown signs aimed specifically at tourists it seems not just daft but unwelcoming.

My one regret is that I didn't find time to visit Kisimul castle, the ancient seat of the MacNeils of Barra.  I sailed past it as I left Barra bound for Oban.

It's quite a long trip but lots to see en route, especially as you sail down the Sound of Mull, although not many joined me on deck.

Lo and behold I came across Mike Mainieri's music again within days of hearing him play when looking for a new tune to work on from my current ABRSM jazz book.  A sign from on high?  Probably not but I'm now getting to grips with his Sara's Touch.

What with a saxophone weekend in the Lakes and a trip to the Hebrides I'm not going to see much of this year's film festival.  I did get to the so called opening gala, though the crowd of smartly bekilted and fashionably befrocked teeming down the steps of the Festival Theatre as a more modestly dressed crowd queued to get in rather suggested that I was going to a post gala screening.

Anyway Tommy's Honour is a very good film, well worth your seeing when it comes out on release.  The Tommy in question is the son of Old Tom Morris, both of them figures of renown in the development of golf in the 19th century and respectively youngest and oldest ever winners of the Open Championship.

The film tells a great story.  There is of course sporting triumph and defeat.  There is generational tension.  There is a love story. There is the class struggle between the gentry of the golf world and men like the Morrises.  And there is tragedy.  All of it filmed in Fife and East Lothian in six weeks during which, according to the director there was only one day of rain.

Another super family story was the highly fictional (I imagine) and highly entertaining Belle Famille. A businessman returns to France en route for a meeting in London after fifteen years in China.  He has a Chinese lady in tow to present to his mother and discovers there is a tussle over the former family home in the provinces.  The fiancee is also a colleague so he packs her off to London to keep the meeting warm for him while he investigates the old home situation.

His childhood chum is involved as is the local mayor and his late father's mistress.  He has a run in with the mistress's daughter (not sired by his own dad fortunately, otherwise social norms and possibly laws would clearly be in danger of being broken before the last reel has run).  Helped by a gloriously funny character who had a crush on him at school he finds out what dark deeds have been done in the past.

There's a scene at a concert worthy of a Brian Rix farce in which evryone runs in and out in pursuit of some aspect of the plot.  Our hero is always on the point of going to London but a turn of the plot always prevents him.  At one point he is run off the road by his childhood chum who has been in a relationship with the mistress's daughter but gets dumped and suspects it's all our hero's fault. Which of course it is. After numerous twists and turns it all ends happily for everyone as you would expect.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the screenwriter and director, known to us for his magnificent Cyrano starring Gerard Depardieu, was there for a Q&A but I didn't hang around for much of that.

Before that I saw an interesting documentary about Chile.  Chicago Boys described the influence of the moneterist school of economics centred on the University of Chicago on those Chileans who studied there.  In particular it focused on the period leading up to the overthrow of the Allende government and the subsequent dictatorship. Undoubted economic progress was made thanks to the plans and model developed by the Chicago Boys during the Pinochet period but at some cost.  One of them who served as Finance Minister made the barely believable statement that he was unaware of the human rights violations that occurred at the time.     

There was a more light-hearted air to the set of animations competing for the McLaren Award for new British animation that I saw earlier, though a couple of them had a darkish tinge.  I was particularly pleased to see Isabella the film I'd made an abortive attempt to see at the Glasgow Short Film Festival a few months ago.  Mind you I didn't give it my number 1 vote.  That went to a delightfully funny and thoroughly traditional animation about a cat's visit to the vet.  Unfortunately the competitors were split over two screenings and I couldn't get to the second so I only saw half the field.

The SNJO concert at the Queen's Hall on Friday was rather sparsely attended which was a great shame.  Tommy Smith had once again brought a guest player of world class to play with his talented band.  Maybe Mike Mainieri is not a household name to Edinburgh jazz fans (I for one had never heard of him though judging by the list of those he's played with I've probably got a few CDs on which he features) or maybe they don't like his instrument, the vibraphone.  Whatever the reason they missed a really good gig.  I hope the citizens of Glasgow and Aberdeen turned out in greater numbers.

Liz Lochhead has created very popular and successful Scots versions of a number of Moliere's plays and now she's written a play about the man himself.  She's made a very good job of it.  While it's very funny as befits its subject there are moments of sadness and loss that add a poignant seasoning.

I'm a Moliere fan so was predisposed to enjoy the show, which is the last in the Lyceum's season, but even I found the early scenes a wee bit lacking in fizz.  Fortunately things warm up and Thon Man Moliere soon starts firing on all four cylinders.  Jimmy Chisolm is superb as Moliere, especially in his rant about the King's suppression of Tartuffe and is ably supported by a cast that know their business and a technical team that know theirs.

The birdlife around here is predominantly made up of pigeons, seagulls and magpies so it was delightful to find two beautiful goldfinches perched on my balcony.  They didn't hang around long enough for me to get a picture so I've pinched one from a twitcher site and photoshopped it onto my balcony. 

Here it is, as large as life.  Well larger actually.

The RSNO did a Cole Porter concert a couple of weeks ago.  They pinned it on the coincidence of the orchestra having been founded in the same year that he was born. But no excuse was needed at all to revisit the extraordinary wealth of wonderful songs that he produced.  Amongst hosts of others the words and music for My Heart Belongs to Daddy, Begin the Beguine, Night and Day and for the musicals Kiss Me Kate and High Society all fell from his talented pen and the talented Kim Criswell delivered them with aplomb.

Richard Strauss (not to be confused with Johann the waltz king) may have written any number of songs but it was his Four Last Songs that featured as one item on the RSNO's final concert of the subscription season.  This was the first time I had heard them live and I thought they were beautiful and so much better than on any recording I've ever heard.  The main work was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  The only trouble with this is that you can't really enjoy the first three movements because all you want to hear is the fourth in which the Ode to Joy is blasted out my a large choir.  It was good when it came and the opening piece of the programme whose name I've forgotten by a young woman whose name I have also forgotten and which was inspired by some flats being blown up recently in Glasgow was another blast.

Men in the trenches of the First World War lived with daily blasts of gunfire and bombs and many fell victim to shellshock as a result. This was the case for one of the three young soldiers whose experiences were dramatised in the National Theatre of Scotland's 306:Dawn.

306 is the number of men who were executed for cowardice during the war and dawn was when sentence was carried out.  Dawn was also when the first performance of the play took place in a barn a few miles outside Perth.  I went to a performance at a more usual time but I don't think the play can have lost much in atmosphere thanks to the exceptional performances, the fine music and an inspired presentation.

Here's a model of what was inside the barn.  The NTS has always favoured unconventional stages and this is no exception.

The seating areas are the dark clumps.  The action took place on the raised grey areas, in the passageways between them and on walkways behind the palisades of giant wooden rifles that surround the whole.

It's a very moving experience watching the men being overcome by the horror and stress of exposure to the brutality of warfare allied to the army's rigid and compassionless regime.  As the review in The Scotsman put it " At the end of the play, many in the audience will weep. There’s also a place, though, for a deep and implacable anger at the cruel, life-denying cult of death and killing that held this all-male culture in its grip. This is an indelibly powerful work of music theatre that will have that impact wherever it is performed, for many years to come."

I'm going to quote Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman again, this time about another WWI play that I saw at the Citizens and which puzzled me.  Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme she says "has never been a comfortable play for those who like things simple, in terms of culture, sexuality, or Irish politics".

I couldn't make up my mind whether the play was an exercise in bigging up Irish protestantism, which I found uncomfortable, or in likening the folly of prejudice to the folly of war.  I'm indebted to Mark Brown in The Telegraph for some enlightenment when in introducing his review of the production he says "Just as the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 was a historic juncture in the shaping of Irish Republican politics, so the Battle of the Somme was  formative in the evolution of its rival tradition, Ulster Loyalism."

As a theatre production it was excellent and I recommend reading both those reviews, Scotsman and Telegraph, as well as a little bit about Frank McGuinness its author for a better appreciation.

Maybe I should have done that before going to see it but I prefer to make up my own mind about things even when a bit of background might sometimes help.  I was in fact a bit worried when I went to see Scottish Ballet's Swan Lake because I had inadvertently read an uncomplimentary review of it in The Spectator a week or two beforehand.

Fortunately I enjoyed it for the most part although as Roger remarked the swans' costumes were somewhat unflattering, reminding him strongly of M&S underwear.  (You have to walk through a lot of that to get to the mens' department.)

That apart it all looked beautiful.  Actionwise Act 1 was a bit bland but when Act 2 got going,  and the black swan appeared with her henchmen it heated up.

Photo by Andy Ross

Some reviews didn't like it because it stripped out a lot of the traditional story.  My relative unfamiliarity with the ballet protected me from that concern and Thom Dibdin who clearly knows his ballet swept those concerns aside in his review.  And what is there not to like in Tchaikovsky's wonderful music. 

I moved on from the Greeks to the Romans by starting to read Robert Harris's second novel about Cicero and in parallel with it Mary Beard's Roman history SPQR.  Her first chapter covers the same ground as the first half of the novel, the Catiline conspiracy, and it's fascinating to see how the real events have been woven into the imagined.  Both books are absorbing and happily cost me rather less than the original hardbacks.

Before either of those civilisations flourished, way back in the pagan days, to judge by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring people made some very strange noises and I was intrigued to see the RSNO deploy a washboard to make some of them.  I don't know if that was their idea or if Stravinsky actually scored it that way but it gave me a little fellow feeling with the great orchestra for I once played the washboard myself.

I think once is the operative word for I can recall playing only one gig.  It was in the YWCA in Kircaldy back in the mists of time.  Of course it might be that the skiffle band went on to greater things without me, my playing having produced sounds too much like Rite of Spring for their taste.

Stravinsky appeals to my taste but so do lots of other things and I had a splendid evening at a concert dedicated to Cole Porter who wrote so many wonderful songs with great melodies and wickedly clever lyrics.  The polar opposite but equally pleasurable was the Arild Andersen Trio gig.  Andersen is a Norwegian double bass player and his trio includes our own Tommy Smith on tenor saxophone.  So the music was jazz but that's a broad church and there are lots of jazz fans who can't stand their particular sub-genre.  There's a website that lists 28 different types of jazz plus another dozen musical styles that it regards as jazz related and I searched around it to try to put a name to the trio's style.  Post Bop and Post Fusion Contemporary seem to be the most appropriate but what's in a name. The best thing is to listen so here's a tune that I think is a good example.

There was a lot of listening in The Grads production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  It's a great play and this was an excellent production.  It got one of the most enthusiastic reviews I've read in a long time so rather than witter on let me direct you to IT.  The run's finished.  Too bad you missed it but check out our website for what's on in the Fringe.

I took my visitors to hear the SNJO doing Dave Brubeck, to an evening of folk music, albeit newly written, and to see an excellent play at the Traverse.  Once I'd bought the tickets I realised that I had seen it before.  But it well merited a second viewing and this was I think an even better production of Right Now than the previous one.

It's the story of a young couple who appear to have lost a child and whose lives are taken over by a rather odd family living next door whose early friendliness turns into an intense and unsettling intimacy.  It's shot through with humour but a darker, disquieting flavour never dissipates and at the end a changing of places leaves you wondering what was real and what was imaginary.

As soon as they left I was off to Keswick again, not for kitchen duties this time but to see Fiona's first class production of The Hired Man.  From the novel by Melvyn Bragg with music by Howard Goodall it traces the fortunes of John Tallentine, a farm labourer and miner, and his family from the 1890s to the 1920s against a background of social and economic change in the countryside and the shock of the first world war.  The company brought it off very well and it made for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.  I also had the pleasure of catching up with some old friends who'd come up from the south to see the show.

Back in Edinburgh the next day I had a quick tootle on the clarinet in preparation for my evening class.  I enjoy the class but I'm not making much progress primarily if not entirely because I seldom make time to practice.  I'm fairly disciplined about the saxophone but having spent time with that it's hard to summon up energy and enthusiasm for the clarinet.

The kids in the TSYJO probably practice hard but undoubtedly start from a base of considerably more talent and natural musicality than I have.  They gave a great concert on Sunday afternoon with sparkling playing, not least a duet between Tommy Smith on tenor and a twelve year old Jessica on trumpet.

I've had a go once or twice at reading The Iliad but have never got very far.  Homer does go on a bit and my spirit has always drooped after twenty pages or so.  I'm sorry to say that I had much the same reaction to Chris Hannan's version at The Lyceum.  That's a shame because it's a very fine work, beautifully staged and with nice humorous Gods in attendance.  Critics other than myself have given it lots of stars but really that Achilles is such a constantly bad-tempered little hero that you just want to pick him up and give him a good skelp on the heel, rather than spend two and a half hours waiting for him to see the error of his ways.

The show also suffered for me by comparison with Zinnie Harris's This Restless House that I'd seen a few days earlier at The Citizens. Based on The Oresteia it's even more of a nasty saga than The Iliad and starts not long after that finishes when Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War.

The first of the three plays is stupendous.  It's wild, it's gory, it's fast and furious.  It's tragic and comic and loud and absolutely bursting with excitement.  The second comes close but is not such an assault on the senses and the third was a little puzzling.  It moves away from the world of myth and magic into modern psychiatry.  It may well be a sensible take on the curses of the ancient world to invoke psychosis and paranoia but Mark Brown in The Herald puts it well for me when he says the third play's setting "creates a discombobulating breach in both the tone and the structure of the drama."

But the whole is really wonderful.