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.