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.