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.