Drainage Alley - a rehearsed reading from the Royal Court, plus our own Jimmy Chisholm, of a Cuban play about life in a less than prestigious Havana street in the uneasy borderland created by the Cuban/USA rapprochement.  Very worth seeing but it's gone now.  However the BBC were filming so maybe it will appear on the box.

What can I say about The Divide?   Well it's big.  So big that it's divided into two three hour sessions.  I very much enjoyed the first half when the situation was being set up and we met the various characters.  Great stuff I thought.  Coming back at 7.30 for the second half it took a while for me to recover my enthusiasm.  I began to lose it again as the play went past several jolly good points at which it could (even should) have drawn to a close.

The acting is super.  The girl who holds the whole show together telling the story in which she is a principal character is outstanding. I didn't lash out four quid on a programme so I don't know her name.

Outside Mullingar opened this evening.  We got a great reception.  The audience obviously enjoyed it.  They even applauded at the end of scenes. Could the Irish Times have got it wrong?

I went to a couple of things this afternoon.  In Praise of Useless Languages was an hour long conversation between an academic and a very large audience which could be summarised succinctly as "being in command even partially of more than one language is good for the brain".  No facts and figures were presented in support of this proposition and no voices demurred.  Boring.

The Quito Papers in the Book Festival was a touch on the boring side also.  Let's not have multinational franchise coffee shops but local establishments.  Hear, hear say I, thinking of my regret at seeing an independent cafe turning into a Pret a Manger in Lothian Road this week.  Strong on the problems of the modern city.  Strong on what we'd rather see.  Weak on how to get there.