The Queen's Hall morning concerts are a popular strand of the EIF music offering and generally a delight to the ear whether you get there in person or listen to them on the radio.  There has only been space for one in my diary this year.  It was an oboe and piano recital.  Apart from the occasional solo within it I've mostly heard the instrument as part of the blend of sound produced by an orchestra.

I know nothing about the oboe repertoire but the lovely music came from composers we hear less frequently than Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and the like.  They played Hindemith, Poulence, Dorati and others,  Some pieces were delicate, some vigorous, some fast, some slow, all beautiful.

I'd positioned myself near the exit after the interval for a quick getaway and a bit of luck with the buses got me down to the Royal Scots in good time for the one woman Richard III that was my next treat. It's a clever show.

As the audience enter they are greeted by Richard as though they were characters in the play.  I was welcomed as His Majesty King Edward IV, given a nameplate to wear round my neck and a little paper crown then escorted to a seat of honour.

The various principal characters were seated in a square of chairs encircling a small table and a swivel chair.  As the actor goes through the play as well as dragging her withered leg about she whizzes around on the chair.  The audience is enlisted from time to time.  We stand for the coronation for example.  She despatches two audience members to kill the princes in the tower.  Their killing and all the others are effected by clapping a sticky label onto the victim.

Here's mine, kept as a souvenir.  An excellent show.

Next stop the Book Festival for a talk by James Fergusson about his book Al-Britannia in which he describes his exploration of Britain's Muslim communities in an effort to uncover the truth behind the more lurid press stories we read.  He attends a Sharia council, takes part in the Ramadan fast, talks to various feared preachers and so on.  It's a fascinating insight and his conclusions are largely optimistic about the ultimate melding of Muslim and non Muslim into one British community.

I couldn't resist a Book Festival event called A Fifer Worth Following and it was well worth attending.  The story of the life of Lady Anne Barnard, born Anne Lindsay at Balcarres is fascinating.  She refused to follow the pre-ordained path of a Georgian lady of aristocratic but pecunious status.  Instead she became an avid and lively "eccentric aristocrat" in London society spurning proposals of marriage until at 42 she fell in love and married a man without money and 12 years her junior.  She travelled with him to Cape Colony and wrote extensively of their experiences there.

Indeed she wrote extensively about all aspects of her life and as well as correspondence and so on  left six volumes of memoir hitherto unexplored by historians.  These Stephen Taylor, who has written about her, would need a deal of editing if they were to be published but in the meantime we have his book Defiance which I am eager to get started on.

Half a dozen poets read work from both within and without a new anthology of poems about Edinburgh, Umbrellas of Edinburgh.  I particularly enjoyed the work of Harry Giles and a Glasgow lady whose name I have forgotten but will find out.

A Stool Against the Printed Rule is a two-hander about an imagined meeting on death row in the Tower of London between Archbishop Laud and Jenny Geddes.  The least said about this show the better.  You'd think they'd at least have given Jenny a Scottish accent!