There's a Turkish rug in my hall, a souvenir of my one and only visit to Istanbul nearly thirty years ago.  The fascination of that city came flooding back listening to Bethany Hughes race through several centuries of its history with a nod here and there to its present state.  She spoke solidly and enthusiastically for an hour without a note.

She's written a book which I'm sure I will read with interest and pleasure sometime but I have more than half a dozen to consume first so I didn't buy Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities.

Gruffdog Theatre gave an impressive performance of Peer Gynt.  It's not a tale nor a play that particularly attracts me.  It was seeing the company on the Royal Mile that persuaded me to give it a go and I was well rewarded.

This is very much an ensemble piece.  All cast members are in a basic costume of white top, grey knickerbockers and black pumps.  That uniformity extends even to eye make-up. They add odd bits and pieces as required to change character and a cap passed from one actor to another passes on the role of Peer.  Four actors in all play him.   They work on a bare stage with precise and atmospheric lighting.  Three triangular slabs on castors each bearing three eight foot high pieces of timber are manipulated to identify places now and then, for example a room in a house, a ship and a shipwreck.  Even simpler devices instantly set a scene.

There is music: guitar, violin, drum and voice.    They form and unform groups.  They dash or slide or crawl or jump.  They manipulate a giant troll king puppet à la warhorse and a smaller one for the result of Peer's dalliance with the troll king's daughter.

The acting is great.  What more can I say?  It's a masterly piece of work.

I soon identified the voice, indistinct and muffled as it was, as that of Cassius Clay (or Muhammad Ali as he later became) as I took my seat in front of a square platform on which stood a young woman.  I was at One Step Before the Fall, classified in the Fringe programme as dance/physical theatre.

It was very, very physical.  She expended tremendous energy bobbing and weaving her way around what became with the addition of ropes a boxing ring.  She propelled herself from the ropes on one side to the other with such force that one rope broke and the fixtures went whizzing off.  Fortunately they hit no-one.  This was more hunting like a tiger than floating like a butterfly but it was great stuff, a truly impressive show and I musn't forget the atmospheric and highly charged singing and playing of her off-stage partner nor the tubular bell clanging out the rounds.

The actress in The Last Queen of Scotland gave a less physical but equally intense emotional performance.  She was powerful, passionate and above all truthful.  Were it not that she was in her twenties and the events she was concerned with happened over forty years ago you could believe it was her personal story.

The expulsion of the Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin brought the subject of the story to a housing scheme in Dundee where she grew up and nursed an obsession with her past that a journey back to Jinja helped her become free from.

Having watched those events in the seventies from next door in Kenya and having shared digs at university ten years earlier with an Asian from Jinja (we often wondered what became of him) I felt almost part of the story.

Christine Bovill brought the golden age of French chanson to George Street with an hour long programme of songs by Ferre, Becaud, Trenet, Barbara, Aznavour, Brel and Piaf.  All my favourites were there plus a couple I didn't know.  She sang them like a native, despite being a Glaswegian, revealed considerable knowledge of the genre and entertained us with personal anecdotes in between numbers.