As well as beautiful trees Autumn is giving us lovely skies like this one that I paused to take a picture of on the Mound.  As I stood there I was approached by a tourist looking for information.  He was sporting a dashing black baseball cap with a masonic logo in gold on it.  He explained that he had just come from the Freemasons Hall in George Street and was now looking for Lodge No. 1 which he had been told was in St. John St. near the Mound somewhere.

Well I happened to know that Lodge No. 1 was in Hill St. and the nearest St John's I could think of was in Corstorphine.  It took my smart phone to convince him about Lodge No. 1 and he set off back the way he had come.

But I hadn't been smart enough to check for a St. John St. because it exists and runs from Holyrood Rd. to the Canongate and it's there that you find St John's Chapel the home of Lodge No. 2 which is surely what he wanted.  Must brush up my guiding skills.

There's been lots on in the last few weeks.  I enjoyed seeing Trainspotting on the stage. It's an absolutely tragic tale really and I think that the enjoyement comes in much the same way as it does from a show like Downton Abbey in that you are looking in on a totally foreign way of life before going home to safely and comfortably back into your own.

I also enjoyed Cabaret.  I've heard the music often enough and in Kitwe bits of it featured in some of our own cabaret type shows and I saw the film years ago but I think this is the first time I've seen the stage show in its entirety.

I was intrigued by the opening which featured a giant camera shutter, surely a nod to John Van Druten's play I am a camera, itself a dramatisation of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin stories. I remember the play being presented in Kirkcaldy when I was in my early teens.  I remember it mostly because of my mum and dad exchanging glances as they declared that it was "not suitable" so I'm not sure that I ever saw it though I daresay my desire to do so was heightened.

The amazing Carlos Acosta was here with his troupe of Cuban dancers in a wonderful show made up as most dance shows are of a number of pieces.  I enjoyed them all but the finale in which twelve dancers threw neon lit litre bottles of water to and fro in a bewildering, complex and ever changing pattern while themselves being seldom still was breath-taking, though maybe it was stretching the definition of dance a wee bit.

I'd seen Ballet Rambert earlier in the month which got five stars from Claire who actually saw it twice.  She persuaded Phil to come along the second time but despite being reasonably enthusiastic it wasn't enough to bring him out for Carlos.

Psycho was screened in the Usher Hall with the RSNO playing the soundtrack.  It's still a pretty gripping film and as good a thriller as many more modern ones.  Unusually I saw another film with a live soundtrack, this time only one man with a piano and a set of percussive blocks.  This was the oldest extant South African film, made in 1916, called Die Voortrekkers.  I suppose we might call it a docu-drama but essentially it's a propaganda celebration of the northwards movement of the Boers seeking to carve out a home away from British control and their battle in 1838 against the Zulus at Blood River.  It was fascinating stuff full of that wild-eyed overacting that seems to pervade silent movies.

Another part of the British Empire has cropped up in a number of talks at the National Library that I've enjoyed, all of them featuring the exploits of Scots better known in India than they are here.  A chap called James Taylor from Kincardineshire has a giant statue in Sri Lanka where he is revered as a major force in developing the tea industry. (Funnily enough in Forres I came across the Falconer Museum named after two brothers one of whom was instrumental in tea development in India.)

Then a talk about five Fraser brothers who went off to India one after another to seek fame and fortune, with mixed results it has to be said.  An interesting book has been written using their letters found in an old trunk in the family home.

Finally Alexander Burnes from Montrose, a descendant of Robert Burns, who was in essence a British spy in what has come to be known as The Great Game when we feared Russian interference in India.  Lionised in his lifetime then according to his biographer the Victorians later downplayed him and airbrushed him out of history because of his racy private and not so private life.  His great claim to fame for my sons will be that he features in the very first Flashman book.