I turned from tourism in Bilbao to tourism at home.  On a lovely sunny day last weekend I wandered by the Water of Leith to the Shore with vague thoughts of a glass of plonk and some jazz in the Shore Bar.  I was too early for that so had a stroll round the port.

Then lightning struck.  Why not a visit to the Royal Yacht?  It's been at Ocean Terminal for 20 years after all.  Visitors from a' the airts including visitors to my own home have been to see it but no me.  So I did and I loved it.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a priveleged lifestyle and an impressive example of marine engineering.  The route through the ship is well laid out and the audio guide precise and informative.  The fruit scones in the caff are first class too.

Scottish Ballet are doing a version of Cinderella by Christopher Hampton this Christmas which I saw and enjoyed.  It's in much more of a restrained classical style than the last Cinderella I remember seeing which was also by Scottish Ballet but choreographed by Ashley Page.  That was done with boldly coloured sets and extravagant costumes.  The press at the time called it "hip and stylish", "fizzing".  I don't think you could say that about Hampton's although it had some great moments - the parade of legs as the Prince hunts for Cinders for example.  But I confess Page's version was more to my taste.

On to the Traverse for two shows this week.  Mouthpiece centres on the unlikely friendship that springs up between a middle-aged writer who's lost her mojo and a troubled teenage schemie who has an artistic talent.  It segues into the appropriation of the miserable experiences of the most deprived in our society for the entertainment of the middle classes.  What a friend of mine descibes as "poverty tourism" or some such phrase.  As usual Joyce McMillan puts her finger on the strengths and weaknesses of the show.  Read her review.

The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven by Jo Clifford is fundamentally a plea for the acceptance of people who don't fit society's norms, particularly gender norms.  Even in these irreligious days I think it's a brave script and one which quite gently exposes the irrationality of prejudice.  The Wee Review does the show justice but sadly as Kirsty McGrory points out the production is preaching to the converted when presented somewhere like The Traverse.  Less indulgent audiences should see it.

Finally a disappointment.  After months of waiting during which I had quite forgotten what caused me to order it in the first place a novel became available for me at the library.  After reading maybe a quarter I decided this satire on modern digital life wasn't working for me.  So it's going back and I'm now waiting for the only one of ever reliable Allan Massie's novels about Roman Emperors that I haven't read - Caligula.

December started in excellent style with a rum and coke at Edinburgh airport prior to boarding Easyjet's flight to Bilbao at teatime on the 1st.  Flight duration and time difference meant that we arrived at our Air B&B fairly late on Saturday evening.  But thanks to the Spanish way of life this was no impediment to finding a pleasant spot in the Casco Viejo to eat and drink.  Indeed we homed in on a delightful colonnaded square where given the mildness of the evening we sat outdoors.  Ross stripped down to short sleeves but I stuck to my warm jacket and bunnet.

The main objective of the trip was to visit the Guggenheim.  It fully repaid the effort.  It's an awesome building and from our lodgings it was a lovely walk along the river with a pitstop in a little cafe for breakfast. ( On the other two mornings we had breakfast in the Ribera market which is every bit as enchanting as La Boqueria in Barcelona.)

Here's a view along the river

First sight of the building.  The tall curved structures form outposts to the main building which you can see rising up beyond the bridge.

Closer to with a giant spider to the right

A view through the spider

 

Alongside with the Ibedrola (parent of Scottish Power) skyscraper in the background

Jeff Koons' puppy that stands guard over the entrance

And finally the whole building seen from the opposite bank of the river 

That's just the outside and however impressive and exciting it may be it's by the contents that it ultimately is judged.  Like most galleries, because in English usage it's a gallery not a museum, it has a permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.  For my money the large steel structures by Richard Serra are the stars of the permanent, or at least longterm exhibits: they promised him a twenty five year tenure.  You can see them here.

There was an exhibition of Giacometti sculptures on while we were there and one called Van Gogh to Picasso.  I've always like Giacometti's stick men and his out of proportion figures so I found this a real treat.  Photography was prohibited so I exercised my meagre sketching talent by drawing the piece I liked best. This is it here (not my sketch - the piece itself).

The Van Gogh to Picasso was also excellent.  I particularly liked early works by Picasso that I hadn't seen before which were naturalist paintings, done many years before he embarked on the abstract works that I most closely associate him with.

Bilbao is not just the Guggenheim.  There's another lovely gallery that we managed to visit and various museums that we didn't.  A pretty park with a lovely fountain, an arts centre in a converted wine warehouse and lots and lots of other things that meant that two and half days were completely inadequate.  Must go back.

From Brighton I went up to London.  David and Sally's spare room being unavailable because of works in the flat I had booked a room in a fleapit near King's Cross.  Fleapit is perhaps a little unkind: it was clean enough, the shower worked and the bed was ok.

When planning the trip I'd discovered that this was the opening weekend of the London Jazz Festival so had booked a few gigs.  The first, on Saturday night, was at the 606 club where a rhythm section backed five saxophonists who, solo and in various combinations, entertained us while we ate.  It was a lively and cheerful atmosphere, the food was good and the music was excellent.

I took a number of inadequate pictures of which this is one.

On Sunday morning I went to hear more saxophones, an unusual combination - an ensemble of ten baritones.  Tokyo Chutei Iki have done their thing all over the world and for forty minutes I enjoyed it but decided not to have too much of a good thing so didn't stick around to hear the second set.  They're  really good but less is probably more.

This is what they looked like

You can check the music out here.

The gig was in  a church in Bethnal Green. It was a nice day so I had a stroll around and took a few pictures.  This squirrel is one of my most successful wildlife shots

and I hadn't seen a copshop lamp like this since the good old days of Dixon of Dock Green so had to snap it.

Walking back towards Kings Cross for my next gig I came across Brick Lane.  Years ago Fiona and I were in London and somehow or other knew people who kept a pub in the street.  We went there and Fiona ordered a cider only to be told that the pub didn't stock cider because it was a popular mixer for the local meths drinkers.

The area has been gentrified a bit since then but it's clearly not been totally cleansed of roughness judging by the list of what musn't be done attached to a lamppost.

  Curiously ball games are not prohibited.

The gig near Kings Cross involved three piano players and was a bit too educational for my taste so I dozed a bit.  But it wasn't too long and afterwards I tubed up to Highbury to David and Sally's place for a wee cup of tea prior to going to our last gig at The Troubadour in Earls Court.

This was another eat while you listen venue.  The band were squeezed into a space behind the window giving onto the street and next to the door.  Incoming customers had to more or less walk through them.  Our table was bang in front of the band, which consisted as you can see of rhythm section and three front line players, two of whom were American visitors.  The drummer, Sebastiaan de Kron runs the group.  I've heard him play in Edinburgh with the SNJO.

They played straightahead jazz tunes, most of which I didn't know, with lots of inventive soloing.  It was a very satisfying gig and the food, wine, service and overall ambience were terrific.

That was it.  Onto the train home the following morning.  My other November highlight was reading Buddenbrooks.  Such a entertaining family saga.  It's up there with The Forsyte Saga.

Since I went to Keswick November has flown by.  I've had my usual dose of concerts and suchlike and a couple of visits to the cinema.  I saw quite a decent gangster movie called Widows, the usp of which is I suppose that all the baddies are women.  Then there was the rousing Outlaw/King about Robert the Bruce.  Decently entertaining, not as silly as Braveheart, didn't take too many liberties with historical fact, beautifully filmed and cleverly finished in 1304 leaving lots of room for a sequel to take us to Bannockburn.

The Grads presented the stage version of All About My Mother,  It was well done but a tricky show to stage because of the multiplicity of locations that are required and that the action moves amongst.

I saw another French film at the Institut but I've already forgotten what it was.  There's been a French film festival on as well in the Filmhouse and elsewhere but the only event I managed to squeeze into my schedule was a session of shorts at Summerhall.  I always enjoy short films which probably tells you something about my attention span, and this event was no exception, very enjoyable.  To distil a story or a situation into just a few minutes requires great skill and imagination.  Both were on show in these half dozen films.

I was a bit underwhelmed by Ballet Rambert's Life is a Dream but to be fair I dozed a little during the first half so am not really in a position to form a proper judgement.  

Given my poor sense of smell and insensitive palate I probably shouldn't bother going to wine tastings but I was persuaded by the prospect of good company to attend one at Valvona & Crolla,  Five wines/ports were to be tasted.  They were all sweet, some sweeter than others perhaps but I couldn't say that I experienced much difference between the £20 a bottle and the £80.  They were tasty though as were the accompanying cheeses.  The V&C man was clearly on an educational  mission.  He went on at length.

I didn't buy any wine but I splashed out a fiver on one of the cheeses.  It was a mixture of Gorgonzola and Mascarpone and may have been the cheese I have been searching for since I stumbled on what the shopkeeper in Cervinia in 1984 called Gorgonzola crema.  I liked it so much that I took a big polystyrene boxful back to Zambia.

I visited old friends in Brighton and although the purpose of the trip was to attend a meeting of the Zambia Society Trust that was cancelled at the last minute I enjoyed the visit and a little potter around the town.

 

The beach had as little sand on it as always

 But the pier looked good  

As did the Pavilion and the street where David and Kay live.

 

The bandstand had surely had a coat of paint since my last visit

and there was a new attraction on the front.  Well I say attraction.  It looks like a very thin factory chimney or a very tall concrete lamppost.  It is a tower called the British Airways i360.  A glass doughnut shaped pod slides up its 450 feet affording grand views.  It was not in operation when I was there alas.

I went off to Keswick for the weekend.  The town was stowed out with visitors as usual and as usual there was a bit of rain.  Not too much and what there was added to the autumnal beauty of the place.

Here are a couple of pictures I took on a stroll by the lake.  Lovely spot is it not?

I rushed back to Edinburgh on the Monday for band practice.  With a concert coming up in December and my difficulties with the pieces we are playing I can't afford to miss more practices than is absolutely necessary.

How wonderful it would be to play as well as members of the SCO, or any good orchestra for that matter.  Their concert this week featured a tremendous new work, a viola concerto by John McLeod.  This world premiere featured the SCO's principal viola player, Jane Atkins.  Called Nordic Fire it lived up to the monicker, hurtling flashes of energetic brilliance from the viola through a solid orchestral groundwork.

The concert started on a Nordic note with the very pleasant and tuneful Holberg suite by Greig and finished with an orchestral version of a Beethoven quartet.  Best left as a quartet in my view.

I went with Claire and Maddy to the NTS/Citizens production of Cyrano de Bergerac.    It was an evening on which a large proportion of the people I know in Edinburgh were also at the show.  It was very good though I thought some of the opening scene could have been done away with.  It's an English version by Edwin Morgan so it's a good text and the production was high-spirited and imaginative with the Lyceum's stage laid bare to its back wall and wings.  While wonderful to look at that vastness may have led to some of the lines floating up into the grid rather than out to the audience.

Since I went to India years ago the country has continued to hold a fascination for me so I was attracted to a talk at the museum called A Punjabi Jewel in the British Crown?  It was an excellent, rapid and sweeping review of relations between the East India Company (and later the British govenment and Queen Victoria) and the Sikhs in the persons of Ranjit Sing, his son Duleep and grandaughter Sophia.

I was familiar with much of the story though I'd forgotten rather a lot but wasn't at all familiar with Sophia.  She was a most interesting character, living an aristocratic life but demonstrating as a suffragette and working as a nurse in the first war.  I'd like to learn more.

In a bout of Francophilia a few weeks ago I joined the French Institute and today enjoyed the first fruits of my investment at a free screening of a super film called Les Grands Esprits.  Denis Podalydès plays a teacher at one of Paris's top schools.  At a cocktail do he propounds the view that what the poorly performing state schools in the banlieue need is an influx of experienced and highly competent teachers like himself.  Little does he know that he's addressing these remarks to someone from the Ministry of Education and finds himself being inveigled into putting his ideas into practice himself.

Of course it's not an immediate success.  His relations with the pupils are not good.  But this is a warm and delightful comedy in which a happy ending is inevitable.  So he brings the pupils round becoming a better person in the process.  I admit to having a tear my eye as the closing credits rolled.

This could be my Wednesday afternoon treat throughout the winter.  That would get my membership money's worth.  And it's not a bad place to eat.

Having saved this painting for the nation, admittedly not single-handed, I was happy to trot along to the National Gallery to hear a talk about it followed by a wee swally.

The talk was very interesting indeed so I followed it up enthusiastically a week or so later with Art and the Jacobites.  Not as it turned out nearly as interesting.  Frankly boring, but the evening was saved by scampi and chips plus some pleasant plonk with chums at the New Club.

Yet more art.  I squeezed in a visit to the Rembrant exhibition that had been running all summer just a day or two before it closed.  All that dark Flemish stuff is not entirely to my taste but they can work miracles with zones of light in the darkness and I do like portraits of which there were many.

I went from Rembrant to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition which has just opened.  It's a spledid collection mostly of posters advertising the attractions of fin du siècle nightlife.  There are some scratchy recordings of the stars of the day to listen to.  I'm sure that in the right place at the right time they were a wow.

That scampi was not my only eating out experience this month.  I've eaten Swiss alpine dumplings in Leith - very tasty; had an excellent French lunch with former workmates; had a mediocre French lunch elsewhere and a pleasant Scottish pre-theatre dinner before Mathew Bourne's Swan Lake.  That's an absolutely wonderful show and so sexy. What an imagination and what thrilling and accomplished dancing.  A couple of the dancers walked past me as I waited for a bus the following morning and I was quite excited to see them.

I much enjoyed hearing Francois Leleux playing the oboe with the SCO last season so it was a pleasure to hear him again.  He played Haydn's oboe concerto which was fine but I actually enjoyed other works on the programme more, notably some Brahms.  More Haydn popped up at another SCO concert.  This time a chorale work, The Seasons.  It was grand.  The chorus sang their hearts out and the soloists were great.   

I heard Catriona Morison sing during the Festival and she was back in Edinburgh this monthe to sing Shéhérazade by Ravel in a splendid RSNO concert under their new Music Director Thomas Søndergård.  He's not a new face for Usher Hall audiences because he has been Principal Guest Conductor for a few years.  He swung into action as the boss with Mahler and Beethoven and followed that up with Grieg and Rachmaninov in the concert that featured Catriona Morison.  I enjoyed both those concerts and were I not nursing a cold in the hopes of it not spoiling my weekend in Keswick I'd be in the Usher Hall again tonight.

I don't know if I can blame my cold on the days I went without central heating while a new boiler was installed but those were cold days in contrast to the mild days that followed, on which the heating seldom came on.  Whatever, my various domestic bits and pieces are gradually reaching the end of their days and being replaced.  A groaning toilet cistern is next in line.

On one of those mild days I sat drinking in the sun with Andrew who happened to be in Edinburgh and was happy to chew the fat with me while Rosemary got on with the serious business of shopping.

I'm catching an early train for my weekend away and luckily I went to collect my pre-purchased tickets today because the machine went through all the motions and told me that it was printing them but disgorged no tickets.  I had to run around a bit to eventually get a man to open the machine and pull them out.  No way I'd have been at the station sufficiently long in advance of my train for that.

Spotted this splendid bird on the hunt for a snack in the Water of Leith.

 

In a mood of hexagonal nostalgia I joined the French Institute the other day.  I suppose I should say re-joined because I have been a member in the past though in my heyday of theatrical activity there in the 90s I don't think I was.  Anyway I toddled off to their celebration of European Language Day which was not too exciting. There was a little quiz, harmless enough, then half-hour taster sessions of a limited number of languages.  The only one that promised me anything new was the Polish one so I went and it was fun in a mild sort of way.

There were refreshments. A pale shadow of the feasts that used to be laid on in Randolph Crescent.  Has austerity accompanied the move to their new premises on George IV Bridge?  I left clutching a pile of leaflets hoping that there are better days there to come.

That same evening I went with Claire and Ross to see Manpower at the Traverse preceded by a delicious bowl of chicken livers at Nandos.  That nosh pleasure saw me through a tiresome show whose raison d'être was lost on me.  Fortunately Claire was reviewing it so now I know.  Generous as ever she gave it two stars.   Joyce McMillan was there as well and on the Scotsman website under her byline it gets four stars but no supporting text.  Very odd.

Also very odd by most measures and the very reason I went to it was a gig featuring the American saxophonist Colin Stetson.  Described as experimental he does all sorts of things with the bass

saxophone except perhaps play music.  The best I could say about it was that it was better than his support band.  To be fair some of his stuff on Youtube is listenable to and this video in which he explains what he's doing is interesting.

At least thanks to meeting a sax playing friend who had arrived early I got a seat.  The Dissection Room being on this occasion as on many others essentially a standing space.

One of the features of where I live that I never fail to be thankful for is the ready supply of buses that are available on my doorstep to whisk me to almost everywhere in the city that I ever want to go.

And I live in high hopes of the tram line being extended down Leith Walk within the next year or two to add a direct link to the airport.

Now that undertaking will entail some disruption to the bus services during construction of the line.  Current plans indicate that buses coming from town would no longer pass my door.  They'd go down Easter Road or Broughton Road.  Not a big inconvenience.  Indeed adding a healthy little walk.

However a new transport option has just been introduced that would overcome the problem and would be even more healthy.  Edinburgh now has a bike hire system with a docking station just round the corner.  I got all excited about it and kitted myself out with the phone app needed to use the system.  Rides were free on the first day but it was close to midnight before I was ready so I thought better of zipping down Leith Walk then.

I still haven't tried it out but I will.  What would be great would be for the conversion of the Powderhall railway into a cycle track to be speeded up.  There's bound to be an access point pretty near here so I could revive my long disused cycling skills more safely than on the roads, or even pavements.

The resolution got me out on the golf course again about a week later but weather and other things have conspired to keep me off it since.

One delightful other thing was a weekend making music at The Burn.  I've been to this lovely place a few times now but this was my first carless trip.  It required a train to Montrose then a bus to Stracathro hospital which is in the middle of nowhere, then a taxi to The Burn.

  
The journey was enlivened by a sprint along the platform and up and down a bridge over the tracks to catch the bus.  I needn't have bothered rushing because a fight broke out on the bus after a few stops.  The sane and sober passengers all got out and hung about till the next bus came along.  To our dismay a couple of the unsobers also got on but collapsed into the land of nod after exchanging a few unimaginative expletive undeleted curses.

The sound of a dozen saxophones playing fortissimo was tranquility itself in comparison.

Then the resumption of my U3A Italian ate into possible golfing time.  Not the class itself which is only a couple of hours every two weeks but I'm now in charge of the group which means I have to prepare materials for our sessions.  It's time consuming but quite fun.  Of course what we need is an actual Italian leading the thing not me but at least I can make sure that what we do is of interest to me if to no-one else.

It's a shame that in his 150th anniversary year Macintosh's art school should have burnt down but fortunately I went round it a few years ago and have visited other buildings of his in the past and this year have been to various celebratory exhibitions.  One of the things that tends to be displayed at such exhibitions is the design he (and his wife Margaret Macdonald) submitted in 1901 to a competition sponsored by the German publisher Koch for"A House for an Art Lover".  They didn't get a prize but the drawings were purchased by Koch and later published.

No house was built from his or anyone else's designs at the time.  I didn't know that a house based on those drawings had been built in Glasgow between 1989 and 1996.  On my most recent visit to that city to lunch with Andrew I had the great pleasure of going to see it.  It's lovely and what's more contains a restaurant that provided us with an extremely good and pleasingly affordable lunch.  Here's some pics

Exterior

Gable view

Dining Room

Music Room

Piano - visitors can play it!

For lots of information about the competition and the design click here.  The Glasgow realisation of the design is very lovely inside and out, but I'm not sure I'd be comfy living in it. Maybe I'm not enough of an arts lover. 

But I do love Chicago, the musical that is; I've never been to the city. The show has been the toast of Pitlochry this season so a bunch of  us took a train up, with fizz thoughfully supplied by Claire for sustenance on the journey.  After an excellent lunch we went to the show.  It merited all the plaudits it has received.  The play on which it is based was written (in 1926) as a satire on the corruption and bending of judicial processes that the city was famous for at the time.  The musical stays true to that except that it's such fun, the songs are so bright and catchy, the characters so engaging and we are so removed from the environment it is set in that the message has a hard time getting through.

Another show that deserved not only plaudits, which it probably has had elsewhere, but a decent sized audience, was Richard Alston's Mid Century Modern which played to a very sparsely peopled Festival Theatre last night.  The dancing was beautiful especially the last piece in which the dancers in various combinations and ultimately the whole company whirled and leapt to Brahms' exciting gypsy piano pieces.

The fine weather tempted me out onto the golf course this afternoon for the first time in many a moon.  I didn't fancy trailing along behind the party of four marshalling on the first tee so I took advantage of a gap elsewhere and set off from the tenth.

Given how long it is since I played last I was very pleased with my game.  I seemed to drive and putt as well as I ever have and my iron play wasn't totally shabby.  Mind you we are talking of a fairly humble level.  Best ever handicap 21 after all and all downhill since then, or I suppose I should say uphill given how the handicap system works.

It was good to get some fresh air and exercise.  I'll make a late summer resolution to play more often and see how long I can keep it up.

I've rather neglegted the Fringe this year and it didn't figure in my final flurry of activity over the weekend.  I went to a concert and two Book Festival events.

Mahler's Eighth Symphony - this is a large scale choral work which filled the Usher Hall stage and choir stalls.

I enjoyed it when it was loud and when it was pin drop quiet but got a bit bored by the bits in between.  People I spoke to afterwards complained that it was very loud.  I think my seat high in the Gods and well to the side reduced the impact.

Lost Countries - a Danish architect who walks the beaches of Europe and collects stamps added to those hobbies an investigation into countries that no longer exist.  He's produced a book called Nowherelands that gives us the rundown on about fifty of them such as Indian princely states swallowed up after 1948 and a country that existed briefly (long enough to issue stamps) under Laurence of Arabia's tutelage until it was snaffled by the Turks and others.  It was an interesting talk and it's a very pretty book but it strikes me as a mini coffee table book that if I bought I should only occasionally glance at.

Monsieur X - now here is a book that I probably will buy but I'll wait for the paperback edition due next March.  Hardbacks take up so much space as well as money.  Anyway it's the story of a French aristocratic follower of the sport of kings who took on the state betting behemoth and took them to the cleaners over a period of years.  His lifestyle as well as his betting was distinctly racy.  Alas he met his comeuppance, the exact nature of which the author did not reveal for fear of spoiling our enjoyment and his sales.

So that's the festivals done and dusted.  I don't think my strategy of not booking up Fringe events in advance worked out terribly well but maybe it was rain and lethargy to blame.

Today I went to a public consultation event about plans for the development of the waste treatment site at Powderhall now that the plant is no longer in action.

It proved to be a more immersive experience than I had anticipated.  Once I'd absorbed or at least looked at all the information on display I was asked to fill in a feedback form.  As well as asking for comments I was provided with coloured pencils and a diagram of the site and invited to map out what I thought should go where.

Blow me when I handed it in a number of cheery urban planners laid out my ideas on a model. It was great fun and my idea for a sculpture and/or a playpark echoing the site's past as a greyhound track and a speedway venue with some bin lorries thrown in raised a laugh or three.

The green is parkland and sports facilities, the orange is housing, the blue is retail and offices.  The white at the entrance to the site is my sculpture/playpark.  What fun.

The Sunny Side of Science - Michael Brooks and Tim Radford are committed to advertising the wonders and beauties of science to the widest possible audience and the Book Festival crowd reacted as they would have wished; with appreciation and pleasure.  Answering questions the speakers both emphasised the vastness of what we don't know despite the vastness of what we have created - Huddle telescope and Large Hydron Collider being but two examples.  Talk of black holes and multiverses reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld's known and unknown unknowns.

Des canyons aux étoiles -  described as Messaien's mystical celebration of the breathtaking natural marvels of Utah this work employed quite large forces including a wide range of percussive instruments one of which, the geophone, Messiaen invented specially for this piece.  There was a lot of sound to try to get your heard around, a bewildering variety in fact.  On my one and only trip to Utah the place seemed majestically quiet rather than noisy so I can't say that I saw a direct relationship but I guess all that could have been going on his head.  I enjoyed the first half hour or so but that was only a third of the way through.  My poor little brain tired progressively as time went on.

Home Truths - Robert Peston's distinctive delivery, mastery of facts and incisive questioning are amongst the joys of British political broadcasting.  He's written a book called WTF? in which he puts forward an analysis of what he thinks has gone wrong with Britain in recent years and why and what we might do to make things better.  He deployed all his gifts in racing through an invigorating and often humorous presentation and dealt succinctly with audience questions.  Politicians please copy.

Visions de l'Amen -  Messaien again but only two pianos and not quite as long as Des canyons aux étoiles and a very different reaction from me.  I thought it was absolutely wonderful, a thrilling high energy mountain range of gorgeous sound that finished with the Queen's Hall audience held in limbo while the last notes slowly faded to be replaced by tumultuous applause.  The first half of the concert had featured a sonata for two pianos by Brahms.  Pleasant enough at the time, it seemed old-fashioned, lumbering and dull once we had heard Messaien.

Rocio is back from her summer in Spain so my sax lessons have resumed, for which I am jolly grateful.

La Maladie de la Mort - I was pretty certain that my response to this show would prove shallow when more accomplished minds were turned to it. Sure enough what I dismissed as base metal Lyn Gardner deemed, if not pure gold then 19.2 carat.  Her successor at The Guardian, Kate Wyver was only slightly less enthusiastic. Flora Gosling however, in The Wee Review to which our own celebrated cmfwood contributes, came close to supporting my opinion, being just a tad too generous.

The English in Modern Scotland - Tom Devine, who must be every Scot's favourite historian, gave a sparkling talk at the Book Festival outlining what he argues in his contribution to New Scots, a book about immigrant communities here.  He reveals that from being a country of net emigration for centuries Scotland has in recent decades become a country of net immigration and that not surprisingly (perhaps?) most new Scots are English born.  They represent now (if I have remembered the figures correctly) a little under 10% of the population.  Contrary to some beliefs they are not all retirees buying up homes in the Hielands to the disadvantage of the locals but the vast majority are workers contributing significantly to economic growth.  He said that the university sector in particular owes a debt to them in achieving a position in which five of our universites are ranked in the top 200 out of a worldwide total of 26,000 institutions of higher education.

The festival second week saw the Book Festival get underway so I've been there as well as to some Fringe and International Festival events.

Pleasures in Prose - the Book Festival is celebrating Muriel Spark's centenary with a number of events but I've only been able to fit one of them into my schedule. The organisers obviously expected a deal of interest and put it in their biggest space but to my surprise and no doubt their's the place was half empty.  Alan Taylor led a lively discussion with writers Louise Welsh and Zoe Strachan focusing on the place of sex and shopping in Spark's oeuvre and life.  It was excellent.  Why were there so few people in the audience and particularly why only a handful of men?

Job-Cher - a fun show about a Cher tribute act. Not you would think natural territory for me but I had a friend in the show.  It was very lively and very entertaining, thoroughly enjoyable.  It also introduced me to the splendid restoration work that has been done on Riddles Court. I'm encouraged to visit after the festivities.

Rome, Sweet Rome - I was a minority of one in the audience crammed into the Spiegel Tent to hear Lindsey Davis talk about her crime novels set in ancient Rome. I'd never heard of her or her books but everyone else knew them by heart.  It was like being at a cult meeting.  She spoke very well and the books sounded fun so I popped into the bookshop afterwards and found the first in the series, The Silver Pigs. I enjoyed it well enough but don't see myself lapping up the score or more that followed.

Maths, Magic and the Electric Guitar - despite my relative lack of academic success with mathematics I find myself drawn now and then to the subject.  David Acheson gave a light-hearted presentation of a number of mathematical ideas that do seem to verge on magic and polished it off  with a stomping guitar solo illustrating for those with very keen ears the formula that defines the frequencies of the harmonic vibrations of strings -
   
Famous Puppet Death Scenes -  Hard to know why I decided to see this show.  It did get five star reviews but that was I think back on their home ground in Canada. The press here were a bit more restrained.  It was very well done and had it been half an hour long I might have sung its praises but it wasn't so I won't.

Catriona Morison - an Edinburgh girl who is the first and only Briton to have won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition gave a lovely recital at the Queen's Hall.  Her voice ranged from quiet and sweet to loud and powerful in pieces by Brahms, Schumann, Mahler and Korngold.

Stories of Africa - two young female novelists, one from Uganda the other from Zimbabwe talked about their books and more widely about the worlds they grew up in and the influences that had operated on them.  Jennifer Makumbi's Kintu is a story that follows a family from the 18th century to the present day but misses out the colonial era and Idi Amin which the Guardian reviewer suggests delayed its publication in the UK. In contrast Novuyo Tshuma's House of Stone takes her country through Cecil Rhodes and colonialism to Mugabe's reign. 

We Need to Talk about Africa -  non-fiction this time but some of the stories told in Paul Kenyon's Dictatorland beggar belief.   Reviews of the book declare it to be a little lightweight which can't be said of Tom Young's Neither Devil nor Child.  He's a lecturer in politics and economics who argues that western interaction with Africa is doing more harm than good.

Laugh Out Loud (Cry Quietly) - is one of Arkle's Fringe shows. It's about internet dating which is certainly not my thing. Although I found some of it quite amusing and some of the performances admirable I wasn't convinced that the text was worth the effort. Here's a very fair review.

You Remind Me of You - Arkle's other show.  A much more coherent text but with its frequent changes of location better suited in my view to film than stage.  Mind you they had an ingenious way of handling the props in scene changes.  It got a very good review so while I wouldn't go all the way with it I don't want to rain on their parade.

Portrait of a Marriage - a super session at the Book Festival with John Bellany's widow Helen talking about her life with him.  Chaired by the admirable Richard Holloway who teased out some gems.

The Beggars' Opera - a 21st version of John Gay's 18th century ballad opera.  I enjoyed the show but much prefer Brecht and Weil's version.

Xenos -  the renowned choreographer and dancer Akram Khan in a visually stunning work.  I was somewhat too far away in the gods to feel as much part of the show as I would have liked to.  It was nonetheless a gripping and absorbing evening. 

Skirt finished its run on Saturday having filled 95% of the seats available over the week and having garnered a four star review.  Thus it can claim success with all due modesty.

The Grads other show, Much Ado about Nothing, played to pretty full houses for most of the week as well, deservedly so, and is off next weekend to strut its stuff at The Dell in Stratford in the RSC's summer programme featuring amateur and community groups.  Let's hope the rain holds off.

A quick rundown of the stuff I have seen since the festivals kicked off:-

First Snow/Première Neige - a joint production by the National Theatre of Scotland and two Québecois companies.  About indentity both personal and national it was well received by the critics but I didn't much care for it.

Scottish Saxophone Academy -  their youth summer school presented a lunchtime concert in the superb acoustic of St. Mary's Cathedral.  They played a delighful variety of music extremely well and we had the additional pleasure of hearing the American saxophonist David Milne guesting with them.

The Antiscians - billed as being inspired by some fairy tale or other it might best have featured in the children's section of the Fringe programme.  A tale of two girls raised separately by a warlock/wolfman. One sleeps by day and learns to feel and be gentle.  The other sleeps at night and learns martial skills by day. They eventually meet, bond after initial distrust, learn they are the results of the warlock/wolfman's mating with a robin and deliver the unassailable moral message that difference is OK.  I should mention that one is black the other white.

Casanova Dreaming - a well staged, well directed, well acted, beautifully costumed show in which Casanova is visited by his much older self who in a series of vignettes warns him against the errors that await him and advises him to enter a monogamous marriage.  We know he doesn't of course. I can't say that I found the content of much interest.

Babyface - now this was archetypal Fringe bollocks.  A young woman did a lot of jumping about, birled a baby's high chair over her head, made baby noises, squished baby lotion about while extolling its virtues as a skin treatment, changed her clothes a few times into those sutable for various stages of childhood, prevailed upon a couple of audience members (me included) to participate embarrassingly and finally let us go in a cloud of baby powder.

Big Aftermath of a small disclosure - a bit like Casanova Dreaming I didn't think much of the content but I did enjoy the style both of the text and of the production. A man announces he is thinking of moving away and this leads to the disintegration of his small friendship group. Like The Stage I'd give it three stars.

Love's Labour's Lost - this was a fun production by a youth group of a Shakespeare play that I don't believe I've ever seen.  Some of the kids showed real potential and the whole company worked well together.

Don't Knock Your Granny - from the other end of the age spectrum a group of mature Australian  ladies presented a song and dance show that had a bit to say about a number of things including a lot about the abuse of the elderly.  I admired their chutzpah but was glad the show wasn't much longer than it was.

Ciara - this is an excellent piece by David Harrower that I saw at the Traverse some years ago.  It's a one woman show whose protagonist is the art gallery running daughter of a now dead Glaswegian gangster.  Like any one person show it presents immense challenges to both performer and director in building a structure that moves the story along with appropriate changes of pace, of movement, of expression, of intensity while remaining firmly on track and keeping a grip on the audience.  This they did.

Autobiography - the first EIFF show I've been to. An hour and a half of dance from choreographer  Wayne McGregor.  All very skilful but I found it somewhat cold and didn't much appreciate the boom, boom soundtrack.

The world premiere of Skirt enjoyed an enthusiastic reception from a completely sold out house last night.  The show went very well and was unblemished except for the contrary behaviour of a champagne (well champagne substitute) bottle whose cork popped prematurely cutting a couple of  lines.

Friends I ate with afterwards declared themselves well satisfied with the show and found the script admirably true to life.  So big congratulations to its author Ms cmfwood.

This is me rather a long time ago at an airshow at Leuchars.  Apart from this souvenir my abiding memory is of going around the airfield with my chum Graham collecting empty lemonade bottles and claiming the deposits on them.

Fast forward several decades to the 2018 airshow at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune where I learnt that instead of just sitting on an aircraft wing kids of the age I was then have been building an aircraft.

OK it's not a sleek and powerful jet fighter, and is perhaps all the better for not being one, but a kit assembled by pupils at Kinross High under the aegis of Aero Space Kinross, an ambitious project to create an aviation and space flight visitor attraction there.


East Fortune airfield was packed with enthusiasts, so much so that I decided that rather than join the interminable queues to see inside Concorde and other aircraft I'd go back some other time when it has relapsed into just being the site of the National Museum of Flight.  So I wandered around the various exhibits and then watched impressive displays by the Red Arrows and other aeroplanes including some quite historic models.

I heard an interesting talk by Tracey Curtis Taylor whose mission in life is to recreate the pioneering flights of such female aviators as Amy Johnson and to inspire young women to enter the world of aviation.  She had an amusing anecdote about being told off by the Livingstone airport authorities for her cavalier behaviour flying around Victoria Falls.  She was told that while that sort of thing might be acceptable in the UK "here in Zambia we have health and safety".

Nothing that I went to in the Jazz Festival was other than enjoyable but in addition to Martin Kershaw's concert that I reported on earlier two others rose to the top of the pile.

The young Mark Hendry is clearly a talent with an exciting future ahead of him.  He had written two pieces for an ensemble of twenty three players, in essence a chamber orchestra with saxophones and drum kit ousting classical woodwinds and percussion.  His Endangered Species suite was a thoughtful, reflective and melodious piece that contrasted vividly with the jagged, piercing dystopian screeches of 1984, written in response to Orwell's novel.  Great stuff warmly applauded by an appreciative audience.

Martin Kershaw popped up again, this time with Dave Milligan, Calum Gourlay and Alan Cosker as a member of Colin Steele's Quintet.  They played ninety minutes of Colin's music (some written in collaboration with Dave Milligan).  Apart from one number that harked back to New Orleans it was straight ahead modern jazz of great quality.  It was the last gig I went to and finished my festival on a suitably high note.  

The Napier Jazz Summer School has been on this week and although I didn't take part this year I had it in mind to go to their concert but for one reason or another I didn't make it.

I have been to some other Jazz Festival gigs though and have more booked for this weekend.  The only one worth reporting so far was Martin Kershaw's.  He'd gathered a few locally well known players together to present the world premiere of a piece he's written called Dreaming of Ourselves.

The title comes from a book by David Foster Wallace who died ten years ago and the music and the concert were in tribute to him.  I've never read any of his work and he sounds a bit of an oddball to put it kindly and I can't say I understand the process of creating music in response to anything; person, book, scenery or whatever.

But the result in Martin's case was super.

The rest of the week was equally wonderful and the journey home, via Munich this time, was equally tedious.

I happened to be in a bar with some American musicians during the latter stages of the Croatia-England World Cup game.  Foolishly they were relying on my football expertise to help them follow the match.  Despite that they enjoyed it and joined in with the general Croation delirium when the final whistle was blown.

They didn't go to the extent of jumping into the nearby fountain like this lot though:

I imagine that many of these bathers, having dried themselves off, were amongst the hundreds thronging around in Zagreb airport at 5am on the following Sunday en route to Moscow.

The journey to Zagreb was tedious, involving as it did hours hanging around Cologne Airport. I did have Muriel Spark's first novel for company and am encouraged to work through more of her oeuvre.

The journey was worth it though. The first day of the Sax Congress was wonderful. I believe their are 1500 participants and over 400 recitals, concerts and other events. Very like the Fringe except that one ticket at 160 euros gives me access to all 400. That's up from 100 three years ago but I'm not complaining.

Numéro Une or Woman Up as it is known here is a feminist drama.  It tells the story of a woman already well up the business ladder who, boosted by a group of women whose mission is the furtherance of the sisterhood, is persuaded to have a go at getting the top job in a company from the CAC 40, the French equivalent of our Footsie 100.

Her hospitalised philosophy teacher father is somewhat sceptical about the business world and her American husband fears for his own career.  Indeed he loses his current job as collateral damage in the machinations that are unleashed.

Sad to say there are lots of machinations and dirty tricks not only from the entrenched interests that oppose her but from her side also.  She succeeds only by stooping to the underhand ways of the male.

I don't think that's a very encouraging or edifying message to women doing their best to break through the glass ceiling.

Peter Sellers has always been one of my favourite actors.  I've enjoyed lots of his films but had never seen Being There in which he plays a simpleton whose deadpan delivery of trite statements about the seasons and gardening are taken by the rich and powerful to be insightful metaphors that illustrate the ills of the world and how to resolve them.  It's very. very funny.

When I went to see Man of Iron I thought I was going to a documentary about Lech Wałęsa, the founder of the independent trade union Solidarność.  Instead it was a drama dealing with the period and the struggle to bind the shipyard workers together and the personal stories behind the events.  I've no idea how true to the facts it was but I didn't care for it much as a film. That's probably a hanging offence because I've since discovered that it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1981.

It contains a lot of shouting and ill-tempered squabbling and weeping women, none of which moved me in the slightest.  All of which struck me as melodramatic over-acting.  That no doubt is my insensitivity at work but there we are.

That's the Film Festival over for another year.

Another film I could well have done without seeing was Pushkar Myths.  I know very well why I chose it.  The Pushkar camel fair has always been high on my list of things to see before I die so a documentary about it seemed a good idea, either as an appetiser or as a means of saving all the hassle of actually going.

Someone said at the screening of another film that there is too much verbalisation nowadays in what is essentially a visual art.  Let the pictures tell the story.  I have a lot of sympathy with that view but in a documentary it's generally helpful to back up the pictures with some words.  That's maybe what the makers of Pushkar Myths were trying to do but none of the words were a direct commentary on the pictures.  They were mostly rambling, and to me barely comprehensible, stories about the Indian gods with a lot of old testament style X begat Y and Y begat Z...

The story the pictures did tell was of a fairly chaotic gathering of people and beasts.  Some of the pictures were great, folk dancing displays for instance or haggling over a best cow in fair competition.  But not all.  A ferris wheel is a ferris wheel is a ferris wheel in India or in Cowdenbeath.  And the camels figured hardly at all.

While Pushkar Myths may have given me the hump Testament repaid my small investment in time and treasure manyfold.  Made in 1983 it's the story of the effects on a typical, not to say stereotypical American family and their small Californian community after a nuclear attack on the country's main cities.

The director, Lynne Littman, was at the screening and was visibly moved when she came on for a Q&A.  She said she hadn't seen the film for 25 years and that as she watched she blushed at everything she thought was wrong with it, every family cliché, every overdone moment, every obvious emotional trick.  But she could not help herself from being stirred.  Neither could the audience. 

Saying she'd been scared at the possibility of nuclear annihilation when she made the film her one regret was that given the present regime in America it seemed to be relevant still.

Going through this year's Book Festival programme I identified 57 events of interest.  Over time I managed to cut that list down to a more manageable not to say affordable 12 and when booking opened yesterday got a ticket for all of them.

I think my choices are quite firmly based which is not always the case.  As I sat in the Filmhouse watching Cosmic Eye I wondered what had driven me to choose it.  Animation is not my bag for a start.  It must surely have been the advertised contributions of Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie that made me ignore the "rarely screened gem" warning in the festival brochure. Fortunately an afternoon Campari and soda taken to celebrate the arrival of a small table for my balcony induced a fair degree of eyelid droop so there was no lasting damage.

Terminal is all style over substance but none the worse for that.  The director told us that they had wanted to create a neon drenched noir thriller set in a dystopian city that had a London flavour to it.  With a caveat over just how thrilling or not it was, they succeeded.

The cinematography, music, costumes and performances are excellent.  The locations like the deserted railway terminal, the vast industrial building with a bottomless pit at its centre and others are all lit and dressed atmospherically.

But the plot advertised as complex, travels more along the familiar paths of the genre.  Its double crosses and reveals, its denouement's echoes of gathering the suspects and explaining all (albeit there's only one left) hardly breaks new ground or strains the spectator's brain. That may or may not be a good thing in the cinemagoers' eyes.  I hope it's a good thing because the film is fun and deserves to do well.

I absented myself from this afternoon's screening of Fritz Lang's 1931 thriller M  to enjoy the current heatwave but I sacrificed sun for cinema yesterday.

First on the agenda was a set of seven short films grouped under the title Where's Your Skirt? That was in fact a line plucked from one of the films. It was not altogether representative of the group though four were about girls and one featured a boy in a negligée. I guess it just appealed to the programmer.  Brief notes so I don't forget.  They were all well crafted and interesting whether lighthearted or serious. 

Winter with Umma - Thirty year old still a student in Edinburgh while her brother is getting married back home in Korea. Can a visit from her mum help her into adulthood whatever that is?

Salt and Sauce - A girl unhappily stuck helping in the family chip shop while friends escape to college or the big bad world.  She likes taking photographs.  A middle-aged lady customer admires them and reveals that she once toured as a provocatively clad magician's assistant. Get up and do what makes you happy is her advice.

Some of these Days - A young German interviewing his grandparents who were school children under the Nazis and adults in the GDR. His grandad's passion was jazz. Sanctioned for playing records to his friends at school things got better in the early post-war years and then jazz became unGerman again.  Grandad sees things getting worse today.

Three Centimetres -  Four girls, friends, take a ride on a ferris wheel in Beirut. Their chat and banter is mostly about sex.  One comes out as gay.

Bo & Mei -  A recently bereaved Chinese runs a dry cleaning business. He forbids his son Bo to help his sister do the dishes.  He insists Bo drinks beer with his meal. But Bo likes lipstick and is found in  a négligée left for cleaning by a client who objected to the Chinese music playing in the shop.  When she returns to collect it they turn up the volume.

Homage to Kobane - The camera sweeps around the ruins of Kobane while a voiceover reads a letter written by a girl fighter to her mum while she waited for death.

Good Girls - A St. Trinian's style group of girls is rounded up reluctantly for a photograph, one of them skirtless.  The director, asked what inspired her said it was her nice pink jersey and lo that became part of the school uniform.

After the screening of Meeting Jim half a dozen of those involved in making the film lined up and declared their devotion to him.  Jim Haynes is clearly a man with charm which for someone who says that his main interest in life is and always has been people is not surprising. In Edinburgh he helped galvanise cultural life in the 60s with his bookshop in Charles Street, the founding of the Traverse, the Writers Conference and so on.  When he moved south it was our loss and London's gain.  He then moved on again to make Paris his home and maintained his people centred philosophy with his legendary Sunday dinners.

All of this and more is capably told in the film which seamlessly knits together archive footage (including an interview with a onetime philosophy tutor of mine) and new material. That new material is in fact a couple of years old since the editing process stretched over two years.

For those new to Jim Haynes the film will be a revelation. For those familiar with his story it is a confirmation of the debt owed to him by many, not least those of us here in Edinburgh.

My last film of the day was a well told and gripping story of intergenerational conflict in a Pakistani family living in Norway.  From the opening scene in which the heroine runs through snowy streets to ominous music to meet whatever curfew has been imposed on her you know that bad things will happen.

And so they do.  Surprised in an embrace with a local lad she is carted off to Pakistan and dumped on relatives.  Naturally she rebels but after a while seems to be softening and indeed developing feelings for a young man I took to be a cousin.  Alas disaster strikes when she and cousin fall foul of relationship norms.  Dad come out from Norway and invites her to commit suicide.  She doesn't but auntie refuses to keep her so back to Norway she goes.  She lies to the child protection agency about her treatment by her family to protect them.

Their next move is to organise marriage to a suitable chap in Canada.  Suitable from the family's point of view.  But for Nisha this is the last straw.  Without giving anything away I can say that the film ends hopefully.  

I may have made What Will People Say sound a bit trite but it's not.  You need to do a bit of suspending disbelief.  You'd very probably hide your involvement with friends and activities that your conservative family would disapprove of but very improbably smuggle a boyfriend into your bedroom even if it was just for a cuddle.

That aside the conflict is real as are the dilemmas that young immigrants find themselves in and the film deals with all of it sympathetically and movingly.

A good day at the Film Festival yesterday; top marks to two out of four, less enthusiasm for the others.

In the closing years of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th Frank Brinton and his wife Indiana from Washington Iowa toured their Entertainment Show.  For the small communities they visited it was a magical trip out of their everyday world through lantern slides and moving pictures.

The Brintons kept everything, not just the slides and films but projectors, playbills, press cuttings account books, the lot. Thousands of items that lurked in a number of basements until over thirty years ago they came into the hands of Michael Zahs a teacher in Washington sprung from generations of Iowa farming stock.

Saving Brinton is a fascinating documentary that as the directors said at the Q&A started out with its  focus on the film history material which Michael strove to rouse interest in over all those years but which became more the background to a story about Michael and the community of rural Iowa in which he is rooted.

It's a wonderful film and Michael's a wonderful chap but he seems to have only one tie, seen several times in the film and worn on his visit to the festival.  It features Grant Wood's painting American Gothic.  Not a pretty tie in my view.

On to a second excellent film.  This time it's a Scottish movie about a highland hunting trip that goes horribly wrong.  That's as much of the plot as it's fair to give away The trailer reveals too much in my opinion so don't look for it.  The film is either a thrilling drama or a dramatic thriller but either way it's intense, quite scary and undeniably dark.  Called Calibre you can see it on Netflix from Friday.

It features in quite large letters in the credits a girl I recruited to do costumes for a show I directed some years ago.  She was at art college at the time and it's lovely to see she's making her mark in an intensely precarious industry so a sixth star to the film for that. 

I was looking forward to seeing Ornette: Made in America.  Otherwise I wouldn't have a bought a ticket would I?  1959 is regarded as one of, if not the most creative year in jazz history.  Ornette Coleman's free jazz came onto the scene then and although it's definitely not my favourite flavour I was interested in learning more about the man and his work.  I don't think I did although the film features Coleman's work for jazz players and symphony orchestra, Skies of America, that I'd like to hear in its entirety.

It's not a new documentary by any means (1985) and was in the festival as part of their celebration of American women, the woman in question being the director, Shirley Clarke.  She's billed as an experimental filmmaker and this is not a straightforward talking heads documentary though it's more the technical treatment that at times got in the way of my enjoyment.  There are sections with very rapid cross-cutting and in particular a monologue by Coleman against a dark background bombarded by coloured lights going off and on that I found quite dizzying.  Indeed I was just a little unsteady on my legs as I left the cinema, rather like coming ashore after a few days at sea.

I have mixed feelings about Never Leave Me.  The film is about Syrian child refugees in Turkey.  That's potentially both a politically charged and a tearjerking subject but the director takes no political position whatsoever.  Politics is never mentioned.  Nor is it a polemic on how terrible their plight is and how something must be done with illustrations and soundtrack to match.


It shows the children behaving in what might be considered a "normal" way, playing, squabbling, forming friendships, bunking off school and so on against the ever present background of the loss of home and parents.  The one thing they don't lose is hope.

As the end credits tell us these are real children playing themselves and so far there are no happy endings.

Why are my feelings mixed?  I think the film for me falls unsteadily between drama and documentary.   There is not enough examination and analysis of the situation to be a satisfactory documentary but neither is there a strong enough rise and fall in the development of a storyline to make it a satisfactory drama.  Don't let me put you off seeing it though.