Apart from the Jazz Festival my diary was pretty empty for July so I optimistically pencilled in "play lots of golf".  I only managed one round.

But I did have a little seaside holiday. 

Some friends were over from Spain and used my flat.  To give them some privacy and save me from sleeping on the floor I spent a few nights in a flat in Portobello whose owner was on holiday.

I took part again in the Napier Jazz Summer School.  As is the usual drill we were split up into groups and given a couple of tunes to work on for our end of the week gig.  A particular challenge for me this year was that I had to memorise the tunes and the forms we'd developed for them.  Luckily that wasn't too hard and thanks to John Rae who steered the group I played in, our contribution to the gig was pretty good.

The festival concerts that I went to were a mixed bag.  I very much enjoyed Tommy Smith and Fergus McCreadie's contribution and Graham Costello's STRATA Expanded as well as the exploration by Konrad Wiszniewski and Euan Srevenson of the relationships between jazz and classical music.  One gig I went to was brilliant provided you kept your eyes shut.  Otherwise the constant fiddling about with laptops and control boxes on the floor was very distracting.  None of the rest were particularly memorable except perhaps Like a Cat Tied to a Stick billed as Radiohead reimagined.  This has earned me respect from some of my younger friends who don't realise that Radiohead means nothing to me.  It was the intriguing title that attracted me.

Small Island was beamed from the National Theatre to various places including Edinburgh.  It was an absolutely wonderful production of an adaptation of Andrea Levy's moving novel about the experiences of the West Indians who came to the UK after the second war.

Also wonderful in lots of ways was The Lehman Trilogy, another National Theatre production though it was broadcast from the Piccadilly Theatre.  The Guardian gave the show five stars.  I'd have given one fewer for the one defect that the Guardian review points out.  The collapse of the bank in 2008, what happened and why, was past before you realised it was there.

On a rather smaller budget than either of those shows was Battery Theatre's Mary, It began with a Lass... which I saw in the gardem behind the Storytelling Centre.   They ran competently through the events we are all reasonably familiar with about Mary Queem of Scots.  The small cast ably supported by a couple of singers switched roles adroitly to inhabit the principal characters of Mary's story and turned to advantage the different levels and nooks and crannies of the garden.

I ate out a few times, including with my school chums in Glasgow.  We went to the exhibition of Linda McCartney's photographs at Kelvingrove.  There were some fascinating glimpses into the family life that she and Paul enjoyed and a number of good portraits of The Beatles and other musicians. Other photographers may have teased out more from their subjects than she did but the work is worth making a trip to Glasgow for.

My Fringe starts tomorrow.

Another Film Festival event that wasn't a film was a concert by the SNJO playing Sketches of Spain to tie in with the Spanish strand of the festival's programming.  A fine gig made even finer by Tommy Smith and Laura Jurd's encore of  So What from that other great Miles Davis creation Kind of Blue.

Before getting back to the cinema I took in Women in Parliament, a translation of an Aristophanes comedy in which toilet humour and sexual gags took pride of place.  There were a number of familiar faces in the cast and one that I only later found out I knew such was the depth of her disguise.  The show was variable in quality but it was fun.  Its two star review was fair.

I'd probably give no more than two stars to Emperor of Paris.  Based on the life of François Vidoq before he became a top cop it was a gungho cops and robbers, cowboys and indians sort of movie that would no doubt have appealed to my very much younger self.  But that self is no more.  I realised when the credits came up that I'd picked it because of its Scottish connection.  James Bridie's great grandaughter was in the cast.  I didn't like the other festival film she was in so her presence is clearly not a reliable criterion on which to base my filmgoing.

Sakawa I'm afraid I didn't much like either.  A documentary about West African based internet scams sounded fascinating.  It wasn't.

I finished my festival going with two programmes of Scottish short films, twelve films in all.  Every one was well worth watching and all the filmmakers had something of interest to say in the Q&As after the screenings.  I'll try to give them one sentence each and I've given the directors' names - to be kept an eye on:

Dark Road (Rory Gibson) - grief shared by a boy who lost his brother and the man who accidentally caused his death.

Duck Daze (Alison Piper) - revenge on an abuser when his daughter returns to her childhood home for his funeral.

Belonging (Rory Bentley) - a child and his sister moved to Scotland after their father's death have to adapt.

The Egg and the Thieving Pie (Lola Blanche-Higgins) - surreal and humorous tale of the search for a stolen egg that finds animal traits in human beings.

Educated (Tom Nicholl) - a schoolboy, a schoolgirl, a teacher in unspoken communication

Let's Roll (Chris Thomas) - a teenager defies her mother to train for the town's dangerous tradition.

Never Actually Lost (Rowan Ings) - memories from the director's granny

Stalker (Christopher Andrews) - an old stalker combats a poacher in the Highlands

Jealous Alan (Martin Clark) - two best mates one girl, the old story 

Lucky Star (Russell Davidson) - a young woman fighting to reclaim her home from an alcoholic husband and rebuild life for her eight year old

Farmland (Niamh McKeown) -  black comedy - Sibling rivalry takes a deadly turn after the reading of a father's will.

Boys Night (James Price) - boy trails round city after drunken foul-mouthed father