You'd think that on a fine sunny Spring day like today a man playing alone on a golf course could hardly be more socially distant but even that strategy has been denied me as the Coucil has closed all its golf courses.  Of course it's a cordon sanitaire rather than a barbed wire fence so one could sneak in but... Could I be so bold?

Everything else I do has vanished like snow off a dyke.  Looking on the bright side as I suppose one must, I have a pile of books waiting to be read, a pile of DVDs waiting to be viewed again and the leisure to do so.

Before the sky fell in I saw three wildly contrasting films and got to one concert.  You can always rely on Beethoven for a good tune.  The young Sumwook Kim rang all the changes out of the Emperor concerto from the most delicate pianissimo to thunderingly majestic chords.  Most concert pianists remain poised over the keys when not playing but Kim swivelled round on his stool and enjoyed himself watching the band.  The audience was a bit thinner than usual (virus effect) but gave him lots of applause which unfortunately didn't prove quite enough to get him back on the stool for an encore.

When Uncut Gems started I thought I was in for an uphill struggle.  Fast paced images jumping all over the place straining my eyes, disjointed and heavily accented New York Jewish dialogue taxing my ears as our hero winged his way from one incomprehensible encounter in the diamond district to another.  But it turned out to be a great film in which the little man almost won.

All I knew about Judy Garland before I saw Judy was that she had been a child star and that she was Liza Minelli's mother.  The film focuses on a series of concerts she gave at The Talk of the Town in London in the sixties to try to restore her finances.  It fills in the background to her increasing unreliability due to drink and drugs with flashbacks to her childhood career with MGM, where we are encouraged to believe lies the origin of her tragedy.  I have no difficulty in accepting that.  She was essentially an abused child who was never able to maintain a stable lifestyle as she grew up.  A sad film but very well made.

There's been a set of Japanese films touring the country under the title Happiness is a State of Mind with the tagline Joy and Despair in Japanese Cinema.   Hogwarts is for witchcraft but Hyakkaoh Private Academy where Kakegurui is set is for gambling, which is a milieu more or less certain to foster buckets of joy and despair.

It's the only one that I managed to see and I thoroughly enjoyed it even though on the face of it you wouldn't think it was my cup of tea.  The film depicts a struggle to win the ultimate prize of being assured of being able to lead whatever life one wishes to after graduation.  The means is to come out on top of games of chance such as Paper, Rock, Scissors (who'd have believed it ) and a game that I didn't follow too well that involved slapping cards down on the table, the team with the highest card winning ( slightly more complicated than that).

It's a beautifully stylishly put together and filmed movie and while the plot is fairly silly the characters are intriguing and played with great enthusiasm and energy, even the traagically morose and silent one.  It springs from an anime TV series.  I know nothing about anime but I might be developing a taste for it.

One of the joys of the film for me was the number of snippets of Japanese that I picked out and understood.  No need to despair of linguistic success then even though the class has been cancelled.

What on earth is this you wonder.  There's a group on Facebook dedicated to the past life and times of Kitwe Little Theatre which is where I found this picture.  I was thrilled because if you look at the page devoted to our production of Joe Orton's black comedy Loot on my website you'll see a plea for pictures of the show and now years and years later there are umpteen on Facebook.

So the photo is me as Mr Mcleavy with lots of shoe whitener in my beard and hair to age me up plus plasters covering the wounds inflicted on my character in the action of the play, and Pete Heath as the policeman who very energetically hauled me away.  My neck still bears the scars.  You can also see Jack Smith the stage manager lurking behind the set.

As well as action shots of the dress rehearsal there are some portrait shots as well and I can't forbear from publishing mine.  Just the ticket for all those occasions when a profile pic is demanded.

In 1988 thanks in part to an appeal by The Scotsman to which I like to think I contributed (if I didn't I should have) Nixon in China came to the Festival.  I saw it then in the Playhouse and memory tells me I enjoyed it.  Now thirty years on I enjoyed Scottish Opera's new production at the Festival Theatre.  As this review makes clear the opera lacks the political frisson that it carried then but for my money the music retains its novelty and strength and this staging is wonderful.  It doesn't have Airforce 1 trundling on to the stage but more than makes up for that with all sorts of technical wizardry.

I'm not a great fan of animated films but in deference to my current interest in things Japanese I went to a film called Spirited Away in which a little girl en route with her parents to a new home spends an adventurous time in a magic world.  Her parents are turned into pigs and the little girl suffers lots of slings and arrows but her grit, determination and absolute goodness defeats the powers of evil and releases her parents.  It was very colourful, very lively, very beautiful, and full of terribly clever effects.  I loved it and managed to pick out the occasional Japanese word into the bargain.

I can't say the same for First Love, another Japanese film.  It dealt with a feud between rival sets of baddies in which a young man who thinks he has a brain tumour intervenes to rescue a young woman.  The film out Tarantinos Tarantino in the amount of blood spilt and it's one of those in which characters survive and indeed thrive on what would clearly be mortal blows.  Heads literally roll. Nonsense.

Seeing that came on the back of spending over three hours watching what I thought was going to be the German family saga Heimat that was very popular on TV some years ago.  This was a family saga of a different stripe called Heimat is ein raum aus zeit.  It consisted of long slow black and white shots of countryside, of woods, of gravel pits, of trains moving, of trains not moving, of people going up steps or down,  accompanied by an intermittent voiceover.  Tedious in the extreme but much lauded on the festival circuit.

You can't apply the word tedious to  Planet Wave.  Colossal, daring, inventive, creative and literally poetic you can, because the work is a collaboration between poet Edwin Morgan and musician Tommy Smith whose music enfolds poems charting the history of the world from the chaos of 20 billion years ago to the age of scientific revolution ushered in by Copernicus.  First performed at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival over twenty years ago the work is being revisited in celebration of the centenary of Morgan's birth.  The performance in the Queen's Hall was magnificent.

I squeezed in one brief visit to the recent Scottish Jazz Weekend to hear a lovely hour of Dexter Gordon in the capable hands of pianist Fraser Urquart  and saxophonist Fraser Smith before having to shoot off to see Ballet Rambert.  I thoroughly enjoyed the show although neither my dance partner nor the reviewers were quite as smitten.  Three stars from each of Guardian. Independent.

Shostakovich is high up in my list of favourite composers having been there since I stood at the back of the Usher Hall and listened to his Fifth Symphony over half a century ago.  I got leave of absence from The Venetian Twins rehearsals the other week to hear his First Cello Concerto.  It's a very intense and vigorous piece and I found the Schubert symphony in the second half of the concert bland in comparison despite its nickname of "tragic".