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".