Time has rushed on since I last posted.  Most of my regular commitments faded away as the Christmas holiday season approached but they've just been replaced by a greater consumption of radio, TV and internet based couch potatoism.  No long healthy walks to speak of but occasional forays to local beauty spots such as Princes Street Gardens, Lochend Park, Leith Links and Porty Promenade,

But I'm happy to report that some of the slack has been taken up by The Antiquary which together with other books purchased earlier in the year has been sorely neglected.  I find Scott a bit heavy going (not quite as heavy as Dickens) but sticking at it I should finish it within the next few days.  His stories are excellent but tend to be overlaid with meanderings that suited the tastes of a 19th century audience (understandably) but nor mine.

I'm surprised that unlike Dickens and Austen, Scott has not attracted the attentions of film and TV adaptors to any great extent in recent years.  

I haven't seen much theatre worth writing home about but I have enjoyed some excellent films.  Most recently Some Like it Hot and Calamity Jane which featured amongst the BBC's festive offerings.  The tale of two musicians fleeing from Chigago gangsters by disguising themselves as women and taking off for Florida in a female band is surely one of the most entertaining films ever made with stellar performances by Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

The Deadwood Stage, My Secret Love and The Black Hills of Dakota are songs I was very familiar with but I'm not sure that I knew they came from Calamity Jane, which I don't remember having seen before.  Doris Day is brilliant as the deerskin clad, pistol toting, tall tale telling cowgirl in love with the wrong man who sets out to save the local saloon keeper's skin by bringing a famous stage performer whose cigarette card picture has set the men of Deadwood's pulses racing, to sing and dance in their very own town.  She gets the maid rather than the madam but everything turns out fine in the end.

There seem to be several films called Adoration.  The one I've recently seen thanks to my Bfi Player free trial is about a teenage couple. He lives with his mum in the grounds of a mental institution.  He becomes obsessed with a girl patient.  They run off together and bad things happen since, despite her claims that the world is plotting against her she's obviously nutty.  I thought the film was nutty.

From the same source came two excellent Japanese films.  In Departures a young cellist is forced to return to his childhood home town to look for work when his orchestra goes bust.  He gets a job whose nature he conceals from his wife and which causes his best chum from the old days to cut him.  As an encoffiner he finds himself preparing bodies for burial.  As shown in the film this is a beautiful and tender ritual and his wife, who has shot the craw when she discovered what he does, is reconciled when she sees him at work on his own father who had also shot the craw from the family home when the cellist was a child.  It is a beautufil, delicate, tender and moving film though as the Japan Times makes clear fiction and real life don't always coincide.    

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian says of Still Walking " this gentle, lovely film is impossible to watch without a lump in the ­throat."   I entirely agree so I'll let you read what else he has to say rather than stumble through a description of mine.

I'm going to pass over the German film festival with this screenshot of the films I watched.

They were mostly OK though I'd give Naked Animals a bodyswerve if it ever comes your way.  An intriguing aspect of the festival was that the two films that I had to pay for, the others being free, I had to book via Ayr Film Society.   It was something of a revelation to read that they've been going for almost 50 years and to skim through their programme.

Diana Rigg died this year so a number of TV programmes have marked that by repeating interviews and showing things she was in.  In Mother Love she played a woman whose anger at the break-up of her marriage became an obsessive need to keep her son away from all contact with his father. He sees him in secret and when he marries persuades his wife to go along with the deception.  Of course it all unravels and chilling consequences arise. Flashbacks helpfully show us that Diana's character was not very nice even when she was a little girl.  

Scottish Ballet produced a film that melded parts of their Nutcracker and The Snow Queen productions together and fixed the blend by the device of having a young boy wander into a theatre and come across characters from those ballets.

Dancing of an entirely different sort came from a BBC Alba programme about the Moulin Rouge. This was a 2019 programme that followed the activities of three Scots girl who dance there during the celebration of the institution's 130th anniversary.  A fascinating programme. 

In his day he was the highest paid entertainer on the planet and would surely have applauded the enterprise and spirit of our girls at the Moulin.  Radio Scotland celebrated the 150th anniversary of Harry Lauder's birth in Portobello with an absorbing look at the man's life and work.  The closing moments of the programme in which we heard an orchestrated version of one of his most famous songs contained a message for these Covid times.

                                Though the way be long  

                                 Let your heart be strong

                                 Keep right on to the end of the road

This is a corner of my lounge transformed into a set with lighting rig for my appearance in Shrapnel, the play that Claire wrote about life under lockdown and which was presented online to quite a substantial number of people.  The cast of eight were together in a Zoom meeting acting away while Claire's dad magically scraped the appropriate combinations of characters for each scene out of Zoom and fed them to the world via Youtube.  The whole thing was topped and tailed by scene titles, music, cast list and so on plus an invitation to donate to our chosen charities.  The critical reception was quite good and audience reaction very positive.

Here's how the audience saw it.

After that finished I returned to being a consumer rather than a provider of entertainment.  I watched the last of my Trollope DVDs - The Warden and Barchester Towers, wonderful stuff with a sublime portrayal of the slimy Mr Slope by Alan Rickman.  The films were shot at Peterborough Cathedral and coincidentally I had just seen a TV documentary which had whetted my appetite for a visit and the DVDs reinforced my wish.  As soon as Covid lets up I shall make a plan.

The Citizens streamed a filmed performance of Fibres.  The play is about how a man's exposure to asbestos affects himself and his family years later.  Not a cheerful subject but a good production and the writer slipped in a reasonably happy ending. 

The SCO continues to provide music online and their concert featuring music by Anna Clyne and Benjamin Britten was delightful.  You can listen here and then maybe drop them a bob or two.

There's been a French film festival on and I watched two features and a collection of shorts.  La Bonne Epouse was a feeble comedy about an institution preparing girls to become perfect little wives.  It ends with the girls, the headmistress and her nun assistant heading for a national homemaking exhibition in Paris just as the 1968 student disturbances were getting underway.  I forget how it happens but they throw off their bourgeois carapaces, abandon their bus and stride through country lanes determined to join the revolution, dancing and singing the while in what, like the pastel shades the film is shot in, I took to be a nod to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.   

Felicità was a degree, but only a degree, more up my street.  Ex jailbird father and eccentric mother who enjoy pranking one another and pre-teen daughter Tommy who doesn't want to be late for the first day of term get into scrapes of one sort or another. They need to flee the country but delay for a day to let Tommy achieve her wish. Dad gets her there in time in a stolen car, goes back to jail but the loving family is reunited when he comes out.  Not very good nonsense really. 

Of the ten shorts two were excellent, two very good.  No descriptions but names and trailers that may jog my memory at a future date.  Pile Poil,  Une Soeur, Mon p'tit Bernard, Le Chant d'Ahmed, 

I saw a weird thing called The Kids are Alright by an outfit or three called  Encounter, Fuel & Northern Stage in which a man dressed as a woman danced around a small patch of grass, shrubs and trees outside some houses pursued by a woman who was mostly bent double and from time to time used an American accent to contribute to their dialogue.  From looking into the matter it seems I may have seen only the third act of a play dealing with bereavement.  Indeed the dialogue which I thought echoed Becket in its incomprehensibility but lacked his humour did include references to death.

Chagall's painting and other art works are lovely but that hardly seems sufficient to explain why someone would write a play that relates the events of a period of his and his wife Bella's life.  It was charmingly done and I suppose made points about the value of art, freedom of expression, anti-semitism and whatnot but The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk didn't do a lot for me.

But I enjoyed it, as I did a winetasting on Zoom which didn't do a lot for me either given my nasal inadequaces and my insensitive palate. 

On the film front I scooped up a Black Friday bargain.  The British Film Institute who inundate me with emails and whose beguiling catalogue has long tempted me extended their free trial subscription offer by a month so I signed up.  So far I've focussed on Japanese films but there are lots more goodies available.

Off to Perth concert hall tomorrow (virtually) to join the SNJO in celebrating their 25 years of existence.