These strangely dressed people are attendees at the Edinburgh Sci-Fi Convention.  I was there with the Dunedin Wind Band playing a selection of appropriate music for their entertainment early on a Saturday morning.  We players were then free to wander and wonder.  I'm not au fait with super heroes and space adventures and the world of Tolkien so 99% of the fancy dress and the literature and paraphernalia there assembled meant nothing to me.  But it was colourful and fun.

That's not quite my only outing over the last few weeks but I haven't done too much outside the house.  I went to an excellent SCO concert.  They played Mozart's flute concerto featuring the orchestra's own principal flute, Andre Cebrian, who then, accompanied by a handful of strings, gave a beautiful encore which as is often the case I enjoyed rather more than the  orchestral piece.  Everything else was great.  More Mozart, from Idomeneo.  Some Debussy and Stravinsky's cheerful Danses Concertantes.

With the photography group I went to St Giles and snapped around here and there trying to be arty.  Here's one of my efforts which may end up on a wall.

The library across the road now shows films. On Wednesdays they show mainstream stuff and I think once a month on Saturdays more recherché films chosen by someone who worked at the ill-fated Filmhouse.   I went over to see one of Godard's best regarded films, Pierrot Le Fou.  I rather enjoyed it despite the Nelson Hall's pillars obscuring my view a lot of the time.  I enjoyed it more than Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket which I watched at home through my BFI subscription. But then although Pierrot deals with misfits and obsession as does Pickpocket it does so with a bit more humour.  Not always intentionally perhaps.

I don't think there was any humour at all in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk which I missed when it was in cinemas but have now seen on TV.  Reading the Guardian's review I'm almost tempted to pretend that I didn't find it a long watch.  

More to my taste was Fortunes of War, a 1987 TV series that popped up on BBC4.  I'm not sure how much if any of it I'd seen when it first ran but I do remember reading The Balkan Trilogy which together with The Levant Trilogy are the books on which the mini series is based.  You could see the show as slightly zany wartime adventures but it's more an exploration of human relationships in a time of stress.  Kenneth Branagh is superb as the eternally busy English Lit teacher who devotes more time and care to sundry others than to his recently aquired wife.  As his wife Emma Thompson grapples with his loving neglect and tries to find space to express her own needs and wishes.  She's brilliant as are all the actors who portray the fascinating assortment of characters who people the story.

Other old material that I certainly hadn't seen before but which has been filling the gaps between commercial breaks on the likes of ITV3 and Drama has held me captive for several weeks.  Scott and Bailey are a pair of all action lady detectives in Manchester who despite their messy private lives solve a murder or two every week surrounded by a cast of fascinating goodies and baddies played by terrific actors.  George Gently on the other hand is closer to Dixon of Dock Green but with a harder edge as, accompanied by his ambitious and sometimes perceptive sergeant, he sorts out the villians of 1960s Northumberland.  I recorded these shows and watched them with remote poised to shoot through the comercials at speed trying not to overshoot.

A newer cops and robbers series I've binge-watched is The Gold, the story of the hunt for the Brinks Mat bullion robbers.  Again great characters both crooks and cops kept me hooked till the early hours.

Thanks to the BFI I renewed my aquaintance with The Handmaiden, a beautifully shot and performed film that panders to my current interest in things Japanese although it's Korean made and from a Welsh novel set in Victorian Britain.  I learnt that latter fact from Wikipedia which is the source of much of my knowledge these days.  Things Japanese included the fictionalised biography of Thomas Blake Glover by Alan Spence.  Glover for those who don't know was an Aberdonian loon who made it big in Japan in the 19th century.  Wikipedia tells you all you need to know about him.

The Boy With Two Hearts is a cleverly designed and adroitly performed play that tells the tale of a family's flight from Afghanistan to Wales after the mother's brave stand against Taliban rule.  It's a heart-rending story and the fact that it's true adds even more power to the piece.  It's available on NT at Home.  If you do watch it I'd encourage you to watch the accompanying short chat between the two boys from the family.  They wrote the book that the play is made from.

The trams come even closer as Leith Walk is opened to traffic for its entire length in both directions.  Bus heaven restored.

For a while my camera had been giving me problems so that I was forever having to switch it off and on again, by which time the proposed subject had often moved on.  Enquiry established that a repair would cost me pretty well as much as the camera cost to buy so I screwed my courage to the sticking point and bought a new one.  New to me that is and a lens, also new to me.  It's the first time I've owned a replaceable lens camera and I can see that that feature could develop into being an expensive pain in the neck.

The still life above is the second picture I took with it.  The first is even less interesting.

With luck the photography course I'm doing this term will help build on what I learnt last term. I'd actually intended to do a course on the use of Photoshop but not enough people signed up so it was cancelled.  Rather than do nothing photographic I decided to do something similar to what I did last term.  

Music has been good so far this year.  

The Dunedin band got going again and we're on show at the Edinburgh Sci-Fi Con in February with a selection of tunes deemed appropriate to the genre.

I enjoyed a Big Blaw Sunday afternoon session.  I heard the RSNO's Viennese New Year concert well after New Year but who cares.  They were resplendent in their white jackets.  The men that is.  It's their summer outfit really but why not bring a bit of summer into Musselburgh in January.  The concert was in The Brunton and we had an excellent meal in The Gurkha  across the road.  Very good food and swift, impeccably polite and friendly service.  

I heard the RSNO again in their more regular setting of the Usher Hall where they played a brand new piece by a young Scottish composer, Lisa Robertson, celebrating the eagles of her home by the Sound of Mull.  Then we had Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto with barnstorming encore (no idea what it was) and Brahms's 4th Symphony.  All super.

The SCO meanwhile featured Francois Leleux as conductor and oboist.  The orchestra played a symphony by Louise Farrenc, a name unknown to me but look her up - impressive. Then some of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words arranged for oboe.  That was absolutely lovely. Then his Hebrides overture and finally Schubert's 4th Symphony.  All very nice but the oboe arrangement made it for me.

Tommy Smith brought his youth orchestra to the Roxy for an afternoon of really good jazz.  They're a talented bunch.  The personnel changes over time as the name implies but there seems to be no shortage of fresh talent as older members move on, many of them to become professional players.  Taking his first steps as a gigging musician and playing tenor for Tommy that afternoon was Sean Megaw, a young man I've bumped into from time to time, first when he played with the Edinburgh Schools jazz band and later at the Napier Summer Jazz School.  He has just graduated from the RCS and is a wonderful player.  Also wonderful that afternoon was a singer called Laura something or other.  I'm sure we'll see a lot more of her.

On Monday I thought all my Christmases had arrived at once when not only did the painters turn up to redecorate the common parts of my block with the carpet fitters promised on their heels but roofers were seen to climb the scaffolding that has languished unconquered against the building for six or seven weeks.  Alas they banged about briefly, and I hope productively, then vanished never to be seen since.  Please come back.

I've long thought that a gap existed in my reading where Samuel Pepys and his diaries should be.  So I borrowed The Shorter Pepys from the library.  It's brick sized while the complete Pepys is house sized.  But the preface assured me that it was not "the best of Pepys".  After struggling to enjoy the book for a while I wished it had been.  So back to the library it went and the gap is unplugged.

One thing I learnt in my brief encounter was that Pepys did a lot of dining and drinking which warmed me to him.  I'm sure I do less of both but I have eaten a couple of times recently.  I had lunch with Siobhan in the former public toilet at Canonmills now known as the Tollhouse.  It was an enjoyable and sociable lunch which lasted a while but I wasn't all that impressed by the food.  Not that it was bad, maybe it was just the very tough cabbage leaves in which my main course was wrapped that soured my enjoyment.  At Beirut on the other hand where I ate with Claire before going to The Studio to see this dance and multimedia show the grub was great.   

The show was billed as a take on the Hitchcock film Vertigo. I read Wikipedia's description of Vertigo when I went home but it would have been much better had I read it beforehand.  The show was, as the review says clever but Claire reckoned the show fell short on emotional engagement for her.  For me likewise.  Maybe it wasn't intended to move us.  Maybe that's a feature of the film as well.  I'll have to check that out some time.