Two weeks ago tonight I was enjoying a delicious roast dinner with friends in Northumberland en route home from France. My time there was lovely but apart from the square bottomed pepper and salt mills that I forgot to pack I'm not missing anything so far, thanks to having been much diverted here by theatre, cinema, live music and suchlike cultural outings, none of which figured in my six pleasant and peaceful weeks in the French countryside.

Have no fear I'm not going to list them all but will report that I enjoyed the very entertaining and up to date Tamara Drewe coupled with the ten years older equally entertaining but quite different Amélie at the Cameo today. The contrast in styles was an entertainment in itself.

When the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in Scotland comes along I'm sure there will be much celebration, very douce in nature of course and even a little dour, but if like me you can't wait another 50 years pop along to the National Library and marvel at the small display of contemporaneous books and documents commemorating the 450th anniversary. These include an Act of the Scottish Parliament abolishing the Pope's authority in Scotland. I hope they kept that discreetly out of sight when Benedict was in Edinburgh last month.

The big man of our restoration was of course John Knox and much of the work here is his including the order of service he put together for the new church. The copy on display is open at Psalm 23 with a very different first verse from the one I learnt at my mother's knee.

The Lord is onely my fupporte
and he that doeth me fede.
How can I then lack any thing
whereof I ftand in need?

There's a tune as well which is undoubtedly not Crimond but I didn't manage to copy it down.

If recreation rather than restoration is your bag then daunder further to their brilliant exhibition on the history of golf.

Scotland claims pantomime as well as golf but like the sport the entertainment may have roots elsewhere, Taiwan maybe? If you'd been in the George Square theatre with the Lord Provost and me watching 明華園 (the Ming Hwa Yuan Arts and Cultural Group) perform 鴛鴦槍 (Lovebird Spears) and 護國將軍 (General of the Empire) you'd have had no doubts that there was a link. They've even got a principal boy and there was audience participation - three volunteers and a pressed man.

It's quite a coincidence that having just mentioned Glenrothes in a post I should find myself within days setting foot in the town for what is probably the first time since a school trip to the shortlived Rothes pit. I think I remember that it was wet down there but that may be an example of something akin to inception.

Not that anyone has been talking to me about pits in my dreams but knowing that the pit was closed because they couldn't prevent the levels from flooding could easily over half a century have created a false memory.

I went to Glenrothes to see Beautiful Burnout, the National Theatre of Scotland's smash hit Fringe success. It's a magnificent piece of physical theatre whose athletic cast produce wonderful stage pictures. Such hard work. The skipping sequence alone left me dripping with sweat. God knows what it did to them.

I wouldn't say there was much of a plot though, but I guess the intention was to explore the paradox of boxing. The drive, discipline, self control, skill and athleticism that combine to produce a spectacle as delightful as any ballet but which can end in blood, tears and the obliteration of a human personality.

Mind you just as it's fairly obvious that filling your lungs with smoke day after day can't do you much good, the idea that having your head thumped repeatedly isn't sensible is surely a no brainer.

My own boxing career was fortunately too short to have had any deleterious consequences. I retired undefeated after my twelve year old opponent hit the canvas in the 1954 Dollar Academy inter-house championships. Some ill-intentioned spectators aver that he slipped but I know that I floored him.

As a native born Fifer proud of his roots I should probably have told you about this celebration long before now but to be honest although I was aware of it, it has largely passed without my participation.

Earlier in the year I went to St Andrews during the Stanza poetry festival and to Dunfermline for a Fife Jazz Festival concert, both operating under the year of culture banner. One day this summer I happened to be in Anstruther when something was going on but of the multitude of other events I can say nothing.

Until now that is. A film festival was launched in Glenrothes as part of the cultural year. It's intended to be an annual event but for it's very first edition it awarded third prize to A Lifetime, the short film in which I took part this summer.

Click here to see the proud directors being awarded their trophy on Saturday night and click on their picture to see the film if you haven't already or if you feel that now it's won a prize it deserves a second look.

Vichy has been somewhat demonised in many people's minds because of its role as headquarters of the collaborationist government during the war, but that was hardly the town's fault.

It's a pleasant place that nestles cosily in the valley cut through the hills of Auvergne by the river Allier. Standing there watching the trotters go through their paces on the Hippodrome track with at your back the beautiful spa that still attracts the well-heeled, waves of bourgeois comfort are almost palpable.

On the other side of the river stands Bellerive, named thus as though the opposite bank were not belle enough. Vichy Sporting Club, one of France's oldest golf courses stands there. I played it a couple of years ago but this week I visited Vichy's other course a few miles away in the forest of Montpensier.

The forest is a lovely place for a walk especially at this time of year when the trees present so many beautiful shades of green and gold and where mushrooms rise up ready to be harvested for the pot - provided you know your mushroom from your toadstool. The gorgeous weather that has prevailed this week would have been the cherry on the walker's cake.

But someone had the silly idea of cutting a few narrow paths through the forest and tempting us into thinking that we could hit little white balls straight down them. Believe me, my little white balls very seldom ventured onto the paths and couldn't see the forest for the trees they kept colliding with.
Now I'm in Dunkirk, someplace else whose fame owes much to the last war. A not so little boat will arrive tomorrow to take me over the channel in greater comfort than that experienced by the retreating armies - in pretty bourgeois comfort in fact.

I’m not sure that we hit 27 degrees yesterday but we were certainly in the warm 20s with bright blue skies in the morning that became progressively overcast as the day went on. One of the interesting side effects of this sudden, and as it turns out brief flourish of summer weather was its effect on the insect population.

I don’t, but no doubt some enthusiastic and dedicated entomologist does know where flies go at the end of the summer. It can’t be very far away for more than a dozen of them, fooled by this temporary summer, buzzed back to invade my kitchen yesterday. Most I am pleased to report were found dead on arrival. That’s my arrival back from the golf course.

A few were sluggishly hanging on to curtains and lightshades and a couple attempted brief flights. I killed them. Others hid overnight but by lunchtime today I had exterminated the living and disposed of all the bodies except for one that I have left struggling in a spider’s web as a warning to those who may still be skulking about.

In the evening several examples of another species, this time a beetle like creature whose method of locomotion is a cross between a scuttle and a hop decided to play about on the kitchen floor. They are usually about an inch long and not very pretty. They scurry across a foot or so of floor and then remain stationary for ages. Can they be imbibing some sort of nourishment from the tiles, or are they, on the contrary, laying down some microscopic excrement? Maybe they are just thinking about the glory days to come when the insects take over the earth.

Whatever they were doing it was a bit of a distraction to someone who was watching a DVD of a film that he had missed in the cinemas last winter. They were not welcome unlike the film which was in fact Welcome. Whether I had sated my bloodlust with the flies or hated the thought of scraping squashed beetles from the floor or was being softened by the moving movie I don’t know, but I carefully captured them one at a time and returned them to the wild, including several recidivists who squeezed back in under the door.

While I love warm weather there’s a bit of me that’s now thinking that it wouldn’t be too bad if it was just a bit cold and slightly miserable for my last week.

It's been a quiet week starting off on the cold side but summer came back again yesterday and they are forecasting 27 degrees centigrade on the golf course this afternoon. Too late I suppose to invite the Ryder cup teams to finish off their competition here.

One of my beefs about Radio 3 is that they don't give enough airtime to jazz and when they do it tends to be at unsocial hours, not to mention the constant moving about of Jazz Record Requests on Saturday afternoons to accommodate the Metropolitan Opera. Now France Musique certainly play jazz at unsocial hours but they also provide a regular weekday slot at 7pm which fits very well with my dinner hour and listening to it the other day I picked up a tip that I may pass on to David Milliband.

I know that Ed is for the moment only a prime minister in waiting and that a week never mind five years is a long time in politics, but David could perhaps protect Ed's chances even more by copying Dominique Fillon, the French prime minister's brother. He plays jazz piano.

I can see David teaming up with Ken Clarke for late night sessions at Ronnie Scott's with Bill Clinton dropping by to jam with them when Hilary is over telling our foreign secretary who to invade next. So much more fun than running the country.

Next time you are tempted to take a second helping of pudding spare a thought for the distress you may cause posthumously to your nearest and dearest. A French family eager to satisfy their deceased relative's wish to be cremated have been thwarted because the corpse is too big to fit into the incineration chamber. Could there be a better reason to exercise self control around the dinner pail?

Disturbances are taking place throughout France at the moment in an attempt to prevent the government from increasing the pension age from 60 to 62. In one of the reports I heard about this an expression that obviously meant work to rule caught my attention. Its literal translation is zeal strike.

Now don't you think that the crematorium employees could have gone out on a limb as it were and with a bit of zeal got that poor lady to where she wanted to be?

It is heartening to learn that the Indian authorities are putting their shoulders to the wheel, straining every sinew and marshalling all their resources to ensure that the Commonwealth Games go ahead.

But did they have to repatriate their summer this morning?

This may not look like a technological leap forward in the fields of medicine or warfare but in the fight against household dirt it has both improved the quality of my floor cleaning (look at those tiles shine) and reduced the strain on my ageing joints and knees now that I no longer have to get down on all fours with a scrubbing brush.

The big smoke around here is Limoges. Although I’ve been there often; to the golf courses, to the airport, to the station, I’ve only once had a stroll around and that was just to some fine gardens not far from the station. So I decided to have a day out to see more of the place and to let the train take the strain rather than drive down.

I was a little put out at being asked for €25.40 for the privilege but Michelin assured me later that it would have cost me €18.30 for petrol and I am sure I could easily have spent the balance of €7.10 on city centre parking so I suppose it was a competitive price. My belief that rail travel in France was relatively cheap was shaken though and to reassure myself I investigated the costs of a similar journey in UK.

I chose Berwick-upon-Tweed to Edinburgh as a comparable market town to big smoke expedition of roughly the same length (in fact 10 kilometres longer) and started digging. Now France offers various fare deals but nothing of the complexity of the British system. Eventually I managed to get a fair comparison. I chose trains leaving at approximately the same times and on the same day of the week and under an equivalent fare regime. Lo and behold I was not reassured at all because that journey would have cost only €20.88. So no whining from the rail passengers alliance next time fares go up. They don’t know when they’re well off.

Saxophone players however may well have cause for complaint. Reeds are sold in the UK at French prices.

As for the day in Limoges, it passed very well. The weather was lovely for a start. If it had rained I might have gone to the museums that I had pencilled in but instead I admired them and other buildings from the outside (apart from the cathedral, into and out of quick I went quickly), strolled in the gardens, watched the world go by while sipping coffee in a pavement café and browsed in a shop or two.


The city’s iconic building is its railway station (completed in 1929 from a design done in 1914), seen here across a fountain, but there are others of interest. The round one in the picture is an art gallery that started life as a cold store for Argentinean beef in 1919 and another is a trompe d’oeil. The flag bearers are gathering for a demo in protest against the retirement age being raised from 60 to 62 and the boys in the orange suits are not a chemical warfare unit but gardeners spraying some toxic juice on the grass. The suits and breathing apparatus may help them to get to 62 but what about the punters sitting in the little garden doing some passive inhalation?

One of the shops in which I browsed was practically giving away DVDs so I went home clutching a handful, including Das Boot. I’ve never seen it. To do so I need to find five hours to get through its two discs, but I’m bound to be confined indoors by rain sooner or later.

These ducks are escaping a barrage of balls from oncoming golfers at Royan. Although the ducks probably don't appreciate it this is a lovely course that is well worth a visit even just to stroll around. It is set in a beautiful pine forest a couple of miles inland from the Atlantic. When we were there last week the sun shone and a good time was had by all.

In contrast to Dryades where bunker shots are a lottery the bunkers here are full of proper sand and it is a positive pleasure to get out of them with a classic stroke that sweeps sand and ball onto the green.

Two failures to report.

I failed to refuse to take a copy of the Watchtower from two English Jehovah's Witnesses who live in a neighbouring village. I need a strategy for the return visit they will no doubt make.

I failed to resist a bribe from Carrefour to sign up for a loyalty card. At least they don't have either my email address or my phone number so perhaps I'll just get more junk mail than usual and the €10 came in handy.

It's been a relatively busy week for my lifestyle in this part of the world.

On Monday I went up to Chateauroux to collect Claire and Naomi. They had been to a wedding in Normandy at the weekend and were adding on a few days down here. They were very lucky with the weather. We enjoyed a little tourism and a gentle country walk on Tuesday, a chill-out day in the sun-soaked garden on Wednesday and off they went on Thursday.

Luckily they left from La Souterraine which made it easy for me to join some friends for a day's golf at Chammet. This is a nine hole rustic course on the Millesvaches plateau which is a northerly extension of the Massif Central. The countryside is very beautiful and it must be one of the most peaceful spots on earth.

It's always difficult to capture landscapes with the sort of cheapo camera that I have but you may get a flavour of the place from this picture.



The course was in beautiful condition, especially the greens. They were a lot better than when I played there last. We played nine holes in the morning and apart from a splendid par on the third hole that saw me land my drive on the green from 200 yards away and 500 feet above I failed to impress and delivered several balls up to nature.

One of those great value French country lunches followed; four courses, coffee, wine, aperitif, mineral water. The whole for 16 euros apiece.

That bucked up my game and the afternoon's round was much better.

Then it was back to Pierre's in Gueret for dinner. The accompanying refreshments were wisely handled and I drove soberly home to a good night's kip.

The countryside around the Biggar road was looking at its glorious best in Wednesday morning's sunshine and the fine weather persisted to some point between Manchester and Birmingham where it started to rain. The rain pelted down from then on more or less without stopping till somewhere not far north of Charles de Gaulle airport on Thursday.

After that it brightened up and a couple of picnic stops later with the thermometer reading 34 degrees I pulled into the Barbansais hangar thinking sunbathing and cool white wine. Alain across the road welcomed me with a chilled tonic as I admired the progress of his renovation.

However it seems as though I have brought the rain with me. Friday dawned sunny but a thunderstorm quickly erupted and it rained on and off throughout the day. However the rain was warm and although Patrick and I managed to get soaked in nine holes we dried off over another five. Then almost before I had downed my shandy on the terrace the rain came on again and we scuttled for our cars.

All that exercise after weeks of candle end burning and sedentary living ensured a good night's sleep and hopefully firmed up my swinging muscles for tomorrow's competition.

"Do not expect to understand the text or to follow a linear story"

Those are words of warning that could be applied to many Fringe shows and were certainly apt for Maria de Buenos Aires in whose programme they appeared. This show resembled nothing so much as a series of animated three dimensional surrealist paintings. It opened in dim light with a sort of Mother Courage figure pushing a large wire shelved structure across the stage and dragging a laden trolley behind her. Having positioned her burdens she lifted the skirt of a semi-recumbent actress sitting downstage, picked up a steak that was resting on her thigh and popped it into a hot frying pan, then returned to the shelves and continued to cook it.

It got more bizarre as time went on ending with a woman (Maria?) singing the closing number inside a vast transparent plastic bubble. Despite the music of Astor Piazzolla and a beautiful and athletic tango couple Maria de Buenos Aires did nothing for this Argentophile.

The Tailor of Inverness on the other hand had bizarre and surrealist overtones but was a real and moving story of the actor's father. Born in Poland of Polish and Ukrainian parents he was buffeted about by the ebbs and flows of the machinations of the European powers, serving in turn in the Soviet, German and British armies during WW2. His part of Poland suffered inter-ethnic brutality as it slid into the Ukraine, the Poles and the Ukrainians massacring one another including members of his family. Demobbed in Britain he eventually found his way to Inverness and made a life there leaving (unknown to the actor) a wife and daughter in Poland.

Music, poetry and video projection supplemented the story as the actor played himself, his father and other characters. I got a bit lost at times when the story jumped around but this reflected (whether intentionally or not) the various conflicting stories of his father's wartime life that he had heard over the years.

The piece grew from the actor's uncovering of the various events of his father's life and his efforts (eventually successful) to meet his half sister. The sad fact is that this moving individual story is only one of millions of similar stories of people throughout the world afflicted from time immemorial to the present day by man's inability to live without conflict.

Those were my final ventures into the Fringe and I cast it off completely by getting rid of Alonso's beard.

At the art college yesterday I caught Gordon's animation in which I discovered various bits of my head and chin appeared as well as my hands. My hands served well there but weren't up to scratch in the snooker hall last night when I played roughly four good shots in two hours.

Let's hope they do better when I resume my golf career at Les Dryades this weekend.

The Tempest is over and hardly a drop of rain on us or the audience throughout the two week run.

Last night really was a miracle. The rain came belting down at some point in the first half and continued through the interval. We were just finalising plan B to do the first scene of the second act inside the boat when the rain stopped. The audience were hastily summoned from the adjacent bar boat and we did the scene on deck.

As Lene our Czech wardrobe angel said to me, our weather is not actually as bad as we like to think.

We had a very responsive audience for the last performance and a good shindig afterwards. That continued for some to my place where four of the cast didn't find the strength to move on till about 11 this morning and where four bottles of spirits found a new home, replenishing somewhat my depleted stocks. In the afternoon we got the boat shipshape and back to its normal state, even super normal since Bob and Andy managed to repair the tilting mechanism on sections of the board room table that had spent the last fortnight in Home Street.

I abandoned the Fringe in favour of the cinema this evening. The Jacques Tati scripted cartoon The Illusionist which opened the Film Festival this year is now on general release and is a beautiful portrait of Edinburgh, particularly for those who knew the city 50 or 60 years ago. If you want to see the Barony Bar or the East Adam Street of yesteryear then this is the film for you. It's also a touching little story but I shall have to see it again since I had to rest my eyes a little from time to time, no doubt thanks to The Tempest late nights.

It was lovely to be sitting in the Cameo and see the auditorium I was in come up on screen. A similar thing happened to me once before, in Paris when I saw an open air screening of a Woody Allen movie in the Trocadero as the film's actors stood in the celluloid version looking at the same cityscape as I was.

She was curled up on John Coltrane's Giant Steps but now she's safely back in Ipanema.

Walking along George Street the other day I came across a line of chauffeured limousines, Jags and Mercs amongst them, all in a tasteful shade of maroon. I thought Lothian Buses must have branched out into the executive travel business or Hearts were having a board away day.

But surely this was too James Bondish even for Vladimir Romanov. There were lots of policemen about and some of those burly guys with curly flexes growing out of their ears. Various swarthy gentlemen with and without mobile phones were hanging around on the pavement.

What on earth is it I wondered and strolled on.

Ross came up with the likely explanation. It must have been the Festival; not EIF, not Fringe, not Book, not whatever else, but Politics.

I should be on my way to Glasgow for lunch at the moment but because of a mix up I'm not. Unfortunately I don't have another free day before I go back to France so this particular lunch will have to be kept warm till October.

The Girl From Ipanema has gone missing.

Either the CD has slipped into a nook or cranny, or one of my late night guests has taken it away to listen to in the comfort of their own home. They may even have asked to borrow it. I become forgetful after a few glasses.

On Sunday I was lucky enough to get a ticket for Freefall at the Traverse. You really can't beat them for drama although Theatre Alba, whose Pudda is lodged in my memory as one of the best things I've ever seen, produced a very fine Seagull in the grounds of Duddingston Kirk in which two of my friends played very effectively.

Before going to Duddingston I caught the screening of a number of This Collection films including the one I was in. Obviously my opinion may be coloured by my personal interest but I think our film stood out. It very clearly and cleverly conveyed all the emotional truth of the poem. It was beautifully shot and edited and underpinned by a lovely soundtrack. I think it should do well at short film festivals. The only downside was that the DVD copy Charmaine gave me was unreadable. A replacement should be forthcoming.

I've seen two more shows. Darcy's Dilemma was disappointing since I had expected it to extend the novel in some way rather than what it did, which was to give us an insight into Darcy's thinking with respect to how he might persuade Elizabeth to change her opinion of him. All very well but we know from the book what makes her revise her opinion so it was pretty much a non event for me and it must have been totally mysterious to anyone who didn't know Pride and Prejudice.

The other show was a jolly romp through the sad story of Lulu made familiar to atonal opera-goers by Alban Berg. Lulu goes through life via a series of husbands and lovers and ends up as a murdered prostitute. Sounds bleak and with music by Berg it probably is.

But this was not bleak and was not an operatic version although there was music. The actors bounced through the piece in the manner of a Victorian melodrama crossed with Alice in Wonderland. The costumes were weird and wonderful. Lulu herself raced around in roller skates on occasion and had the most mobile and expressive of faces. She was queen of the pout and died delightfully.

I took several snaps of a lovely rainbow from my balcony recently. I couldn't get the whole thing in so I did it in sections and spent ages trying to create a panoramic image to show the entire arc. But the left hand section has persistently failed to merge seamlessly with the other two. So I've had to settle for two thirds.We are not quite two thirds of the way through our run of The Tempest but are already looking forward to the after-show bash. This will be the official party. Like the play itself there have been rehearsals.

At one such rehearsal CDs were pulled randomly from my shelves; some played, some discarded, some put in the wrong cases, most left lying around caseless. So far, so normal - but catastrophically some were replaced on the shelves at random. I think I've sorted them out but the crunch will come when my catalogue tells me to look in position X and the wrong CD is there.

The Tempest is playing to full houses and is being well received by most spectators. We've had several reviewers in but only one review has been published so far. Since the run is sold out it doesn't matter commercially what they say but there are egos to be massaged and that influential web organ Broadway Baby hasn't played its part by giving us only two stars. This is generally translated as don't bother unless you can't get a ticket for anything else. But it's amazing what a little selective quotation can do, viz.

"...this production does have a very strong grasp of space. While so many other site specific works during the festival have trouble using their locations, this piece creates a new vantage point every few minutes, looking from the barge to the quay and vice versa..."

Sounds encouraging doesn't it. But read the full review. At least I'm not picked out for punishment. Otherwise I wouldn't give you the link.

I have seen several other shows. The only one that stands out for me so far is a production of The Penelopiad at the Church Hill. I won't give you a link because it closed yesterday. I chanced upon this play one rainy afternoon last year and was bowled over by the talented young company from London who presented it. I've tried hunting them down this year but have not been helped by the fact that I can't remember what they were called. However I found that another young company, this time from Calgary, were doing the show.

Their production was significantly different in style, owing a lot I felt to Peter Brooke in its simplicity, its imaginative transformations of actors aided by no more than lengths of cloth to thrones, beds and even Odyseus's bow. Add atmospheric music, subtle lighting, beautifully composed tableaux, a magnificent central performance from the girl playing Penelope and you had a five star show.

Much of the press went bananas over Sub Rosa, or to give it its full title "David Leddy's Sub Rosa" (who he?) awarding four and five stars with the impression that they'd have given six if they could have. I could not see anything more than a three star production. It was Jackanory for grown-ups shuffling round a masonic lodge in the dead of night. No conflict, no drama, no humour (almost none anyway), not a play at all.

Last night I shot up from Leith to town to see a version of Lulu (not the opera but the work on which it is based) only to find that it was their night off. So in the hopes of stumbling upon the show of shows I said give me a ticket for what's on next.

It was billed as a cabaret and consisted of various indifferent comics trailing their own shows and girls who dignified the taking off of some of their clothes to music by calling themselves burlesque artistes. I deduced that what distinguishes a burlesque artiste from a stripper is that the former keeps her nipples covered and her knickers on.

The one act that I enjoyed was a trail for an acrobatic show called Circus Trick Tease. They were death defyingly excellent, or severe injury defying anyway. The show is not at a time that I can make while The Tempest is running but I may manage to fit it in on the couple of days I have afterwards before setting off again for France.

Despite the distractions of the move-in to the boat, a dress/tech rehearsal and a preview performance I managed to make it to a number of jazz festival events at the weekend. I came out of the Hub on Saturday night just as the tattoo bands were marching out of the castle. The jazz audience had to stay inside the gates until the bands were past so we got a military music complement to end the evening.

There were various events in the Botanics on Sunday afternoon with nature as their theme or inspiration, including music by some of the Jazz Festival participants. It was not quite on the scale of the Sunday concerts I used to go to in the Parc Floral at Vincennes but the music was pleasant. I particularly enjoyed sets played by an Indian duo. One of them was announced as a raga made from (or maybe inspired by) the music of James Scott Skinner. Scottish fiddle music played on the sittar sounds a little odd but I could take more of it.

The Tempest opened last night to a capacity audience and went very well. We had a full house again tonight and despite one or two little imperfections, not unusual on a second night in my experience, it was a good performance. Only twelve to go.

The little film I was involved in last month is now viewable. See me as the caring husband here.

I'm not exactly centre stage in that but I'm an even more shadowy figure in Tom's Life In A Day. Check out the on location sequences (parts 3, 4 and 5) and catch me hanging around or reading my book under a golf umbrella.

But that's now on Kevin and Ridley's longlist for the documentary of the century. Will any of it make the final movie? Should I book my trip to Sundance now?

Can't wait to see less of me? Well thanks to Gordon Craig the hand that moved the stone will shortly appear as one of a pair on a screen in the art college postgraduate degree show moving a box hither and thither.

Wednesday afternoon was set aside for the Castle but the lengthy queues at the ticket office and the thought of squeezing into the various apartments with a legion of perspiring tourists put us off.

So we wandered a bit. First to the National Library where there is an excellent golf exhibition. It has been mounted to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Open Championship. As well as glittering cups and old hickory spoons and photos of chaps in plus fours there is a lot of written material dealing with the social side of the sport. A 1792 bill from The Golfhouse, Leith Links lists 3/- spent on dinner and 12/- on claret. Golf was thirsty work then as it is now.

Greyfriars Kirk and graveyard is always worth a visit and my friends were suitably impressed by the story of the loyal wee dog and by our celebration of the fact that McGonagall, easily our worst poet, is buried there. I was impressed that I was able to correctly explain the National Covenant, first signed there in 1638.

Naturally we popped into Greyfriars Bobby for a refreshment. It has to be one of Edinburgh's most pleasant pubs, especially when the students are away on holiday. Another pub attracted my attention on our way to the Parliament. Rutherfords in Drummond street was a favourite haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson in the late 1860s and was not unknown to myself in the 1960s.

It's now called the Hispaniola in a nod to Treasure Island but has become part of the Italian restaurant round the corner. The outside thank God, looks much as it always has but judging by the photos here the inside has become a veneered hall with all the character of a railway waiting room. But I have not been inside and this transformation took place two years ago so maybe it has matured. Their website doesn't reassure me though.

I fear the happy howff it was has gone forever.

At the Parliament there was an exhibition of press photography. Suitably chastened by pictures of man's inhumanity to man but cheered up by some of his dafter activities we went off to The World's End for scoff. They serve lots of good pub grub. I chose and enjoyed their excellent cullen skink and then their delicious haggis washed down with a good beer. St Andrew's Ale is not a bad swallee. Either the saint or the golf course, whichever it is dedicated to, should be proud of it.

This cultural journey ended with an evening of country dancing in the courtyard of Linlithgow Palace. It's a splendid setting and would look wonderful filled with beautifully dressed and accomplished dancers strutting their stuff. We were a bit of a rag tag and bobtail crowd whose dancing was energetic and enthusiastic but could not be called accomplished.

There's only one more chance this summer so polish up your pas de bas and your skip change of step and go for a Scotch Hop.

It's been a couple of decades since I wandered into the byways of East Lothian. The staleness of my local knowledge plus vegetation partially or completely obscuring roadsigns (a consequence of pressure on council budgets no doubt) meant that it took a little longer than anticipated to find the Glenkinchie distillery. But my passengers enjoyed the bonus tour and ultimately the distillery tour.

We didn't dig into our pockets to buy the bottle of Scotch on offer at £230 despite having been given a £5 discount voucher. We didn't even buy a cheaper one.

Instead we wandered on through the countryside ending up in Gifford where I introduced the Swiss, famous for their chocolate, to millionaire's shortbread. As soon as we got home Sabin grabbed a stick of celery from the fridge, doused it with salt and munched it desperately as an antidote.

The Festival is almost upon us. We had our penultimate rehearsal on the boat last night and tickets are selling well. So buy now here. One of the two and a half thousand competing attractions has set itself up on a waste site across the road and is practising its music as I write. It's a nice jazzy sound which might well draw me into the Tabu Circus tent though most of their performances clash with my own.

I've been a bit lazy about sorting out what to go and see but I rather like the haphazard system of wandering around with a Daily Diary and choosing something that's about to start close to wherever I happen to be. A dangerous system but not a dull one.

I left my late rising visitors to fend for themselves on Saturday while I practised my scales.

They fended so well that they came back with a bag of groceries and cooked a delicious evening meal. Since Falk is a trained chef it was not only delicious but was presented in five star style, let down a little by our not having been able to borrow any of Holyrood's 3000 piece silver dinner service from which to eat it. I manfully opened a bottle or two.

In what might seem to some a cruel return for such kindness, but which they claim to have enjoyed and why should I disbelieve them, I took them to Sunday's Tempest rehearsal. In preparation I had given them a German translation but unsurprisingly they had not ventured far beyond the plot summary. Shakespeare's glorious text then (all the top people say it's glorious, just because you don't understand the jokes doesn't mean it isn't) was somewhat opaque. But the body language which is hardly ever more than a foot away from your eyeballs and the mellifluous tones of the actors which are hardly ever more than a foot from your earhole no doubt transcended that little problem. As a bonus it rained so they got the full promenade experience getting slightly drookit on the quayside while the cast tried to keep their footing on a wet deck before being shepherded into the next performance space by our version of Shakespeare's sprites and fairies, known affectionately as Ariel's bitches.

The next national glory to which they were exposed (at their own request) was the game of golf. I could see on the driving range after 100 balls had been poked at and occasionally whacked into the air in random directions that a proper golf course would be a step too far so we went on to Bruntsfield Links whose 36 little holes were just dandy for their skill level. My skill as a teacher sadly failed to change Falk's natural inclination to hit the ball more or less as hard as he could irrespective of the distance to be covered and as for sweeping rather than whacking on the green - a pearl that fell on deaf ears. But then there are lots of things that I continue to do wrongly even when I'm reciting the correct method to myself as I swing the club. Who'd be a teaching pro?

We retired to the Golf Tavern afterwards. It's cozy wood and leather interior with little nooks and crannies was turned into a wasteland of a steel and plastic regular cube some years ago but seemed even colder and nastier yesterday. There is lots of golfing memorabilia decorating the walls but somehow it creates no atmosphere. Maybe it's the effect of the half a dozen silent (thankfully) TV screens that hit your eyes every time you lift your head from your drink.

Ever been to the Powderhall Arms in Broughton Road? I thoroughly recommend it. Not just because they gave me a free shot of Glenmorangie but because it is a very friendly pub where you can play all sorts of board games, read books, play cards and generally relax.

It was number four in a series of six pubs that I took my visitors to on Wednesday night after introducing them to central Edinburgh.

Thursday, inter alia, we had a very interesting tour of Holyrood Palace. It's probably more than 50 years since my last visit and I'm sure that there were still traces of Rizzio's blood on the floor then. They've been cleaned up since and a 3,000 piece silver dinner service has been added to the crockery store but I imagine the rest is much as it has been since it was built aeons ago. I'm sure there was a conducted tour in the past but now there is an excellent audio gadget available in numerous languages to hang round your neck and listen to as you go round. I was pleased to find that I had not made too many errors in the potted history lesson I delivered before we got there. I think I got a couple of King James mixed up but since there were seven of them I don't think that's too bad.

We gave the Parliament a body swerve and slowly worked our way up the Royal Mile, stopping to visit and admire the Canongate Kirk in front of which as you may know there is a statue of Robert Fergusson. There was a girl there handing out flyers for a walking tour in which she takes you to various places that figure in Fergusson's poem "Auld Reekie" and explains and declaims the poem en route. I'm very keen to take the tour but didn't feel that the Swiss would be as taken with it as they were with the brown sauce that accompanied the very tasty pokes of fish and chips we treated ourselves to. So I've noted it for a future selfish treat.

We eventually got to the castle having been diverted by a bed of nails fire eating sword swallower on the way but thankfully were too late for the last entry of the day. That gave me an hour to put my feet up at home before heading for The Boat for a Tempest rehearsal and then back up to town for some more nightlife with my visitors.

Friday saw my traditional tour of Fife. We head out to the road bridge, stop for viewing if I feel like it, which I didn't, then take the coast road through Inverkeithing, Aberdour, (stopping at the viewpoint), Burntisland, Kinghorn, Kirkcaldy, Dysart, the various Wemyss, Buckhaven, Methil, Leven and Lundin Links, arriving in Lower Largo for a bracing walk on the beach followed by scrutiny of Alexander Selkirk's statue and a refreshment in the Railway Tavern.

Then it's on again, taking in Kellie Castle if time allows (it didn't) to Anstruther where fish and chips from the Anstruther fish bar is de rigeur. They claim to sell the best fish and chips in Scotland and I have no reason to quarrel with that claim. We walked to Cellardyke and watched with some amazement a youngster pop a dozen golf balls into the sea with a 7 iron. I hope he found them all under gorse bushes and didn't half inch them from his father's golf bag.

Next and last stop St Andrews where we walked a bit of the Old Course, checked out the castle and the cathedral before rushing back to Edinburgh. It pained me to miss out Falkland Palace but there was no way we could be late for Salsa Celtica. The Queen's Hall was packed to capacity and the band were wonderful. The melange of Gaelic song, fiddle music, uilean pipes and Latin rhythms is extraordinarily entertaining in my opinion. Sabin and I had a lot of fun dancing as we did from time to time when we were unlikely flatmates in El Puerto.

A nightcap at the Steamie to the strains of a band called Lemon something or other brought the evening to a close.

You may have heard of the project by Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald to create a feature length film of a day in the life of everyman from YouTube videos that were all made on the same day but you'll be as surprised as me to learn that I may be in it.

It so happens that yesterday was the day and that I happened to be spending that day surrounded by cameras and that some video footage that was taken may be uploaded to YouTube, may be incorporated in the movie and may well have me somewhere in the background.

Admittedly it's a pretty long shot and is unlikely to herald the beginning of a late flowering Hollywood career but such is the siren call of the silver screen that I'm brushing up on Oscar speeches already.

But why was I surrounded by cameras anyway? That was for another project, slightly less global and glamorous but perhaps more creative. This is an Edinburgh collaboration between film-makers and poets. 100 one minute films are being made to illustrate or complement or in some way combine with 100 poems that illustrate life in the city.

I was portraying a character in the film of poem number 92, A Lifetime by Ron Butlin. The filmic interpretation of the poem portrays a former ballet dancer, crippled in an accident, and the husband who has wheeled her about for decades. Like all films I've ever been involved with the actual filming from the actor's point of view consists of hours of hanging about and minutes of actual performance. Not so bad if you're getting paid for it but I wasn't so had to content myself with the fun of frightening my screen wife with my wheelchair handling and throwing stones into St Margaret's Loch while trying not to hit the swans that insisted on swimming into shot. It was a long day with much tedium but it didn't rain a lot and we had a laugh or two.

So I expect the siren call of the silver screen will have me back, particularly to the Cameo's "silver screen" shows on Tuesdays where I get a cheap seat and a free coffee.

I’m a bit late in recording the pleasant day we had at The Open on Sunday. The train and bus access was very efficient and the leisurely progress through Fife meant that by the time we got there the morning rain had stopped. The weather got progressively more pleasant as the day wore on, for the spectators at any rate; no doubt the players would have preferred a little less wind on the course.

For a little while it seemed as though the leader might conceivably be caught but the challenge fizzled out and as the private jets slid graciously to earth at Leuchars ready to take the players on to their next challenge we left the scene for our less gracious and considerably cheaper ride home.

There I was able to see more of the actual golf than I had at St Andrews thanks to having recorded it, since good vantage points on the course are scarce. The next time The Open is on Scottish soil (Muirfeld 2014) I shall be there but may just plonk myself into a grandstand for the day. I’m looking forward to seeing The Ryder Cup at Gleneagles then as well where if memory serves there are sticky up bits of landscape to perch on.

By that time I may have a definitive answer on how to pronounce this year’s Open Champion’s name. The home-bred commentators persisted with something close to how we might pronounce the combination of letters making up “oosthuizen” if it were English. Jean Van De Verde, no stranger to mispronunciations of his own name, had the bright idea of asking the man himself and rendered the result as “west haze en”. This pronunciation found its way onto BBC TV breakfast news but not to other broadcasts. BBC Scotland’s man at the course stuck a whisper of a “w” in front of “oost” but the Championship committee representatives restrained themselves. I listened in to Afrikaans radio a couple of days later but by then the news was stale and since they haven’t caught up with the iplayer revolution yet no backtracking through bulletins was available.

The best I’ve been able to come up with through a combination of Afrikaans and Dutch pronunciation guides is “wist how sin” and although it has rather a Chinese ring to it I’ll stick there till I know any better.

I made a strategic mistake yesterday by going to St. Andrews without a pair of waterproof trousers. The rain swept in horizontally all morning and combined with the water cascading down from my jacket to drown my legs from thigh to ankle.

Now had there been exciting action on the golf course this might not have mattered but on the last day of practice, as this was, not many players were on the course at 10 o'clock when I arrived and their number declined as the morning wore on.

By lunchtime no golf was being played, my jeans were a cold clammy carapace to my legs and my enthusiasm had waned to vanishing point. A brief leaflet collecting expedition in the "Welcome to Fife" pavilion, where they also gave me some sample packets of instant flavoured porridge, and I was off home.

Even the enthusiasm of the twenty odd former Open champions lined up for a special four hole competition that afternoon to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the event didn't hold up. The competition was cancelled and they stayed indoors , so I was in good company.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for better conditions on Sunday.

Here's my world cup souvenir. I wasn't there of course but Ewan was and brought it home for me. Strangely he didn't invite me round on Sunday to participate in the final. Out of respect for his neighbours I dare say.

Should any of my neighbours ever complain about my saxophone I shall offer them the alternative of the vuvuzela.

The paint that I bought is called Natural Stucco. When applying it to the wall it appears to be an undistinguished but not unpleasant shade of cream. When it dries it's a sludgy, undistinguished and unpleasant greyish-brownish hue.

You might think that is due to the influence of the violent orange substrate and a third coat would usher in the cream, but my skill with the brush proves that not to be the case. The paint that has dripped onto surfaces that were not violently orange dries to the same light mud.

I don't much care for it but for the moment I'm stuck, oh!

Rather more accomplished painting was on view on Sunday at the Mansfield Traquair Centre. I haven't been in there since it was cafe Graffiti and then not only was it dark but the murals were covered up anyway. Now they are visible in as close to their original vivacity as the conservators could manage. Absolutely lovely and worth a visit. Apart from their regular monthly openings the place will be open most mornings during the Fringe.

Edinburgh's latest festival is magic and Connor and I are off to see a show tonight but some other magic is not working for me at the moment.

That's the magic of the paint mixing machine. In the bad old days you had a choice of a couple of shades of whatever basic colour you wanted but now there is an infinite range. I pity the poor soul who has to dream up names for the infinitesimally different shades of yellow or whatever. You can't just say light yellow, dark yellow, very dark yellow. Names like sunburst or morning glow or forest daffodil have to be invented.

Anyway I got some colour shade cards from shop A, decided on a couple of colours and went back to get little sample pots to see how they would look in situ. The mixing machine was out of order. A day later it is in order but not quite, since my particular colours cannot be guaranteed to come out of the machine in their proper glory.

So I went to shop B. Since they stock an entirely different range I knew I would have to start with the colour cards again. I found the paint aisles taped off and a little notice expressing regret and advancing health and safety concerns as the reason. Their cards and the mixing machine were tantalizingly in sight but an assistant insisted that access was impossible.

Enquiring as to what particular health hazard I was being saved from I learnt that were I to venture into one of the aisles I might be peppered with paint pots and end up with a shirt of many colours since the racks on which they stand have been deemed to be unstable.

Months will apparently go by till it is sorted out since the decision has been taken to refit the whole store for fear this instability is infectious.

So I shall have to trudge off to shop C and hope that their magic mixer has not been hexed.

Take a look at this image which appears without comment in a recent Plaything post.It is not a manifestation of iphone mania but a bushel under which a theatrical light is hiding. Our director, who is not normally publicity shy, is surely appealing in this instance to only her most dedicated readers; those who can be relied upon to magnify the picture and scan the text thoroughly in search of hidden treasure.

That treasure is the news that her production of The Tempest on board the Mary of Guise barge moored in the Water of Leith is a 2010 Fringe Festival hot ticket.

So get yours now.

It was a long and weary drive from Dover on Monday but for a change I went up the M11 and the A1 and then cut across country on the A68. The A68 drive is through lovely scenery and is very exhilarating with its ups and downs but can be a bit frustrating if you get stuck behind a lorry or a Sunday driver.

The evening was the sort of evening that has been hard to find in the Creuse this month, warm and sunny. So I did what I hadn't done in France; sat out in the garden with a glass of wine and watched the sun go down. Admittedly my Edinburgh garden is a little less than 2000 square metres and is perched on top of the flat below's window bay without a forest view but I'm very pleased with the progress of my plantings. Here's a sample.
I didn't actually sit but if I bought a little collapsible camping stool I'm sure I could squeeze it in and feel very continental.

Since then it's been tennis and tempest. Not that I've been playing in a storm. I've been glued to the telly for Wimbledon and torn myself away for a couple of rehearsals of The Tempest. So the good weather is wasted on me really.

Usually when I'm within 50 miles or so of Paris I tune my car radio into TSF to get a jazz fix but today I stuck with France Musique.

They've been having something of a British focus this week. Many of their broadcasts have even come from London. This has been in celebration of De Gaulle's call to arms after the fall of France broadcast by the BBC on 18th June 1940.

This afternoon they were playing music by Vaughan Williams including his opera Sir John In Love which I don't believe I've ever heard before. It was very tuneful and most of the time very jolly so I stuck with it.

Apparently he based a lot of the music in the opera on English folk melodies, ten in all. The only one I can truthfully claim to have recognised was Greensleeves and that because it was played pretty straight. The least variation or disguise of a tune and I'm lost.

I wonder how I'd have fared listening to the 24 hour broadcast of covers of Yesterday if I hadn't known what was going on?

So far, this June has been the wettest and most dismal of the ten that I have spent in France. It seems to have rained without intermission. If the weather during the last third of the month is as poor then I shall be heartily glad not to be here.

Of course all things are relative and I have not been swept to my death in a flash flood as many people have been in the south so it’s not been all bad.

The big question is whether or not there will be an interlude of dryness between now and Sunday lunchtime to allow me to cut the grass before I go. I’ve just been on-line to look at the forecast for this area but Météo France tell me that in view of the prevailing weather conditions their site is currently saturated and will I please try later.

I assume the saturation is from information seekers like me but I wouldn’t put it past that pesky rain having permeated the French bits of the world wide web.

Have you heard of Glen Baxter? I don’t believe I had until I came across an appeal for 100 ukulele players in the window of a music shop in Poitiers.They were required, and probably still are, in connection with Baxter’s historico-gastronomic tour of Poitou-Charente which starts today and continues until 12^th September. He is described in the pamphlet I picked up as a living legend of British nonsense.

Having looked at his website I cannot disagree.

We all know that black pudding is made from blood. But I often think when I eat a Scottish black pudding that the pig who provided the blood must have died of a heart attack, given the amount of fatty matter that is included.

Now that may be more natural for a pig than to be slaughtered but from my selfish viewpoint I prefer the sort of black pudding that I ate in Poitiers the other day. It could have contained nothing put pure healthy blood that had been harvested as it gushed from a neatly sliced throat. Accompanied by a delicious portion of mashed potato and half an oven baked apple it was a lunch to die for. And my thanks to the pig who did.

I was in Poitiers on a rest day between rounds of golf at a very pretty golf course in Vienne, where incidentally I can heartily recommend the golfers’ lunch. Fifteen euros will get you three tasty courses, a glass of wine and a coffee. The second time I lunched there my main course was wild Scottish salmon. How come I can’t get that in Edinburgh for 15 euros by itself never mind as one course out of three? Should you wish to brighten up your mashed potato by the way try mixing in some purée of split peas.

As I write this I am hearing of the death of Egon Ronay. His life is over but his work is not yet finished.

After the golf yesterday I set off with my prize of a bottle of red to the little village of La Celle Dunoise to attend a birthday barbecue. It was a lovely setting in a garden leading down to the river from a rather splendid 1920's residence. Unfortunately it rained intermittently and rather more on than off.

I stayed relatively dry myself not only because I had a drive of around 30 kilometres ahead of me to get home but in an attempt to balance my intake at the two social events that I had attended in my own village earlier in the week.

These were crowned late on Thursday evening by a substantial tumbler of Laphroaig served with a remark about how being Scottish I must like whisky and so on. Now as it happens I do like whisky and Laphroaig is one of my favourites so it would have been churlish to refuse.

But it would have been wise.

After a second round score of 73 Celia was still first equal but I'm sad to say she put in a disastrous 82 today and has ended up in 4th place. Not too bad for your first excursion overseas I suppose but disappointing both for her and for her supporters at Les Dryades. She's back to France tomorrow for another competition this weekend so let's hope that goes a little better.

I've at long last heard what part I am going to play in the Grads production of The Tempest in the Fringe. I shall impersonate Alonso, King of Naples. He is one of those who were instrumental in the usurping of Prospero. He seems a bit of a wet fish so I shall be acting against type (given how I see myself anyway).

Here's the venue - the good ship Mary of Guise - handily placed for drinkers opposite The Shore pub and restaurant with a number 22 bus stop only yards away. Come in your millions.

Keeping my flat warm this weekend have been the golf ace from Les Dryades, Celia Mansour, and her dad.

Celia, who attends a special school for France's elite young golfers, is playing this week at Gullane in her first overseas golf competition, the US Kids Golf European Championship, with her dad on the bag.

Naturally I'm keeping my eye on the results and am delighted to see that in the 14 year old girls competition after the first round Celia with a score of 75 is first equal out of 17 competitors.

I only wish that my golf skills had gone even infinitesimally in the same direction as Celia's since I first played with her about 5 years ago.

I played in my first competition on Sunday and although I didn’t do as well as I have been doing in informal games it wasn’t a total disaster.

Over the post game refreshments the conversation turned to Erse.

The initial capital will have alerted you to the fact that we are not talking bottoms here but language. It seems that in French crossword puzzles erse generally means Scottish Gaelic. (There is also a French word erse whose meaning need not detain us here.)

I maintained that this was nonsense and that Erse is Irish Gaelic. Later investigation via the OED, Chambers, Collins, Marian-Webster, Britannia and Columbia revealed that the origins of the word go back to Old English “Irisc” and/or Old Norse “Irskr” meaning Irish.

Point proved you might think but not quite. Various quotations show that Erse was applied to Scottish Gaelic in the past, often on the basis of its supposed derivation from the Irish(or its true one for all I know). But the authorities are pretty unanimous that currently its use is restricted to Irish Gaelic.

So I’m counting that a draw and suggesting to my French buddies that their crossword compilers need a boot up the e**e to bring them up to date.

My postman was born and spent his early years in Chile and this winter took three months leave of absence to visit his former home and travel in Chile, Peru and Ecuador including Easter Island and the Galapagos.

Thanks to the miracle of digital photography he was able to record this trip in some detail. He promised to share the joys of the journey with me and last night together with some neighbours we gathered in my kitchen for this treat.

Now we all know that the pleasure of viewing other peoples’ holiday snaps has its ups and downs so to cater for the downs I had laid in some nibbles and a few refreshments. The downs were immediately apparent when he turned up with four DVDs and announced that he had 4000 photographs. My heart lightened somewhat when he said we could skip quickly over many of them and lightened a lot more when it proved impossible to read his DVDs on my machine.

I was all for making polite expressions of regret, refilling my glass and tucking into the nibbles but in view of his obvious disappointment (he has been waiting since February for a means to show the neighbours his pics) I felt impelled to ask if he still had the flash memory cards. Indeed he did so dashed off home and returned with camera and cards.

Then came the tedious job of transferring them to my PC. After some false starts we had 5 gigabytes of pictures loaded with 3 to go. We were now an hour and a half into the proceedings and hadn’t seen a single photo except for when they lumbered past during the transfer.

So we started to view. Now some of the pictures were really interesting and a number were lovely and with a slideshow of say 25% of the total Jean might have stayed the course. But he is in his 90s after all. He was the first to go – no I tell a lie – that was Alain who was glad of the excuse of the non-readable DVDs, downed his pastis at that point and fled. Josette followed Jean an hour or so later and I was left showing the postie out some five hours after his arrival with his cheery promise to return to show the remaining 3 gig at a future date ringing in my ears.

Since the old lady across the road died some years ago her house has stood empty despite the fact that her son Alain has declared from time to time his intention to do the place up and move in. To be fair to him he has kept the plot in reasonable trim and has occasionally shown signs of activity, such as stripping out the byre a couple of years ago.

But now serious work is underway. The house has been reroofed since I saw it last in October and Alain or one of his many chums is here most days beavering away.

This has proved to be to my advantage. I got my strimmer on the go a couple of days after my arrival and had done the driveway and the strip alongside the road and had started on the jungle that was the garden when Alain wandered over and opined that I was never going to manage. I retorted that I’d done it often enough before and that tedious and back-breaking work though it was I’d have it done in a very long jiffy. No way, he said. If it doesn’t rain this afternoon I’ll do it. He has of course an industrial scale mower and he was as good as his word.

So all I’ve had to do is rake up the cut grass, and believe me that was tiring work that took a few hours, and trim the edges and corners that he couldn’t get at.

Shall I drop the news casually that I’m away in July and August in the hope that he’ll volunteer to keep the grass tidy?

I fell foul of the French obsession with lunch within minutes of landing on Monday.

My usual travel pattern was disrupted not by ash but because I went to see Fiona's excellent production of The Hired Man in Woking on Saturday and stayed over. So I found myself driving off the boat around 1 pm local time and thought I'd just nip into the Carrefour that's on my route just a few miles from the ferry terminal and buy some essentials for my tea and Tuesday's breakfast.

But I forgot. All good Frenchies are lunching at that time. Fortunately the petrol pump is automated otherwise I'd have had to twiddle my thumbs for an hour. So the only harm done was that I had to pay motorway prices for my victuals.

I'm so glad the return of the volcanic ash spared Newcastle yesterday and allowed me home to spend the night following the election. What fun it was and continues to be - and such great graphics.

I thought Gordon Brown was about to propose a government of national unity a few minutes ago in his Downing Street statement. What a marvellous prospect that would be. The uneasy relationship between Gordon and Tony would pale in comparison with Gordon and David. But for the moment he's holding out enticing titbits to the Libdems in the hope of putting David Cameron in difficulty in his talks with Nick Clegg and getting his own claws on Nick.

We'll see what the three little piggies get up to over the weekend.

The spammers who have been trying in vain over the years to entice me into enhancing my manhood have changed tack. Their spies have been out and realised that I am an ageing gentleman and may well be suffering from droopy manboobs. Hence their latest offering:

"BareLifts - The Invisible Solution For A Naturally Perky Look

BareLifts are completely strapless and will help lift your breasts while ensuring a naturally perky look in virtually ANY outfit. With BareLifts, you can lift your breast and realign your nipple to a higher position...."

I'm tempted.

What the world in general, and my little bit of the world in particular, does not need is another branch of Tesco. But I have learnt that some of their three billion profit is being spent on buying up the Co-op at the bottom of Easter Road.

Shame on them and more shame on the sell-out by Scot Mid. This is a blow to consumer choice and a wound in the side of the co-operative movement, imbued as it is with camaraderie and solidarity, not to mention its superior selection of wine.

To paraphrase a famous king whose name I have forgotten - "Who will rid me of this troublesome supermarket?"

Volcanic ash didn't keep me away from St Andrews this morning. The prospect of an hour and a half on a rainy beach did. So I have missed out on seeing what sounded like an interesting production of The Tempest.

But I may be affected by the ash all the same. My saxophone teacher is in Amsterdam and may still be there when it's time for my lesson on Tuesday. Siobhan's dinner chez moi will get cold if she's still in Portugal on Wednesday. And in the slightly longer term what about my flight to Barcelona in ten days time?

The great British public have decided that, last night at least and for the time being, the fairest of them all was the man with the manifesto packed with fair phrases.

So is the wind set fair for Downing Street for Mr Clegg? I doubt it but I suppose his party's vote may increase to give him some influence over whichever of the other two parties comes out on top. He'd be wise to hammer on about voting reform to give him some chance of forming a government in his own right next time around. Brown has promised reform but I doubt that he would give it any priority. There's always the excuse of having to save us from ruin first. I mean further ruin of course.

But Clegg had an easy job. Don't scratch your bum, look human, just allow Brown and Cameron to slag each other off and appear as the relaxed voice of reason. And since you have to be a bit of a political nerd to have seen him before he was for most people the new kid on the block. How many hopefuls have appeared who were gloriously exciting or at least not an immediate turn-off on day 1 but revealed a few defects in the longer term?

So I fear it will be with Nick and his uncle Vince, but let's give them a chance to bask for a bit before we turn and bite.

Now that the main parties' manifestos are out I've been trying to pick a winner.

An animated cartoon video in black and white slightly redeems the dullness of Labour's document. Its risible cover that looks like a Chinese communist propaganda poster (before the introduction of the one child policy clearly) at least spares us another thousand words. The HTML or downloadable pdf versions that are the only options for getting at the content are densely printed, only relieved now and then by coloured text and by coloured pages that separate the sections and bear logos in a style akin to lavatory signs.

It looks like they are appealing to the low-end computer user.

The Tories are definitely going for the high-end. Their document can be read on-screen in black and white text only but the downloadable pdf is packed with propaganda posters in an agit-prop style, with diagrams and with photographs, though the text is pretty dense and black. Some photos like those telling you that Glasgow and Brighton are great places for one reason or another don't seem terribly relevant but hey. You can even download a high definition version presumably so that you can print it with the photos in their full glory. But you don't have to print your own because they offer you a means of buying a printed version for a fiver. And they have large print for the poorly sighted, braille for the blind and easy-read for those with learning difficulties. If being on-line is your thing though there is a Flash version that's very well presented and you can listen to an audio version. When you have get on your bike or take the bus the audio version can go with you on your mp3 player. If you can't be bothered with the whole thing there are various little related videos.

No reason not to get the Tory message then.

The Libdems' manifesto offering gives you more or less the same options as the Tories; without braille but with a better Flash version and with a pick and mix video iphone app. Their webpage looks better and where they score heavily is on the presentation of the document itself. Labour's pages of dense text and the Tories' strident posters are banished in favour of well laid out pages with a good balance between text and pictures and well thought out, clear highlighting.

For me it's the winner.

But what about the content? I conducted a little experiment. Labour's document is entitled "A future fair for all" so I said to myself, as I often do, "mirror, mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all?" and searched the documents for instances of "fair", "fairer", "fairest" and "fairness".

Here the Libdems are streets ahead with 94 occurrences. Labour come second with 61 and the Tories a poor third with only 9. Draw your own conclusions.

The experts came, saw, were defeated. A superior expert arrived on April Fool's Day, made a diagnosis and retired declaring that the necessary parts should not be long in arriving.

A week may well be a long time in politics but it's even longer in a house with broken central heating. Fortunately I have some alternatives to fall back on but I am still boiling kettles to provide hot water for cleaning pots and pans, dishwashers being notoriously ineffective in that respect.

But the weather is brightening up and life in the stair will also brighten up if the underpants tastelessly draped on a flat's door handle last week constitute the lift lunatic's dying flourish. Not that he's any closer to death than the rest of us as far as I know but I spotted a note on the dashboard of a parked car declaring the driver to be a new resident of the flat that I suspect to be the litter lunatic's lair. The note begged indulgence for not yet having a parking permit but failed to melt the heart of officialdom (what does?) for a ticket had been clapped onto the windscreen. Normally I would be sympathetic but it seems that having lost a lift lunatic (I fervently hope) we have gained a car park lunatic for he was straddled across three spaces at a little less than 90 degrees to the normal direction of parking.

But people do the strangest things. How to explain for example why a man in black tights and a wig standing facing a group of people should declare "Sunbeds Regulations Act 2010" to be followed by a similarly clad chap who had his back to the audience spinning round to face them with the words "La reine le veult".

Easy you say; all part of the prorogation ceremony that took place in the Lords the other day. Now I've seen the state opening of Parliament with Black Rod having the door symbolically slammed in his face before being admitted to the Commons to summon the lower orders to the house of peers to listen to the Queen's insipid delivery of a string of miracles the government is going to achieve in the next session but I didn't realise that there was an equivalent at the end.

Black Rod did the business as before but this time no Queen. Another of those chaps in wigs, this one wearing a cloak instead of tights, read a letter from HM saying how sorry she was that she was detained by pressing business back at base and had entrusted the assenting to divers acts and the proroguing of Parliament in this the 57th year of her reign to some loyal and well beloved chaps and chapesses who she was sure would make a good job of it.

The five said chaps and chapesses sat below the woolsack dressed in red robes and comic hats and one of them read out a speech in identically insipid tones to HM listing the miracles that the government had achieved during the session. I expect a number of the audience might not have counted all these achievements as miracles, or even as achievements but there was no heckling.

This was followed by the two man GB wigtight team reading out the names of acts and assuring us that the Queen veulted them. There was a speciality turn from the veulter at the start when in a long stream of Norman French the Queen remercied her loyaux and ben aimed sujets for having provided her with enough pocket money.

The whole thing was awfully polite and at various points the two red-robed chaps did some synchronised doffing. The ladies did not participate. Their funny hats were a different shape not well adapted to doffing but I expect that in time feminist pressure will succeed in opening up synchronised funny hat doffing to female competitors.

The final event in the Lords was the naming of the day that they should all meet again. Now we all know that there is going to be an election on May 6th and that the new parliament will assemble on May 18th but because this ceremony is taking place a couple of days before parliament is officially dissolved HM, in the person of her red-robed well beloveds chose April 20th as their next date. Let's hope they all understood this mad fiction.

After that the commoners trooped back to their little chamber and the Speaker read out the whole list of bills to which we had heard the Queen's proxy graciously assenting not fifteen minutes earlier. This presumably for the benefit of those members who had not been able to squeeze into a space within hearing distance in the Lords since they don't actually get to sit down on the red benches or even get very far into the chamber. Emails no doubt will go out to the several hundred MPs who, like the PM, weren't there at all.

How reassuring to see democracy in action. Had Sadaam seen it he would no doubt have declared this to be the mother of all parliaments.

I was being facetious when I conflated the arrival of summer time with the arrival of summer itself but the central heating system has taken me at my word and stopped. With snow forecast over the next few days this is not good news.

Applying my limited understanding of these things and consulting the manual I increased the water pressure, which had certainly fallen below the recommended level, and bled all the radiators but to no avail.

I'll give it twenty-four hours to come to its senses then I'll call out the experts.

I called for expert help recently by emailing a BT support service with a query. The reply was from one Garry Watson who had clearly not devoted much time to reading my question. The advice was to ring a helpline.

A few days later I had worked the thing out for myself and in a spirit of goodwill towards men I sent an email saying "I don't need your help any more thanks". I got a reply from this same Garry Watson saying "We understand you are having problems with BT Vision. If this persists please ring ......".

Calling a computer Hal led to all sorts of trouble. Calling one Garry Watson seems at least to do no harm even if it does no good.

I called my central heating system all sorts of names this morning but I shall just call it Garry Watson in future.

It's astonishing how many things needed to be moved on an hour today in celebration of the arrival of summer:

Bedroom clock
Wristwatch
Mobile phone
Central heating
Lounge clock
Telephone
Kitchen clock
Oven
Microwave
Car
Camera

These ones sorted themselves out automatically:

Laptop
Set-top box
Kitchen radio
Hi-fi radio
Bedroom radio
Mondo wi-fi radio

I have watched the bids mounting on the pasta machines that I picked out on Ebay.

If you buy one of these in the shops you can pay up to forty quid or so but you can get the same model brand new on Amazon for £33 including postage. So it strikes me as strange, not to say perverse that anyone should pay £35 for a second-hand one on Ebay. But that's what two of those machines went for. The others fetched a slightly more reasonable £27 and £25 but I'd be looking for a better discount on the new price than that.

My good spirits on returning this evening from the RSA where I had not only enjoyed the art and a glass of wine but bumped into some old friends were dissipated on discovering that the lift lunatic is back at work.

The severe talking to he got from the fire brigade at New Year (for I am sure it is the same jerk) must have worn off. What to do?

The items I put up for sale on Ebay attracted exactly one bid each. No cut throat competition there then.

When I went to post the ink cartridges the cost was about 40p more than when I'd taken the package in to price it (the added weight of the address?) and I forgot to include the padded envelope in my p&p charge, so what with that and Ebay's cut I suspect it cost me more to sell them than to throw them away.

I saw a couple of one-act plays at the weekend that were entries to the English equivalent of the SCDA festival. They were quite good but what impressed me most was that they were performed in a little theatre (100 odd seats and a bar) that belonged to the amateur group doing the shows. Oh that the Grads had had that sort of vision rather than hanging onto the coat-tails of the university for the last fifty-six years.

I also saw a professional production in Harrogate's Victorian theatre where the ornate decoration has been delightfully restored and the entire building refreshed. The show was Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends. It's one of his superb dark comedies and I enjoyed it very much. I played in it once myself but could remember only that my character got a jug of cream poured over his head and that he had to smoke a cigar so the play unrolled before me like something entirely new.

Had the production been in Scotland the actor could not have had a cigar but English legislation allows smoking on stage. A notice in the foyer warned us that "..... this play contains instances of profanity and that due to artistic integrity there will be smoking on-stage." At least we can still enjoy the profanity up here.

I was staying with friends I had made in Italy and Ron was extolling the joys of making your own pasta having recently bought a machine in a deli's closing down sale. I don't know about the joy of making it but I enjoyed watching Brunella do it many years ago and I certainly enjoyed the fruits of her labour.

So I must try it and am now on Ebay again in the more familiar role of buyer keeping an eye on four pasta machines, ready to strike at the last minute and reel in a bargain.

The helium balloons used in the show have been decorating my lounge ever since and are now showing signs of deflation. Particularly the red one which initially flew as high as the other.

I'm interested to see how long it takes for the pair of them to bite the dust.

I switched on my computer with some excitement this morning eager to see how the bidding was going on the items I put up for sale on Ebay yesterday. The results so far are at least better than on the one and only previous occasion on which I tried to sell something on Ebay. Then my ad was found to be in contravention of the railways act and was removed. This time the ads are still there but no-one has bid.

So if you want a barely used beard trimmer or some printer ink the way is clear.