The university residence where I'm staying provides an excellent and fortifying breakfast for which I'm thankful since trying to catch as many events as I can I've found time for only two restaurant meals all week and have survived by snacking between shows.

Today looking for something hot in a rainy lunch hour I avoided the establishment offering leak (sic) and potato soup (there could be something quite nasty in that) and got a delicious mugful of lentil and vegetable in another shop where the lady who served me told me that coriander is another word that presents a spelling challenge to the local takeaway food industry.

The Tailend fish and chips shop, whose product quality reaches the same high standard as its confrère in Leith Walk, has provided a tasty nibble or two for me and for  a goodly proportion of the congress delegates just as the grass in the museum grounds that I've walked through every morning provides an enormous number of rabbits with their daily bread.

I've heard a lot of what you might call old music today (Debussy, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Dukas) but a mountain of new pieces as well including the world premiere of Edinburgh composer Helen Grime's Shadowplay for soprano saxophone and piano played by my teacher Rocio Banyuls Bertomeu and Audrey Innes. It's one of those avant garde pieces that the man who enjoyed Sting would not have called music.

As well as Rocio, the tutors who run the saxophone week that's likely to be a regular feature of my winter have played and/or conducted here so I feel I'm in more than capable hands and probably have a chance of becoming a better saxophonist than golfer.  However that's not setting the bar particularly high so don't put money aside to buy the debut album.

Thanks to a bit of silliness by the French I can even claim with absolute truth to have performed at the 16th World Saxophone Congress here in St Andrews in July 2012.  The saxophone ensemble of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Dance de Paris gave a concert this evening in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy.  Why is no one here from the conservatoire by the Clyde I wonder?

Anyway leaving that aside the concert featured Sent from my iFaune - for ensemble ad lib and interactive audience.  In this, while the ensemble played the audience were invited to switch on their phones at maximum volume and ring other members of the audience who were not to answer the calls but let them ring.  If you happened to get a call from someone not in the audience during this time you could answer it and politely explain that you couldn't take the call because you were playing in a concert.

Daft but I played my part so there I am - a world premiere performer.

What was fascinating about the master class that I went to yesterday was that many of the points made by the "master", who in this case was a distinguished mature lady who gave her first concert at the age of six, to the three ultra able students who braved having their dirty playing scrutinised in public were the same as those made by my teacher to me.  We're not talking about the mechanics of playing the instrument here but the business of shaping and transmitting the music.

That music can be shaped in bizarre ways was evidenced by a French group I heard (it had to be the French I suspect) where two musicians intoned abstruse poetry while one of them disdaining the keyboard played the wires of a grand piano and the other produced weird noise from an electronic keyboard.  Simultaneously a sax player and a flautist interjected odd notes and a girl carrying a long black rod caused shapes and distorted images to come and go on a large screen behind the musicians apparently by manipulating the rod.  It was actually quite pleasant to listen to believe it or not.

Very pleasant to listen to were Brass Jaw the brilliant Scottish quartet that features a trumpet instead of a soprano sax.  Despite having played for four hours with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra they hoofed it straight over to the Byre Theatre for the last gig of the night and were reluctant to leave the stage two hours later at half past midnight.

Perhaps they have the luxury of lying in their beds this morning but I have an early date with a recital or two so it's breakfast and off.

A Dutch lady at breakfast on learning that there was a saxophone congress in town exclaimed "That must be fun, for sure a lot more fun than ours."

"What's yours?"

"Theology."

No answer to that.

And it was fun yesterday, especially when the sun shone and there was music in the streets.

I heard a great variety of stuff in the events I went to.  As I was leaving a German quartet's tribute to Sting recital I overheard a guy saying "Well that's music, not like all that avant garde stuff."

I have some sympathy with that view but you can be pleasantly surprised.  John Cage and Gyorgy Kurtag are not known for producing music that's a bundle of laughs so when an American composer introduced the piece that her piano, violin and alto trio were about to play by saying that those two were the major influences on her work some gritting of teeth seemed called for.

In fact it was a beautiful, gentle, soulful mix of silence and ethereal tones that left the audience, myself included, delighted.

Totally different from the foot-stomping jazzy compositions of Barbara Thompson that filled the Byre theatre to capacity late in the evening for the final feast of another great day.  

It's a bit like the Fringe here, moving rapidly from venue to venue to catch the next show on your list, a little easier because there are only half a dozen venues all within 5 or 10 minutes of one another.  It's also like the Fringe in variability of audience.  One unfortunate I saw had an audience of five but later I couldn't get into a session because the hall was full.  A guy similarly turned away told me he'd come from Australia specially to hear that particular quartet.  I suspect he exaggerated somewhat.

Also like the Fringe there is rather too much.  I was on the go from 9 in the morning till 11 at night yesterday and took in a dozen performances.  I found time nonetheless for an excellent two course lunch for only £5.95, pity about the cost of the wine.  Today I'm going to take it a little more slowly.

Having just played in a wind band concert it was fascinating, not to say humbling to hear the Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra backing a number of amazingly virtuosic soloists.Again it's been almost all new music.  I did hear a bit of Bartok but apart from that all unknown to me and again like the Fringe there were a couple of plonkers, though strictly speaking it was the material that I didn't care for rather than the quality of the performance.  In the Fringe it's frequently both but that's the glory and the shame of a totally unselective festival.

The weather in St Andrews today is miserable and not likely to change for the better but I'm here for the music and although some street events are planned the overwhelming majority are indoors.

The opening concert was preceded by some words of welcome and wisdom from the university principal throughout which a young French group behind me chattered even after being hushed. I had no more interest in what she had to say than them in fact but the convention is that such remarks should be listened to in respectful silence.  They have clearly not seen God Bless America where such behaviour reaps a just reward.

The concert itself was terrific.  It opened with a stomping extravaganza involving bagpipes, fiddle, accordion and bodrum in addition to nine saxophones of varying sizes.  Then the Scottish Chamber Orchestra came on and we had four different works and four different saxophone soloists.

Of the five works played four were by living composers (all present) and two were world premieres and I loved them all which goes to show that contemporary music doesn't have to be hard to listen to.

Now I'm trying to pick what to go to tomorrow.  There are 71 events to choose from plus the outdoor stuff (rain permitting) plus the three dozen stalls of those hawking instruments, music and assorted paraphernalia.

I'm sure it was more stressful to watch that match than to play in it.  A disappointment but he has done better than any British man for over 70 years and it was a wonderful display from Federer and a major plus point for me was that it finished in good time for my Faustus rehearsal.

What a wonderful afternoon at Wimbledon.  I abjured the traditional strawberries and champagne in favour of olives and chenin blanc and needed all the strength and fortitude they gave me to withstand the disappointment of that abysmal first game in the third set.

But I rallied, as did our man and the battle was won but we may need another bottle before the war is over.

Nail-biting stuff from Murray as usual but he seems to have got a grip on himself and remained calm and collected long enough to make his way into the semi-final.  Yippee.

Happening to tune into a French radio station on Sunday morning I learn that as of 1st July motorists in France are obliged to carry a breathalyser kit in working order.  This is not to help out a financially challenged police force because if you are stopped they will use their own equipment to check you.

It's a preventive measure.  If you've been drinking you're supposed to test your blood alcohol level before you take to the road.  Clearly you're expected not to drive if the gadget glows red or whatever it does.

Now a moment's reflection will reveal that if testing yourself with the throwaway chemical breathalyser shows that you are ok to drive you'll be committing an offence if you do because you will no longer be carrying a kit that's ready for use.  So you'll need to have at least two to hand every time you have a glass of wine at a wayside lunch or a country supper and surprise surprise there's been a run on them and they are out of stock almost everywhere.

The same thing happened with the flourescent jacket law and now as then motorists are promised freedom from prosecution for the first few months.

For the more affluent, or more frequent drinker there is a reusable electronic version that runs out after 300 tests or one year whichever occurs first.

This was all a surprise to me.  The law has apparently been some time in gestation but I never heard a dickie bird about it last summer from my French friends, all of whom generally find themselves downing a beer or a glass or two of wine after a game of golf.  As do I, in France if not here.

But it wasn't a surprise to Amazon UK so I'll be putting in an order (£6.75 for two) before I head for the ferry in August.

An advantage of the Film Festival is that you don't have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before the feature starts.  But sometimes the film is worse than the ads would have been and that was the case with one I was led to believe was an artistic work of sociological importance that turned out to be thinly disguised porn.

It just shows you can't believe everything you read (even if it's written here) and you certainly can't believe everything you see on the screen where lots of things are heavily disguised.  But Day of the Flowers is undisguised in its intentions to entertain.  Maybe its Scottish/Cuban story made me feel warmer towards it than either The List or The Hollywood Reporter but I was able to suspend my disbelief throughout and to enjoy the action, the characterisations, the photography and the happy ending.

The Hollywood Reporter wasn't overwhelmed by the other Cuban oriented film presented in the festival either.  I have to agree with them that 7 Days in Havana was a bit of a hotch-potch and I enjoyed it more for its locations than its contents though both the Tatiesque section and the altar building sequence appealed to me.

Feel My Pulse has a character named Thirsty McGulp in the credits indicating that it's not perhaps the most serious film to have been made in the 20s.  Indeed it's a madcap slapstick comedy in the Buster Keaton mode that I rather enjoyed.  I found the live piano accompaniment a little too loud but that together with the occasional whizz and blackout as the film slipped on the sprockets added to the jolly feeling of travelling back in cinematic time.

On the other hand you couldn't get much more bang up to date in cinematic time than God Bless America which the director (present with the lead actor at Cineworld on Friday night for the European premiere) described as a very violent film about kindness.  In fact its tomato sauce bloody blowing people's heads off is no more than the technological extension of the biffs with assorted implements and chloroform assault that featured in Feel My Pulse.

But it does have a more sophisticated edge to it.  It's a very clever, amusing and insightful satire on the consumption and celebrity infested society that isn't limited geographically to America.

My final festival excursion is this afternoon to what I understand is another satire, this time Japanese, called Sailor Suit and Machine Gun  in which a teenage girl inherits the leadership of her late father's yakuza organisation. Death by chopsticks in this one perhaps.

A little less than a year before the wall came down I spent a couple of wintry days in east Berlin.  Until last week I had never been back and it was fascinating to see what changes it had undergone and to see the western side of the city for the first time.

The obvious change of course is the disappearance of the wall.  Here's the Brandenburg Gate in 1988 complete with barbed wire, wall and look-out towers standing in a desolate no man's land.

Now despite the plethora of snaps that digital cameras allow us to take in contrast to the old 36 exposure cassettes I don't have a comparable 2012 picture to share with you.  If I did you'd see that both sides of the avenue leading to the gate have been built up and that the area in front of it is awash with cycle rickshaws, human statues, fake GDR guards, junk food stalls and other tourist tat.  The bottom section of the gate itself was obscured by hoardings emblazoned with the initials of a TV company whose vans were parked under the lintel.  Behind them was scaffolding that I think held up the giant screen on which Germany's Euro 2012 games were being shown. Rather like digital photos it was a case of more is less.

Another less than beautiful change has occurred in Alexanderplatz.  There were lots more people in it than in this picture but since pictures of a square jam-packed with chain stores and fast-food restaurants has little appeal I didn't even take a photo.

The cathedral and its grounds seem pretty much the same

and on the positive side many, many buildings have been refurbished (the museums for instance)

and the smelly putt putt Trabants have gone to the great garage in the sky.





Over in the west the great architectural triumph is the Reichstag.  What an amazing building; the combination of its glorious 19th century walls and towers and contemporary interior topped by Norman Foster's beautiful glass dome is extraordinary - and lunch on the roof terrace was just as wonderful.

 Elsewhere in the west I was keen to see the Kurfürstendamm but its heyday is long past.  It was just a long Princes Street without the benefit of gardens and castle.

Back in the east a great pleasure was to see a play at the Berliner Ensemble.  OK much of the dialogue, let's say 99.9%, was incomprehensible but we got the main idea and with Siobhan's help at the interval and afterwards all became clear. The seats were only 5 euros (we could have stood for 2) and the theatre itself (Theater am Schiffbauerdamm) is lovely.  Inside it doesn't look as though it can have changed at all since it was built in 1896.

What may or may not have changed is the final resting place of the ensemble's founder and most famous director, Bertold Brecht.  Together with his wife Helene Weigel he's buried in the  Dorotheenstädtischer and Friedrichswerder Cemetery but according to my photographic record not in the same spot as in 1988.  Could a German Burke and Hare have been at work?

According to Melvyn Bragg, whose opinion was echoed by the numerous academics I have heard pronouncing on the subject these last few days, Ulysses by James Joyce is amongst the most influential but least read books of the 20th century.

My own copy has languished on one shelf or other for over 40 years, being taken on holiday now and then with the firm declaration that this year I would read it and then being replaced with no more than a page or two turned.  There's a postcard of Taunton between pages 138 and 139.  I imagine it got there on the occasion I accompanied my aunt by train between Taunton and Kirkcaldy one snowy festive season in the 90s and I suppose it marks my furthest point of penetration.

But I am in good company.  For instance Niamh Cusack who performed the Molly Bloom monologue in yesterday's brilliant dramatisation on Radio 4 admitted to never having read the book, except obviously for her bit.  I saw the monologue done on-stage once but it didn't grab me whereas the radio one did.  It's reckoned to be the longest sentence in world literature running in my edition from page 659 to page 704.

Several commentators declared this to be the best place to start reading and maybe that's true but I wouldn't bother reading any of it as long as the dramatisation with which the BBC celebrated Bloomsday 2012 is available.  Get it now.

I've read 138 times as much of Ulysses as of Finnegan's Wake but I'm now formally abandoning any ambition to read it.  I'm hanging on for the BBC to dramatise it.  

I've long mourned the passing of Mr Boni's so was delighted this afternoon to discover a more than worthy successor, in the ice-cream stakes at least, in Afterz.

I don't know how many transformations Mr Boni's former premises have gone through but the most recent, a Punjabi restaurant, has ceded part of the site to the enjoyment of ice-cream treats, soft drinks, cakes and confectionery.

I had a Cherry Glaze which the extensive menu describes as made of cherry and coffee ice-cream, amarena cherries, whipped cream, chocolate blossom, shortcake pieces and cherry sauce.  To call it yummy would be to damn it with faint praise.  It was galactic.

There are a few Koranic inscriptions on the walls inherited no doubt from the Punjabis (assuming they are not from the Indian Punjab) or from the Kurds who preceded them but this is not halal ice-cream.  It's good Scottish-Italian from Equis in Cambuslang.

No future visit to the Kings or the Cameo will be complete without a courtesy call to Afterz and what a pick-me-up after loading a van in Home Street.

It was indeed early arrival at the Cameo that caused me to stroll in that direction and I strolled back alongside a much more contented inner man to see an absolutely brilliant and entertaining documentary about Woody Allen.  It's got great clips from his years as a standup, from TV interviews and talk shows, and from his movies.  There are keen observations from actors, critics, producers etc etc. Enjoyable for anyone but  fascinating for Woody Allen fans.

It was a bit of a damp squib when Djokovic double-faulted in the fourth set and thus failed to become the first man since Rod Laver to hold all four grand slam titles simultaneously, but it was a great match.

All Nadal for the first two sets, then a gradual climb back for Djokovic and as the rain lashed down yesterday evening Nadal got more and more out of sorts.  Djokovic handled the conditions so much better but with the resumption of play today, despite a brief interlude of rain, the dryer and eventually even sunny conditions allowed Nadal to resurrect his clay court supremacy and claim the French title for the seventh time.

Roll on Wimbledon.

At the ECA degree show there is a superb documentary about the protests last year in the Yemen.  You can't believe the bravery of the cameramen covering the events. It's already been shown at several festivals and will no doubt appear again.  You can see a trailer on Youtube and here's a short interview with the director and some extracts from the film.

I'd gone to see one of the films that I was involved in because although it will be screened at Filmhouse shortly its on an evening when I have to rehearse our Fringe show.  In fact when I walked in one I hadn't expected to see, 16 Across -  Knitting a Statement , was flickering across the wall near life size.  The Matinee Idol wasn't projected while I was there but I was able to watch it on a computer screen.  It looked lovely in muted sepia tones and it was fascinating to see how the green screen we filmed against had been replaced by proper backgrounds.  There are bits and pieces of it on Facebook but to see the whole thing (which obviously you are dying to) get to the degree show tomorrow or Filmhouse on the 19th.   

Between watching the French Open Tennis championships and providing translations for my yachting chum's revived transatlantic and amazon sailing enterprise, not to mention devilish cavorting in the Faustus rehearsal room, I've managed to transfer my holiday snaps to the computer.

Here's a general view of the Iguasu Falls and a general non-view of Christ the Redeemer.

What a difference a day makes.

From the blistering heat of  autumn in Buzios to chilly CDG and EDI where June is doing its best to bust out all over but not succeeding too well.

A weekend down south is a rare event for me these days so en route to see Fiona's production of Bugsy Malone in Woking I lingered a while in London and walked down to and across the river, pausing on Westminster Bridge to check out the cityscape.  There was a new to me skinny pyramid shaped skyscraper going up that I later learnt is destined to be the highest building in Europe.

To see it from the London Eye I'd have had to linger all weekend but fortunately I had no wish to do so and sought refuge from the multitudes in the National Theatre coffee bar.  The Communist Party HQ in Paris is testament to the fact that you can create beautiful conrete bunkers but the NT, like the previous incarnation of the St James Centre, shows that mostly you can't.  But the coffee was good and the slice of ginger tiffin (a confection I had not come across before) was delicious.

A musical about gangsters and their molls and brawls doesn't seem on the face of it suitable material to be performed by child actors but that's how Bugsy started life.  It also started as a film but has become a popular stage show for youth groups.

This production was performed by adults.  I can't judge how much that added to or subtracted from the impact on the audience.  We were at least spared the oohs and aaahs of delighted grans and grandads though some of this cast must have brought along a few sympathetic followers.

The show looked lovely, was well lit and costumed and the singing and dancing was excellent as was the live band.  The plot and storyline such as they are didn't allow a great deal of space for drama and tension and not all the characterisations compensated for that.  But on the whole it was a good evening and I had the additional pleasure of a pre-theatre dinner with old friends.

Back in London on Monday I did see a bit of architecture to admire, the wonderful white fan of steel tubes that roofs the revamped Kings Cross concourse. 

You wouldn't think that religious controversy would make for a fun night out at the theatre.  Take  The Blasphemer for instance, a play I saw some years ago about Thomas Aikenhead the student executed in Edinburgh in 1697 for ridiculing christianity probably while he was in his cups.  It was one of  George Rosie and Fifth Estate's fine contributions to Scottish theatre but it was not a bundle of laughs.

Not so Anne Boleyn currently passing through Edinburgh on a UK tour. In many ways it's more like a pantomime than a play including as it does knockabout humour, songs and interaction with the audience.  The  actress playing Anne would have made an excellent principal boy if they'd only given her a pair of thigh-length boots.  The portrayal of James VIth and Ist (you'll gather there's a bit of time twisting to bring him into the act) is very much a hyperbolic pantomime performance, dreadfully funny but perhaps overegging his sobriquet as the wisest fool in Christendom.

It is an impressively clever script that gets across the arguments of the day concisely and effortlessly but, for me at least, with almost no emotional impact.  Given the fact that people burnt one another at the stake for the sake of the ideas being expressed I can't say that however much I enjoyed the entertainment the play succeeded as drama.

There was no particular tension built up as events unfolded either by the clash of ideas or personalities and at the end despite the enormity of the betrayals and counter betrayals I didn't give a toss about poor Anne having her head chopped off.  Thomas Aikenhead's misfortune affected me much more.

Another week of excellent snooker has unfortunately seen Stephen Hendry bite the dust but my second favourite, Ronnie O'Sullivan, shows every sign of making it to the final.

I've not spent all my time glued to the telly though.  I popped into the art college to do some oohing, ahing, grunting and muttering for the soundtrack of Matinee Idol and spent an afternoon in the sunshine grunting and muttering my way around the golf course.

Amongst the many good works of the European Union are the various agreements that have been reached on the mutual recognition of qualifications.  These cover varied fields as this little extract from Eur-lex shows

• 31996L0026
  Council Directive 96/26/EC of 29 April 1996 on admission to the occupation of road haulage operator and road passenger transport operator and mutual recognition of diplomas, certificates and other evidence of formal qualifications intended to facilitate for these operators the right to freedom of establishment in national and international transport operations
  Official Journal L 124 , 23/05/1996 P. 0001 - 0010
• 32005L0045
  Directive 2005/45/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 7 September 2005 on the mutual recognition of seafarers' certificates issued by the Member States and amending Directive 2001/25/EC (Text with EEA relevance)
  Official Journal L 255 , 30/09/2005 P. 0160 - 0163
• 31991L0670
  Council Directive 91/670/EEC of 16 December 1991 on mutual acceptance of personnel licences for the exercise of functions in civil aviation
  Official Journal L 373 , 31/12/1991 P. 0021 - 0025

But golf has so far resisted mutual recognition to the extent that the handicap awarded me by the Féderation Française de Golf is not worth the plastic it's stamped on in Scottish eyes.  So I am muttering and grunting my way through a specified series of trials to prove that I am as incompetent a player as the FFG says I am.

In the aftermath of celebrating yesterday the 30th edition of  International Dance Day the fact that today is the very first International Jazz Day has understandably slipped under most people's radar. 

Not a trumpet has sounded in Edinburgh but festivities have taken place from Algeria to Uruguay and Glasgow has beaten the drum for the UK.  Not a lot to look forward to now until the 70th International Man of the World Day in December.     

There's a very good little programme on Radio 4 called More or Less that lifts the veil from statements and reports of a statistical or mathematical nature normally emanating from government or the like to expose their shaky foundations.

I've done my own veil lifting of today's statement by Royal Mail in defence of the increase in postage rates asserting that UK rates remain half those pertaining in France or Germany.  I know nothing about German rates but I was very sure that this was nonsense with respect to France.

A straightforward comparison of the cost of first and second class stamps in the UK and in France shows that French stamps are cheaper, but Royal mail's assertion is not entirely nonsense. If for example you send a letter weighing 100gms by second class mail in France it will indeed cost you twice as much as it would in the UK.

But in looking at a dozen cases between 20gms and 1000gms that's the only case I found that supports their assertion.  In six cases the UK was cheaper and in six cases France was cheaper so the honours are even.

Vive la différence! Or should that be vive le match nul.

There's been some enthralling snooker on this week and despite three fairly long days filming I've managed to catch quite a lot of it.

It was wonderful to see Stephen Hendry back in form after several disappointing years.  I hope he manages to keep it up.  Another player who's slicing through the opposition is Ronnie O'Sullivan.

I'd love to see the pair of them in the final.  The last time I saw them play one another was the infamous concession, viewable on youtube. 

Habemus Papam!  In comparison to the real ones I shall be quite a young pope when I tread the boards in the Grads production of Marlowe's Faustus in August.  I'm also playing a chap called Wagner but he is not the composer which is a shame because I fancy waving my arms about musically instead of just making the sign of the cross.

It's hard to know how many times I've walked past this building but I seem to have been blind to its beauty until today.  I was on my way along the Water of Leith with a bagfull of goodies from Stockbridge market to the art gallery where I had a light lunch in the sunshine and then strolled around the current sculpture exhibition.  My favourite was the masked men on all fours.

Sated with both food and art I decided to Munch at a later date.

If you went off up North to shoot the final film of your four year course at the art college only to find that your cast and location provider had changed their mind you'd be forgiven for returning to Edinburgh in a gloomy state of mind.

This unlucky lad however had the good fortune to be put in touch with me and through me with Susan and through her with the entire amdram community of the East of Scotland and now has a new cast who are able to do the shoot in time for him to have ten days to put a film together to meet the submission deadline.

One lucky srtike led to another.  He's found a perfect location in  a street I once lived in.

Over the course of the winter I've been playing golf on Sunday afternoons and so have not been able to take advantage of the free to members Cameo double bills.  I'll be playing even more golf over the summer but not generally on Sundays and was looking forward to those double bills. 

It was a bit of a body blow then to discover that the double bills will be no more as of the end of April.  We are promised occasional advance screenings of films about to be released but that's hardly adequate compensation.

I expect to be a Tuesday regular on the golf course which will preclude my taking advantage of the Cameo's silver screen deal of coffee and movie for very little money.

I may have to transfer my loyalty to Filmhouse.

There was a very clever re-working of The Marriage of Figaro at the Lyceum last week.  The lecherous Almaviva was transformed into a randy Edinburgh banker and Figaro a young hedge fund entrepreneur on the make.  Beaumarchais' play stood up well to the treatment and provided lots of farcical highlights including the appearance of an accountant dressed in a penguin suit.  It was beautifully staged and I loved the transformation from bank boardroom to Princes Street Gardens.  

As usual I was too mean to buy a programme and the theatre was too mean to provide a cast list so I can't congratulate by name the actor who played Figaro on how well he did in singing various arias from the opera to cover scene changes.

Neither can I congratulate the lady behind me who not only had failed to silence her phone but answered a call and then spent ten minutes grappling with the phone, I assume in an attempt to switch it off, during which time it emitted a series of irritating beeps.

That's matinee audiences for you.

No such shenanigins either on stage or off at the Traverse where the new artistic director's work was on show for the first time.   For Once is a set of three interwoven monologues that could have been presented Becket style with three chairs and three spotlights as Orla O'Loughlin admitted was her first reaction to the script.  Instead she has placed them in a realistic domestic setting with a practical sink and an iron that emits steam as the mother gets through a pile of shirts in the course of the play.

But until the last moment when they come together the actors while physically existing and moving in the same space don't so much as acknowledge one another's presence.  You know from the start that something awful has happened but it's a while till it's revealed and the tension that is built up in that process is held throughout despite a number of moments of humour.

I liked the performances very much and the treatment but I'm not sure that I go all the way with what I am led to believe is the play's argument that bad things happen because teenagers have nothing to do.

No pain.

An unexpected visit from friends from the west led to two absorbing hours in the protrait gallery following the jacobite cause, a mini pub crawl through Sandy Bells and The Abbotsford (where we fell in with a fellow langtonian) and a delicious meal chez The Dogs.

Who said Friday 13th was unlucky?

This little beauty caused a degree of excitement when it was pulled from my jawbone an hour ago.  Excitement to the extent that my dentist sent it next door for her colleague to admire.  It is you see the four leaf clover of the dental world.  It's a double rooted canine.

What's more it's in mint condition.  There's no decay.  It isn't broken.  It bites perfectly.

But it had to go.  You see it's a drifter.  For several years it's been making it's way out of my jawbone towards my upper teeth and those upper teeth are about to be lowered in the reversal of some treatment that I was conned into having many years ago.  The canine was sitting too high for that to be done without a collision so bye bye little dogie.

Now it's a question of waiting till the anaesthetic wears off and the pain begins. 

I gritted my teeth on Tuesday morning and set off in light sleet through rush hour traffic to play in the first seniors competition of the season.  The light sleet gradually got heavier and turned into driving snow as I crossed town.  The Pentlands could be seen dimly in the distance to be covered in a blanket of wet snow and arriving at Lothianburn I was relieved to see a course closed sign.

It turned out that I hadn't followed the proper procedure concerning entering for the competition so I wouldn't have been missed anyway.  However now I know what I'm supposed to do and I'll be there come hell or high water for the postponed encounter next Tuesday and as a bonus I don't need to get there at dawn because I've drawn a tee time of 10:18.

I was innocently trying to update www.dicksonfield.co.uk to bring to the notice of the world in general and the residents of Dicksonfield in particular that the chairman of our residents association will be one of the carriers of the olympic flame as it makes its way around the UK when I found that access to my hosting account had been suspended.

I fired off a support ticket asking why and in answer was asked to explain the nature and purpose of my websites and especially to explain what one particular page was all about.  Would it not have been easier I thought for the defenders of freedom to have read what was on the page rather than assume that the words "Heil Caesar" (brought to their attention no doubt by a crawling bot) were a manifestation of  neo-fascist goings on that had to be quashed by closing down The Life of Brian and freezing my account.

If the government get their way over cyberspace surveillance I'll probably be fighting extradition next.

At last the show is on the road.  Yesterday we found ourselves in the once familiar surroundings of Adam House where the Grads used to do all their shows.  The place is in remarkably good nick considering how little tlc it ever got in the past and how little we can assume it has received since we stopped being regulars.

The dressing-room tannoy was reliably non functional but who cares when the house is practically full and the show is going great guns.  The feeling on stage was good in the little bits I'm in and sounded spot on from the wings elsewhere.  The audience laughed a lot at the funny bits (of which there were more than I had noticed), maintained a respectful silence when it was sad and serious and applauded enthusiastically at the end.  What more can you ask for?

And oh, the director was deliriously happy.

The car-park of a block of flats just around the corner yesterday.

I'll never feel so bad about litter at Dicksonfield again.

I'm a somewhat reluctant member and a less than occasional user of Facebook but someone in India wants to peek at my wall and use my facilities.

Thanks to the vigilant powers in cyberspace I have been warned about this activity and have updated my password to provide a staunch defence of the very unexciting material that appears in my account  Perhaps I should also delete my profile picture in case an intruder exercises his or her make-up skills to impersonate me.

Rabbit Punch made it - first prize in its category.  So now I've appeared in two prizewinning films.  That's assuming my brief appearance in this one didn't end up on the cutting room floor.  Surely not.

The documentary about Jocky Wilson also won first prize in its but Jocky himself just missed the news by dying, poor chap.

Yesterday was the last of the winter mixed social golf competitions that I have been playing in.  What a lovely day it was weatherwise.  The haar of the previous day had dispersd and we enjoyed a gloriously sunny and warm afternoon.

The end of the season was celebrated by playing a Texas scramble instead of a Fourball and afterwards we had a meal in the clubhouse, various prizes were presented and silly games played.

I didn't feature in the golfing prizes but my team triumphed in the silly games.  One guy was astonishing in his ability to catch a soft ball on his head while wearing a velcro studded cap.  I didn't excel at anything although at least none of my magnetic darts fell on the floor.  However the team performance won me a little box of chocs.  

The real golf season starts shortly and I'm looking forward to that.

While in the art college yesterday I learnt that a film in which I make a fleeting appearance is on the shortlist for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent award.  Rabbit Punch is one of three in the short fiction category.  It's no thanks to me of course but I'll be rooting for it and keeping an eye open for the results when they are announced later this month.  If it wins maybe it will get a screening and I'll have a chance to see it.

Looking through the other nominees my attention was caught by Kirkcaldy Man in one of the documentary categories.  It's already won a prize in a German documentary film festival.  It's about Jocky Wilson the darts player who went from rags to riches and back to rags again.  It was screened in Glasgow last month but alas I did not know.  The Guardian's man saw it somewhere and has this to say. If BAFTA like it perhaps we'll all get a peek.

I was in the art college working on a student film called Matinee Idol which is a little story about a handsome silent movie star whose voice is a rough and impenetrable Aberdonian.  His first foray into the talkies is losing the movie moguls, of whom I am one, lots of money.

It's being produced using what's called chroma key compositing meaning that everything is shot against a plain colour background (normally green or blue) and afterwards the desired background replaces the green through digital magic.  Thus you don't need to go all the way to Australia to be filmed gazing in awe at Ayer's Rock if you can get hold of some footage of it.

The little twist compared to filming in real locations is that since all the backgrounds are in the same physical position you have to move your set and your actors around to get shots from different points of view instead of moving your camera quite as much.  Tricky getting lined up against something that isn't there.      

Good company, good food and drink and exceptionally good weather all contributed to an excellent weekend in the Lake District.

So it was a trifle dispiriting to get home and find that the invasive smokers who I thought I had got rid of some time ago had been in the stair again, polluted the place and littered it with smoking debris.  This time their twisted little minds had added a touch of vandalism.  I can see them giggling away as they burnt a smiley face into the carpet with their fag-ends.

The knowledge that smoking kills gives me a little comfort.  If only it killed more quickly.

It's been on since October but I've only just managed to get around to seeing it.

The Cadell exhibition at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art ,the biggest and best for 70 years, is simply lovely.  I've long admired pictures such as The Orange Blind and Portrait of a Lady in Black that are in our public collections.  They are both here but the exhibition draws on a number of private collections for the majority of the pictures on display and those naturally I had never seen.

There are gorgeous still lifes; one of white geraniums particularly appealed to me.  There are beautiful interiors that together with elegant women one thinks of as his trademark.  I could have happily ripped two or three of those off the wall and taken them home with me; Interior Croft House, Interior Strathur and the terrific portrait of the wife of one of his patrons whose name I've forgotten.

Add to that a whole roomful of vibrant landscapes of Iona and a few fruits of his visits to France and Venice and you have the makings of a satisfying afternoon in the gallery where you can finish off by indulging in a nice cup of coffee as you rest your feet.

Don't neglect the little display of letters and photographs charting his life that is shown in the ground floor library.  From his explanation during his teenage sojourn in Paris as a student accompanied by his mother and sister that they didn't stay long in the Jardin des Plantes because of the smell of the poor people to his sad comments on financial distress towards the end of his life they are fascinating.

But hurry; it closes on the 18th.

After the disappointment of A Dangerous Method (which several critics praised by the way) it was a relief to thoroughly enjoy two highly contrasting films later in the week.

Cria Cuervos (made in 1975) is, according to the critics, a parable on the lingering death of Franco's regime.  Be that as it may, it is also a stonkingly good story of adult peculiarities seen through the large penetrating brown eyes of the marvellous eight year old Ana Torrent. It's a warm, charming and ultimately happy picture of kids growing up.  There's that parable I suppose.

Carancho is anything but warm and charming, or rather the world of ambulance chasing lawyers and insurance fraud that it portrays isn't.  But the romantic relationship that develops at the centre of the brutal and bloody events that pepper this Tarantinoesque thriller has its own gentle warmth.  The ending won't come as a surprise to the wordly wise cinemagoer but the more sentimental amongst them will regret it.

They're running out of time to meet the promised deadline of the end of February for the restoration of our bus-tracker at  Albert Place.  You'd think that after all this time (somewhere between 3 and 4 years) they could spare a man with a shovel and a screwdriver for a few hours from the teams currently tearing up York Place for the umpteenth time, relaying George Street, footering about along the entire length of Princes Street and laying waste yet again the Princes St., Shandwick Place, Queensferry St. junction.

But no; the reserves are in training for the promised tearing up of the east end starting Saturday.  That's the sort of promise they are able to keep.

I seldom leave a cinema part way through a film but even as the title sequence faded away and our heroine was carried screaming and twisting into Dr Jung's clinic I sensed that A Dangerous Method would try my patience.

And so it proved.  A few minutes into the action is Jung's first interview with the patient and we learn that the precursor to the psychiatrist's iconic couch was a bentwood chair.  This is a perch well suited to the sequence in which Keira Knightley contorts her body, twists her arms, tenses her throat, sticks out her lower jaw in simian style and answers the probing question "to what do you attribute your behaviour?" with the stranglingly grunted news that her father beat her.

Problem solved then.  We leap forward a couple of years to Jung's encounter in Vienna with Freud when we learn that Keira is now established as a medical student and doing jolly well.  The two psychs have a nice thirteen hour chat during which Freud analyses Jung's dream.  We see that this psychoanalysis business is as easy as falling off a log.

Someone, was it Gertrude Stein or perhaps Brendan Behan, said "a rose is a rose is a rose" but in the dreamworld a log is not a log is not a log.  No prizes for working out what Freud logs it as in his little notebook.

During the journey back to Zurich Jung assures Keira that she has the makings of a psychiatrist.  A new patient, himself a medical man, then enters the scene popping pills and making lewd suggestions as to how Jung should treat his female patients.

At this point my impatience with the film reached breaking point and I left.  Thank God it was a Cameo silver screen presentation so that I at least got a coffee for my £2.80.  

I was waiting to cross the road at the east end of Princes St when a tourist asked me how to get to Market St.  The easiest way I thought is to go through the station.  Just pop down the newly re-opened Waverley Steps, along the walkway and emerge through the back door into Market St.  So I told her.  Then I want to go to the High St. she said.  Thinking to myself that the best way there was up the North Bridge to the traffic lights, turn either left or right and you're in it I asked if she had business in Market St. or did she really just want to go to the High Street.

At this she pulled out a mini google map print, pored over it and explained that her enquiry was to enable her to rendevous with a coach early tomorrow morning in Castlehill.  Why she hadn't asked for Castlehill in the first place I can't imagine but I then sent her along Princes St., up The Mound with a right kink in front of the Assembly Hall to the top of Castlehill.

I expect the coach will in fact be parked on the Castle Esplanade but she can find that out for herself.

Yesterday was a beautiful day to be on the golf course.  My putting was on fire which made it even more beautiful.  Four pars and two birdies.  Pity about the other twelve holes.

All week I managed to avoid finding out the result of the African Cup final although I caught a glimpse of a suggestive tag line on a newspaper photo.  Today I sat down to watch the recording and at the end of half an hour of extra time when the score was still Zambia 0 Ivory Coast 0 up popped the news that the recording was finished.

Frustrating or what.  I found the penalty shoot-out easily enough on Youtube but couldn't avoid seeing the score as I searched.  But even knowing that it would end 8-7 in Zambia's favour it was edge of the seat entertainment.

What a good competition it has been and what good sportmanship has been displayed.  Not like much of what we see in Europe.

There was a hoolie on Thursday night with various groupings doing their party pieces.  I featured in one fast and funky number.  I think there were nine of us and my part was labelled easy alto.  It was mostly, although there were a few bars that stretched my fingers.

After the ukelele sing song finale we repaired to the bar for an hour or three and then wrapped up on Friday with lunch after two playing sessions.  I was definitely the least experienced and the least able player there but I had a great time and I've signed up for next year when I hope to be better able to cope.

My next major musical moment is the World Saxophone Congress in July.  I shan't be playing in any of their concerts though.

An extra tutor came in on Wednesday and for the evening session the four tutors formed a standard saxophone quartet (i.e. soprano, alto, tenor and baritone) and held a workshop on quartet playing that turned into a superb concert.

The following morning the new chap, Alastair by name, held a session designed to introduce basic jazz ideas.  I listen to a lot of jazz but have no idea of the musical structure behind it and the idea of improvisation has always seemed mysterious so I was very interested. He gave a spiel on some of the various scales and chord structures used and demonstated a few common jazz rhythms complete with demos.

Then he declared it was our turn.  He launched a blues backing track and said he would point at people as it played for them to improvise using  the techniques he'd described.  He pointed first at some guy who's been playing jazz for twenty years (don't know why he was at that session) and then horror of horrors he pointed at me.

I suppose you could say that the half dozen carefully rehearsed notes that I played in Hamlet was my first excursion into jazz but this was throwing in at the deep end stuff.  I didn't drown but you couldn't say that I swam an entire length before climbing out of the pool.  I'll be diving in again though.

Thanks to Peter Shaffer's wonderful play Amadeus we all know that Salieri was fiendishly upset by Mozart's take over of the musical pole position wherever it was in the Austo-Hungarian empire they plied their trade.

Having played some Salieri this morning I can understand why he was so miffed because his music is really lovely.  The piece (Armonia per un tiempo di notte) looked somewhat daunting at first glance but fortunately it was designed to be played at a tempo within my range and I didn't feel that I let down the ten piece band I was playing in.

The range of tempi that I'm comfortable with doesn't extend much beyond a metronome marking of 100 and not at all above 120 so in the slavonic helter skelter dash by Dvorak that we went on to, marked at 240 I was tempted to surrender.  However I ploughed on and waggled my fingers about somewhat aimlessly during the excruciating runs up and down and the wild leaps from low to high and down again.  I took the frequent key changes in my stride mostly by ignoring them but had the great satisfaction of  hitting the longish notes that occurred every few bars at the right time and ending the piece triumphantly on the right note and at the same time as the rest of the band.

There are 29 people on this saxophone week that I’m attending.  Twenty eight of them have not only been coming here for years but regularly attend similar events in other parts of the country.

A friend who lives in this area and who knows the venue from professional events said that however the music went I could rely on the quality of the food.  She was right about that and the bar is well stocked and the people who run the place and my fellow musicians are very friendly so it will be a pleasant week.

It’s just a pity that for most of the time I’m out of my depth musically.

There are four one and a half hour sessions a day.  For three of them we play in groups of different sizes; trios, quartets, septets or whatever.  The fourth session takes place after dinner and involves everyone.  Last night that seemed hard to me but it was as nothing compared to this evening.  The Dunedin Wind Band repertoire is a piece of the proverbial in comparison.

But I dare say I’m learning something, like how far I’ve got to go.

Loud music and noisy TVs in pubs I have long regarded as a scourge.  On the other hand a silent TV when an important looking news item is being shown is frustrating.  So if there is a TV I like it to be one where the dialogue or commentary appears as text on the screen.

The bonus ball is that like machine translation, speech recognition software frequently offers unintentional humour.  I particularly enjoyed a report I saw last night when an Argentinian spokesman accused Britain of miniaturising the South Atlantic and our response to the further complaint of having deployed a slinky new destroyer was that the vessel previously on station was getting cold.

Amusing, but I hope the bugs are sorted out before voice controlled vehicles are let loose on the roads.

An exciting match ended in a 1-0 victory over Ghana to take Zambia into the final of the African Cup of Nations.  They play in Libreville on Sunday night.  I won't be around to see it but given the non coverage by of the event by the UK news media I can probably record it and rely on not hearing the result during the time I am away.

For somone who is not a football fan I'm enjoying this competition a lot.  I suppose it's because I feel I have a team to support and that team is winning. 

Another Scottish rugby disaster.  I had been multi tasking during the first half so pausing and restarting.  When I switched my telly back to real time I rejoined the match not quite in time to see England's try but to see the celebrations.

I headed off then in a slightly depressed mood to have it lifted in Kirkcaldy by the mellow tones of a Scottish musical success.  Joe Temperley, a boy from Lochgelly who made it good in the big bad outside world and who at 82 still holds down a baritone sax chair in New York, was playing with the Fife Jazz Orchestra at the Adam Smith.

It was a terrific concert of classic big band nunbers in which Ellington's music predominated which, quite apart from its status in the genre, is not altogether surprising from a man who played in that scene. 

I got home at midnight and watched as things got worse in the second half.  Thanks God I had the highlights of Zambia's 3-0 defeat of Sudan to cheer me up before I went to bed.

In contrast to the snowy weather which has afflicted the south the sun shone over the Pentlands yesterday afternoon adding to the pleasure obtained from my round in Lothianburn's winter mixed series.  I've been part of a winning combination the last two weeks but yesterday I played in a trio whom luck deserted.

The evening saw me back in Fife for more jazz.  This time it was Kyle Eastwood in Dunfermline.  This was a totally different genre, even the one 40s number they played as an encore was given an up to date cutting edge treatment.  Apart from Kyle himself who wrung wonderful clumps of notes from a cello sized electric double bass and a piano player whose hands were literally a blur at times the star for me was the trumpet player.  He got amazing sounds out of the instrument from hair-raising screech to lullaby coo.  It's a mystery to me how you can get such a multitude of music out of those three little valves.  

I had another late sporting night; this time catching up on Ivory Coast versus Equatorial Guinea.  I'd hate to watch "live" on ITV4 since they seem to manage as many extended ad breaks as American football.  Zipping through a recording on the other hand gets you all the game and none of the pain.         

The sale of the house in Barbansais finally became fact a week ago and co-incidentally my ownership of the domain name www.barbansais.com came up for renewal this week.  I have let it lapse and some time today my pretty little website will no longer pop up onto the screen when you enter that name into your address bar.

Pretty little things are on show at GoMA.  I paid a post-prandial visit yesterday and particularly liked the lampshade tower, the photo of the pish balloon and the video of the alien disguised as a human being; for the modern art lover there are lots of other treats including some fluorescent tubes by Martin Boyce that I saw in a fashion show video on Youtube just a few days ago.

As is usual in galleries there was a chap keeping an eye on visitors and exhibits but unusually (I imagine) he turned out to be something of a modern art lover and indeed proselytiser.  He chatted to us knowledgeably about the exhibits and the development of modern art since the beginning of the 20th century.  Not only was it impressive but it made me look at the stuff with kinder eyes.   

This is a very exciting month for me since, apart from going off on a saxophone holiday, I was promised when last I complained that the Albert Place bus tracker would be back in operation by the end of February.

For me Murray's epic five hour struggle stretched over more than seventeen hours.

Before he made it to the semis I'd fixed a lunch in Glasgow and since I hadn't seen Bob for a couple of years and he was leaving the city at the weekend I watched what I could, which turned out to be the first two sets, and then set off for Glasgow taking the pricey train instead of my usual free bus to be able to make my appointment.  I had hit the record button at the start so was confident of seeing the rest on my return.

We lunched at the recently opened Martha's.  It's a fast food joint done out in a cheery bold coloured Cbeebies style distinguishing itself from the likes of MacDonalds by the healthy nature of its food.  A strange choice for me you might think and when I tell you that it's also unlicenced your astonishment will know no bounds. But I have not become a health freak and signed the pledge.  The head chef/manager is the son of a school friend.

To undo the damage that abstinence is well known for we repaired to the Drum and Monkey and shared a bottle of exceptionally pleasant New Zealand pinot noir and later to Princes Square to rendezvous with Mrs Bob who was taking a medicinal coffee between shopping bouts.

I got back to Straid Banrìghinn around 5.30 (via a sheet music shop now gone out of business) expecting to catch the 6 o'clock only to learn that 6.30 is the earliest off-peak service back to the east.  When did that happen?  Since that train wouldn't get me to the Usher hall for 7.30 I purchased an upgrade raising the rail over bus premium to even more dizzying multiples of infinity.  My cursing the cost of inter-city travel was somewhat assuaged on learning from Caroline, currently travelling daily between our two great metropolises and who I met on the train, that an on-peak day return sets you back 20 quid if you are not the privileged owner of a senior railcard.

So a brisk walk from Waverley (translate that into Gaelic if you will) saw me settled into seat AA30 in excellent time to enjoy a ravishing programme of Debussy, Prokofiev and Roussel under the always cheerful and chatty Stéphane Denève.  He'll be sorely missed when he hands in his RSNO baton in May.

On my way home I shared the top deck of a 22 with a bunch of cheerful and chatty chaps and chappesses whose banter was as witty as you might expect from the watering it had clearly received.  By 10.15 I had rustled up a can of beans on toast and was comfortably esconced ready to resume the match thanking my lucky stars that I had managed to avoid inadvertently learning the result.

I fast forwarded through the first two and a half hours and was gripped by the terrific third set.  As Murray's last victorious whack of the tie-break died away everything stopped and BT Vision declared that my recording was done.  I don't really blame BT.  Their gadget is not quite clever enough to cope with the Beeb switching from BBC2 to BBC1 to allow a regular noon time programme to run.  But I do blame the BBC.  Would it not have been more sensible to let the match run its course on BBC2 and show the noon time programme on BBC1 thus annoying only one group of viewers rather than two, not to mention recorders.  I insert here another gripe of mine.  They never hesitate to consign Saturday afternoon's Jazz Record Requests to outer darkness in favour of transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera instead of giving it a decent regular slot and padding out the schedule with one-off programmes when the Met doesn't need a 5 o'clock start.

Back to Melbourne.  I then struggled for 20 minutes or so trying to get the iplayer to run the match on my telly.  Getting it up and running was in fact very easy.  The problem was getting it to the start of the fourth set.  It spluttered and wheezed and stopped and started and flahed up mysterious whirling helices till I was driven demented.

I switched off the telly and powered up the laptop and within a short time saw Murray lose the first few games of the fourth set and thus for all his brilliant recovery in the fifth lose the match.

By a quarter to two his struggle and mine were over.

Oscar nominations were announced today.  I've seen a few of the contenders but by no means all of them so I'm in no position to give you any tips for a winning bet.

One I haven't seen is The Descendants.  I've seen the trailer several times and have decided that it's too schmaltzy even for me so I'll abstain on that one.  I did see The Artist and enjoyed it.  I think it stands a good chance of Best Picture because of its hommage to the very industry whose practitioners form the electorate.  The only other one of the nine nominations for Best Picture that I've seen is Midnight in Paris  which I very much liked and since I can't see myself getting through the others I'll give it my vote (virtual of course).

We are being very badly served by the BBC this year with respect to coverage of the Australian Open Tennis Championships.

Last year there was wall to wall coverage at all hours but this year only three matches are scheduled to be shown live and our only guarantee of seeing Andy Murray play is if he makes it to the final.  They don't even have a daily highlights programme.  As an innovation doubly to be deprecated we are offered an on-line text commentary.

All to do with saving money apparently.  Perhaps they could have shaved a bob or two off the synchronised swimming at the olympics instead.

A friend who wasn't there expressed an interest in hearing the recordings made at the Dunedin Wind Band Christmas Concert. So since she's gone back to Germany I spent some time this evening setting up a website to hold the music.

It's simple but looks rather nice I think.  The idea was to click on the title of a piece to hear it.  But clicking any of the titles whisks you away to a fee paying file hosting site.  My website host clearly doesn't extend the kindness of its free service to mp3 files.  I wish I'd known that before I started on the work.

Reporting on one of the many fatuous and generally self-interested research studies that insult our intelligence every other day BBC Radio Scotland declared that, thanks to competition, retail prices in Scotland were 5% lower than in the rest of the Eurozone.

I don't know about them but in this part of the Eurozone I use the Pound Sterling.

In reviewing The Well Digger's Daughter the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says "You will need a slightly sweet tooth for this movie...".  Well my tooth is undeniably sweet and I loved the film.

Bradshaw makes the obvious parallel with Tess of the D'Urbevilles but thankfully that miserable and tragic tale this film is not.  Indeed one is hard pressed to imagine such a history taking place in the warm golden sunshine of Provence though I suppose that at times life there is just as dreich and dismal as in Hardy's Wessex.  Think more of the Bennets and the jollities and contretemps of Jane Austen's lovers but set in a much humbler social milieu.

This is Daniel Auteil's directorial debut and the question arises as to whether his excellent performance is a result of his fine acting or his fine directing.  He has other very fine actors in his cast so we may have to wait for his second outing to resolve the issue.

In the meantime give your emotions a treat by going to see the film and if you have an ear for French accents there's an extra treat in store.

A chance car-park encounter yesterday morning led to a very pleasant afternoon.  I had arrived to play golf by myself when a lady unloading her clubs at the same time as me told me of a Sunday social competition for which she is the organiser.

Called the winter mixed the deal is that you turn up at 11.30 on a Sunday morning and teams of four men and/or women are put together at random to play a four ball competition.  Each player puts in a quid and the winning team split the pot.

It was a blustery day but rain free and not too cold.  Such cold as there was was mitigated at the halfway stage by a wee swalley of rusty nail from a hip flask handed round by one of the friendly three I played with.  We didn't win but I was more than happy to have contributed a couple of holes to our combined score.

It was good to play 18 holes instead of the 12 that the seniors stick to and there was a nice half hour's chat in the bar afterwards so I have pencilled it in for the next several Sundays.

The penny has dropped, all the way into the abyss of language history.  For yesterday I heard a Radio 4 news reader declare that something or other had gone up or down by one pence.  After the endorsement by such an authority of a singularity that I have noticed in the vox publica in recent years the OED will surely put in its tuppence worth and decree that one p, one penny and one pence are but three sides of the same coin.

Can less instead of fewer be far behind?

I've lost sight of exactly when the bus tracker in Albert Place went out of action but we are talkng three or even four years.  I've tried every so often to jolt someone into fixing it, from Lothian Buses through the City Council to TIE and have been fobbed off with more excuses than you could throw a stick at.

So amongst the select few New Year resolutions that I have made is to continually harass the powers that be in an effort to make 2012 the year of the Albert Place bus tracker restitution.  I fired my first salvo today.

I await a reply with impatience. 

Fun and games in Edinburgh yesterday.  Quite literally because a number of games formed part of the Hogmanay festivities.  Claire and I managed to take part in two, stealing ribbons from the minotaur as we stole quietly through his maze inside St Giles and throwing paper aeroplanes in the Hub to cause an invisible electric band to burst into music.

There were two other major games and lots of smaller things like hoopla that we didn't find time to do and despite our best efforts our team, the Uppies, were beaten by the Doonies.

It was a great idea which I hope they will repeat.

Fun and games later on in Dicksonfield where three fire engines were called around midnight to deal with a fire in a binstore.  You might think that's not a major event but the binstore in question is underneath someone's flat so the fire-raiser could well have been a widow-maker.  Preventive measures have already been set in motion by the ever vigilant DORA committee.

There are no prizes for guessing what this Christmas present is but you might enjoy puzzling over it.  As a clue let me tell you that the right-hand piece fits into the left-hand piece.

I didn't manage to work it out myself but fortunately there was a shop sticker on the base.  Even then I had to be told how to use it. 

I breathed a sigh of relief this morning when I heard in a radio traffic report "services through Haymarket are back to normal after engineering works".

For I had been totally discombobulated last night when my train from Preston after arriving at Slateford chugged off into dark and unrecognisable territory eventually surfacing around London Road and coming to rest in the hitherto unexplored backwaters of Waverley, made worse by the reconstruction around us.

Thank goodness for the homing instincts of my son who led us to the desired exit.

A friend from my Zambian days who now lives in Iceland added me recently to a Facebook group that has been set up for those interested in Kitwe Little Theatre, former members of Nkana Kitwe Arts Society (NKAS) for the most part.

I duly wrote a little post and included a link to the website in which I've recorded all the shows that I had anything to do with in Zambia.  Another former NKAS member now living in Portugal looked through it and wrote me a very nice email.  She also passed the website address to yet another former member who lives in retirement in the south of France. Mike, for that is his name, came across mention of a show called Not Dead Only Sleeping on my site.

I've recorded the fact that I was in it with a scan of the programme as proof but noted that I didn't actually remember the show and could only guess what I might have done in it.  Well Mike produced it but he couldn't remember what I did either. However he kindly sent me this photo of my number and all is revealed.  

It's a Billy Connolly sketch and the body language tells me that it's that point in The Crucifixion where the Roman soldier is about to stick his spear in Christ's side.  It's a great sketch though it did earn me a death threat from an affronted Christian on one occasion.  The hair is not genuine by the way.

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It's that time of year again

It is better to come to the classics late than not at all and this afternoon I spent three hours in an unheated cinema devouring Les Enfants du Paradis.  This wonderful movie was made under the German occupation by a number of French cultural colossi of the time and a digital restoration is currently on release in the UK.

I can tell you about it but all manner of commentators have done the job better so I'll refer you to a number.  The film is explained at length in Wikipedia and here's The Guardian's brief 5 star review.  A previous article in the same paper had rather more to say when reviewing a hundred years of film.

One of the principal characters in the film is Jean Gaspard Deburau, the great mime known on stage as Baptiste and played in the film by Jean Louis Barrault who was one of the greats of French theatre and whose Barrault-Renaud company I'm sure I saw in the Edinburgh Festival many years ago.

My enjoyment of the film was probably enhanced by the fact that I played Deburau in Paris ten years ago in an extract from Sacha Guitry's 1918 play about him in which Guitry himself played the lead.  In our little scene Deburau is testing his son's avowed desire for a life in the theatre by pointing out all its disadvantages but he can't help but be carried away by his own love of the profession.  I can almost remember some of the lines about his feelings when the curtain rises and the audience is gripped by his performance; great stuff and extremely mellifluous French as I recall.

An artist friend of mine was exhibiting at the weekend so I wandered along to have a look.  Judging by the work on display he'd spent the summer on the beach and indeed he told me that there's a beach an easy walk away from his summer residence.  It's one of those manmade lakeside beaches that you find all over France so there are shady trees to sit under with your sketch pad and a handy bar in which to slake your thirst. I like his work and one day I may buy a painting to add to the prints that I bought a couple of years ago but it was not to be this time.

I wandered on to Stockbridge market and bought what turned out to be the tastiest bread I've had since I left France in September and that's counting Manna House breads.  The baker was in fact French but I came home with delicious Scottish products too.  Yummy chutneys from Portobello and Perthshire and succulent lamb from Liddesdale.

There were plenty more food stalls and other goods of interest so I'll be loafing around there again.

The shops and streets were remarkably uncrowded this afternoon thanks it would seem to the windy weather having kept people at home.  Various bus diversions were in place because of fallen railings and one of my neighbours got an afternoon off because her employer feared a scaffolding collapse.  All reasonable enough.

But getting home and finding a message on my phone telling me that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert that I was due to go to this evening had been cancelled because of adverse weather conditions baffled me.  It wasn't an outdoor concert for goodness sake and I doubt that the Queen's Hall has been blown away.

I'm sure the Dunedin Wind Bank, that counts me amongst its members, is made of sterner stuff and that Saturday's concert will go ahead.  It's free as are the post concert refreshments so come along.

I was passing the Old College around tea time and popped in to have a look at the quadrangle which thanks to an anonymous donation of a million quid has been beautifully laid out completing at last a building whose beginnings date back to 1789.

It's lovely, well worth the wait and perhaps in another 222 years there will be a handy tram stop outside.

Here's the commerative brochure published by the university.

Two excellent films in the one evening.  First up was my last foray into the French Film Festival with a delightful comedy that poked fun at many French preoccupations: immigration, wartime deportations, laicity, the war in Algeria, citizenship, bureaucracy, politics.

Our heroine in The Names of Love cries as she joins the rest of the left in voting for Chirac to keep out Le Pen in the shock election of 2002 when Jospin was eliminated in the first round.  She's even more upset when she accidentally votes for Sarko in 2007.

But then she is particulary keen on making rightwingers into better people, but believing in the slogan make love not war that's what she does and a period between her sheets seems to work wonders of political re-education.  And she's happy to marry for identity papers from time to time.

Of course love intervenes when Baya meets a man who seems as staid and bourgeois as she is wacky and revolutionary.  It's great fun.  I can't find a British review of it so here's what the Vancouver Observer had to say.

Then a film about another vivacious woman but one who was much more troubled than Baya.  My Week With Marilyn is not a comedy though there is plenty of humour in it. Marilyn Monroe came to Pinewood studios in 1956 to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier and this is a memoir of that event by the then young third assistant director (whose family affiliations I have learnt thanks to The Guardian review) with whom Marilyn developed a friendship.

It's a lovely film with amongst many others excellent performances from Kenneth Branagh as Olivier and Judy Dench as Sybil Thorndyke and an outstanding Michelle Winter as Monroe.  For me she captured the character entirely, both physically and emotionally and I hope she gets a just reward come the Oscars.

On a day when we are promised paralysis in the public services in pusuit of a comfortable old age it was heartening to see one humble council employee sticking to his post and carrying out his normal duties with zeal and determination.

A view not likely to be shared by the owner of the vehicle I saw being ticketed this morning by one of Edinburgh's much loved parking attendants.  Hope it doesn't belong to a striker.

Happy St. Andrew's Day.