Not many German films make it to our screens so it was with interest that I went to Who Am I, Kein System ist sicher in the Film Festival, skirting the red carpet at Cineworld.  Not that there were any stars on it that I could see but it seemed only good manners.

I was a mite underwhelmed.  It's a decent enough story about a shy young man who happens to be a whizz kid on the computer keyboard and teams up with three other guys to form a humorous hacking gang who engage in daring, amusing, satirical but harmless exploits.  Then things turn sour.  They earn the wrath of some baddie hackers, get into the bad books of the authorities as well and go through various convoluted plot twists and turns to a happy ending.  Yawn.

No yawning at the Jazz Bar where The Scottish Sax Ensemble were trailing and trialing the presentation they will be giving next month at the World Saxophone Congress for which I myself am bound. It was an excellent gig of contemporary and in some cases brand spanking new jazzish stuff played terribly well.  Sue, who leads the group, told me that they will be playing in the open air in Strasbourg so if it rains I'll be glad I heard it here.

Robert Carlyle's The Legend of Barney Thomson opened the film festival but didn't get terribly good reviews so I'm quite glad I wasn't in time to fork out for a ticket.  I have bought tickets for seven of the two hundred or so being screened.  That doesn't seem many but in percentage terms it's probably orders of magnitude more than I'll manage on the Fringe.

First up was a set of four short documentaries.  I love the short format.  It must suit my attention span.  These were absorbing, from the story of a welder turned poet to a wild looking old Bulgarian living in the midst of the debris of his life.  Then another wonderful full length documentary in which the director dug under the surface of her family to unearth unusual goings on.  The Closer We Get is a moving and compassionate portrait of complicated relationships that unveils like a novel.  Excellent.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a title I've been familiar with for years.  I knew it was a classic and I knew vaguely that it had something to do with trains but until today I had never seen it. It's a thoroughly enjoyable thriller about a gang who hijack a New York subway train and the cop who is pitted against them.  There are great performances, not least from Walter Mathau as the laid-back cop and Robert Shaw as the ice-cold gang leader.

A month without posts has gone by without raising a murmur from my readership.  There have been no concerned communications expressing the hope that my health has not deteriorated.  There have been no anguished cries that on-line literature is the lesser for my absence.

Is it worth taking up the keyboard once again I ask myself, and resoundingly answer YES.  My brain's already full of things I've forgotten so the blog is a handy memory bank.  Unless I ultimately  forget how to use a browser.

My last shot of it

When I left you my pigeon was still growing and the balcony was getting more and more messy.  Then blow me did the parents not produce two more eggs.  Well I had to harden my heart against that so I swept them and the ramshackle nest to oblivion.  That left the chick a wee bit in the lurch because the adults kept away mostly.  But it could fly a bit by that time and with it has to be admitted a mite of encouragement from me it eventually buggered off and I was able to reclaim my balcony, scrub it up and freshen up plantings for the summer.

 But I have not spent all my time fretting over pigeons.

I fretted a bit I suppose over the French Open Tennis championships but watching Murray was less stressful than it's been in the past.  He seemed to play much more confidently even when things were not going his way.  As well as his games I enjoyed many others and managed to watch in Croatia and in Northumberland as well as at home.

To get to Croatia I hauled myself to Glasgow airport at four in the morning where, much to my surprise the place was going like the proverbial fair and I was able to buy the couple of plug adaptors that my hostess had asked for which I had thought to be a lost cause.

Mountain view from Split harbour

The island of Hvar is a couple of hours from Split and because of the infrequent ferries outside of the high season I had to spend several hours there both going and coming.  That was no hardship.  The weather was fine and the place is lovely.

On Hvar itself peace and tranquility reigned though I can imagine that in July and August it is stowed out with tourists, especially Hvar town which advertises itself as the Saint Tropez of Croatia.

Hvar Town from the hills

Island view

Local lace on sale

I was staying in the small and pretty town of Stari Grad but don't seem to have much of a photographic record.  The few days I spent there involved mostly eating and drinking and in Stari Grad one is well served for both.  I didn't have time to sample many restaurants but I'd go back to Jurin Podrum - very tasty.  As for the fulled bodied Plavac Mali red wine, moreish in the extreme.

My Morgan?

Despite the licence plate this sweet little motor spotted on the Split
harbourside on my way home has nothing to do with me but it could be mine (or anyone's) for the immodest sum of 250 euros a day.

Likewise despite its name you won't be within a thousand miles of Kirkcaldy if you eat here.

Somewhat nearer Kirkcaldy is this novelty recently erected outside the Assembly Rooms.

It's beds are full of herbs and fruits claimed to be just the thing for making the cocktails whose recipes are also on display.  I'm looking forward to some demonstrations and tastings.

Another eating and drinking opportunity took me to Northumberland where Claire had invited friends and family to spend a weekend celebrating her 40th birthday.  A party of around ten adults, four children and a dog gathered in a lovely little spot near Bamburgh.  Healthy walks were enjoyed by some, model aeroplanes were flown, homework was done, much food was cooked and fun was had.

My little contribution to the fun was this Karaoke video made with help from Siobhan and Miriam.  You need to be a bit of a Grads nerd to understand all the allusions I'm afraid.  The repetitive sax riff between verses was played live at the viewing. 

My pigeon is growing.  The adults leave it alone most of the time now.  I suppose they are off looking for worms to stuff down its gullet.

Amazon it seems to me used always to send stuff to me by Royal Mail but this week they used something called Amazon Logistics.  I think that's just an umbrella term they use to conceal the actual carrier.  Anyway the one who came to me must have applied the logic in the name to his task and decided that although the two little packages he had would have passed easily through the letterbox they were not letters.  So he put a card through my letterbox (stretching the definition a bit) and left my packages with a neighbour.  My neighbours are not usually in at 1pm but this chap works shifts and was at home.   I was also at home in fact so either I'm getting deafer with time or he knocked very quietly.

I complained to Amazon about the stupidity of the affair and got an email that gave every sign of having been written by a human being who had read my missive.  Either that or they've got hold of some very clever email analysis software, perhaps from GCHQ.

The Lyceum finished their season with a sparkling production of a play by Goldoni and having just been the Teatro Goldoni (not to the show that was on, it sounded dire) and the Goldoni Museum (hardly worth the 5 euros entry) I felt I couldn't miss it and I'm glad I didn't.

In The Venetian Twins the eponymous duo arrive independently and unknown to one another in Verona, one fleeing from justice and the other to marry a lady he has never met.  The other characters, who aren't aware either that there are twins around continually find themselves in situations in which they believe they are dealing with one twin when it is in fact the other.  Much confusion and entertainment results.  

The adaptation into very Scottish English abounds with humour of the seaside postcard variety,  but also has some keenly satirical fun with early feminism and male pomposity.  There's slapstick and the engagement of the audience in pantomime fashion (less the community singing I'm glad to say).  It all adds up to a splendid entertainment.

The SCO and chorus gave a totally different but equally splendid entertainment in the presentation of Haydn's Creation.  I hadn't realised before that this is a relatively lighthearted work, far away in spirit from the serious religiosity of the cantatas of Bach for example.  It was sung in English and sung very clearly by both chorus and soloists so there was no barrier to understanding and the soloists made the most of the elements of humour in the piece.  I'd heard it once before as music behind a ballet in Rio but I don't recall a feeling of lightheartedness in the dance or the music.  I expect that was a failing of sensitivity on my part.  If it's not spelt out in bold caps I'll miss it.      

The Traverse had a very good play on last week. By a Quebecois writer Right Now is the story of a young couple who appear to have lost a child and whose lives are taken over by a rather odd family living next door. Despite dealing with loss it was very amusing, terribly well performed and at the end left us wondering what was real and what was imaginary.

Two extremely bloodthirsty families are at odds in Titus Andronicus which the Grads have just presented.  I suppose the play could be considered as a 16th century precursor of Hammer horror movies and treated on that level it's quite fun but I think Shakespeare was wise to abandon the genre and move on to much more interesting stuff.

It was done in the round in what's a new venue for us, Assembly Roxy.  It's a great space and the staging in the desert was excellent. ( It took two hours for a substantial team of which I was a puny member to move that sand out on Saturday night.)  In general I enjoyed the show, all the cast were convincing and some performances such as SJ's Lavinia who is beaten, raped, has her hands cut off and her tongue torn out were truly excellent.  But what a lot of tosh.  

The Roxy set up for Titus (photo by Gordon Hughes) and how it looked less than 24 hours afterwards during a recital by Sue Mckenzie and Ingrid Sawers. Saxophone and piano make a great combination.

Minimalist music is not everyone's cup of tea but I'm a fan so went hotfoot to The Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow this weekend to enjoy a plethora of fascinating pieces from Steve Reich's monumental Music for 18 Musicians that runs non stop for an hour and demands super competent players to the same composer's Clapping Music, a five minute piece for two but which was performed by a group of school children on this occasion.

I didn't make it on Friday to hear Philip Glass's big concert nor did I grace the midnight to three art college gig and I gave the three hour Sunday morning session for kids a body swerve but I still managed to hear about ten hours of music plus a very entertaining session with Reich in conversation with Colin Currie.

It was not the first time I'd set foot in the concert hall building but it was the first time I'd attended an event there.  The auditorium is splendid and there were plenty of other good spaces for the free concerts that took place in the afternoons and for Saturday night when the RSNO were also in action in the building.

It was the first time I'd heard any of this music live with the possible exception of Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds which I think Michael Nyman's band played on a visit to Edinburgh a long time ago.  It confirmed my conviction that recorded music is a poor second best to live performance.

Hard to pick a favourite from around twenty-five disparate pieces but maybe Horses of Instruction by Steve Martland did it for me.  But I'd happily hear them all again.

During a break on Saturday I popped round to see the Theatre Royal's new front door and foyer.  It's very smart and there's a lovely staircase spiralling its way heavenwards that I couldn't resist snapping.

There are a number of displays in the foyer including a wonderful video that compresses the two day set up of an opera into two minutes and fifty five seconds by running at breakneck speed.  Here are a few stills from it.

There are dozens of international days for this or that recognised by the United Nations.  They are listed here.

One of them is International Jazz Day which falls today.  It's been going for four years and is being celebrated with concerts throughout the world, including at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow.  But the epicentre this year is in Paris where there are multiple events taking place. France holds a very special place in the history of jazz, having welcomed many black American jazzmen who were discriminated against in their own country and given them a space in which to work freely.

The main gig is being held in the Unesco building and is being streamed live over the internet.  I am watching it as I write.  Herbie Hancock has just announced that next year's gig will be hosted by Barack Obama in the White House.  It would be nice to be there but I rather think I'll have to be content with the internet.

A glimpse or two of the amazing city of Venice where I've recently spent a week.  It's narrow winding streets many of which don't seem to lead anywhere are daunting at first and it's easy to lose your way, even for the ultra modern traveller equipped with GPS, but before long you can move around the town like a native.

Unless you can walk on water you're also very likely to use the vaporetti, the wonderful water-buses that go up and down the Grand Canal and serve the various islands that make up the city.  They're expensive but fun.  You even get to the airport by boat. 

Venice's most famous boat is of course the gondola and dozens serve the tourists at a not inconsiderable profit to their owners.  In theory there are also special gondolas that act as ferries from one side of the Grand Canal to the other (useful given that there are few bridges along its 4km length) but I never saw any in action.

There's stacks of art in galleries and churches but the city itself was enough of an open air art gallery for me on this trip so I only went indoors for food, drink and music.  Vivaldi's Four Season's is everywhere.  Much though I like it you can get too much of a good thing so I avoided it.  I had hoped that there would be an opera on at the famous La Fenice.  There wasn't but I went just the same, mainly to see the inside of the building, and the concert of renaissance madrigals that I attended was very appropriate for the architectural style.  It's famous for having burnt down and about a dozen firemen were on duty throughout the evening, something I've never seen anywhere before.  There were also lots of usher type people and a souvenir shop in operation but not a coffee or an ice-cream, let alone a drink to be had.

I went to some other reasonably enjoyable musical events though I found the electronic clarinet gig hard to warm to.  At least it was free. 

The bottom right photo above is where I was staying.  Fans of the novels of Dona Leon will be excited to learn that it's in the very palazzo in which il commissario Brunetti has his flat albeit on a different floor.  My friends (who have written guides to Venice focusing on locations associated with the Brunetti books) were very excited but I took it in my stride.

I'm no pigeon fancier but I felt bad this morning when I chased a pigeon off my balcony only to discover that she had made a nest in the corner and produced a couple of eggs.

 Was my action destined to kill two chicks before they were even born?  Maybe not, mum is back on the job.

When I arrived in Obertauern for a skiing holiday this year I was relieved to find that I had just missed a week of celebrations of the town's fifteen minutes of fame - the visit of the Beatles in 1965 to shoot some snow scenes for the film Help!

As well as holding a week of jollity they have erected this permanent memorial and other installations that I take to be temporary but you never know to what lengths fans in combination with tourist offices will go.  Wogblog tells the full exciting story of the fab four's visit.

The weather was not the unrelieved blue sky and sunshine of my last visit so I took one day off to visit Saltzburg which celebrates its connection with another musician of renown.  Arguably Mozart has been memorialised in a less dignified manner than the Beatles by the invention of Mozart Balls and the opening of shops devoted to their sale.

You know you are someplace swanky when the lemon to squeeze on your pork comes in a little yellow muslin bag tied up with a ribbon.

For the people who know these things today's eclipse had been in their diaries for centuries but I only heard about it last night.  So as the day dawned bright and cloudless I was unequipped to take advantage of the fine eclipse viewing conditions.

I risked my sight to cast a few brief screwed up glances heavenward with little success.  I found my ski goggles provided no protection.  I looked at the sun through a bottle of red wine seeing only a Rorschach ink blot that revealed nothing.  I tried the sun's reflection in my dirty window panes but that was too bright.  I poked my camera towards the sky thinking that I could at least get a photo but all I got was an ill defined but very bright blob.

I got very excited when the circle of light cast through the pinhole device that I created had a dark bite taken out of it till I realised this was not the moon but one of those undescended chards made famous in an American vote count some years ago.

So I gave up and watched it on the telly.

However, after it was past its peak and the moon's retreat was underway the sky clouded over and every so often for ten minutes or so as the cloud cover varied there was just the right degree of veiling for me to see the crescent shadow on the sun without going blind.  A result.

The A Play, A Pie and A Pint season started this week and Siobhan and I went to the first offering at lunchtime.  After the half dozen concerts I've been to this month it was nice to be led back into drama by the mellifluous Welsh voices of the three woman cast of Leviathan.  Especially given the lovely text that Matthew Trevannion, the author, had given them.

Set in a council house garden on a fine sunny day we met Mavis, who described herself at one point as having been a functioning alcoholic, her daughter Karen who slumps in an armchair eyes closed most of the time, stirring every so often to deliver coherent but disturbing monologues and Hannah, Karen's daughter, who has narrowed down the potential father of her unborn child to a list of three.

There is a fourth character whom we never see.  This is a murderous moggie who is busy wiping out the birds that visit the garden.  I'm sure that's very important and that Mavis taking an injured but still breathing bird into the house towards the end of the play with the stated intention of nursing it back to health is crucial to our understanding of the work.

But I didn't understand anything by it.  On the other hand there's a great deal of humour and I loved the cut and thrust of the dialogue between Mavis and Hannah.  They argue over Hannah's way of life.  They argue over semantics - gypos versus travellers.  "Travellers!" says Hannah "I went to school with most of them."  They argue over Karen.  Hannah screaming that the woman needs her mental health sorted out while Mavis maintains she only needs to rest.

What's it all in aid of?  Who knows but it's very well done and mightily entertaining.  

GB's victory huddle after Andy Murray saw off John Isner in straight sets to seal the tie.  Mind you he made it difficult for himself.  He was a bit shaky early in the match and at points throughout but managed to pull rabbits out of hats when he had to.  I guess he was feeling the pressure of both the expectation and the necessity of a win.  Isner in turn clearly was desperate to redeem himself from his failure on Friday and tried too hard at times.

Fortunately Murray's less than flawless first serves were matched by Isner's surprising difficulty in coping with Murray's second serves. 

GB now play France in July and given the wealth of French tennis talent that will be a tough one.

James Ward came on court at The Emirates Arena in Glasgow yesterday after Andy Murray had comfortably beaten Douglas Young in a couple of hours in the Davis Cup tie between GB and USA.

James ranks a full 90 places below John Isner, who is a one-time top ten player so I for one didn't expect to be late home but how wrong I was.  It was a gargantuan battle from the start.  The players were never more than a point or two apart in the entire five hours of play.

Ward stayed with Isner through the first set to force a tie-break that he narrowly lost and again lost the second set by a slender margin.  He got a second wind in the third set and came out a winner at 6-3.  The fourth set ended in a second tie-break but this time Ward won it with points to spare.

Then came the marathon fifth.  Thankfully it didn't quite reach the extremes of Isner's match against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon a couple of years ago otherwise I'd still be there but it ran on until Isner finally fell to Ward 13-15.

The crowd was delighted and not a little astonished.  The pleasure of the victory mitigated to some degree my trudge through the rain all the way to Queen St station where I caught the ten o'clock home.

I got home a few hours earlier today having witnessed another excellent five set match in which the world's best doubles players, the Bryan brothers were mightily discomfited and very nearly dislodged from their perch by Jamie Murray and Dominic Inglot who took them to 9-7 in the final set. 

GB need to win only one match out of two tomorrow to progress to the quarter finals and I'll be there rooting for them.

Waiting for play to start

The Toss

Serried Snappers

Cheese figures too in The Caucasian Chalk Circle when Azdak, sheltering the fleeing Grand Duke (though he doesn't know it) gives him a lump of cheese and advises him to "look at it mournfully - because it's already disappearing - like all good things".  But at least he gets to eat it.

Azdak is one of the parts I've most enjoyed playing and seeing the Lyceum's fine production in the company of other veterans of The Grads 2006 production brought back pleasant memories.  My memory wasn't perfect because I only remembered that I'd also played another role when I saw the character on stage and I signally failed to remember another one even when he appeared and had to be reminded of it afterwards.

There was lots of lively music in CCC and for an entirely different but equally spirited genre I was back in the same theatre the following evening for a wonderful concert organised by Jazz Scotland  featuring Ravi Coltrane, son of the great John, and his quartet. They were preceded by New Focus, a Scottish quartet led by Konrad Wiszniewski and Euan Stevenson. 

Jazz is a very broad church with many styles.  Ragtime, dixieland, swing, hard bop, acid jazz, fusion and free are amongst the plethora of sub-genre names that rear their heads in writing on the subject.  I don't rightly know what to call what I heard from those players but it was very much today's jazz from both groups.  Perhaps with a sweeter more contemplative accent from the Scots compared to a grungier more urgent tone from the Americans but that's a broad characterisation denied by examples from either side. The best thing is to listen to it and not bother about the taxonomy.

Joe Temperley and Brian Kellock will undoubtedly provide equally wonderful music tomorrow but it will be more firmly linked to the former's long and distinguished career with the great bands of the 60s and his sojourn in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.   

"Later we'll go next door where we can sample some cheeses and see how a number of different wines combine with them."

Those were approximately the words of the chap leading the wine tasting at the French Institute which we had been led to believe would last from 6 to 8.  So as the slides slid past and his mellifluous tones led us through the geology, the climate and the agronomy of the Loire valley in heart stoppingly beautiful French our estimate of when that cheese and wine nirvana would arrive which at 6 had been comfortably positioned around 7 moved uncomfortably closer to 8.

Having genteelly sipped our way through one glass of a Muscadet and one of a Menetou-Salon over nearly two hours were we destined to a rapid swallow of the promised five remaining wines and a pig-like gorging of bread and cheese in the last quarter?

Well no quarter was given for the release to hit the next door feast came at ten past eight.  No good for those with an 8.30 dinner reservation in a restaurant on the other side of the city.  Caveat vinoamator next time.

A chalet from Billy Butlin's first holiday camp opened in Skegness in 1936 and its 2015 equivalent at Whinfell Forest.


I've just spent a few days there.  Apart from a day visit to Butlin's Ayr camp in the 50s I'd never been to a holiday camp before and was greatly impressed by this one. It has a beautiful setting that with its groups of wooden houses set in the forest reminded me strongly of Colorado.

It struck me as a super place for family holidays.  There are lots of outdoor activities to suit both adults and children and luckily, given our climate, just as many indoor ones.

When you've had enough of self catering, grazing and sluicing are well provided for in the various restaurants and bars.  I'm told the swimming pool (or sub-tropical paradise as it prefers to be known) is wonderful.  I didn't try it and since my friends had to leave the pool and stand around shivering while a fire alarm was investigated I don't feel I missed out.  I did enjoy table tennis and ten pin bowling and snooker and pool and archery and "the segway experience".

PS It's not cheap.

 

A thoroughly enjoyable toe-tapping evening in the Queen's Hall last night at the farewell concert of Fat Sam's jump jive and swing band.  Although they've been active on the Edinburgh scene throughout the  thirty years of their existence it's probably twenty years since I last heard them play, something I'm now beginning to regret.  But they wouldn't be the first band to have more than one farewell concert so I'll keep my ear to the ground.

Pictures from The Burn

On my way home from a saxophone weekend at The Burn near Edzell I went to a couple of Fife Jazz Festival gigs in St Andrews.

I was intrigued by the idea of a saxophone and tuba duo and was blown away by the resulting music from Marius Neset and Daniel Herskedal.  A lot of noise can and did come out of those instruments, but interestingly one of the refrains of the weekend had been the importance of dynamic contrast and this pair gave a master class on the subject.  From thunder to barely audible in a heartbeat. As for technique, the sounds they got, their speed and dexterity; all were marvellous and underpinned a fascinating sound world.

A really nice Italian meal later I was in the totally different sound world of Dixieland.  Although Dixieland and other varieties of traditional jazz no longer hold my interest to the extent they once did you can't help but enjoy its infectious rhythms and bright colours.  These guys were good, particularly the harmonica player.  I had a chromatic harmonica at one time as a kid but could never produce anything other than an overall mush.  How anyone can direct air through particular sets of those little holes I'll never understand. 

By the interval I'd enjoyed about much as I was likely to and was thinking of those "lang scots miles, the mosses, watters, slaps and stiles" and decided to forego the second half in favour of  getting home for bedtime.  And I'm so glad I did.

The A92 was closed off east of Kirkcaldy so I drove through the top of the town (not without an accidental and unwished for diversion through a housing estate) to find that it was still closed west of Kirkcaldy.  That meant going into the town and onto the Dunfermline road to get to the bridge.  Well blow me but the bridge was closed so I had an extra 50 miles to drive via Kincardine.  Had I stayed to the end of the concert it would have been half past midnight till I got home.

There was a bit of a silver lining though.  That diversion took me past the beautiful Kelpies glowing red and silver in the dark.  Tam O'Shanter would have loved them.

It was suggested to me this morning that choosing to walk up the stairs nine times out of ten instead of using the lift might not be quite enough preparation for my skiing holiday next month.

With that and inspired by the fitness displayed on court in Melbourne I decided on a vigorous walk to Modern Two this afternoon to see the Two Roberts exhibition.  Well, after a post prandial relaxation session I had to get the bus most of the way for fear of being too late to get round the show.  It would have been well worth walking all the way though, super stuff.

Happily I found on leaving the gallery that the Water of Leith pathway which had been partially closed for months because of a landslip was fully open again so I got my vigorous walk after all.

I stopped halfway for a coffee in Stockbridge and was served by a young woman I recognised as having been a fellow attendee at a salsa class some time ago.  I didn't let the fact that she didn't remember me get me down. I saw it instead as an endorsement of the character actor's ability to melt into the crowd when playing himself.

At Canonmills I passed a couple of pubs that used to be spit and sawdust establishments but are now smart, comfortably furnished, attractive bars where you can eat or just have a coffee rather than down a pint leaning against peeling wallpaper.  It's a wonderful social revolution, and no smoke to boot.

An exciting closely fought tussle that didn't last.  Murray faded away in the third set and was obliterated in the fourth.  It must be excruciating for the loser to stand listening to the various platitudinous speeches at the end and then have to make his own but Murray stood up to that test manfully.

At least the match finished in good time for me to prepare lunch.

A good week of tennis viewing culminating in Murray's victory over Dimitrov in an absolutely gripping match this morning.

As well as the two streams corresponding to its TV channels  Eurosport broadcasts additional streams and it has been possible on occasion (it's a bit hit and miss I don't know why) to watch a match on one of them without either commercial breaks or commentary.  That's such a bonus since much of the time the commentators contribute very little to enjoyment of the game.  I generally don't need to be told that a good shot has been played and remarks such as "..he grabs the ball with his racquet and returns it full of meaning..." simply annoy me.  I am indebted though to one commentator for sharing with me the knowledge that Sharapova never wears sweat bands and seldom calls for a towel between points.

Again more or less by accident I caught Zambia's second group match.  They played Tunisia and were all over them, mounting attack after attack, swarming around their goal, banging away but only managed to get a ball in the net after 60 minutes.  Tunisia got an excellent equaliser ten minutes later.  That seemed to put fire in their bellies and in the dying minutes they scored a winner.  Such a shame. 

Perhaps the new president will take a day off to nip up to Equatorial Guinea to encourage them, or maybe Guy Scott will since he looks likely to have time on his hands.

I enjoyed The Merry Widow very much.  Unlike the Daily Telegraph I found lots of wit and sparkle in it; the book and lyrics in particular, by Jeremy Sands, were a treat to the ear.  The sumptuous set and costumes were lovely, the can-can dancers spirited and the principals incarnated their characters well although I will agree with the Telegraph to the extent that I found some of the delivery of the text a wee bit clumsy.  I also understood the business with the fan very easily which I didn't the last time I saw the show.  Mind you that was done in Hungarian so I didn't stand much of a chance.

The Australian Open Tennis grand slam is upon us and I have purchased a month's subscription to Eurosport to watch it since neither BBC nor ITV have much coverage to offer.  It's a streaming service so I can watch on a PC or even a telephone but the device of choice will be my smart TV.

It's remarkably cheap (provided I don't rack up some excess broadband usage charge and I remember not to let it be automatically renewed).  As a bonus I got it in time to watch Zambia's first match in the African Cup of Nations.  They scored a great goal just outside of 60 seconds after the kick-off and spent the rest of the game gamely trying to get another but gave the ball away rather too often to their opponents, the Democratic Republic of Congo.  They were the better team overall but only managed to get through the Zambian defence once so the match ended in a draw.

The time difference between here and Melbourne is such that the daytime matches start at about midnight our time.  I shan't see many of them.  I did try to stay up last night to watch Murray's first match but tiredness got the better of me.  The evening matches on the other hand start at breakfast time, to be honest a bit before my usual breakfast time but I may make an effort to get up earlier for the next two weeks.  

Throughout 2014 I was sure that I was going to fit in a visit to Belgium to enjoy some of the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Adolphe Sax, whose invention I've been learning to play for the last several years.  Dinant where he was born looks worth a visit even when it's not bedecked with saxes but I didn't make it there nor to Brussels where he was brought up, studied music and became an instrument maker in his father's business and which has been hosting a large Sax exhibition.

The French have a great claim on Adolphe since it was to Paris, a much more important musical centre than Brussels, that he moved in 1842; where he set up a workshop and over the following years developed the saxophone to a form recognisable to us today.

So it's not surprising that as part of the inaugural activities at their new concert hall, which opened on Wednesday, they are devoting Saturday afternoon to the saxophone.  I was tempted and if Easyjet had had a Saturday morning flight I might have succumbed to temptation, but I'm going to the Met instead, not actually to New York but to it's satcast manifestation in the Cameo where I'm standing in for a sick friend and accompanying his wife to The Merry Widow.

Although the sax was initially taken up by military bands and used by a number of classical composers, it has flourished in the world of jazz and nowhere more so than in the USA.  Now thanks to my favourite jazz programme I know that the Met (museum not opera) is running a sax exhibition till the end of April.  I've never been to New York and would quite like to visit so maybe......    

"You don't do the lottery surely" said the man on the train as we stood side by side in the corridor.

This was in response to my doubly unlucky dose of travel trouble.  I had gone down to London on Saturday when, thanks to engineering tardiness at Kings Cross, my train spent an hour standing in Stevenage and then a second hour tantalisingly close to Finsbury Park station, then crawled in and released us.

Finsbury Park is a handy ten minute bus ride from David's flat but when I designated Kings Cross as the station at which I would activate my Oyster top-up that was in expectation of the train fulfilling its normal destiny.  So I accepted a free tube ride and added another half hour or so to my late running journey.

Returning to Kings Cross yesterday to come home I found that the 13.00 to Edinburgh was not going past Newcastle thanks to an electrical problem on the line further north.  No problem, a speedy connection with a local train to Berwick and onwards in a fleet of what were no doubt luxury coaches had been arranged said the station staff.  The fact that the train guard still thought we were going all the way to Edinburgh was a communication failure soon put right.  And anyway said she optimistically it may be fixed by the time we get to Newcastle.

It wasn't.

But only 40 minutes to wait so I had a coffee and a biscuit in the warmest corner I could find in Costa's little cafe.  For Newcastle is a drafty station.

As time grew closer to 16.30 and there was no sign of the Berwick train, confidently still declaring itself to be On Time on the departure board, some degree of doubt crept into my mind.  At this point a shortly due Aberdeen train was mentioned and rumoured to be going across country to Carlisle and then on to Edinburgh.  Could our train not have done that I thought.

At about 16.40 still claiming to be On Time the Berwick train trundled in but kept its doors shut for ten minutes or.  Before they opened passengers for points north were entreated not to board it but to wait for the Aberdeen train.  Half a dozen people got on leaving several hundred on the platform.

At about 16.59 there was much whistling, waving of arms and striding up and down by station staff but the by now admitting to not being on time 16.30 to Berwick didn't move.  Every so often over the next half hour they tried again but the train sat still like a reluctant sheepdog.  To cheer us up at some point it was announced that the Aberdeen train was outside the station waiting for a platform.  Unfortunately it seemed that the stationary Berwick train was occupying the required platform.  It was then redundantly announced that the Berwick train had a technical problem.

I judged at 17.30 that I could risk going to the gents and in the few minutes I was away the Berwick train disappeared but the Aberdeen one didn't arrive.  After a while it did but as everyone tried to pile onto a clearly already packed train we were tempted with the announcement that another Edinburgh train was due in less than half an hour.

Fearing that it might be a long half hour I got aboard as did pretty well everybody and a bit before 18.00 we were underway and it appeared that the electrical problem had been sorted for there was no further talk of Carlisle.

Half an hour or so into the journey a passenger was asked over the train intercom to return to the foodbar as the buffet car is now known.  The girl concerned heard her name but didn't catch the message.  Hard enough for anyone but doubly hard for an American as she was.

"I've just come from there."  "You must have left something."

She had of course, a passport I think.  Now this train was so crowded that she chose to wait till we got to Berwick then jump off the train and run down the platform to the foodbar rather than fight her way through the standing passengers.

The driver hurtled the train along and we got to Edinburgh about 19.20.  I got through the scrum of disembarking and embarking voyagers and up the steps happy with the thought of slipping across Princes Street and onto a 22.  The street was empty of buses and full of torchlight processors so I had to set off down Leith Walk on foot.  As I got closer to home I decided that a Tailend fish supper would just hit the spot.

The food would clearly have been fresh given the crowd waiting for it to appear from the fryer but I had had enough waiting for one day so raided my deep freeze instead.

The silver lining is that I can probably claim a free return trip to London under East Coast's delay compensation scheme.  But do I want to risk it?  Maybe I should try the lottery instead.

A nail-biting finish to the snooker last night for Ronnie O'Sullivan supporters as Judd Trump fought  back with determination and skill from 9-4 down to 9 all to force a deciding frame.  But even with a broken ankle O'Sullivan is a hard man to beat and a perfectly played snooker behind the green put paid to Trump's challenge.  It was a great match.

Something put paid to my bus pass a week or two ago.  It lasted about two years I think and would have been due for replacement sometime next year.  My new one must be made of sterner stuff.  The machine on the bus tells me that it expires on 9/11/41. It's good to know that the City of Edinburgh expects me to last that long.

The reading material in most barber's shops around here tends to be The Sun or The Daily Record so I was pleasantly surprised when I went to get rid of my Festen grandfather beard to find The Herald, The i and the new pro independence paper, The National, to browse while I waited.

That excitement aside it has been a musical week.  First up was Judith Bingham's choral work The Christmas Truce.  Famously German and Allied troops briefly laid aside their weapons in favour of football and fraternisation at Christmas 1914 and this work deals with that.  The singers made all sorts of whooshing and whistling noises to represent the mayhem of bombardments and during the truce section the male singers split into "Germans" and "Tommies" and sang respectively Oh Tannenbaum and Still the Night, did a bit of male bonding hugging and then went back to war.  I'm told by someone I know in the choir that it's a really good sing and I have to say I thought it was a really good listen.

Following that was the SCO and Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.   I first heard it in the Festival Hall in London in 1967 and it's been one of my desert island discs ever since.  Later in the week the RSNO performed Shostakovitch's Second Piano Concerto.  That's another favourite but of a totally different character, energetic and jaunty while the Beethoven is poetic and lyrical.

Earlier in the week I dashed from a DORA quarterly meeting to the final Dunedin Wind Band rehearsal before our participation in the Scottish Concert Band Festival.  That happened today in Livingston where over the weekend about 30 bands from the central belt ranging from primary 7 kids through youth bands to our category of community bands are doing their thing under the watchful ears of an adjudicating team of two who award certificates of greater or lesser excellence.

We took part for the first time last year although I wasn't able to be there and were awarded a silver certificate.  This year with my participation we won gold.  Just a coincidence no doubt.  It's not as impressive as it sounds because gold plus and platinum are obtainable so it's a bronze in Olympic terms.  However it does qualify us to play in the National Finals in Perth Concert Hall in March. I can't be there unfortunately because I'll be away ski-ing but I expect they'll struggle through.

Next up is our Christmas concert 

 Despite Festen being over and done with I didn't get away from theatre altogether. I auditioned for the Grads next production, Titus Andronicus.

Four stars for Festen http://alledinburghtheatre.com/festen/

I spent some time this morning grappling with the most recalcitrant, user unfriendly ticket selling website I've seen in my puff.

Eventually after several restarts ab initio and by giving in to the system's insistence that my date of birth was 25/11/2001 I got a ticket for each of the three days of the Davis Cup tie between GB and the USA that's to be played in Glasgow in March.

I played golf yesterday for the first time in months.  Absence has not made the game grow stronger.  On the other hand I didn't seem to play much worse and I only lost two balls.

It's difficult to measure how you are doing when you are hacking round by yourself, playing two or more balls on a hole if there are no players pressing behind.  You need the discipline of competition and a scorecard.  I expect that discipline would have made me feel more disappointed.

Tomorrow we move into the theatre for next week's production of Festen.  Part of the effort to publicise the show is to create little video trailers that are tweeted and distributed via Facebook.  These in this case consist of the characters talking about the birthday party they are about to attend and which is the context in which the play takes place.  They are being released one a day and mine hit social media this morning.  For the unsocial media savvy here it is.

A conservatoire according to Collins dictionary is "an institution or school for instruction in music", so when the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama changed its name to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland you could have been forgiven for thinking that they had decided to get shot of their role as a drama school.  Not so. Theatre training continues and produces excellent results.

I popped over to Glasgow recently to see two productions by the final year acting students. They were both excellent.  One was The Hypochondriak, a version of Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire. His comedies always seem to work well in Scots and this was no exception.  The other was an absolutely first class production of The Country Wife.  The Herald gave it five stars and it deserved every one.  

Another great play and fine production that I saw last week was Bondagers.  It's an exploration of the lives of a group of 19th century female agricultural labourers that premièred at The Traverse a little over 20 years ago.  I was stunned by that production so the Lyceum's was inevitably a little bit of a let-down but only a little bit.  The harshness and fragility of the life people led in rural Scotland at that time has thankfully gone but the characters drawn surely still exist in different guises throughout modern society.

My neighbour in the Usher Hall on Friday opined that "she fair draws them in" referring to the fullness of the house, the fullness of the Caird Hall the previous evening and doubtless the fullness to come of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, brought about by the presence of Nicola Benedetti.  For it was she we had come to hear play Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.  I'm sure there are other violinists who play it well but we all believe that our local hero is the best.

A few people seated in the organ gallery could be seen shuffling out during the piece, their loyalty to Nicola (if indeed that's what brought them) not sufficient to stand up against Shostakovich's brutally beautiful phrases wrenched from the extremes of the instrument.  I love it.

As the news of Acker Bilk's death came through I was practising his great hit Stranger on the Shore which had been dished out as homework by the clarinet evening class tutor.  I do hope that my mangling of the tune neither hastened his death nor caused any turning in the grave.  

My DVD player seemed finally to have become immune to my coaxing strategies and refused to open its drawer whatever I did so I bought a new one.  Trying it out for the first time I took the opportunity to view two discs that have remained in their shrink wrapping for some considerable time.

I'm not sure how I acquired either of them.  I think Masters of European Football IV must have been a freebie that I've been too weak willed to throw away.  It purports to be a set of profiles of a dozen famous footballers but it's really just a selection of their shots at goal.  By the time I'd watched six players my boredom threshold had been well and truly breached so the remainder will remain  a mystery.

Jeane Manson is an American singer who made it big in France.  So big that she had to sell her house and horses in Normandy and retreat to a but and ben in Spain to pay off a tax bill.  I don't think that put her too near the poverty line though.  Anyway at some time she cut a DVD singing Christmas songs with a Red Army choir and I have it.  How did I get it?  Well at Barbansais there wasn't a lot to do in the evenings. The supermarkets and FNAC often had deals on DVDs, five for a tenner and so on.  I think I must have picked up this DVD as a make-weight in some such deal.  It's not to my taste though.  I only managed to get through it by fast forwarding.

But I still haven't managed to throw either of them out.

This is a sight familiar to all visitors to Glasgow but it's not the only way in which traffic cones can be diverted from their designed use by the citizens of that fine city.

At the Argyle Street end of Buchanan Street the other day I saw a member of a busking group playing a cone rather in the manner of a didgeridoo.  At intervals he pounded the pavement with its base thus exploiting its percussive possibilities as well.  How long before the weegeehorn takes its rightful place in the concert hall at the other end of the street?

I was in Glasgow for my periodic school chum lunch after which we went to the exhibition on Mackintosh's architectural career running until January at the Hunterian.  A lot of it was fairly familiar because there are really only a handful of designs of his that turned into actual buildings.  More's the pity when you compare his three imaginative designs for a small gate lodge that were rejected in favour of a dumpy cube, no doubt practical but yawningly boring.

The new cultural and education seasons are now well underway and I have been putting my bum on the seats of various theatres, concert halls and classrooms.

The Lyceum has a very sparkling looking set of worthwhile plays this year with a brand new show for openers.  Kill Johnny Glendenning garnered a fistful of four star reviews and the audience at the performance I attended clearly loved it.  I thought it was dire.  It always pains me to see such talent, hard work, skill and money devoted to trivia.  But with those reviews it will hopefully have brought many punters in and filled the theatre's treasure chest and with any luck those happy punters will come back to see the better stuff that's on offer.

Mahler and Shostakovich are amongst my favourite composers and have featured in the concerts I've been to so far.  I'm not particularly familiar with Bruckner and thoroughly enjoyed his massive 7th Symphony.  Apart from a short burst of cymbal clashing and frenetic triangle bashing in the third movement there is almost no percussion but with seventeen brass players on hand he gets a great deal of noise out.  Perhaps the piece I've enjoyed most though and which was completely unknown to me was Christoper Rouse's Flute Concerto.  It's absolutely lovely.  There are several performances on Youtube.  Try this one.

It almost makes me want to have a go at learning to play the flute but I've already launched on a Clarinet for Beginners evening class.  I so often see saxophonists double on clarinet that I'd thought I might have a go.  So far (two lessons in) it's not been too tricky and my fingers still go to the right places on the sax so no adverse impact yet.

One of my sax endeavours has just collapsed.  The guy who was running the U3A jazz improvisation group has packed it in and I don't think anyone else in the group is capable of replacing him.  I'm not too disappointed.  I got into it more or less by accident and my improvisational skills and knowledge were manifestly inadequate for the repertoire.  The improvisation work I do with my teacher is more in tune with my abilities and with the passage of time, touch wood, I'll be more up to the job of playing in a group.

But now I've got my Wednesday afternoons back and am already looking forward to devoting some of them to going to the cinema, something I've neglected for a while.  Mind you I'm not neglecting it this weekend.  I saw A Most Wanted Man yesterday, an excellent spy movie and then sat up late to re- watch Shine with its brilliant central performance by Geoffrey Rush.  David Helfgott, the subject of the film was troubled by mental illness and La Herida which I saw earlier in the evening screened within the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival also dealt very interestingly and movingly with the topic.

Moving too was the plight that many of Edinburgh's 20,000 odd Spanish residents find themselves in as depicted in the documentary En Tierra Extraña, another of the festival films.  Unable to find work at home many thousands of young Spaniards have gone abroad, many of them to Edinburgh where despite having enough degrees to throw a stick at they knuckle down to working as cleaners, dishwashers or whatever.  And they are not all young.  The people featured included a 52 year old woman with hardly a word of English who left hearth and home to look for better things.  I recognised one face on the screen as a man who drives the airport bus.  I don't suppose having a PhD (or whatever qualification he has) hinders him but it might be seen as a waste.  It's certainly a waste of the treasure spent by the Spanish state on education. I haven't found anything in English about it on the web but if your Spanish is up to it here's an article.

On the dance floor I have not been but a touring production of Top Hat was and so was Scottish Ballet.  I enjoyed both shows very much.  Richard Burton's deep rich voice reciting poems by Dylan Thomas in Scottish Ballet's Ten Poems ran the risk of overshadowing what was happening on stage but the choreographer and dancers rose to the challenge  of interpreting the poems as we listened.  This was paired with The Crucible.  Now I've been in Miller's play and know it quite well so I understood what was going on but there was no way in which a stranger to the story could have followed all its narrative thread, partly because it wasn't all there of course.  What could you do in 40 minutes.  But it was compelling and beautiful dancing so who's complaining.  Not me and not really The Guardian.

Top Hat was an entirely different kettle of fish and the entire story such as it is fitted comfortably into the evening.  I loved it and some may accuse me of double standards because if Kill John Glendenning is trivia then surely Top Hat is too.  True it is as they say not Shakespeare; but even taking away the music, the well-known songs, the well-worn old jokes, the wonderful dancing, and the sheer glitter of it all there is a kernel of human feeling and reality that the Lyceum's play simply lacks.

In addition to celebrating Rocio's 50th with some 36 hours of what seemed like continuous eating and drinking I managed to do a little tourism.  Spanish railways do an equivalent of our Senior Railcard, only at one fifth of the price and giving discounts of up to fifty percent on fares which are to British eyes already very affordable.

Birthday party eating and drinking

A gate to Badajoz

That's the sort of roundabout I admire

Roman theatre at Merida

View from the stage

What was that line?

Ibn Marwan

A panoramic view of the 18th at Gleneagles yesterday.  Not much golf going on, just waiting for some practicers to turn up.

The end of the Festival has not brought theatrical life to the crushing halt that might have been expected.  Apart from the very exciting referendum, whose denouement I was able to follow on Radio Scotland from a bed in Badajoz thanks to the internet, there was the wonderful Blabbermouth, a 12 hour NTS marathon of words and music that passed like a 100 yard dash on the eve of said referendum.

Duart Castle - Mull

Before that and slightly less wonderful in my view was their In Time o' Strife and on the beautiful island of Mull the very entertaining  The Greatest Little Republic (In the World), which when it started I thought was going to be a comedic satire on Scottish independence but as the Herald review explains turned out to be a much darker piece.  There was comedy on Mull in the form of The Weepers  by Rachel Maclean but after I read the very detailed handout describing the film it was clear that my artistic sensibilities had not been finely enough attuned to see beyond the bleeding obvious.

There's a lot of bleeding and other goriness in Titus Andronicus which Grads are presenting in the Spring.  It's a play I knew nothing about until we had a read-through this month.  It has a high bodycount and I spent a lot of the time wondering which of the many deaths I might be privileged to demonstrate but came to no conclusion.  In Festen, now in rehearsal for production later this year, I'm not meant to die but I am old and the vigorous conga dancing might just finish me off.

I was in Spain for a 50th birthday celebration and hoped to go to the theatre in Madrid on my way home but Monday tends to be the day of rest in continental theatres so I missed for example seeing Duet for One that I played in years ago, so would surely have followed the Spanish version easily enough.

With the Spanish birthday girl