Here is one of the idiosyncrasies of the golf course on Barra.  Every green is protected by an electric fence to keep the cows at bay.  Its other notable feature is the absence of fairways. It's all rough.  The views are lovely though and it's an invigorating hillside walk.

I arrived in Stornoway on a Saturday night so the first full day of my Hebridean holiday was the Sunday.  It rained non-stop.  Even in glorious weather a Sunday in the land of the Wee Frees is quiet but in the rain it's comatose.  I spent the day driving around Lewis trying to spot an islander but they all stayed resolutely indoors and only the tourists were observable asking themselves why they hadn't started their holiday on a Monday.

I exaggerate only a little.  I got to see the standing stones at Callanish if not the inside of the visitor centre and the Doune Braes hotel not far away was open for lunch.

Mind you a young man recently returned to Lewis after a decade's absence did suggest to me that if one had to live on an island dominated by religion it was best to make it a Catholic one since then on a Sunday you could at least play golf.  Which of course I did when I got to Barra.

I played the other four courses on the islands as well. Having just seen the film Tommy's Honour it was clear that I couldn't miss playing at Askernish, a course originally laid out by Old Tom Morris in 1891 and brought back to life ten years or so ago.  It's a brilliant course but played havoc with my feet.  They're still beplastered.

The islands are famous for their beaches and here's one of them on Benbecula.  There's a lovely blue sky in the picture but the wind was blowing raw and cold so there was no danger of me putting my trunks on.

 Apart from golf I did the tourist thing and admired the landscape and visited various spots of interest.  There's an excellent museum on South Uist and not far away the remains of the village of Howbeg which I was interested to see because of a book I read recently called The French MacDonald.  Alexandre MacDonald was the son of a man who left Howbeg for France in 1746 with Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Alexandre rose to be a Marshal of France and was made a Duke by Napoleon on the battlefield of Wagram.  He came to the Hebrides in 1825 to visit the land of his fathers, met various relatives and is said to have taken a handful of Hebridean earth back to France with him which accompanied him to the grave.

These teuchters specialise in romantic tales.  You can see Flora MacDonald's birthplace or at least a cairn where her hovel is said to have been and you can have a dram in Am Politician on Eriskay named after the boat full of booze that foundered there and gave rise to the novel Whisky Galore.

There's a lot of lovely landscape to see and idyllic spots to retire to if you're into peace and quiet.

I didn't hear very much Gaelic spoken over the week.  There were a couple of old codgers chatting by the pier in Tarbert but I think that was it.  However, Gaelic is very much present on bilingual roadsigns and as a linguiphile I suppose I should welcome that.  But I have some reservations about the fact that the Gaelic and English texts are not given equal prominence.  Unlike on bilingual signs on the mainland where the text size is the same for both languages, on the islands English is allocated a significantly smaller one.  Here's an example:

It seems a bit daft to me unless the islanders have poorer eyesight than we tourists.  In the case of the brown signs aimed specifically at tourists it seems not just daft but unwelcoming.

My one regret is that I didn't find time to visit Kisimul castle, the ancient seat of the MacNeils of Barra.  I sailed past it as I left Barra bound for Oban.

It's quite a long trip but lots to see en route, especially as you sail down the Sound of Mull, although not many joined me on deck.

Lo and behold I came across Mike Mainieri's music again within days of hearing him play when looking for a new tune to work on from my current ABRSM jazz book.  A sign from on high?  Probably not but I'm now getting to grips with his Sara's Touch.

What with a saxophone weekend in the Lakes and a trip to the Hebrides I'm not going to see much of this year's film festival.  I did get to the so called opening gala, though the crowd of smartly bekilted and fashionably befrocked teeming down the steps of the Festival Theatre as a more modestly dressed crowd queued to get in rather suggested that I was going to a post gala screening.

Anyway Tommy's Honour is a very good film, well worth your seeing when it comes out on release.  The Tommy in question is the son of Old Tom Morris, both of them figures of renown in the development of golf in the 19th century and respectively youngest and oldest ever winners of the Open Championship.

The film tells a great story.  There is of course sporting triumph and defeat.  There is generational tension.  There is a love story. There is the class struggle between the gentry of the golf world and men like the Morrises.  And there is tragedy.  All of it filmed in Fife and East Lothian in six weeks during which, according to the director there was only one day of rain.

Another super family story was the highly fictional (I imagine) and highly entertaining Belle Famille. A businessman returns to France en route for a meeting in London after fifteen years in China.  He has a Chinese lady in tow to present to his mother and discovers there is a tussle over the former family home in the provinces.  The fiancee is also a colleague so he packs her off to London to keep the meeting warm for him while he investigates the old home situation.

His childhood chum is involved as is the local mayor and his late father's mistress.  He has a run in with the mistress's daughter (not sired by his own dad fortunately, otherwise social norms and possibly laws would clearly be in danger of being broken before the last reel has run).  Helped by a gloriously funny character who had a crush on him at school he finds out what dark deeds have been done in the past.

There's a scene at a concert worthy of a Brian Rix farce in which evryone runs in and out in pursuit of some aspect of the plot.  Our hero is always on the point of going to London but a turn of the plot always prevents him.  At one point he is run off the road by his childhood chum who has been in a relationship with the mistress's daughter but gets dumped and suspects it's all our hero's fault. Which of course it is. After numerous twists and turns it all ends happily for everyone as you would expect.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the screenwriter and director, known to us for his magnificent Cyrano starring Gerard Depardieu, was there for a Q&A but I didn't hang around for much of that.

Before that I saw an interesting documentary about Chile.  Chicago Boys described the influence of the moneterist school of economics centred on the University of Chicago on those Chileans who studied there.  In particular it focused on the period leading up to the overthrow of the Allende government and the subsequent dictatorship. Undoubted economic progress was made thanks to the plans and model developed by the Chicago Boys during the Pinochet period but at some cost.  One of them who served as Finance Minister made the barely believable statement that he was unaware of the human rights violations that occurred at the time.     

There was a more light-hearted air to the set of animations competing for the McLaren Award for new British animation that I saw earlier, though a couple of them had a darkish tinge.  I was particularly pleased to see Isabella the film I'd made an abortive attempt to see at the Glasgow Short Film Festival a few months ago.  Mind you I didn't give it my number 1 vote.  That went to a delightfully funny and thoroughly traditional animation about a cat's visit to the vet.  Unfortunately the competitors were split over two screenings and I couldn't get to the second so I only saw half the field.

The SNJO concert at the Queen's Hall on Friday was rather sparsely attended which was a great shame.  Tommy Smith had once again brought a guest player of world class to play with his talented band.  Maybe Mike Mainieri is not a household name to Edinburgh jazz fans (I for one had never heard of him though judging by the list of those he's played with I've probably got a few CDs on which he features) or maybe they don't like his instrument, the vibraphone.  Whatever the reason they missed a really good gig.  I hope the citizens of Glasgow and Aberdeen turned out in greater numbers.

Liz Lochhead has created very popular and successful Scots versions of a number of Moliere's plays and now she's written a play about the man himself.  She's made a very good job of it.  While it's very funny as befits its subject there are moments of sadness and loss that add a poignant seasoning.

I'm a Moliere fan so was predisposed to enjoy the show, which is the last in the Lyceum's season, but even I found the early scenes a wee bit lacking in fizz.  Fortunately things warm up and Thon Man Moliere soon starts firing on all four cylinders.  Jimmy Chisolm is superb as Moliere, especially in his rant about the King's suppression of Tartuffe and is ably supported by a cast that know their business and a technical team that know theirs.

The birdlife around here is predominantly made up of pigeons, seagulls and magpies so it was delightful to find two beautiful goldfinches perched on my balcony.  They didn't hang around long enough for me to get a picture so I've pinched one from a twitcher site and photoshopped it onto my balcony. 

Here it is, as large as life.  Well larger actually.

The RSNO did a Cole Porter concert a couple of weeks ago.  They pinned it on the coincidence of the orchestra having been founded in the same year that he was born. But no excuse was needed at all to revisit the extraordinary wealth of wonderful songs that he produced.  Amongst hosts of others the words and music for My Heart Belongs to Daddy, Begin the Beguine, Night and Day and for the musicals Kiss Me Kate and High Society all fell from his talented pen and the talented Kim Criswell delivered them with aplomb.

Richard Strauss (not to be confused with Johann the waltz king) may have written any number of songs but it was his Four Last Songs that featured as one item on the RSNO's final concert of the subscription season.  This was the first time I had heard them live and I thought they were beautiful and so much better than on any recording I've ever heard.  The main work was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  The only trouble with this is that you can't really enjoy the first three movements because all you want to hear is the fourth in which the Ode to Joy is blasted out my a large choir.  It was good when it came and the opening piece of the programme whose name I've forgotten by a young woman whose name I have also forgotten and which was inspired by some flats being blown up recently in Glasgow was another blast.

Men in the trenches of the First World War lived with daily blasts of gunfire and bombs and many fell victim to shellshock as a result. This was the case for one of the three young soldiers whose experiences were dramatised in the National Theatre of Scotland's 306:Dawn.

306 is the number of men who were executed for cowardice during the war and dawn was when sentence was carried out.  Dawn was also when the first performance of the play took place in a barn a few miles outside Perth.  I went to a performance at a more usual time but I don't think the play can have lost much in atmosphere thanks to the exceptional performances, the fine music and an inspired presentation.

Here's a model of what was inside the barn.  The NTS has always favoured unconventional stages and this is no exception.

The seating areas are the dark clumps.  The action took place on the raised grey areas, in the passageways between them and on walkways behind the palisades of giant wooden rifles that surround the whole.

It's a very moving experience watching the men being overcome by the horror and stress of exposure to the brutality of warfare allied to the army's rigid and compassionless regime.  As the review in The Scotsman put it " At the end of the play, many in the audience will weep. There’s also a place, though, for a deep and implacable anger at the cruel, life-denying cult of death and killing that held this all-male culture in its grip. This is an indelibly powerful work of music theatre that will have that impact wherever it is performed, for many years to come."

I'm going to quote Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman again, this time about another WWI play that I saw at the Citizens and which puzzled me.  Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme she says "has never been a comfortable play for those who like things simple, in terms of culture, sexuality, or Irish politics".

I couldn't make up my mind whether the play was an exercise in bigging up Irish protestantism, which I found uncomfortable, or in likening the folly of prejudice to the folly of war.  I'm indebted to Mark Brown in The Telegraph for some enlightenment when in introducing his review of the production he says "Just as the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 was a historic juncture in the shaping of Irish Republican politics, so the Battle of the Somme was  formative in the evolution of its rival tradition, Ulster Loyalism."

As a theatre production it was excellent and I recommend reading both those reviews, Scotsman and Telegraph, as well as a little bit about Frank McGuinness its author for a better appreciation.

Maybe I should have done that before going to see it but I prefer to make up my own mind about things even when a bit of background might sometimes help.  I was in fact a bit worried when I went to see Scottish Ballet's Swan Lake because I had inadvertently read an uncomplimentary review of it in The Spectator a week or two beforehand.

Fortunately I enjoyed it for the most part although as Roger remarked the swans' costumes were somewhat unflattering, reminding him strongly of M&S underwear.  (You have to walk through a lot of that to get to the mens' department.)

That apart it all looked beautiful.  Actionwise Act 1 was a bit bland but when Act 2 got going,  and the black swan appeared with her henchmen it heated up.

Photo by Andy Ross

Some reviews didn't like it because it stripped out a lot of the traditional story.  My relative unfamiliarity with the ballet protected me from that concern and Thom Dibdin who clearly knows his ballet swept those concerns aside in his review.  And what is there not to like in Tchaikovsky's wonderful music. 

I moved on from the Greeks to the Romans by starting to read Robert Harris's second novel about Cicero and in parallel with it Mary Beard's Roman history SPQR.  Her first chapter covers the same ground as the first half of the novel, the Catiline conspiracy, and it's fascinating to see how the real events have been woven into the imagined.  Both books are absorbing and happily cost me rather less than the original hardbacks.

Before either of those civilisations flourished, way back in the pagan days, to judge by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring people made some very strange noises and I was intrigued to see the RSNO deploy a washboard to make some of them.  I don't know if that was their idea or if Stravinsky actually scored it that way but it gave me a little fellow feeling with the great orchestra for I once played the washboard myself.

I think once is the operative word for I can recall playing only one gig.  It was in the YWCA in Kircaldy back in the mists of time.  Of course it might be that the skiffle band went on to greater things without me, my playing having produced sounds too much like Rite of Spring for their taste.

Stravinsky appeals to my taste but so do lots of other things and I had a splendid evening at a concert dedicated to Cole Porter who wrote so many wonderful songs with great melodies and wickedly clever lyrics.  The polar opposite but equally pleasurable was the Arild Andersen Trio gig.  Andersen is a Norwegian double bass player and his trio includes our own Tommy Smith on tenor saxophone.  So the music was jazz but that's a broad church and there are lots of jazz fans who can't stand their particular sub-genre.  There's a website that lists 28 different types of jazz plus another dozen musical styles that it regards as jazz related and I searched around it to try to put a name to the trio's style.  Post Bop and Post Fusion Contemporary seem to be the most appropriate but what's in a name. The best thing is to listen so here's a tune that I think is a good example.

There was a lot of listening in The Grads production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  It's a great play and this was an excellent production.  It got one of the most enthusiastic reviews I've read in a long time so rather than witter on let me direct you to IT.  The run's finished.  Too bad you missed it but check out our website for what's on in the Fringe.

I took my visitors to hear the SNJO doing Dave Brubeck, to an evening of folk music, albeit newly written, and to see an excellent play at the Traverse.  Once I'd bought the tickets I realised that I had seen it before.  But it well merited a second viewing and this was I think an even better production of Right Now than the previous one.

It's 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 whose early friendliness turns into an intense and unsettling intimacy.  It's shot through with humour but a darker, disquieting flavour never dissipates and at the end a changing of places leaves you wondering what was real and what was imaginary.

As soon as they left I was off to Keswick again, not for kitchen duties this time but to see Fiona's first class production of The Hired Man.  From the novel by Melvyn Bragg with music by Howard Goodall it traces the fortunes of John Tallentine, a farm labourer and miner, and his family from the 1890s to the 1920s against a background of social and economic change in the countryside and the shock of the first world war.  The company brought it off very well and it made for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.  I also had the pleasure of catching up with some old friends who'd come up from the south to see the show.

Back in Edinburgh the next day I had a quick tootle on the clarinet in preparation for my evening class.  I enjoy the class but I'm not making much progress primarily if not entirely because I seldom make time to practice.  I'm fairly disciplined about the saxophone but having spent time with that it's hard to summon up energy and enthusiasm for the clarinet.

The kids in the TSYJO probably practice hard but undoubtedly start from a base of considerably more talent and natural musicality than I have.  They gave a great concert on Sunday afternoon with sparkling playing, not least a duet between Tommy Smith on tenor and a twelve year old Jessica on trumpet.

I've had a go once or twice at reading The Iliad but have never got very far.  Homer does go on a bit and my spirit has always drooped after twenty pages or so.  I'm sorry to say that I had much the same reaction to Chris Hannan's version at The Lyceum.  That's a shame because it's a very fine work, beautifully staged and with nice humorous Gods in attendance.  Critics other than myself have given it lots of stars but really that Achilles is such a constantly bad-tempered little hero that you just want to pick him up and give him a good skelp on the heel, rather than spend two and a half hours waiting for him to see the error of his ways.

The show also suffered for me by comparison with Zinnie Harris's This Restless House that I'd seen a few days earlier at The Citizens. Based on The Oresteia it's even more of a nasty saga than The Iliad and starts not long after that finishes when Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War.

The first of the three plays is stupendous.  It's wild, it's gory, it's fast and furious.  It's tragic and comic and loud and absolutely bursting with excitement.  The second comes close but is not such an assault on the senses and the third was a little puzzling.  It moves away from the world of myth and magic into modern psychiatry.  It may well be a sensible take on the curses of the ancient world to invoke psychosis and paranoia but Mark Brown in The Herald puts it well for me when he says the third play's setting "creates a discombobulating breach in both the tone and the structure of the drama."

But the whole is really wonderful.

There's nothing like the imminent arrival of visitors to bring out the sleeping domestic god within so I have spent the bulk of today with duster, mop and hoover, even to the extent of moving furniture to get at hidden nastiness and realign the Moroccan rug.

Above and beyond the call of duty I cleared out the pamphlet store that is the lower level of my coffee table casting into the recycling without a second thought gems that are not yet twelve months old.  I haven't gone so far as to dispose of the 2011 Fringe programme nestling in a drawer in the spare bedroom but one has one's limits.

The trouble with this blog business is that it's so easy to get behind unless you have enormous self discipline.  The more you do the easier it is to get behind.  Here we are very nearly at the end of April and my reactions to nine plays, two films, two concerts and a science festival evening remain unrecorded.  That's not to mention TV, radio, books and the dreaded internet.  Well so be it.

I've also fallen behind with my coffee drinking.  I went into the freezer after lunch to fetch a new bag of coffee to find that the only one I had was a "special limited edition Christmas Blend".  To be enjoyed it said with mince pies and Christmas jumpers.  Neither were available but there had been several short showers of snow like stuff on the drive up from the Lakes this morning so perhaps the coffee wasn't being drunk in an entirely unseasonable setting.
  

After three days on the trot of getting up at 7am to help in the B&B you'd think I'd have been glad to get to bed early when I got home but I couldn't tear myself away from the telly before midnight.

That's when the wonderful rerun of the 1966 election results programme which had occupied the BBC Parliament channel since 8 in the morning ended.  I saw only the last four or five hours; those  that were originally broadcast on the afternoon of the day following the election.

It was a feast for the memory.  All the journalists and presenters who were household names at the time were there.  The studio was under the control of Cliff Michelmore.  Bob McKenzie and David Butler presented the numbers and analysed the swings.  Iain Trethowan gave political commentary.  Robin Day interrogated Grimond and Heath (Wilson kept himself aloof which rather surprised me).  Smooth James Mossman gathered comments from a bar in the square mile. Fyfe Robertson stumbled along the production line at Fords in Dagenham drawing out nuggets of opinion from the workers. Trios from various interest groups were marshalled by Kenneth Allsop to give their take on the result.  He also handled George Woodcock from the TUC who delivered vigorous opinions.  We heard from the likes of Esmond Wright for the Scottish results, Michael Barratt in the Midlands and so on.

They took us out to various live counts, to Downing Street (no security gates and the press milling around onto the very steps of the house) to see Wilson arrive back at number 10 with his majority increased from less than a handful to nearly a hundred, to Heath's losing press conference.  He was in great form, relaxed, cheerful, humorous, positive.  Having got used to his sourpuss image after being supplanted by Thatcher it was a delight to see this earlier incarnation.

Leaving aside the fact that I was watching a squarish black and white video recording sitting slightly unsteadily in the middle of my wide screen it was interesting to see how far from our present flashy computer graphics we were fifty years ago.

Individual results appeared on caption cards reminiscent of silent film dialogue frames but less professionally created.  Apart from a couple of block graphs the principal information presentation form was rather like an oldfashioned cricket scoreboard.  The most high tech item was the swingometer, lovingly tended by Bob McKenzie and whose development in later years was even more lovingly supervised by Peter Snow.

The most striking difference, noted by my inner feminist, was the absence of women.  None of the presenters, pundits or interviewees were women.  Not a total absence though, illustrated in a slightly surreal sequence in which two presenters held a discussion. Between them sat a woman who stared fixedly ahead hands resting motionless on the desk while remarks passed over her head like tennis balls over a net.  One of many female gofors I suppose.

Did that strike me as odd or unfair at the time I wonder?  I don't suppose so.  We did after all have some women fronting serious TV programmes, such as Mary Marquis and Joan Bakewell.  The vanguard of the many who have followed.

The Sunday Times this week selected Stockbridge as the best place to live in Scotland.  I can only think that their man must have been at the exceptionally fine concert that the Dunedin Wind Band and others presented in Stockbridge Parish Church on Friday evening.

For the dozens of Facebook friends and others who failed to respond to my invitation to attend, indeed not a single one turned up, here's what you missed.

And afterwards there was my homemade gingerbread.  I shan't give you the chance again however hard you beg.

The tunnel taking Edinburgh trains out of Queen Street station closed to traffic yesterday for five months and my fruitless journey to Glasgow which had taken an hour via Motherwell was further exacerbated by the hour and twenty minutes ride home by way of the innumerable stopping points on the Airdrie line.

Fruitless through my own fault.  I'd been to the Glasgow Short Film Festival on Thursday where a film I had some involvement with was showing; Dear Peter , which I learn today won the audience award.  I had gone back to see a film made by an Edinburgh College of Art graduate I'd met while doing a film there.  Unfortunately I didn't check the programme first and found when I got there that the film had been shown in the afternoon.  To sharpen my disappointment Isabella won the Scottish Short Film award.

Before going to the festival I'd been to the Fairfield's shipyard museum on one of my periodic jaunts with Andrew.  It's in their renovated offices which are largely given over to providing space for local businesses but quite an extensive set of rooms document the history of the yard from its beginnings to the present day.  It's well worth a trip to Govan. 

We were fortified for the excursion by lunch at the Bavaria Brauhaus.  New to me and possibly quite recently established, as the name suggests it's all German beer and grub (wine is available too).  My lunch looked so nice I had to snap it

It was called Spanferkel on the menu.  That's really suckling pig and this was humble pork belly but it was absolutely delicious and highly recommended should you find yourself in Bothwell Street at lunchtime.  The beer on the other hand was nothing to write home about.  But I speak as someone for whom lager is an unacquired taste.

The view of Edinburgh's skyline from in front of Inverleith House has always been one of my favourites and Monday morning's mist lent it an extra je ne sais quoi.  The mist was soon replaced by glorious blue skies and warm Spring sunshine that was no doubt further encouragement to the rhododendrons and other plants in the Botanics whose buds can scarcely contain their impatient flowers.

After my stroll around the gardens I spent a little while watching the controlled mayhem taking place in Inverleith park under a banner reading EPSSA, which I hazard to guess stands for Edinburgh Primary Schools Sports Association.  Countless kids were milling about being marshalled by loudhailing adults into appropriate groups to run around the park.  I don't know if prizes were being awarded but I hope if they were there were a few to spare for the teachers whose task looked to me a lot harder than that of the runners.

I suppose it's a hard task to turn a popular novel and even more popular film into a stage play.  Get Carter at the Citizens was such a play.  I knew nothing about either the book or the film so was judging the work purely on what I saw and heard.  The staging was super; a vast mountain of bricks behind a foreground space that served as laying out parlour, casino, bar and numerous other spaces with the adroit addition or removal of key bits and pieces.  A drum kit sat down left and was played from time to time by the main protagonist's dead brother.

The first half worked well for me.  Little shafts of light were shed on the plot, characters were drawn, tension built up and I went out at the interval full of expectation for an interesting second act.  Unfortunately it all got a bit convoluted and silly. Multiple deaths occurred, revelations tumbled over one another and it all seemed a waste of an afternoon. 

Many years ago in my last year at university I was down in London for an interview and had to stay overnight.  Looking for something to do in the evening I wandered over to the Festival Hall and heard Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto for the first time.  It's been one of my desert island discs ever since and I was delighted to have another chance to hear it played live at the Queen's Hall last week.  There was some nice stuff by Mozart and by CPE Bach on the programme as well but the piano concerto was the tops.

My nephew Max's funeral, like many, was an odd mixture of sadness and conviviality.  I didn't know him at all well and learnt much of interest from those who spoke.  He shared many of his opinions with his dad but was a bit more active in trying to implement them.  His dying had the merit if one can call it that of being pretty much organised by Max himself.  He’d written a lot about dying during the course of his illness and was active with others in developing ideas about controlling and planning end of life  You can read some of his stuff here http://peoplethinkingaction.blogspot.co.uk/.

Death by hanging is the lot of dozens of people caught up in the witchcraft paranoia of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.  Although based on 17th century events that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts he wrote it in response to the communist paranoia stoked up by Senator McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee in the 50s.  I like the play very much partly because I found the part of Revd Hale a very satisfying role to play but also because of the work's richness of character and dialogue, its emotional charge and its forensic examination of intolerance.  The Lyceum's current production appealed to me very much.  The central matter that sparks off the whole dreadful tale is Abigail's rejection by John Proctor.  Her continuing desire for him, her jealousy and her anger lead her to concoct a tale of witchcraft on the basis of some youthful high jinks in the woods.  She's normally thought of as a wholly bad egg.  This is the first production I've seen that made me feel some sympathy for her.  It's also a splendid example of truly ensemble acting with around twenty actors taking part.

A rather smaller ensemble of two plus a little extra at the end took the stage in Blackbird at the Citizens.  This is a play about child abuse that was very well received in the EIF ten years ago.  I was spending a sunny summer in France at the time so had not seen it.  This revival delighted The Telegraph but struck me as no more than a thoroughly competent production of a perfectly well crafted play.  My companions were less generously opinioned.

In the great theatre that is sport Andy Murray did another sterling job at the weekend defeating almost single handedly (Jamie joined him in the doubles) the Japanese team in the first round of this year's Davis Cup competition.  His Sunday afternoon match was draining to watch so what it must have been to play in goodness knows.  He looked absolutely knackered as he dragged victory out of the fifth set.

Brooklyn is a novel that I bought after hearing its author Colm Toibin speak at last year's Book Festival.  I enjoyed this tale of a young girl's emigration from Ireland to New York circa 1950, her homesickness, her adaptation to American life, her romantic involvement, the tragedy that strikes her family and her subsequent return to Ireland.  Her return is intended to be temporary but things develop that threaten that intention.

I shan't spoil your enjoyment by disclosing what happens but suggest you run along to a cinema and see the beautiful film they have made of it.  Take some Kleenex.

What a musical weekend I have had.  As forecast Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto in the hands of  Boris Giltburg was exhilarating.  It's a high octane number so you'd expect him to choose a relaxed little ballad as an encore but not a bit of it.  He raced through another physically demanding piece albeit a lot shorter.

Even the orchestra most unusually played an encore.  I don't know what it was but it was a reasonably substantial latin sounding piece.  Not surprising given the conductor was Mexican.  It was very jolly with lots of odd percussion including at one point the conductor giving his head a knock.

The evening had started with another jolly piece called Naughty Limericks by a Russian I'd never heard of and after the Rachmaninov we were treated to a symphony by my favourite Russian composer, Shostakovich.  Lovely stuff.

 I should  have been at an SCO concert on Saturday but forty winks induced by an afternoon tea party although they ended in time for me to make a mad dash to the Queen's Hall doused my enthusiasm so I didn't go.  I mustn't drink so much tea in the afternoons in future.

On Sunday I was making music as well as listening to it at the Scottish Saxophone Academy's  saxophone day in the Roxy. Philippe Geiss who, inter alia, was the main man organising the sax congress I went to in Strasbourg was there to run a couple of master classes and we all played in various combinations in the concert that closed the day.

Not having had enough I went on to hear my chums the Jazz Romantics in an evening of swing in a bar I hadn't been in for over fifteen years.  It used to be a favourite post rehearsal refreshment stop called Maxies with pretensions to being a wine bar.  Now it's a mini brewery real ale place with twenty pumps on the bar counter.  Well maybe only a dozen I didn't actually count.  Fortunately they still sell wine and the ambience is still delightful.  And the music was good and there were dancers to watch as well - a jolly good round off to the weekend.

#Likes was performed on Saturday but didn't live up to its name as far as the adjudicator was concerned.  I thought too that the applause was polite rather than enthusiastic so the audience may have shared his opinion.  Disappointment reigned supreme until dissolved in alcohol.

Endgame at the Citz on the other hand was greeted with lots of applause.  It exhibited what might be thought of as contradictions.  It was both entertaining and incomprehensible.  I sought understanding in the reviews but found none.

Incomprehensibility was the order of the day though.  I was going on from Glasgow to a jazz event in Kirkcaldy before returning to Edinburgh but rail ticket pricing meant that I would save £10 by going back to Edinburgh before setting out for Kirkcaldy.  So I did.

The jazz was good.  Vocalist and fiddler Seonaid Aitken fronts a group called Rose Room who were joined by saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski and the Capella String Quartet and played a mixture of great tunes from Django Reinhardt's Paris and from the Great American Songbook.

Amongst great Russian piano concertos one of the best known, thanks to its prominence on the soundtrack of Brief Encounter, is Rachmaninov's 2nd which was given a rousing airing in the Usher Hall by Boris Giltburg with the RSNO.  He's back with them this week to bash through Rachmaninov's 3rd which I'm sure will be equally exciting.

In between those two giant concertos the RSNO played the pretty gigantic Symphony No. 1 by Vaughan Williams, known as A Sea Symphony.  There must have been over 100 musicians on stage and I counted a choir of around 130.  Together with baritone and soprano soloists those forces created wonderful music.  I can't say that it particularly brought the sea to my mind but I thoroughly enjoyed the noise and it somewhat dwarfed Debussy's La Mer which was presented in the same programme.

Back in the land of incomprehensibility, until you applied a little thought to it was the sub-prime mortgage and banking fiasco which was ably and entertainingly explained and illuminated through the lives of a number of participants in the movie The Big Short.  The film or the book it came from should be part of the school curriculum to help kids get wise to the big bad world of money.    

I've been busy rehearsing the one-act play that Claire has written for the SCDA competition.  It's called #Likes and is about current preoccupations with fame and celebrity.  The protagonists are two teenage girls who are simultaneously best friends and Youtube rivals.  I play their headmaster.  It's a Catholic school so I get to invoke the Holy Virgin from time to time.

In the professional theatre I saw a very enjoyable production of The Weir at The Lyceum.  It's a very gentle, poignant and profound picture of unexceptional lives in rural Ireland.  It was one of those productions in which everything seemed perfect.  There was an excellent set with a clever back wall that changed from see through to solid.  The characters were beautifully drawn and whenever I gave it a thought I was impressed by how skillfully and unobtrusively the director had deployed her cast about the stage to best effect.

The Dunedin Wind Band had a playaway day but because it took place on the day following a Burns Supper held in my flat I played safe and didn't put my name down.  It was the wise choice.  A late night and a belly full of haggis and drink would not have been a sound basis for a day of music making.

But this last weekend I've blown a lot of wind through my saxophone.  I was up in Edzell for the second year running for a couple of days playing and socialising.  Here's the group of happy campers.  I'm barely visible near the top of the stairs.

On my way back home I spent a day in Stuttgart where I took this photo of a photo of São Paulo railway station. Something of an odd choice of souvenir you may think but there is a reason for it.

Next to the main station in Stuttgart they are digging a big hole.  That's where a new station is to go as part of a monumentally expensive and controversial redevelopment that knocks our pitiful tram project into the dust.  Google Stuttgart21 for the full story.

Anyway, along the walkway that fringes the hole and leads out of the existing station (a fine building) is a display of photographs of notable stations from around the world. São Paulo's is an impressive example but what led me to photograph it was learning from the caption that the station was built in Glasgow then shipped out and assembled on site.  Days of engineering glory.

After a pleasant lunch looking out onto the Scloss Garten, a green space in the middle of town, I got on a red double decker for a city tour.  The winter frequency of these tours is one an hour so I didn't get off at any intermediate stops despite the attractions of the Pig Museum in the old slaughter house (45,000 exhibits) and the vineyard walk (several hectares of vineyard within the city) and the Mercedes Benz museum.

Another trip will be needed when I might find someone to explain to me why wine is served in quantities of 110 or 210 millilitres.

On Saturday I went on a bus trip to Wurzburg on the river Main.  Back in the day it was terribly important and to judge by one of it's main attractions, the bishop's palace, there was plenty of money about.

You don't build something that size for peanuts even in an age where the peasants were lucky to get sixpence a day.  I quite liked the building but Baroque and Rococo are not styles that appeal to me so I found much of the interior decoration and furnishings somewhat OTT, all that heavily carved gilded wood and plush.

The place was badly knocked about towards the end of the war so there was a degree of reconstruction in the interior but I couldn't understand enough of what the guide said to know whether I was looking at an echt Tiepolo ceiling fresco or one done by a local house painter.

The town has a stone bridge over the river reminiscent of the Charles bridge in Prague with its array of statues.

On the hill behind the statue you can see the fortress that we also visited.  It's beginnings are very ancient.  The spot is clearly one you would pick for defence in the bad old days of marauding tribes. It has a well that goes a hundred metres down through solid rock to the river.  Those peasants had to work their fingers to the bone for their sixpence a day.

Nowadays their descendants are busy fleecing tourists, servicing the university's 20,000 students or making wine.  Amongst the university's clutch of Nobel laureates are Roentgen of the X-rays and Heisenberg of the uncertainty principle.

I felt obliged to try the wine and it eased my consumption of what my dictionary called meatloaf but I thought more like spam.  I can't say I've been smitten by the food on offer but I did eat well in Nuremberg so it is around.  The wine was tasty and I've bought a couple of bottles to accompany my upcoming Burns Supper.

 Back in Schwabich Hall the snow fell heavily yesterday and the younger element tossed snowballs about beneath my window.  When the fight was over I went for a stroll and after a coffee and a sachertorte came across this chum of Martin Luther.

He doesn't look the sort of chap who'd be terribly amused to find a snowball in his holy cup.

Yesterday was bright and sunny so after lunch instead of scuttling off to my bedsit I had a good wander around some parts of the town that I had not seen.  There's an unmanned railway station where not many trains are scheduled although in its day it must have been quite busy given the size of the buildings.  The booking hall is now an art gallery, closed yesterday.  It's not far away from a smart gallery endowed by local family made good, the Wurths.  Adolf's little screw making business has grown into a worldwide group with 65,000 employees and is still family owned.  In Swabisch Hall they make solar panels.  On the way here from Stuttgart I saw solar panel farms but no wind farms although I've spotted one since.

Here's how things looked in yesterday's sunshine and here's the view from my window in today's snow

If you were setting up a flute band you wouldn't call it the Bingo Flute Orchestra but a Japanese group of that name entertained the townspeople of Sawabisch Hall on the morning of the Feast of the Epiphany.  I imagine Bingo must be something else in Japanese.

There were about a dozen players and a choir of eight.  They played both western and Japanese music, adding an instrument called a koto for the latter.  It was a lovely concert.  Two of the girls had studied here which I think is the main reason the town was included in their European tour.

After culture came sport, the Three Kings Race around town.

Here I've caught the tail-end of the start.

Swabisch Hall sits in a river valley and rises steeply on either side but especially on the side these hearty chaps (and a few chapesses) were doing their pans in on.  Here they are peching up a hill.

When not covered in athletes and race paraphanelia the Markplatz or at least one side of it looks like this.

I went on a trip to Nurnberg yesterday. It's a much larger place but has a similarly ancient and beautiful old centre. The trip featured a visit to the oodles of cellars dug over the years and at four levels starting way back in the Middle Ages for the storage of beer.

Impressive but not all that interesting.  I'd rather have visited the Albrecht Durer museum.  What was interesting and not a little horrifying was to find that from the beer mash they distill something they have the effrontery to call whisky, and organic single malt whisky at that.

I've still to try it.

I arrived in Stuttgart on Sunday evening en route for my two weeks of studying German in the beautiful little town of Swabisch Hall.  It really is lovely and if it stops raining I'll post some pictures.

In the meantime here is my super efficient Deutches Bahn train broken down in the bundu where we waited an hour for the next one.

On top of spending Sunday afternoon hanging around Edinburgh airport and the night in an over-priced Stuttgart hotel and much of the morning waiting for a train this was tedious.

 When I got to the Goethe Institute more tedium while I was processed.  Tedious but thorough including as it did uncovering the depth  of my ignorance.  So early to bed for on early start : breakfast served from 7am in the institute caff.  Quite a decent spread. Then a welcome speech from the boss and brief remarks from administration people before being whisked off by a teacher.  There are over 80 students representing 40 countries.  I am the only Briton.  I am also undoubtedly the oldest but while the majority are twenty somethings there is a sprinkling of greyer heads.

In my group we are nine and the level is pretty much at the limit of what I can do but I'm sure I'll muddle through and learn something.  I spent the afternoon on a sort of treasure hunt so I can now for example tell you what you can buy on the third floor of Muller's department store and which bus goes to the swimming pool.

Tomorrow is a public holiday (those three kings) so no classes which explains why my two weeks extend into the Monday of a third week.

It was a good week on my favourite jazz programme last week.  Each of the five Open Jazz broadcasts was entirely given over to recordings that Duke Ellington made for Columbia Records between 1951 and 1961. I particularly enjoyed the hour in which his Shakespeare inspired compositions featured.

The music played was from the umpteen LPs Ellington produced which are now available on two CD box sets.  The obvious tunes are there, some in various versions, as well as lesser known pieces.

All these programmes as well as many more are available on the Open Jazz website.  In contrast to the BBC which gives you 30 days to listen to a broadcast after it has gone out Radio France gives you nearly three years so there's no rush.

As well as presenting a well attended and well appreciated Christmas concert this year the Dunedin Wind Band had another and arguably more exciting gig.

We were invited to be part of the general frenzy accompanying the opening of the new Star Wars movie.  Six bands around the UK turned up at their local Vue cinema and played while audiences poured in to see the film.  Naturally we played Stars Wars music and I assume the other bands did the same but we played other film music as well to fill out our hour.  Nonetheless the Star Wars stuff was repeated several times and I'm pleased to report that my fingers got progressively more nimble while never quite mastering it all.

Apparently all the bands were being videoed and a composite video is to be produced, to what end I'm not terribly sure.  To appear on screens throughout the country?  Perhaps national fame awaits but my immediate reward was a free cinema ticket and a bucket of popcorn.

I bought an Evening News the following day to see if our fame had at least reached Holyrood Road but there was no mention.  However the Daily Record and the Scottish Sun had a better nose for such an important news story and this picture is nicked from one of them.  My tiny head is positioned just where the tips of the conductor's baton and the cinema manager's pointy thing meet.

The absence of posts to this blog over the last few weeks is not due to my having been floating around in space but I just happened to catch the arrival of three new astronauts at the international space station this evening and here they are gathered together in the Russian kitchen for a welcoming photo session with the three others who were already on board.

It is unfortunately a little bit out of focus ( I've got one that's even worse) but they were goodness knows how many thousands of miles away and I took the picture from Earth thanks to an excellent event organised by the Edinburgh Science Festival at the museum.

Here's the crowd in the big hall watching the big screen.  We were treated to a video of this morning's launch and amazing shots from inside the Soyuz and then some of the tricky docking procedure, made trickier on this occasion because the automatic system didn't work so they had to guide it into place manually.  An astronaut who had already spent time in the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, was on hand in the museum for an interview and two ladies from the European Space Agency answered lots of  questions as we watched the live broadcast from the station waiting for all the multitude of techie things that needed to be sorted out before the hatch separating the Soyuz from the station was opened and the three new crew members swam weightlessly into view.  It was brilliant.

Much of the audience left at this point but those who stayed on, of whom I was one, then saw a film called The Martian about an astronaut being marooned on Mars, his struggle for survival and eventual rescue.  It wasn't a bad film but I'd have enjoyed it more if the acoustics in the grand hall had not distorted most of the dialogue.

At least it was not as grim a story as Sunset Song which I saw in the afternoon.   It's decades since I read the book but I don't remember the story being as relentlessly dreich as this was.  The book is still on my shelves so maybe I should revisit it to check.

So if I haven't been out in space or spaced out what explains the lack of posts.  Lack of dedication.  I resolve to do better. 

Is this taking protection from sports injuries too far?

When I went to see King Charles III the other day there were small screens on either side of the stage informing me that this would be a captioned performance and explaining that "Captioning makes the performance accessible to people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing."

Well I've no quarrel with that provision but the inclusion of the word "deafened" rather puzzled me.  Were they drawing a distinction between those born deaf and those who had become or been made deaf later in life?  Or did it mean that there would be loud bangs during the show that would deafen us momentarily?  There were no such noises so it wasn't that.

I remain to be enlightened.  Don't all shout at once, just in case. 

There was an item on the radio this morning about the success that the play King Charles III is currently having on Broadway.  This was attributed not only to the Americans' interest in (or even fascination about) our Royals but to the resonance the play has with the American foundation story.

According to the radio some factions would have not have fought against Britain had the King overruled the parliament's taxation of the colonies as they requested and the veto powers of the US president are a reflection of that.  That's what the play is about.  The King and Parliament at odds and I just happened to see it last night.

I knew nothing about it before I went apart from what the five stars puffs on the publicity told me and those I always regard as undoubtedly partial.  It's a fine production in many ways.  I particularly enjoyed the very theatrical opening when the cast come on dressed in black, carrying candles and start singing the Agnus Dei in Latin.  We are at the obsequies for the late Queen.

When they started to speak English I was a bit puzzled until I realised it was blank verse.  So it's mock Shakespeare then?  Well no, I'm sure the writer had no intention of mocking the Bard.  Like mock Tudor it's admiration and of course Shakespeare's history plays are all about Kingship and the relationships within royal ranks and power and whatnot.  This play is billed as a future history and it's very much done in a Shakespearean style and staging.

The language didn't always sit easily in my ear.  The Kate Middleton character for instance frequently addresses William as "husband".  To me that just sounded foolishly archaic.  Nor would I call any of 
the soliloquies poetic but it's an interesting listen.

The stalls were half empty, perhaps reflecting a lack of much interest in the monarchy amongst younger theatregoers because the audience had a greyish tinge. Whatever the reason it didn't help the atmosphere and a few guffaws broke out at one or two more melodramatic moments that do well in Macbeth or Hamlet but here required more suspension of disbelief than this audience was willing or able to summon up.

The final scene is a coronation and like the opening it's very theatrical and brings a sense of power and majesty to the climax of the play.

Seats in the Festival theatre are not very comfortable. That doesn't bother me when I'm fully engaged with a show but last night I had more than a touch of numb bum.

But the critics' bums are not in tune with mine as you'll see from this review and many others. Maybe the original cast would have done it for me but they're wowing audiences on Broadway.

It always seems to rain when I go to Glasgow but since it was raining here on Saturday I was no worse off.  I went over to attend the concert celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and an afternoon concert by the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra.

Here they are in the beautifully appointed but somewhat unimaginatively named New Auditorium of the Royal Concert Hall.

It was an excellent hour and a bit.  These people are amazing players showing, as Tommy said, that the future is bright.

I had rather too many hours to spare before going to the City Halls and since wandering around in the rain didn't sound like fun I lingered in a music shop for a while, visited three branches of WH Smith, bought a book and used it to space out a very tasty meal of tiger prawns in a yummy sauce followed by sea-bass on spicy lentils.

That still left a little time on my hands but as crossed town I came across this disintegrating queue of disconsolate punters who had been too late to profit from the free food distribution that had emptied the white lorry.

Now the food being given away was boxes of doughnuts so I suspect this was a publicity stunt rather than famine relief or a food bank.  It could have been modern art I suppose given what I've recently seen at Tramway and what I came across next as I passed the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, known as GOMA to its friends (of whom I count myself one).

These neon signs are part of Real Life Scotland which is extensively and persuasively explained here.  Someone could usefully write up the Turner entries in the same comprehensible manner.    

The concert when I got to it was brilliant, one of the best SNJO gigs I've been to.  It was wholly dedicated to the Glenn Miller catalogue.  The band all looked as though they had been dressed by the same tailor as Miller, handkerchiefs peeking out of breast pockets and sleeked down hair.  They didn't throw their instruments in the air as you can see the originals do in this Youtube clip but they did pop up and down and perform synchronised moves in the manner of the time. They had also recruited some young singers from the Conservatoire to play the part of the Modernaires which they did with aplomb.

The music and the playing was wonderful.

I have to say the same about the SCO concert I went to this afternoon.  It was totally different music of course and a totally different set up.  This was chamber music; a string sextet and some clarinet and piano trios.  All music that was new to me and which I really enjoyed.  Here's one of the beautiful trios courtesy of Youtube. 

A well deserved four star review for the Grads production of Wildest Dreams by the prolific and perceptive Alan Ayckbourn which I saw last night and enjoyed very much.

The four short-listed contenders for the Turner prize are to be seen at Tramway in Glasgow. Andrew and I were there yesterday and after fortifying ourselves with some so-called Scottish tapas and half a litre of red cantered round. This is the corner of a room containing several similar groups of fur-coated chairs.  

We didn't immediately grasp the meaning of this work. Indeed Andrew dismissed it as "all fur coat and no knickers" so we sought enlightenment in the descriptive poster. 

Going with the spirit of its wobbly word order I suspect that many vintage women, and vintage men too, will consider this to be vintage art-speak that sheds little light. Perhaps it is as clear as day to the non-vintage social media generation.

It was nice to get back over the rainswept M8 to some recognisably worthwhile art, albeit musical art, with the SCO's joyous romp through Sibelius's Third Symphony.   

I've been too idle to keep things up to date and don't have the time or energy to write reviews in extenso but I like to keep a record so here's a list with mini comments.

Hidden was the Young Lyceum's party piece and although I didn't always know what they were on about it provided a fascinating tour of the theatre building from under the stage to the gods.

Pictures at an Exhibition is one of my favourite pieces of music but I don't reckon much to the pictures that inspired it.

An afternoon spent helping to sort out the Grads costume store was as exciting as it sounds.  Only marginally more exciting has been persuading audiences leaving the Lyceum and the Traverse to take a flyer advertising our production of Ayckbourn's Wildest Dreams that opened tonight.

I was caught out by the clock change and arrived at the Assembly Rooms an hour too early to hear Mary Beard promoting SPQR, her history of the Roman Republic.  I whiled away the time with a glass and a snack so it wasn't too much of a pain and Ms Beard was worth the wait though I didn't buy the book.

The last A Play, a pie and a pint offering was an excellent little comedy in which we saw how Dr Johnson despite his avowed aversion to Scotland needed five Scottish assistants to put his dictionary together.

Red Army is an absolutely brilliant documentary about a soviet ice hockey team.  Don't miss it. It's about much more than the game.

Sicario is typical Hollywood action movie fare.  There's lot of blood and explosions and shoot outs and I really don't think anyone should bother to see it.  What was I thinking of?

Tipping the Velvet at the Lyceum has been showered with five star reviews and it's very well done although the story didn't float my boat very high.  It was nice to see the theatre set up for music hall, quite reminded me of Kitwe.

You'd think that advertising a world premiere would draw the crowds but concert audiences tend to like what they know so The Queen's Hall was half empty for an SCO evening that featured not only 12 minutes of brand new Finnish stuff but a 38 minute UK premiere of some obscure Sibelius.  Maybe they knew and disliked the third work which was a violin concerto by Nielson but they missed a notably interesting evening.

The poster for Scottish Opera's Carmen featured her in a blood red outfit but that was nowhere to be seen on stage.  Not much could be seen because they played the whole thing in semi darkness. I was disappointed.

I'm not sure what drew me to the launch of Alice Thompon's latest novel but I got a glass of wine out of it and a wee chat with my German teacher and her husband who happened to be there.  I've never read any of her stuff and had only a vague memory of what I'd read about her work so I asked which book she'd recommend for starters and have since bought The Existential Detective.  It's set in Portobello so I'm almost bound to enjoy it.

There's a French film festival in town and I saw three films at the weekend. SK1 is a not very wonderful police procedural based on real life events redeemed for me by an excellent performance by Adama Niane as the baddie.  The Silence of the Sea probably deserves respect as a precursor of the Nouvelle Vague and for its various technical innovations but it wasn't very entertaining.  The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun on the other hand was super entertainment.  The lady in question borrows her boss's car without permission and sets off to spend the weekend on the Riviera.  We follow her progress into a weird chain of events that gets quite creepy at times.  I loved it and was delighted to learn that the leading lady is not only an Edinburgh girl but James Bridie's great granddaughter.

In between films I enjoyed a non bonfire night party featuring food, drink and chat. 

The first of the current  A Play, a Pie and a Pint shows that I saw was the story of a young African trainee teacher in Glasgow preparing a display about Mary's Meals.  It seemed to me more of a straight plug for the charity than a story.  The second character was a school handyman whose part in the action was to feed her lines that enabled her to lay forth about some wonderful aspect of  the charity.  There was a tiny sub-plot about her going in for some DJ competition but it was all a bit didactic.  I expected a plea for funds or a leaving collection but strangely there was no such thing although the Traverse was plastered with posters and leaflets about Mary's Meals. It does seem to be a very worthwhile charity and of course has a connection with blogging given the wee stooshie about the school dinners blog so I have to at the very least contribute by directing you to its website.

This week's offering was I suppose didactic in its way, in that we were taught something.  But the teaching was more skilfully embedded in a work of art. We saw a man develop dementia, its effect on him and on his wife and daughter.  We learnt something about the disease and about the human spirit. Descent by Linda Duncan McLaughlin was an excellent piece, very well performed and very moving.

I found Martyr, in which a young man spouts fundamentalist religious views by quoting from a holy book, rather irritating.  But who would not be irritated by a constant stream of biblical quotations, for it's that holy book not the other one.

But it's a modern play from Germany and we don't see many of them so I tried hard to appreciate it.  Unfortunately, and unlike the majority of critics I didn't.

It's about an hour's walk from my flat to the Modern Art Gallery via the Water of Leith but it's a pleasant way of stretching your legs provided it's not raining so that's the route I took to the Roy Lichtenstein exhibition the other day.

As I usually do when passing through Stockbridge I checked that my bell pull of fifty years ago had not been interfered with.

It's still resisting the winds of change as are those of the neighbours but a little tarnished looking. I'll have to take a tin of Brasso with me next time.

That would surprise the current occupiers.

There were a number of Lichtenstein works that were not the comic book images that I associate with him.  They were stylistically similar though and I liked them.  So much so that I lashed out three quid on some postcards which I have framed and added to my own little corridor gallery.

On the comic book image front there was something very interesting.  The gallery owns a piece called “In the Car” that they paid £100,000 for in 1980.  In a case in the room in which it was being displayed they had a copy of the image he used as a source. In the case there was also a quote from Lichtenstein – “ My work is actually different from the comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place, however slight the difference seems to some.  The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.”

I’m one of those to whom the differences seem slight and don’t seem to add £99,999.50 to what was probably the price of the comic. But there you are, that’s the mystery of art.
 

This Wikipedia article has pictures of both the comic and the painting so judge for yourself.  It also has the interesting information that another copy of the painting (a smaller one) was sold for $16.2 million ten years ago so it looks like our hundred grand was a good investment.

Septimo was the third of the Spanish film festival offerings that I saw.  A father sets off to take his children to school.  He takes the lift down from the seventh floor of their apartment building.  The kids run down the stairs.  Who will be first to the bottom?  It's their regular game but this time when daddy arrives at street level no children are to be seen.  The film is a kidnapping drama with its fair share of blind alleys and hopeful leads.  There's a little twist but it's a pretty conventional piece, entertaining enough and with nice shots of Buenos Aires.

Irrational Man was unconventional in as much as it was a Woody Allen movie in which he didn't appear as an anguished out of luck pursuer of the fair sex.  But he had a proxy.  I largely shared the critics' verdict of underwhelming but it was a decent journeyman product and the baddie got his comeuppance.

The wrongdoing of the protagonist in 99 Homes is overturned by the end of the film although in his case it's more a question of his innate goodness rising from the depths to which he has sunk.  This was an excellent, gripping tale of how a young man, evicted from his home thanks to nasty bankers wanting their money aided and abetted by a hardboiled estate agent/property speculator and desperate to get his home back, becomes an evictor himself.  Natch he loses the love and respect of his family in the process, suffers inner turmoil etc.  Eventually he sees the light and makes a heroic return to save a fellow suburbanite from homelessness.  Sounds banal, but a very good film.

And then a very good play performed well nigh to perfection by Bill Paterson and Brian Cox celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Lyceum Company with Becket's Waiting for Godot.  I saw several productions in the first couple of years after Tom Fleming took on the Lyceum in 1965 but can't say any have sprung to mind so far but I've ordered a copy of the book they've produced about those fifty years and look forward to having my memory prompted.

I've seen Waiting for Godot several times, not least a Kitwe production, though the one that sticks in my memory as being excellent was a previous Lyceum production.  This one seemed to bring out more comedy at the expense of its pessimism about existence.

There was nothing pessimistic about a wine and munchies get-together at the weekend where as well as being drunk the wines were scored by the participants and the person whose wine got the highest marks was rewarded with the accumulated differences between the price paid for each wine and the upper price limit of ten quid.  I didn't win but my wine was the best all the same.

The RSNO started off their new season with a big powerful work, Mahler's 2nd Symphony, known as the Resurrection.  When in the finale orchestra, chorus and soloists are all giving it laldy it raises the rafters and the spirits.

There are no rafters in the Usher Hall but there do seem to be new seats in the stalls.  They are pretty much carbon copies of the previous seats with one user friendly difference.  You used to see punters trying to find their seats bending down and peering at the underside seat numbers though even from that attitude they were almost unreadable.  The cognoscenti meanwhile would stroll along the row and place their ticket in front of the little golden plate and by some miracle of physics the number could be read effortlessly from a standing position.  Now bold black digits can be picked out instantly by anyone.

I'm not a great fan of the organ but amongst the works that I do like is Poulenc's Organ Concerto which I first heard at Snape Maltings while I was working in Norwich over twenty-five years ago.  I've seldom heard it live since so when I saw it was being played at Greyfriars I went along and enjoyed it very much.  I also enjoyed another piece that I've added to the small group of organ works that thrill me.  This was a very powerful and intense concerto by Kenneth Leighton. 

The beautiful organ of Greyfriars church

There's a Spanish film festival on in Edinburgh at the moment.  There are about a dozen films of which I have now seen two and will unfortunately see only one more. 

Everyone has heard of Federico Lorca, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel and a number of other men known collectively as the generation of '27 but that generation also contained a number of female intellectuals whose names are hardly known to the Spanish never mind the rest of us.  Las Sinsombrero is a documentary designed to open our eyes to eight of those women writers and artists.  It was an extremely interesting and enlightening film and is part of a larger project to bring those women and others back into the place they properly should occupy in Spanish cultural history.

Magical Girl could hardly be a greater contrast.  This feature film is the story of how the father of a young girl who is dying of leukemia sets out to satisfy his daughter's fascination with a Japanese manga character by buying her a dress and wand like the one illustrated below.

You sit back and relax thinking this will be a warm-hearted, moving little film that will bring a lump to your throat and may even require recourse to a tissue or two.  No such thing.  It turns out to be a much darker movie altogether involving blackmail, sadism and other nasty stuff.  I thought it was a great film but don't want to give too much away so keep a look out for it.