I made the very rational decision just before the Beast from the East struck not to keep a car any longer. It's very handy to have one sitting at the bottom of the stair for when the travel bug bites but for the most part, given where I live and how I spend my time, it's money down the drain.

The first test of this brave new public transport only world came over the Easter weekend when I was due to take my sax to a country house in the Trossachs.  Research showed that it would be possible to get very close by train and bus but a lot of hanging about between stages would be involved so I decided to take a taxi from Stirling station.  Not cheap but just the job.

Coming back the weather was frightful.  Before Leith Street closed for the St James redevelopment I could nip over the road on leaving the station and get on a bus that would drop me at my door.  Now it's either walk home or go up to George Street for a bus.  I didn't fancy either prospect in the driving wintry rain.

I first thought to catch a tram at Haymarket.  Current roadworks there mean no bus passes the station going my way but the tram does.  Then I had what I thought was a brainwave.  Why not get the tram from Edinburgh Park since unlike Haymarket train and tram are on the same level.  Genius.

Not genius as it turned out since I had to cross the train lines which meant going up, along and down.  It didn't help that while I did so a tram arrived, stood for a bit then headed for town leaving me to the inadequate shelter of the tramstop for seven minutes.  My good humour was restored somewhat when at York Place I got onto a bus within seconds of leaving the tram.

But I will get off at Haymarket next time - no double entendre intended.

As it happens there was a consultation event at the library yesterday about the potential extension of the tram line to Newhaven.  It can't happen soon enough for me.  I felt it might be a bit cheeky to suggest they move the proposed Macdonald Road stop from the town side of the junction to my side but I did offer the thought that with all the construction going on at Granton they should take the line on to there from Newhaven.

Of course there will be inconvenence on Leith Walk again when work gets under way. (I can't believe that they will decide not to do it.)  The proposed construction plan means that for eighteen months I'll have to walk from an Easter road bus stop when coming home from town since buses will run on Leith Walk only towards town.  Not a major inconvenience.  Indeed probably a healthy one.

Here I am enjoying a draught of après-ski on the final afternoon of my holiday.  I'm not generally a beer drinker but I found the Austrian hooch most palatable, more so than their wine - the bog standard haus wein anyway.

The weather was nothing like the warm sunny Spring of Kronplatz last year.  The mountain tops were visible on only one day, being shrouded in mist and cloud otherwise, but only one day was truly horrible.  I gave my thighs a rest that day and took the train down to Innsbruck.

I've been in and out of the airport several times but never before into the city.  There is some lovely baroque architecture to admire in the old town and it probably looks even more lovely when the sun shines on it. 

They were getting themselves geared up for Easter.  Giant eggs were on display in various parts of the city centre.  Here's one:-

There was a definite end of the season feel about Seefeld which I suppose must be why it was so quiet despite being only 20kms from Innsbruck.  The snow was in excellent condition too especially on my last day following a heavy fall overnight.  But not many were there to enjoy it as you can see from this picture taken on a day when the sun shone a bit.

 Back home I've seen a couple of films, the rather odd-ball The Square which takes the mickey out of modern art and the wonderful Cabaret which gives us Liza Minelli's so vulnerable and so determined Sally Bowles against the the background of the rise of the Nazi party.  I saw a production of the stage  musical not long ago but the film transcends it in every way.  Joel Gray as the Kit Kat club MC is an impossible act to follow.

I had the pleasure of reading Benedick at the readthrough of the Grads upcoming Fringe show Much Ado about Nothing.  I was in the show the last time the Grads did it as a lowly henchman of the villain.  Obviously I shan't be playing Benedick this time round unless David adds a geriatric touch to his slimmed down re-genderd version but it was fun to read the part.

Something else I read the other day amused me.  On the side of a box containing an electric toaster was the boast that the gadget had a "climate sensing toasting cycle".  So whatever happens with global warming we can rest assured that our breakfast will be safe.

There was an article in the Evening News yesterday about the new concert hall to be built on the site of the office block behind Dundas House in St. Andrew Sqare.

It was complete with a natty artist's impression of the circular auditorium ringed with stacked balconies.  My objective when it opens will be to locate the seat nearest to where my office was when I worked for RBS.

The pesky pigeons survived snowmageddon and continued their attempts to set up home on my balcony.  They managed to lay one egg which I swiftly removed and we then entered into a war.  As soon as they found a little corner in which to nestle I deployed an obstacle.

They were very persistent.  The balcony is now criss-crossed by silver tape that is claimed to frighten them but doesn't really, although it impedes their movement.  It's also strewn with upturned flowerpots and other obstacles that leave no sheltered spot a bird can rest in.  The right way up flowerpot that received the egg now boasts wooden slats poking up out of the soil and just itching for a pigeon to try lowering its bum onto them.

I'm praying they've got the message because I've exhausted my gamut of defensive measures.

Encouraged by Claire's rave review and the wish to try what sounded like Aldous Huxley's "feelies" I went to see Black Panther.  It wasn't a bad film as far as Boys Own Paper adventures go and the visual effects were impressive.  The pitch and yaw seats, blasts of air and sprinklings of water were fun.  I missed a smell effect but am assured that's because my sense of smell wasn't up to the job.  I don't think Huxley would have been entirely satisfied but it was enough for me.  For once anyway.  I fear that the experience would quickly get boring so don't expect to try it very often.  Plus it's hideously expensive.

I enjoyed a wonderful SCO concert and was impressed as was this reviewer by just how much the musicians were enjoying themselves, It bodes well for Francois Leveux's return visits.  I've put them in my diary.

The second Jazz at St James concert was equally rewarding.  Brian Molley and his quartet played a very generous two hour-long sets, mostly his own compositions in a contemporary jazz style with a tinge of the other gained from the quartet's travels in India and elsewhere.  Here they are in Bangalore last year.

Preparatory to striking another blow in the St James Centre rebuild and the sometime, maybe, let's hope not never tram extension, Picardy Place has had its statues moved and its trees cut down.

Sherlock Holmes has been stuck in a storage cupboard somewhere but the Paolozzi pieces have been put in the gardens at Hillside Crescent/London Road and very lovely they look there.  The contemplation chairs are a welcome addition.

Pity about the Picardy Place trees but the Council has a two for one replanting plan which sounds good.  The reason given for axeing them now is that it had to be done before the bird nesting season got underway.  I synpathise. The pigeons who nested on my balcony last year have been doing their best to move in again and I've been fighting back.  I haven't seen them for a few days so perhaps the Beast from the East got them.  It's an ill wind and all that..

I can't tell how cold it is on my balcony because my thermometer is covered by snow.  I'm not particularly inconvenienced by the nasty weather.  I don't need to drive anywhere and I have in any case just disposed of my car.  I have done so not out of a fervent desire to save the planet though I do hope it will hang on for a few more years but I now use a car so little that it didn't seem worth the expense of keeping it going or, given its age, buying a replacement.

The snow has so far caused the cancellation of two concerts I had tickets for.  A blessing in disguise really since it meant that I didn't have to venture out into the cold night but could stay comfortably at home.  The major danger is that I will run out of milk for my breakfast cereal before the supermarkets have their supplies restored.

Before I disposed of my car I stopped by the roadside and took some snaps of the tailend of the Ochils near Stirling which, thanks to some clever software, I stitched together to make what I think is a lovely panorama.

This is Gean House in Alloa where a couple of dozen saxophonists congregated for a weekend of music making.  Much fun was had by all and the food and drink were excellent.

Instead of coming straight home on Sunday I went on to Glasgow to an SNJO concert at the Conservatoire.  It was a good decision because the concert was brilliant.  Tommy Smith had arranged Peter and the Wolf for the band plus a classical flautist since as he explained in a pre-concert chat none of his reed section could play the flute well enough.  Liz Lochhead had written a new text with a mildly Scottish flavour and it was delivered in bravura style by Tam Dean Burn.  Playing the piano was Makoto Ozone, a Japanese jazzman who has worked with the SNJO before and who had created the second work played,  a jazz version of Carnival of the Animals.  I loved it.

I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of weeks in front of my TV drinking in the thrills and spills of the Winter Olympics.  I loved it all but am unlikely to emulate the teeniest, weeniest Olympic manouevre  when I get onto the slopes in Austria next month.

One of the events I enjoyed most was the figure skating and coincidentally or not the film I, Tonya which deals with the notorious attack on an American skater to prevent her taking part in the Lillehammer games in 1994 was showing at the Cameo.  Tonya Harding was banned from competitive skating for life because of her involvement.  The film paints a picture of Harding's upbringing by an unloving, fiercely pushy mother and her physically abusive marriage which inspires a great deal of sympathy for her, or it did in this spectator.

I've seen more films recently in a bid to maximise the benefits of my Cameo membership before it runs out.  They are asking what seems to me too much for renewal this year.  One was another abrasive mother daughter relationship, fictional this time, entertainingly told in Ladybird complete with happy ending.  While in Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri the daughter is already dead and the black comedy is the tale of how the mother tries to force the cops to get off their butts and find her killer.  It's very funny.

I wasn't so keen on Phantom Thread, despite it being lauded by the critics.  While it's very beautiful and well acted and all that it was a bit dull.

The Grads had a couple of shows in the SCDA one-act competition this month and I managed to see them both and enjoyed them both and they came first and third which must be the best result we've had for some time.  I'm in the Grads production of Macbeth which is now in rehearsal though so far it's been focussed on jaw, jaw, jaw  Luckily I missed the session in which we were asked to associate a song with our character (in my case characters since I'm two) and blether about various other odds and sods.  I'm all for getting on with the action and drawing out character and relationships and meaning in the process.

That's on in May.  One of our Fringe shows will be a new play called Skirt written by Claire and it had its first airing at a readthrough last week.  She's tried quite successfully to pack a multitude of what we might loosely describe as women's issues into a piece intended to run for an hour and twenty minutes. Men do get a look in with some nice parts.

I could give you a day by day account of my holiday in Tenerife but let me save a few thousand words by posting some pictures instead.

A lorryload of bananas spotted when out walking

Something of a cloudy day but it was perfectly warm and the sand perfectly delightful if you don't mind the colour.

It even snowed one day but only at 12,000 feet.

One of the floats in the Three Kings procession.  Sweets were sprayed liberally over the crowd. A "shortcut" back to my hotel ended up in a taxi ride two hours later.

 Here are the extraordinary jagged ranges of spent volcanic peaks that I remember vividly passing as we sailed into Santa Cruz en route home from Kenya in 73.

I couldn't get enough pictures of gorgeous waves breaking on the rugged rocks that make up the coastline.

In contrast a path through a forest in the mountains.

Flowers in the aptly named Orchid Garden in El Puerto.  This is the garden of a private house built by a Scottish wine merchant in 1730.  It's been in British hands ever since and lots of household names have stayed there, Oscar Wilde and Agatha Christie amongst them. 

This chap's picture is pinned up somewhere in the garden.  I discovered that he was the founder of an industrial empire in Tenerife that persists to the present day. He arrived from Greenock aged 17 in 1816 and flourished.
These two articles give the lowdown.

The Hamilton Heritage

The Scottish Origins of the Hamilton family   

It's a beautiful place.  I'll be back.

These jolly fellows are the three wise men or as they are known here Los Reyes Magos. While you were footering about taking down your Christmas decorations last night for fear of incurring a year's bad luck they were parading through the streets of Puerto de La Cruz (and by magic elsewhere at the same time) bearing gifts to be opened this morning by the good little children of the town.

Unfortunately for those getting outdoor toys the winter sun has bowed out in favour of winter rain so they'll have to be content to whizz around indoors to the annoyance of their parents and the detriment of the furniture.

Arrived in sunny Tenerife yesterday and here's the view I woke up to this morning when I walked out onto the balcony of my hotel room.  Rather splendid, so long as the volcano keeps quiet. Though on second thoughts it would be splendid to see an eruption.

It's good to be in a position to unwind after the activities and indulgences of Christmas and New Year, indulgences mostly of an eating and drinking nature.  I had an excellent birthday lunch in the High Street before heading for Keswick where I ate several large and tasty meals over a period of four days in the company of Fiona, Connor and Ewan (for the first time in a few years) plus Ben, Amelia, Julian, Maureen, Claire and Patrick.

My next stop was Stratford upon Avon but the rail connections are such that it was easier to come back to Edinburgh, spend the night at home and set off next day than to go directly from Keswick.

Given the chaos on the network at the same time of year I experienced a couple of years ago and with Connor's "have a good journey" ringing in my ears as he dropped me at Penrith my spirits were dimmed when the first thing I saw on entering the station was a display announcing that my train was cancelled.

After a few words with the guy at the desk I settled down grumpily for an hour's wait.  But ten minutes or so later another passenger waving his phone about said "cancelled?. According to this (wave of phone) it's running, five minutes late but running.". And do it was. Grumps gone and home in good time.

I was going to Stratford to see the RSC's dramatisation of Robert Harris's trilogy about Cicero.  I had very much enjoyed the novels (and others by Harris who knows how to weave a good historical tale) and could see that putting them on stage (or on TV, is that to come?) would be tricky but potentially rewarding.

Indeed it was a great show.  Six hours not counting intervals spread over two evenings and yet large chunks left out, particularly of the first novel. I was briefly unsympathetic to part of the second evening when I felt there was rather a lot of running about to little effect but otherwise I have nothing but praise for the whole enterprise.  The trip was well worthwhile.

I'm almost tempted to go back to see their Macbeth but it's going to be broadcast to cinemas so I may save time and money by booking a comfy seat at the Cameo.  There are a lot of Macbeths coming up in 2018, including a Grads production which was unaccountably missing from the Guardian's enumeration of them the other day. I hope to get a part in that one.

Christmas

This is the result of a little photographic project that rather to my surprise I've managed to complete.  The photos were all taken in Princes Street Gardens on the same day of the month (with a couple being a day out) and at roughly the same time of day.

I'd like to claim that they were all the same aperture and exposure etc but that's a bit too technical and anyway I mucked about a little with the camera settings and don't know what's what.  That's the problem with being an ungifted amateur.

So the year is slipping towards Christmas and there have been the inevitable Christmas concerts including my own.  This year we played in Old St Paul's Church rather than in the hall and friends in the audience thought the sound quality better.  From the depths of the band you can't really tell.  I went to hear another local wind band the following evening in Greyfriars.  I thought the quality of their playing superior to ours but they fell down compared to us in not providing lashings of free mulled wine.

Though in fact we were a bit short in the lashings stakes.  I left it somewhat too late to join the queue and got some only through the charity of those already served.

The Grads got into Christmas spirit of sorts with their production of Reckless.  It's not about Christmas as such but it's set at Christmas.  I was at the readthrough some months ago and thought it rather a weird and unwieldy affair, decided not to audition for it but was very pleasantly surprised when I went to see it.  They'd made it a very entertaining piece.  Played in the round it was propelled along by a troupe of Christmas elves who whisked bits of set on and off, pushed a couple around in an open car and generally added to the fun.  I still thought it an odd piece but they definitely made a silk purse out of it, paricularly the final quite moving scene which brought out a tragic quality beneath the zany humour.

Tommy Smith is acknowledged as a great jazz performer but he's also a ccomposer of note and this month saw his most ambitious project to date.  Spirit of Light drew together the jazz singer Kurt Elling, Capella Nova, players from the SNJO and a number of other instrumentalists to present the words of writers as diverse as Liz Lochhead and Meister Eckhart in a Christmas celebration that is both secular and sacred.  I heard it within the lofty walls of St Mary's Episcopalian Cathedral which complemented perfectly the style of the work. It was excellent. 

The long shadow of times past has hovered over town for the last couple of weeks in the shape of Previously..., Edinburgh's history festival.

Amongst the plethora of events I attended several. They both entertained and educated. I learnt that there is a Roman fort in Bearsden, that the Jacobites at Culloden were not wielding claymores but firing the same sort of muskets as their foes, that Napoleon's main problem was an inability to stop when the going was good and much more.

What I expected to learn at a talk about King Alfred was the truth about the cakes, but they weren't even mentioned.  I didn't dare sully the fairly academic atmosphere by raising the issue in the Q&A.

The talks were a bit like the Fringe audiencewise although the audience were never outnumbered by the cast (usually only one) when I was present though some came damn close.  The best attended event to which I'd say a hundred or so turned up was a double act with Alec Salmond and Tom Devine.

In the first half Devine probed Salmond's journey to and through his political life.  With many amusing digressions and comments on the political personalities he had come across on the way we heard about his grandad's influence, his reason for choosing to go to the not overwhelmingly Scottish university of St Andrews and his various electoral campaigns.

In the second half Salmond took questions from the audience and dealt supremely well with all of them.  He finished off with a hilarious impersonation of Ricky Fulton's Reverend Jolly that made me regret very much that I didn't see his Fringe show. He's clearly a comedian manqué.

He'll be back at the Fringe next year but this time in a more serious vein talking about some Scots who are not as well known as he believes they should be.  James Connolly and Thomas Muir are two amongst those he intends to discuss.  I'll definitely try to be there.

The other Salmond activity that has aroused controversy and that he stoutly defended is his RT interview series.  I haven't seen any of them but I've set up my TV to record them from now on.  The first one I should see will be the St Andrew's night show.  You could hardly choose one more appropriate. 

History of another sort hit the Traverse bar this evening with the launch of the Scottish Jazz Archive.  This is a project to gather and curate memories and memorabilia of the Scottish jazz scene from its earliest days (thought to be the 1930s) to the present day and beyond.  If you can fight your way through the adverts you can read a little more about it in this Scotsman article and a website will eventually appear because this is intended to be a digital archive rather than a physical one.

As well as beautiful trees Autumn is giving us lovely skies like this one that I paused to take a picture of on the Mound.  As I stood there I was approached by a tourist looking for information.  He was sporting a dashing black baseball cap with a masonic logo in gold on it.  He explained that he had just come from the Freemasons Hall in George Street and was now looking for Lodge No. 1 which he had been told was in St. John St. near the Mound somewhere.

Well I happened to know that Lodge No. 1 was in Hill St. and the nearest St John's I could think of was in Corstorphine.  It took my smart phone to convince him about Lodge No. 1 and he set off back the way he had come.

But I hadn't been smart enough to check for a St. John St. because it exists and runs from Holyrood Rd. to the Canongate and it's there that you find St John's Chapel the home of Lodge No. 2 which is surely what he wanted.  Must brush up my guiding skills.

There's been lots on in the last few weeks.  I enjoyed seeing Trainspotting on the stage. It's an absolutely tragic tale really and I think that the enjoyement comes in much the same way as it does from a show like Downton Abbey in that you are looking in on a totally foreign way of life before going home to safely and comfortably back into your own.

I also enjoyed Cabaret.  I've heard the music often enough and in Kitwe bits of it featured in some of our own cabaret type shows and I saw the film years ago but I think this is the first time I've seen the stage show in its entirety.

I was intrigued by the opening which featured a giant camera shutter, surely a nod to John Van Druten's play I am a camera, itself a dramatisation of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin stories. I remember the play being presented in Kirkcaldy when I was in my early teens.  I remember it mostly because of my mum and dad exchanging glances as they declared that it was "not suitable" so I'm not sure that I ever saw it though I daresay my desire to do so was heightened.

The amazing Carlos Acosta was here with his troupe of Cuban dancers in a wonderful show made up as most dance shows are of a number of pieces.  I enjoyed them all but the finale in which twelve dancers threw neon lit litre bottles of water to and fro in a bewildering, complex and ever changing pattern while themselves being seldom still was breath-taking, though maybe it was stretching the definition of dance a wee bit.

I'd seen Ballet Rambert earlier in the month which got five stars from Claire who actually saw it twice.  She persuaded Phil to come along the second time but despite being reasonably enthusiastic it wasn't enough to bring him out for Carlos.

Psycho was screened in the Usher Hall with the RSNO playing the soundtrack.  It's still a pretty gripping film and as good a thriller as many more modern ones.  Unusually I saw another film with a live soundtrack, this time only one man with a piano and a set of percussive blocks.  This was the oldest extant South African film, made in 1916, called Die Voortrekkers.  I suppose we might call it a docu-drama but essentially it's a propaganda celebration of the northwards movement of the Boers seeking to carve out a home away from British control and their battle in 1838 against the Zulus at Blood River.  It was fascinating stuff full of that wild-eyed overacting that seems to pervade silent movies.

Another part of the British Empire has cropped up in a number of talks at the National Library that I've enjoyed, all of them featuring the exploits of Scots better known in India than they are here.  A chap called James Taylor from Kincardineshire has a giant statue in Sri Lanka where he is revered as a major force in developing the tea industry. (Funnily enough in Forres I came across the Falconer Museum named after two brothers one of whom was instrumental in tea development in India.)

Then a talk about five Fraser brothers who went off to India one after another to seek fame and fortune, with mixed results it has to be said.  An interesting book has been written using their letters found in an old trunk in the family home.

Finally Alexander Burnes from Montrose, a descendant of Robert Burns, who was in essence a British spy in what has come to be known as The Great Game when we feared Russian interference in India.  Lionised in his lifetime then according to his biographer the Victorians later downplayed him and airbrushed him out of history because of his racy private and not so private life.  His great claim to fame for my sons will be that he features in the very first Flashman book.

The trees in Princes Street Gardens were resplendent in Autumn colours as I passed through on my way to see The Death of Stalin. 

The film is a brilliant bit of comedy forged from the not at all funny jockeying for power amongst Khrushchev, Malenkov et al after uncle Joe kicked the bucket.

I was a bit disappointed with the National Theatre's much vaunted production of Hedda Gabler.  I'm not too sure why.  The Festival Theatre was not full and the mostly empty set stretched over the entire width of its very large stage.  Both factors I thought worked against the creation of the sort of atmosphere that the drama needs.  They might also have given some thought to the sightlines.  Not seeing the action on one side of the stage was annoying.

Our Fathers at the Traverse had a good theme to examine.  How to relate to those you love when you don't share their beliefs.  Two atheist sons of clerics in this case.  Alas I found their examination somewhat boring.

Thank God then for The Real Thing which gave me a thoroughly enjoyable evening in the theatre.  Stoppard writes with wit and energy whirling the English language around like an F1 driver.  A man who cares as much as I do for the proper treatment of the gerund and would never say less when fewer is required gets my vote every time.  But the play is not all shiny verbal surface. There is content.  His portrayal of the struggle to handle emotions and relationships and come out bruised but unbeaten moves even more than it entertains.   

I was moved too by Losing Vincent.  The publicity for this film was all about the vast team of artists who had worked on the painting of every frame.  So I went out of curiosity to see that, and indeed the form of the film is impressive giving us Van Gogh's glorious brush strokes throughout.  But the story of Armand's search for the truth about Van Gogh's death (whether that search really took place or not) was fascinating and painted a moving portrait of a lonely man who like other artists never saw his genius recognised.

I was down by Silverknowes golf course the other day, not to play though I must renew acquaintance with it sometime, but drawn out by the fine Autumn weather for a stroll along to Cramond.  It was windy enough to persuade me to put my cap in my pocket for fear of losing it but the sun shone, the views were magnificent and I felt jolly healthy at the end of it.

Elgin cathedral is a ruin but it has lots of fascinating bits and pieces on display.  My favourite was the stone figure of an archbishop from the top of his tomb.  The label on its case explains that it would have been highly coloured when first created but of course the paint has not survived the centuries.  However at the press of a button and by lighting magic the colour is restored.

Colour was pertinent to the touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire that was on at the Kings last week.  The play is set New Orleans and its main protagonist, Blanche, is a lonely alcoholic remnant of plantation society who looks back with regret on the days that there was a coloured girl to cope with drudgery.  She has been forced to throw herself on the mercy of her sister in a white working class area of the city. There is talk of niggers in the text.  We are clearly in a racially divided society.  It seems perverse then to practice colour blind casting in that context.  But they did.

I had other slight reservations about the show but the fact that the first half ran for an hour and fifty minutes and didn't seem a jot too long testifies to it's being a pretty good production.

The Traverse runs its Play, Pie and a Pint series of short lunchtime plays twice a year.  I took a raincheck on the Spring series but I've seen the first two of their Autumn offering and they've both been excellent.

Pleading presents a young couple in an Asian jail, heroin having been found in their luggage as they arrived from the Australian leg of their backpacking holiday.  Too bad it's one of those places where they execute drug smugglers.  A local lawyer is trying to help them.  They plead ignorance. They tell one story.  They tell another.  Aspects of their relationship are revealed.  Through the lawyer the prosecution offer a deal.  Plead innocent and die or plead guilty and spend life in the distinctly unappetising jail. They have differing views.  The truth comes out. Serious stuff.

Death figured also, not surprisingly given its title, in Love and Death in Govan and Hyndland but here with much comic effect.  It's a one man show in which the actor, Stephen Clyde, brilliantly takes us through his mother's terminal diagnosis and death with love and humour.  He moves skilfully from character to character; mother, doctor, senior consultant, auntie, brother and himself never putting a foot wrong.  It's very funny and ultimately life affirming.

Cockpit is a brave revival by The Lyceum of a brave play that hasn't been seen since its first airing in 1948.  There's a sympathetic and sensitive review here. 

I've had the great pleasure of listening to The Rite of Spring not once but twice within the last week.  The RSNO played it at the Usher Hall and then the orchesta of Scottish Ballet at the Festival Theatre.  They of course were playing to accompany dancers in what I thought was a superb bringing into flesh of the music even though I couldn't see the logic that led Christopher Hampson from the first part of his interpretation to the second.  Claire didn't share my enthusiasm and has written amusingly about it.

In other ways I've been busy:  a talk about tartan, a talk about a Scottish contribution to the tea industry in Sri Lanka, the museum's Jacobite exhibition, the City Art Centre's Edinburgh Alphabet exhibition, a couple of Spanish films (one good one not), a French film (enjoyable but about which I can recall more or less nothing), a round of golf, an afternoon of sax ensemble, a U3A Italian group (good fun), the start of an adult education Gaelic course (which promises to be entertaining but challenging).  These plus my regular band and sax lesson have kept me from being bored.

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words so I'm going to save myself some typing by posting a few pictures of my recent trip to Northern parts.  But first I'll break my golden silence by rabbiting on about the other excitements that have got me out of the house in recent weeks.

The Lyceum opened its season with What Shadows, a play from Birmingham Rep about Enoch Powell.  Ian McDiarmid's performance as Powell was terrific but the play was somewhat diffuse and went round in circles that were not always very interesting.  A tighter focus would have been welcome but I couldn't have been more gripped by the famous rivers of blood speech.

The Attic Collective's third and last show of the year was the eagerly awaited (by me) The Threepenny Opera.  So eagerly awaited was it that I sacrificed the first evening of a saxophone weekend to see it.  Alas I was a wee bit disappointed.  Some of the performances were exceptionally good.  McHeath, Polly Peachum and Mr Peachum in particular, and the on-stage band were great and I have to admit that the presentation's use of the full stage, the boxes and bits of the stalls was ingenious.  But.  Maybe it was just me.

The following morning I rose at dawn and headed for The Burn in Edzell to take part in the rest of the saxophone weekend.  I'd guessed that breakfast would be around 8 and arrived in time for that but I was in fact an hour early.  No matter, I rested.  The weekend went very well.  The Burn is lovely and proved much more comfortable in a bright September than it was in my previous visit in a cold and dismal February.  After the Sunday afternoon session instead of coming home I headed North of which more later.

I came home a week later in time for a super concert by the SNJO.  They were celebrating the music of Django Reinhart so they'd cut down on brass and added guitars, violin and accordion to the line-up.  A friend who was there felt that the two musical forces didn't combine well and came over as two separate units but I couldn't disagree more.  One feature of particular interest to me was that the accordion was played by Karen Street.  She's a lady whose arrangements for saxophone groups I've played quite often, mostly down south.

That concert was packed (helped partly by the SNJO's policy of free seats for school groups) unlike another fascinating concert by the RSNO.  This was of modern Chinese music by a chap called Xiaogang Ye who was there in person.  Although one piece made extensive use of a dozen or more Chinese percussion instruments his work is very much in tune with Western styles.  Indeed comparing his music with Benjamin Britten's Sea Interludes which was the only non Chinese piece on the programme I felt they could have come from the same pen.

It was a very enjoyable concert but the most sparsely attended I've ever seen in the Usher Hall.  The stalls could not have been much more than a quarter full and from where I was I could see about one third of the dress circle in which sat one solitary punter.  It was a real shame but there were quite a few Chinese in the audience, including the wife of a chap I met at the Napier jazz summer school, so at least the local Chinese community supported it.

My destination when I left The Burn was Banff.  I wanted to take an indirect touristy route but had forgotten to bring a map.  So I fiddled about with Google maps on my phone to decide on intermediate points and then connected up my GPS gadget.  That led me round and round the mulberry bush before I eventually found myself on a recognisable route to Aboyne.  It was pretty bleak and hilly and at one point my clutch was emitting burning smells and the engine was revving like fury while I crept up a hill.  I didn't relish being stuck for the night out here (no phone signal!) but fortunately after a recovery period at the top of a hill progress was resumed without incident and I rolled into my hotel just in time to eat before the kitchen closed. (They don't dine late in these parts.)

Banff Beach

Protecting Banff Town Hall

Duff House

Typical Landscape on Buchan Coast

Despite appearances a working trawler

Fraseburgh Beach

The town has been pretty quiet since the Festival ended and I've been slowly recovering from hyper-activity by practising sloth. 

Normal service is slowly being resumed.  The band has started up again as have my sax lessons.  I've put the clarinet back in its box so my Wednesday evenings are free for other things.  I've booked up various dance, music and theatre shows for the Autumn and I'm off for a saxophone weekend and a wee staycation shortly.

Some of my chums from the Spanish class I went to for years are now meeting monthly for coffee and chat and that's a rhythm I think I can keep up.  I've hardly spoken a word of Spanish for three years and when I've tried there's been a degree of Italian interference so a monthly douche will do me good. To blur my language landscape further I've signed up for a Gaelic course. 

It's also been a good time to catch up on exhibitions that have been running all summer. I caught the end of one at the Museum on the fascinating subject of an Egyptian tomb and what was found in it.  It made me feel that mummification might be a nice alternative to cremation when the time comes.  I also saw the exhibition Beyond Caravaggio.  I was struck by the modern feel of many of the figures in the paintings and the gorgeous capture of light by so many of those who learned from and/or copied the man himself.

I'm also trying to reduce the height of my books waiting to be read stack.  I've got through half a dozen ranging in subject matter from the history of computer programming (an enthralling read) to a spy story set in Paris ( not enthralling at all).

Like the rest of the family and all his friends I was relieved that the Houston floods in the wake of hurricane Harvey had left Ewan pretty well unscathed and that the subsequent hurricanes are heading elsewhere.  By the way I assume the hurricane namers have never heard of Irma La Douce.

I've seen several shows as a result of having a flyer thrust at me in the street.  It's as a good a method of random selection as any and none turned out to be turkeys.

My last was one of these, a musical with a simple story efficiently told and staged.  A young couple meet, discover they are both murderers, team up and dispatch a bunch of hitchhikers, find themselves falling in love, consider going straight, too late the law is close on their tail.  They commit suicide. The end.

Sounds a load of cobblers which I suppose it is but it was an entertaining hour and quite sweet.  It met with a rapturous reception from a full house of around 150 punters at this their last of 26 performances so they must have been doing something right.  It was called Buried by the way.

Adam is the exact opposite of Eve.  The gender change is female to male, the timescale is years not decades, the theatrical presentation is large and open not small and intimate, the acting is noisy and vigorous not quiet and reflective.  But the impact is the same.  You feel for them deeply and rejoice in their eventual liberation whilst quietly echoing Archie Rice's punchline "thank God I'm normal".  It's superb.  Too late now to see it in the Fringe but both Adam and Eve will be reprised at The Citizens in September.  Go west young man.

It's probably pointless talking about music and the hopes I had of learning much from the talk given by Sally Beamish and Evelyn Glennie at the Book Festival were unfulfilled, not to say dashed.

Another disappointment was Rain.  This was an object lesson, masterclass even in how many ways you can run about a stage for over an hour to very loud music without saying anything.  I couldn't even work out by the end why it was called Rain.

A much more jolly and rewarding hour was spent in the company of Nicolas Hytner former director of the National Theatre.  He's written a book about his twelve year tenure, some of which I'd heard read on Radio 4 so not all his anecdotes were new to me but even second time round they were fun.

Seagulls was also great fun but raised a question in my mind.  Was the intention to illuminate Chekhov's play The Seagull?  I hope not because it didn't.  But I suspect the play was just a hook to hang their anarchic and surreal vision on and in that it triumphantly succeeded.

The actress Harriet Walter has made something of a thing about performing male roles in Shakespeare's plays in recent years and shared her thoughts about that and other theatrical matters while promoting her book Brutus and other Heroines.  It was an interesting session though I can't say that I shared her enthusiasm for the all female Julius Caesar set in a female prison.

The Fringe is notorious nowadays for the number of stand-up comedy shows on offer, 144 pages in the programme against 106 for theatre.  I saw only one and even that was only half a comedy show.  The classicist, novelist and former comedian Natalie Haynes was at Blackwell's bookshop to publicise her rewriting of Oedipus the King as a novel and from Jocasta's point of view.  It was a mildly humorous presentation and I enjoyed her thesis equating Greek tragedy with soap opera.  I'd like to read Children of Jocasta but it will have to wait.

George Street's temporary installations were being torn down as I left Charlotte Square yesterday afternoon and scaffolding was being loaded onto trucks from a Bridges venue as I left Blackwell's in the evening.  That sad moment has arrived when it's all over till next year.  But not before I've seen my last show this afternoon.

There's a Turkish rug in my hall, a souvenir of my one and only visit to Istanbul nearly thirty years ago.  The fascination of that city came flooding back listening to Bethany Hughes race through several centuries of its history with a nod here and there to its present state.  She spoke solidly and enthusiastically for an hour without a note.

She's written a book which I'm sure I will read with interest and pleasure sometime but I have more than half a dozen to consume first so I didn't buy Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities.

Gruffdog Theatre gave an impressive performance of Peer Gynt.  It's not a tale nor a play that particularly attracts me.  It was seeing the company on the Royal Mile that persuaded me to give it a go and I was well rewarded.

This is very much an ensemble piece.  All cast members are in a basic costume of white top, grey knickerbockers and black pumps.  That uniformity extends even to eye make-up. They add odd bits and pieces as required to change character and a cap passed from one actor to another passes on the role of Peer.  Four actors in all play him.   They work on a bare stage with precise and atmospheric lighting.  Three triangular slabs on castors each bearing three eight foot high pieces of timber are manipulated to identify places now and then, for example a room in a house, a ship and a shipwreck.  Even simpler devices instantly set a scene.

There is music: guitar, violin, drum and voice.    They form and unform groups.  They dash or slide or crawl or jump.  They manipulate a giant troll king puppet à la warhorse and a smaller one for the result of Peer's dalliance with the troll king's daughter.

The acting is great.  What more can I say?  It's a masterly piece of work.

I soon identified the voice, indistinct and muffled as it was, as that of Cassius Clay (or Muhammad Ali as he later became) as I took my seat in front of a square platform on which stood a young woman.  I was at One Step Before the Fall, classified in the Fringe programme as dance/physical theatre.

It was very, very physical.  She expended tremendous energy bobbing and weaving her way around what became with the addition of ropes a boxing ring.  She propelled herself from the ropes on one side to the other with such force that one rope broke and the fixtures went whizzing off.  Fortunately they hit no-one.  This was more hunting like a tiger than floating like a butterfly but it was great stuff, a truly impressive show and I musn't forget the atmospheric and highly charged singing and playing of her off-stage partner nor the tubular bell clanging out the rounds.

The actress in The Last Queen of Scotland gave a less physical but equally intense emotional performance.  She was powerful, passionate and above all truthful.  Were it not that she was in her twenties and the events she was concerned with happened over forty years ago you could believe it was her personal story.

The expulsion of the Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin brought the subject of the story to a housing scheme in Dundee where she grew up and nursed an obsession with her past that a journey back to Jinja helped her become free from.

Having watched those events in the seventies from next door in Kenya and having shared digs at university ten years earlier with an Asian from Jinja (we often wondered what became of him) I felt almost part of the story.

Christine Bovill brought the golden age of French chanson to George Street with an hour long programme of songs by Ferre, Becaud, Trenet, Barbara, Aznavour, Brel and Piaf.  All my favourites were there plus a couple I didn't know.  She sang them like a native, despite being a Glaswegian, revealed considerable knowledge of the genre and entertained us with personal anecdotes in between numbers.

In Eve Jo Clifford presents a gentle and touching narrative charting her progress from a boy called John never comfortable in his own skin to her present contented middle-aged woman.  She has the advantage in telling her story of being an accomplished playwright and is supported by an excellent but simple staging.

In Douglas Maxwell's The Whiphand  a fiftieth birthday party disintegrates into a domestic squabble set against the moral case for making reparation for the family's apparent involvement in slave-owning several generations previously. Scars and hidden animosities surface and hypocrisy over modern misdeeds is uncovered as an excellent ensemble cast move surely through Maxwell's closely woven story.  Reparation may be on the cards but simple apologies for lesser evils are not forthcoming.

Not many world champions can have come out of Kirkcaldy and the least likely must surely be Jocky Wilson twice world darts champion.  Jocky Wilson Said has him reminiscing and hallucinating with only a cactus for company in the Nevada desert having lost touch thanks to the demon drink with the party he's travelling with to a tournament in Las Vegas.

Grant O'Rourke plays him as a warm, humorous and likeable man and also creates a wealth of characters from his cronies in the pub darts of Kirkcaldy where Wilson started to his rival and friend the Londoner Eric Bristow.  It's a lovely show full of fun but this is Jocky when he was doing well and says nothing of the downward slide in health and wealth that was to come.  Maybe that's material for a future work.

Though written in 1936 Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed until 1961 and made its first appearance outside the Soviet Union at the Edinburgh Festival the following year.  I spent that summer working in Edinburgh and remember standing in the Usher Hall (I assume a student concession in those days) listening to Shostakovich under the young Gennadi Rhozhdestvensky and falling in love with the music.  I think that was the Fifth rather than the Fourth however.  It remains one of my favourite pieces and I've heard it often since because it's quite popular.

The Fourth is not heard so often and given that it required the combined forces of the RSNO and the Mariinsky Orchestra of St Petersburg in the Usher Hall last night to provide sufficient players to satisfy the demands of the score I doubt if I will ever hear it again live in my lifetime.

From the opening bars which burst out in wave after wave of shattering sound to the final single note from the celesta with which the symphony ends I was transfixed.  A glorious piece of music.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham is not a household name in Scotland today but it should be.  Nicknamed Don Roberto from his years in Argentina he was adventurer, writer, politician, friend of both the great and the humble men of his day and well ahead of his time.  His great nephew Jamie Jauncey gave a sparkling talk about him at the Book Festival.  To everyone present's regret he hasn't yet written a biography but surely he will.

Former drama critic Robert Dawson Scott has written a most entertaining play.  The programme warns that Assessment is set in the future, but only just.  A pilot scheme called Pension Exchange is being run by a private company on behalf of the government.  This offers selected individuals the opportunity of commuting future pension payments into a large capital sum.  Alan McDonald, a man in his late seventies, is eligible because he has made a living will and declared that he would not wish to be resuscitated in the event of severe trauma.  The snag is that in return for the money he has to make a dignified exit and that he can't use the money himself only determine who gets it.

How did the company know about his living will?  Is that not a private matter?  His daughter, struggling to bring up two boys without a husband around and with grandad sharing their small flat has let the company know.

Very funny, with great characters and not without a thought provoking streak this has to be a popular choice for Scottish drama groups in future.  I've got my eye on the old man's part.

Another excellent show that combines fun and games with serious matters is Amy Conway's Super Awesome World.  Amy get the show rolling by telling us, quoting various research findings, that playing video games is good for us and describing her own back story of starting with a second hand Nintendo.  Then she gets the audience active.  She moves them about a bit, gets them flicking balloons towards her, reading cue cards in response to numbers appearing on a TV screen while she frantically performs some associated task dictated by a squeaky female voice coming from the TV.

She introduces the idea of the Samaritans for whom she says she is a volunteer and we become overhearers of telephone calls from those in need of listeners in between game playing episodes.  Subtly she turns into both caller and listener and finally poses enough questions to the audience about their experiences of feelings of inadequacy or depression or worse to end with everyone on their feet.

I finished the day in the Usher Hall with an orchestra and choir from Turin belting out Verdi's Requiem.  Very loud, very raw, very enjoyable.  I don't want to give the wrong impression.  They were belting it out, not me though I'd have liked to.

With some erstwhile clarinet class chums I went to a lovely concert in the oh so beautiful St Andrew's and St George's West by the Scottish Clarinet Quartet.  The music ranged from Indian raga to a Hebridean wauking melody and we encountered an Australian cartoon character with the delightful name of Vasco Pyjama on the way.

I ran from there to Charlotte Square to hear Michael Luders talk about Blowback.  In this book he argues that the roots of the current calamitous situation in the Middle East lie in past western interference. I'm 100% with him on that analysis but it's solutions we need and he offered none other than the passage of time.

Before our last performance of Outside Mullingar (received rapturously to exaggerate only a little) the cast watched Arkle's other show The Fair Intellectual Club.  This is a cheerful little comedy written by a twentieth century comedian Lucy Porter (who came along on her night off from stand-up) about an eighteenth century club for ladies who aspired to more than needlework.  Both shows played to good houses and were favourably reviewed here and here.

Sunday lunch to mellow jazz with friends was followed by The Fall from the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.  The cast come on tightly bunched together and move around the stage swaying and chanting like a Zulu impi.  One after another they break off from the group and introduce themselves.  The group breaks up and we find ourselves in a student meeting discussing the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town.

The play like the Rhodes Must Fall student movement expands into discussion of the decolonialisation (as they term it) of tertiary education in South Africa and charts much of the student protest there in 2015 and 2016.  The view is put forward that white privilege persists well into post apartheid education and a few swipes are taken along the way at well off blacks and coloureds (represented in the cast).

It's an enormous task to bring education to all in South Africa on an equal basis and this play does well to examine the issue in a vigorous, powerful and entertaining format albeit with little in the way of light and shade.

Summerhall can be relied upon to produce interesting if often baffling theatre.  A good half dozen audience members failed to last the distance at Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and slipped out more or less quietly as the show wore on.  Written by Witold Gombrowicz in 1938, Wikipedia tells me "it describes what the enslavement of form, custom and ceremony brings."

It's set in a royal court where a bored young prince decides for a joke of sorts that he will marry a lumpen, tomgue-tied young woman (played intensely by a strapping six foot lad with unruly locks in shorts and tee shirt).  This is met with severe disapproval by king and queen but they are persuaded to go along with it by their chamberlain on the grounds that it shows the prince as generous and noble-hearted.

That makes the play seem almost rational but it's an absurdist piece so the ebb and flow of the action, the incarnation of the characters, the language and dialogue, the bits and pieces of the in the round staging; all of it, is basically nuts.

I have to say I really enjoyed it though I'd recommend cutting a good thirty minutes.  And what does the aforesaid enslavement bring?  Death by choking on a pike bone in this instance.

Immediately before that I saw Black Mountain which has some affinities with Pinter in its disjointed, or rather uncompleted, dialogues and its sense of unexplained mystery and a growing feeling of menace.

It's superbly presented by Paines Plough in their Roundabout season at Summerhall.  The audience enter a tent full of swirling mists and the show literally cracks into action with a blackout that erupts with a flash and a bang.  The excellent light and sound plot adds great atmosphere throughout.

Rebecca and Philip are a couple who prowl uncomfortably around one another in a remote country retreat avoiding being explicit about their back story but damage has been done somewhere.  A third character, Helen, or is she Heather, appears to Philip and they too have some mutual mystery.

The three characters come together in a triangular confrontation, mist swirls, lights dim, the actors vanish, blackout, lights up to reveal an axe centre stage.

Loved it.

Jogging, part of the Arab season at Summerhall seems pretty straightforward in comparison.  It's a one woman show performed in Arabic with occasional bursts of English and French and projected subtitles clearly visible to all.  The audience are occasionally drawn into the action to read introductory pieces (in English) and in one case a man goes on stage to hold the actress's ankles while she performs some fairly orgasmic sit-ups.

It's quite a physical show because the format is explained as a woman in her fifties jogging around Beirut musing and we share her thoughts. She does run about and she does exercises but in the main storytelling sections she is less active.

She launches into the story of Medea and her murder of her children and segues into the murder (real event?) by a Lebanese woman of her children and her subsequent suicide.  Effected by rat poison in fruit salad and cream, three dishes of which she provides for the audience enjoining them to tuck in after the show.

With references to her sex life with her husband and her erotic dreams about the Lebanese Boris Johnson she gets to the penultimate story about a woman who lost two sons in war with Israel in 2006 and her third son in Syria in recent years. 

That takes us to the boats crossing the Mediterranean in which many sons are lost.

It's an absorbing show if a tad discursive, well performed by someone who in real life I'm sure we'd find feisty.

Nederlands Dans Theater in the EIF are quite simply wonderful.  Three diverse and beautiful, beautiful pieces performed by dancers with bodies so flexible their bones must be made of elastic.  Lovely music, light and sound.  Perfection all round.  But strictly non-narrative.  Make what meaning you will out of them.  Here's a taste.

The Queen's Hall morning concerts are a popular strand of the EIF music offering and generally a delight to the ear whether you get there in person or listen to them on the radio.  There has only been space for one in my diary this year.  It was an oboe and piano recital.  Apart from the occasional solo within it I've mostly heard the instrument as part of the blend of sound produced by an orchestra.

I know nothing about the oboe repertoire but the lovely music came from composers we hear less frequently than Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and the like.  They played Hindemith, Poulence, Dorati and others,  Some pieces were delicate, some vigorous, some fast, some slow, all beautiful.

I'd positioned myself near the exit after the interval for a quick getaway and a bit of luck with the buses got me down to the Royal Scots in good time for the one woman Richard III that was my next treat. It's a clever show.

As the audience enter they are greeted by Richard as though they were characters in the play.  I was welcomed as His Majesty King Edward IV, given a nameplate to wear round my neck and a little paper crown then escorted to a seat of honour.

The various principal characters were seated in a square of chairs encircling a small table and a swivel chair.  As the actor goes through the play as well as dragging her withered leg about she whizzes around on the chair.  The audience is enlisted from time to time.  We stand for the coronation for example.  She despatches two audience members to kill the princes in the tower.  Their killing and all the others are effected by clapping a sticky label onto the victim.

Here's mine, kept as a souvenir.  An excellent show.

Next stop the Book Festival for a talk by James Fergusson about his book Al-Britannia in which he describes his exploration of Britain's Muslim communities in an effort to uncover the truth behind the more lurid press stories we read.  He attends a Sharia council, takes part in the Ramadan fast, talks to various feared preachers and so on.  It's a fascinating insight and his conclusions are largely optimistic about the ultimate melding of Muslim and non Muslim into one British community.

I couldn't resist a Book Festival event called A Fifer Worth Following and it was well worth attending.  The story of the life of Lady Anne Barnard, born Anne Lindsay at Balcarres is fascinating.  She refused to follow the pre-ordained path of a Georgian lady of aristocratic but pecunious status.  Instead she became an avid and lively "eccentric aristocrat" in London society spurning proposals of marriage until at 42 she fell in love and married a man without money and 12 years her junior.  She travelled with him to Cape Colony and wrote extensively of their experiences there.

Indeed she wrote extensively about all aspects of her life and as well as correspondence and so on  left six volumes of memoir hitherto unexplored by historians.  These Stephen Taylor, who has written about her, would need a deal of editing if they were to be published but in the meantime we have his book Defiance which I am eager to get started on.

Half a dozen poets read work from both within and without a new anthology of poems about Edinburgh, Umbrellas of Edinburgh.  I particularly enjoyed the work of Harry Giles and a Glasgow lady whose name I have forgotten but will find out.

A Stool Against the Printed Rule is a two-hander about an imagined meeting on death row in the Tower of London between Archbishop Laud and Jenny Geddes.  The least said about this show the better.  You'd think they'd at least have given Jenny a Scottish accent!

Drainage Alley - a rehearsed reading from the Royal Court, plus our own Jimmy Chisholm, of a Cuban play about life in a less than prestigious Havana street in the uneasy borderland created by the Cuban/USA rapprochement.  Very worth seeing but it's gone now.  However the BBC were filming so maybe it will appear on the box.

What can I say about The Divide?   Well it's big.  So big that it's divided into two three hour sessions.  I very much enjoyed the first half when the situation was being set up and we met the various characters.  Great stuff I thought.  Coming back at 7.30 for the second half it took a while for me to recover my enthusiasm.  I began to lose it again as the play went past several jolly good points at which it could (even should) have drawn to a close.

The acting is super.  The girl who holds the whole show together telling the story in which she is a principal character is outstanding. I didn't lash out four quid on a programme so I don't know her name.

Outside Mullingar opened this evening.  We got a great reception.  The audience obviously enjoyed it.  They even applauded at the end of scenes. Could the Irish Times have got it wrong?

I went to a couple of things this afternoon.  In Praise of Useless Languages was an hour long conversation between an academic and a very large audience which could be summarised succinctly as "being in command even partially of more than one language is good for the brain".  No facts and figures were presented in support of this proposition and no voices demurred.  Boring.

The Quito Papers in the Book Festival was a touch on the boring side also.  Let's not have multinational franchise coffee shops but local establishments.  Hear, hear say I, thinking of my regret at seeing an independent cafe turning into a Pret a Manger in Lothian Road this week.  Strong on the problems of the modern city.  Strong on what we'd rather see.  Weak on how to get there.

Rhinoceros in the EIF is a cracking good production. The staging is superb, so imaginative in how the set mirrors the reduction of the human population to one solitary figure as more and more people gradually succumb to the epidemic and become rhinoceroses.  It's performed with panache and viewed simply as an entertainment on absurdist lines it's great fun.

That's how I enjoyed it, but I know the author's ideas and intentions were more profound.  There are many analyses available that bring those depths to the surface.  Here's a good one.

Ben Jonson's Volpone is revitalised and made palatable to a modern audience in Martin Foreman's production for The Grads.  The twists and turns of the plot in which various greedy Venetians try to outdo one another in currying favour with the allegedly dying Volpone, each having been assured by his tricksy servant Mosca that they will be the sole heir to his fortune, are ably directed and performed assuredly by a strong cast.

Everyone gets his comeuppance in the end of course, including Mosca and Volpone.

In beauty, the Grads other show, the protagonist, famous photographer Ty Jackson, doesn't.  But maybe there's no comeuppance to be had.  He's taking pictures of young girls but are the accusations of paedophilia warranted?

Claire Wood has written a believable story with well drawn characters and tight dialogue.  The show looks good.  The direction is sure-footed.  The cast are excellent.

It well deserves the three and four star reviews that have appeared on the web and in the press.

I was offered earplugs on my way into the Cantonese Opera Workshop's Macbeth with the advice that there was some loud drumming.  Maybe that came in the second half which I didn't stay to see.  The first half wasn't too noisy though I was using the earplugs.

It was similar to The Boor in style but not at all as well done in my opinion.  They'd changed the story significantly.  Macbeth is off fighting the King's enemies at the start.  He's not doing too well so Mrs. M sets off and rescues him.  On their return Macbeth expresses some degree of anger that an underling has received more praise from the king than he has.  I was a bit puzzled by that since he's awarded a golden sword for valour by the king shortly afterwards.  Anyway Mrs. M looks up the magic books and works out that they are destined to be king and queen.  She can't persuade Macbeth to kill the king so she does it herself with the golden sword.

The curtain then fell on the first act.  Metaphorically since it's an open stage, so open that the black drapes at the back don't stretch all the way across.  Left and right of the action you are treated to actors wandering about throughout.  There are longish, dark gaps between some scenes adding to that village hall feel and such furniture as is brought on for one scene is absolutely out of kilter with the luscious traditional Chinese costumes worn by the cast.

Like The Boor the acting is very exaggerated.  I don't object to that in its context but when a chap comes on and spends a good while alone twirling a couple of swords about I'm searching for how that is advancing the plot. The constant drumming and banging of cymbals to accompany the actors' gyrations were a bit of a strain too.  Overall I found it boring.

I couldn't see the second half being any more exciting so I left.

I was back next day to St Giles for another recital by the same pianist but this time as accompanist in a programme of songs called From Havana to BA.  Enjoyable, though I preferred the previous day.

The Free Fringe promised a programme of songs under the title Nostalgie taking us back to the cafes of Paris, to Piaf and Greco, very much a genre close to my heart.  When I got to the pub basement venue a magic show for kids had replaced the chansons.  Softening my disappointment with a G&T I watched.  The kids' reactions were more magic than the tricks but I didn't stay long.

Chechov's The Bear is re-titled The Boor in the Shanghai Theatre Academy's version but sticks faithfully to the story of a man demanding payment from a young widow of her late husband's debt to him, their arguments, their duel, the growth of mutual affection and the eventual happy ending.  It's done in what I'm told is Peking Opera style which fits very well since the play is essentially a farce and demands broad comedic playing.

It gets that in spades from the melodramatic fluttering of the heroine to the swaggering bravado of the hero and the athletic backflip of the servant.  He spends most of his time running around in a crouched position which I couldn't keep up for thirty seconds but he's clearly a fit young chap behind the white beard and oversized paunch of his costume.  Costumes and makeup are gorgeous.

There are a couple of puppeteers as well who provide a preface and epilogue as well as saying something at another point or two in the action.  The sub-titles were awkwardly placed so I'm not at all sure what they were telling us.

The dialogue is mostly sung in somewhat unattractively shrill tones matched by accompanying live music from strings and percussion.  All a bit loud for my taste.  I liked what I saw more than what I heard but the audience (at least 90% Chinese) loved it all.