After one of my Fringe shows I walked home via the Canongate and was entranced by the renovation of the physic garden and the Abbey Strand buildings.  The garden was opened to the public in November last and although I've passed that way since I hadn't noticed and I think the buildings have only recently lost a carapace of scaffolding, but for me recently often turns out to mean within the last year or three.

I had a festival packed weekend with a leisurely start at 11.30 on Saturday at the Book Festival.  They've moved from Charlotte Square to the Art College.  The Covid diminished festival fits into the space but I think it would be a bit of a squeeze if they were ever to welcome the crowds of the past.  However I believe the intention is to continue with the hybrid model that combines a limited number of events in which writers and audience are physically together onsite with many events that allow a worldwide audience and a worldwide body of writers to get together online.  

Thomas Pringle was a writer from the Borders who led a party of settlers to South Africa in 1820.  He was not much cop as a farmer and went off to Capetown where he was involved in running a school and running newspapers.  He fell foul of the colonial government and returned to London where he became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society.  Known, at least from a white colonial standpoint, as the father of South African poetry; literary awards are made there in his name to this day.  But he's not well known in Scotland.

Indeed he was unknown to Stuart Kelly, a Borderer himself and a literary critic who lives a stone's throw from Pringle's birthplace.  He was at the festival to discuss with Zoe Wicomb her novel Still Life.  At school in South Africa she had to learn a number of his poems by heart.  Intrigued by the man, his championship of native rights, the paradoxies of his life she has written a novel that weaves together real and fictitious characters in a time-shifting story that she insists cannot be characterised as a historical novel and which Scottish publishers turned down as being too difficult for the reader. 

I hope it's not too difficult for me because I bought a copy.

I suppose we could call the version of The Importance of Being Earnest that I went on to see an inclusive production.  Thanks to the conceit of replacements being needed for actors who hadn't turned up it included members of the audience. There was even an audition for the part of Miss Prism, the winner being selected by audience acclaim.

If these were plants they were very skilful actors indeed but I fear they were genuine punters.  I don't want to be negative about this production.  I'm sure it wasn't that easy to do. The audience actors clearly enjoyed their frolics on stage.  The audience were in gleeful fits.  A good time was being had by all.  I loathed it and left well before the end.

Now I didn't loathe the next one but The Laird Strikes Back struck me as much less entertaining than it might have been.  We meet Gussie McCraig, the sort of Scottish toff who went to Eton, hunts shoots and fishes, drinks to excess, condescends now and then to the odd Scots expression but strangles the vowels and holds opinions to the right of right.

He's practising a speech or presentation, swilling whisky and consulting notes as he does so.  He does that so well that I wondered if indeed he didn't know the lines.  But he inhabits the character brilliantly.  There's a videoed sequence of him on a Zoom call, sozzled and as we see at one point semi-clad.  Super acting but I couldn't for the life of me work out who the call was with or what its point was.

We see him later in Number 10 blethering on about what he said to Dom and how he sorted out Carrie while waiting to be fired for some misdemeanour.

Being fired leads to elevation to the Lords and a spot opening COP26 against a backdrop that unaccountably proclaims the conference to be being held in association with Italy.  Something to do with the Mafia?

Satire I think needs a much better defined target and a razor sharp delivery. But the actor was great.

Saturday night at Tynecastle.  I think only the second time I've been in the stadium.  This time at least it was to do with football.  In case you're wondering the last time was to watch rugby league with my late chum Dick Bowering.  The play Sweet F.A. is about the flourishing of women's football before, during and for a few years after the First World War before it was consigned to oblivion for decades.

A talented cast of about a dozen women act and sing their way through the story of the creation of a works team, their victories, their defeats and their struggles with the SFA.  Their individual backgrounds with husbands, brothers and lovers off to war and the close relationship two of the women develop are skilfully woven in.

The show is joyous, funny and moving.  Maybe a bit long when the cold wind of a Scottish summer evening blows through the park.

I began Sunday with Richard Holloway, everyone's favourite former bishop, talking to Joan Bakewell, one of my favourite former frequent faces on TV.  She's getting on a bit (88) and has downsized from a large Victorian house where she'd lived for fifty years to a ground floor studio flat and has wrtten a book about it, The Tick of Two Clocks. 

The discussion moved from this particular experience to the more general problems of old age both for individuals and for society, to the question of assisted dying. What's the difference Joan asked, between upping the dose of morphine in the name of palliative care and the same manoeuvre to take the pain away forever.  What indeed?

Black is the Colour of my Voice was the choice of our Thursday online theatre watching group a month or two back.  I missed it but probably would have enjoyed it.  I most certainly enjoyed it live.  I count Nina Simone amongst my favourite jazz singers and Apphia Campbell's voice has similar strengths but the focus of the show is not on Simone's jazz repertoire or that aspect of her life but on her beginnings and on her growth through the civil rights movement. Campbell shows herself to be an accomplished actress as much as singer.

The show ran for a bit longer than billed and I had to sprint up from the bowels of the EICC and walk vigorously to the Filmhouse bus stop where after only two minutes wait an 11 whisked me off and deposited me at the door of St Andrew's and St George's West with seconds to spare before the Guitar Recital I had come to hear started.

I was greeted by name.  You recognised me, I said.  The lady on the door didn't seem to realise this was meant to be a joke and informed me in serious tones that I happened to be the only single (ie unaccompanied) attendee on the list.

The recital was lovely.  A complete contrast to the show I'd just come from.  Quiet, contemplative classical pieces.  I didn't have a programme so I've no idea what the guitarist played.  He didn't announce any of the pieces.  Indeed he didn't so much as say hello or goodbye.  He just melted on and melted off.

Then to the Castle Terrace muti-storey carpark rechristened MultiStory for the nonce.  Rituel was a dance-like piece in which four young men, assisted at times by a guitar player or by a soundtrack, played out the sort of male bonding games that characterise the growth from childhood to adulthood.  It was excellent and the release of a helium filled balloon into the sky at the end was a beautiful moment though no doubt environmentally questionable.

Back to the Book Festival for a discussion between Alan Little and Nick Bryant about the latter's When America Stopped Being Great.  Bryant has reported from America  since 1984 and regards the roots of Trump's ascendancy as dating back decades to Vietnam and earlier.  This was an interesting conversation and on the day that Kabul fell to the Taliban the book's title could not have been more appropriate.

In the week of the Plymouth shootings Screen 9 also resonated with the present.  It's an account, in the words of survivors, of the mass murder of twelve individuals and the injuring of many more at the midnight premiere of a Batman film in Aurora, Colorado in 2012. 

You're offered popcorn as you enter what could well be a cinema.  The four actors appear on stage below a screen on which a blurred image is being projected.  They recount how they spent the day of the screening; how they were looking forward to it; how they'd decided to go; how they prepared.

Lights go down.  The actors take up positions amongst us in the audience.  They tell us what happened.  The teargas canister.  The shots.  The blood.  Their friends, relatives dying beside them.

Back on stage the aftermath; the grief; the questions; the guilt; the ongoing fear.

This is a fine piece of theatre that to a British audience, even with Plymouth a live issue, causes us continuing puzzlement at the role of guns in American culture. 

The festivals are back and crowds of visitors with them. Not in quite such overwhelming numbers as we've been used to in recent years but enough for the Grassmarket to be packed with outdoor diners on a sunny Saturday. 

 The Royal Mile has it's entertainers again, who like policemen get younger every day.

Not everyone enjoys the shows they go to see and some go to extreme lengths to leave the venue.

Luckily most of the shows I've seen so far have been worth the investment of my time and treasure.

I started off with Phantasmaphone at the French Institute.  Alone in a little cubby hole just inside the building you pick up a phone and have a fifteen minute chat with someone in Paris about whatever you like but which ends up with them reading you a poem.  The reading will be in French but you can chat in English though I gave my French a whirl in what was the first conversation I've held in the language for two years.  A great start.

A little later came Granny Smith, also at the Institute.  The billing reads "Join us for a show full of humour and gentle instruction on language and cooking."  What I hadn't picked up was that it was really a kids' show.  In fact that made it even more fun.  The actress (English but working in France for thirty years or so) explained that the show had been developed following requests for a show that would help with language learning.  So she potters about getting up in the morning, having a cup of tea and so on the while getting across various French words.  She has the whole audience up doing a French hands kness and boomps-a-daisy at one point.

The centrepiece of the show is the making of a cake and by this time she's got three kids on stage reading the recipe, mixing the ingredients and generally having the time of their lives.  Three adults in the front row were handed a pear and a peeler each and instructed to "épluchez les poires et enlevez les trognons".  It's pretty obvious that means "peel the pears and take out the cores" but I don't know that I'd ever come across the word "trognon" before so the language learning objective was met in my case at least.

Unfortunately there was then a fire alarm and we all had to leave the building.  We hung about for a while chatting and one little girl who'd been sitting near me and sticking her hand in the air whenever a volunteer was called for and who had obviously been deeply disappointed at never being chosen bravely went up to Granny and asked if she could take part when the show resumed. 

I had a lunch date so didn't wait for the resumption.  I've since had an invitation from the Institute to go again but I doubt that I will though I highly recommend the show even if you don't have a kid to take you.

In the afternoon I saw Moonlight on Leith.  This had a faint whiff of Under Milk Wood about it as the doings of several denizens of Leith are displayed and in the heightened language of the narrative.  There's not what you'd call a plot but there's a romance here and there, a glimpse at interconnecting lives, animal as well as human and the exposure of the nasty developer who wanted to tear down the red sandstone parade in Leith Walk but was foiled by the community.  Ably presented by recent graduates of acting courses offered by Napier and Queen Margaret universities. 

I thought I was going to see a play but Love in the Time of Lockdown was a sketch show.  Some of the sketches were quite substantial though and one quite a moving riff on loneliness. The accent in general however was on humour.  Even the slightest was entertaining and very well played by an excellent cast.  The opening sketch was love blossoming between a man and his lady vaccinator which she explains as he goes off happens several times a day.  My own particular favourite was the woman in love with her car who it turned out returns the feeling and has a voice with which to tell her so. 

Miss Lindsay's Secret at the Netherbow was the sad story told through letters to her of a romance that never flowered. Her young man left Glenesk to seek a fortune in the Yukon gold rush at the beginning of the twentieth century and conducted a correspondence over a period of years.  All we know of what she said to him is conveyed by what he said in reply because she kept his letters but we have no idea what happened to hers.  He talks about how he longs to come home and how his luck is bound to change soon but it never does.  The letters stop or she didn't keep them or they got lost after fifteen years or so.  She died unmarried still in the glen at 85.  He also died unmarried in Canada never having been home.  As well as two actors there was a musician on stage whose playing sometimes for my taste intruded on what was a fine if depressing production.

It hasn't all been about festivals.

You no longer need to book an entry slot to the Botanics so I had a pleasant stroll around them last week and went on to Stockbridge where I bought some tasty bread and cheese and things.  I had a delicious dinner at the Outsider.  I was supposed to go on to a show but lingered over dinner instead.  It turned out to be a good choice because I'd have missed it anyway.  I thought it was at the Pleasance, not far from the restaurant.  But it was at "The Pleasance@EICC",  a much further away venue.

I had a rehearsal (online) for a short podcast play and I went to the dentist.

Back to the festivals for my next post.

 

The Forth Rail Bridge from underneath with a glimpse of the two road bridges upstream taken from a wee boat on which I went for a wee excursion one recent sunny Saturday.  The intention was to go with Siobhan.  Indeed she had organised the trip but was unwell on the day so I went alone.

The Maid of the Forth took us under the rail bridge and downriver to Inchcolm, rounded the island and then up to and under the two road crossings and back down to the Hawes Pier at South Queensferry where we had embarked.  It was a lovely sail.  You can spend time on Inchcolm and catch a subsequent sailing back but tickets for that option were sold out.

When I was a child excursions to Inchcolm ran from Aberdour and I visited the island that way probably more than once.  I also remember travelling on the ferry between Burntisland and Granton.  The world's first roll on roll off rail ferry ran on that route but that was well before my time.  It fell out of use after the rail bridge was built.

But there was a passenger and vehicle ferry which I travelled on when I was at primary school.  There's not much about it on the internet. According to my researches it ran for only a couple of years from 1951 to the end of 1952, although in The Scotsman in the summer of 1950 there are adverts for excursions from Granton to Inchcolm and for a service to Burntisland.

One post on the net recalls using the ferry for summer holidays at a grandparent's house in Burntisland where they were joined from Friday to Sunday by their father.  Another says that the service was popular on a Sunday when only bona fide travellers could get a drink and then only in a hotel bar.  A substantial detachment of policemen were apparently deployed to meet the last ferry as it docked at Granton on a Sunday night to welcome the returning drinkers.

There's a picture of one of the ferries, the Glenfinnan, here and another of her leaving Granton for India in 1954 (sold on presumably) here.  

I found mention also of a catamaran service in 1991 on the route.  I don't remember that at all but I do remember a brief trial by Stagecoach of a hovercraft service between Kirkcaldy and Portobello.  According to The Scotsman the trial did not result in a full service because Edinburgh City Council refused planning permission for a hovercraft terminal in Portobello.

The festivals are all doing their best to present something this summer despite Covid.  Much of what is available will be on-line but some are in-person events.

First to get going was the Jazz and Blues Festival.  They offered 42 gigs.  All were available on-line either streamed as they happened or on demand afterwards.  You could get that for the bargain price of £40.  I don't know how many live in-person events there were but I went to three.  They were held at The Roxy and were very well organised with respect to Covid restrictions and they were pretty good musically as well.

I had a day out that was almost like a pre-Covid experience.  I went to an enthralling exhibition at the Museum about typewriters that had on display very early models and more modern ones that I recognised.  There was quite a lot about the social impact they had, particularly how they provided a route to economic independence for many women.

Then I had lunch al fresco in Victoria Street before heading to the National Library to see two exhibitions.  One was Petticoats and Pinnacles whose virtual opening I posted about recently.  There's more about the women who feature in the exhibition here.

The other was about Henrietta Liston focussing on the years she spend in Istanbul (then known as Constantinople).  She accompanied her husband there in 1812 when he was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte.  It celebrates the publication by Edinburgh University Press of her Turkish Journals 1812 to 1820 but there is some additional material about her origins in Antigua and her travels in North America.  Very interesting and a lot more is to be found here and here.   

I saw a couple of plays on-line.  Bitter Enders was billed as a black comedy.  The setting was a Palestinian house that had been half taken over by Israeli settlers.  A dividing line ran through the living room and the comedy and the blackness were supplied I suppose by the dilemma the Palestinian family found themselves in when a doll was thrown over the line in a fit of temper by one of them.  We never saw the Israelis unfortunately.  That might have offered an opportunity for substantially more comedy and blackness than we got.

The other was a Young Vic production from 2014 of A View from the Bridge.  I thought it was tremendous and the Guardian of the time agreed with me and gave it five stars.  Not all of our theatre viewing group agreed, mainly because of the stripped down staging.

The Lyceum/Pitlochry Soundstage play for July was Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil, a story of devotion to lower league football and the love of a daughter for her father.  It was funny, moving and thoroughly enjoyable.  What's more it introduced me to a Scots usage that I had hitherto been unaware of.  Returning to Cowdenbeath from Los Angeles for her father's funeral the protagonist (played beautifully by Cora Bisset) is asked about "the purvey".  By which is meant the food and drink served on social occasions, in this case a funeral.

Much attention, including mine, has rightfully been paid to the Olympics these past ten days or so.  I'm not much of a football fan but I turned to Eurosport to watch the Copper Queens, Zambia's women's team, in their first match.  Up against the Netherlands, 100 places higher in the FIFA rankings the outcome was never in doubt.  Indeed they got thumped but they did put 3 goals past the opposition and the game was so enjoyable that I decided to watch their second match.

This was against China, 89 places higher in the rankings.  Barbra Banda who scored the 3 goals against the Netherlands produced another hat-trick here and as the match approached its close Zambia led 4-3 but handball in the goalmouth gave China a penalty and led to a 4 all draw.

Again it was an enjoyable game to watch so I was eager to see how they'd do in their final group match against Brazil, 97 places higher.  Maybe 15 minutes into the game a courageous save by Zambia's goalie ended with her being stretchered off, a Zambian player being sent off (a harsh decision) and Brazil being awarded a free kick just outside the box from which they scored.  It was 11 girls against 10 for the rest of the match but Zambia held off the might of Brazil till the final whistle going down only 1-0.

Claiming third place in the group they deserve a hero's welcome when they get home. 

I've watched a whole bundle of other sports.  The sailing coverage has been particularly good with excellent and exciting on the water filming, good graphics and intelligent commentary.  I enjoyed seeing two 13 year olds taking gold and silver in skateboarding but I feared for the competitors as they took tumbles on what seems to be concrete.  Gymnastics I always enjoy and fencing repaid the hour or two I spent watching that.  BMX racing was new to me but was a great watch and I believe the BMX freestyle is even more exciting.  I was struck by the elaborate costumes worn by some lady shooters.  I couldn't for the life of me see what they contributed but maybe they're just meant to look impressive.  I was sorry to see Djokovic not achieve his golden slam but not as sorry as he clearly was when he lost the compensatory bronze.  But I suppose he can afford to smash a racquet or two.  Even straightforward running and swimming has entertained.

I've watched most of that on laptop or tablet because my telly broke down more or less simultaneously with the start of the Olympics but I got a new and bigger one on Friday which improves matters.  It seems huge to me but I'm sure I'll get used to it and it's still a 10" smaller screen than calculation recommends for my viewing position.

I usually find myself doing a tax return about this time of year and this time HMRC told me I owed them 35p which I duly sent by bank transfer.  I think they could have let me keep it.

One of the Covid rules that has been most irksome socially has been the limitation to three of households eating together in a restaurant.  That has now been increased to four and I duly took advantage of it with lunch at La Casa in Leith Walk yesterday where four of us enjoyed the birthday lunches we've been forced to miss since whenever.

 100 years ago a plebiscite was held in Leith to decide on an amalgamation with Edinburgh.  Despite the good burghers of Leith voting six to one against the proposal, parliament passed the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension & Tramways Act in 1920 and the deed was done.

To Leithers it still rankles like a vague memory of a football failure, but to commemorate the centenary an online exhibition called 100 Days of Leith was created.  I came across this somewhat late but worked my way through it day by day and thoroughly recommend it.  There is a great deal of interest in its 100 pages about Leith, both past and present including a picture of the town seen from where the Water of Leith enters the harbour.  I often walk alongside the river down to there so I took my own picture one evening from the same vantage point.

The Covid restrictions still limit social activites so the various in person engagements I've enjoyed over the past weeks; barbecue, afternoon teas, restaurant visits, social drinks and more recently an overnight stay have all involved only the permitted number of people from the permitted number of households.  Cultural entertainment has been exclusively online but that is about to change I'm glad to say with the advent of Edinburgh's festivals.  Reduced in size and scope and as hybrid as the last year's education they nonetheless offer the first opportunity in a long time to go out to a show.  My first will be Soweto Kinch at the Roxy on Saturday.

Online I've seen a number of plays whose names I will record.  It seems the least a good diarist should do and will help me find out what they were about since even now my memory of them is dim.  The Merthyr Stigmatist, LIT and Possible I saw.  Parlour Song I tried to see but the website concerned was uncooperative.

The memory is still bright of the talk given online by Mollie Hughes who was opening the Petticoats and Pinnacles exhibition at the National Library of Scotland.  The exhibition is about Scotland's pioneering women mountaineers and Mollie is a modern version, albeit not Scottish although Edinburgh based.  She had climbed Everest twice by the age of 26 and followed that up a couple of years later by skiing solo from the coast of Antartica to the South Pole.  If someone can play rugby for Scotland after three years residence then the sooner Mollie does that the sooner we can add her to the list of Scottish mountaineering heroes. 

I also enjoyed very much the six part biography of another hero on iPlayer.  A literary hero this time though a tough guy to boot.  The story of Hemingway; his wives, his travels, his writings, his mental health was fascinating.  It must be over 50 years since I read any of his work but the series will drive me back to it I think. 

Wimbledon was back after a year's absence and there was much lively, skilful and exciting tennis to watch.  Andy Murray provided something of a helter-skelter ride for his fans but it was good to see him in action again.  A number of British players gave a good account of themselves with three of them getting as far as the mixed doubles final.  Undoubtedly the star of the tournament for British tennis fans was Emma Raducanu.  Born in Toronto to a Rumanian father and a Chinese mother she's been fully Britishised by the Borough of Bromley since she was two.  She's a pretty girl whose delightful smile belies her fierce intensity on the court.  That intensity carried her through three rounds and had it not been for the breathing difficulties that forced her to withdraw in the fourth she might well have gone further.  In a couple of years time I hope to see her and Coco Gauff fighting it out for Grand Slam honours.

On the men's side Djokovic took the singles title by beating Berrettini.  It was a good match and while Berrettini was fantastic I don't see Djokovic surrendering his place at the top of men's tennis just yet.

I spent my first night away from home since before the pandemic in Fife then the next day travelled via the Falkirk Wheel and The Kelpies to spend my second in Keswick.  I'd gone to Anstruther to meet up with Fiona and Ben who were spending a few days in Scotland.  

The East Neuk was as beautiful as ever as was Keswick.  I'd seen the Falkirk Wheel before but this was my first time up close to the Kelpies.  Unbelievably lovely. 

 

                          

It didn't take long after my visit for Glasgow to be placed out of bounds to travellers from less Covid afflicted areas but it wasn't me what done it guv.  Fortunately most of the rest of the country remained open and I made my second out of Edinburgh excursion to the place pictured above.  It may look as though I had gone to foreign parts but it is in fact a Japanese style garden not far from Dollar.

Established 100 years ago but having suffered neglect and vandalism since the death of its creator in 1949 it has been being brought back to life over the last few years.  It was established by one of those indomitable Victorian lady travellers, Ella Christie, who visited Japan in 1907.

There's an interesting article under her name on Wikipedia but there is this even more interesting and informative article which contains a lot of extra information including the somewhat dotty behaviour of her father in his later years and how she went to law to have his will overturned to prevent herself from ending up on the streets.

Although general merrymaking has opened up a touch more we are still afflicted by the need to open accounts and QR code ourselves daft to be served as much as a coffee.  One sunny afternoon with friends in the Teviot House garden bar the ordering app was particularly recalcitrant and digitally mangled my two payment cards and my Paypal account till we had to call for help from the staff.  "You can always go up to the bar and order you know" she said.  We didn't but next time we'll forego the electronics.

The net has been a bit kinder.  I saw an excellent production of The Importance of Being Earnest from the USA.  It was a 2011 production directed by the late Brian Bedford who also played Lady Bracknell.  First produced in 1895 the play wears its years lightly and Wilde's wit continues to sparkle. 

Kafka's novel The Trial turned into a play by Steven Berkoff  was I thought terrific.  On a bare stage with the only props being door sized rectangular frames manipulated by a carefully and imaginatively choreographed cast whose control of mime and movement was impressive Josef K lives out the nightmare of his arrest on unknown and unknowable charges.

Here's what the East Productions version that is available from Digital Theatre looked like.

Another great show was Hindu Times, one of the Lyceum's Soundstage productions.  Written in thick Dundonian and played in accents to match it portrayed a roistering Saturday night by the Tay in which Hindu gods fused into local lads about town.  It reinforced the impression of strong writing that Jaimini Jethwa's earlier play, The Last Queen of Scotland at the Fringe in 2017, made on me.

But there was a dud.  I forked out a donation to see a production in English of La Scozzeze by Goldoni mainly because of my as yet unconsummated appearance in The Venetian Twins. (Arkle's production by the way has now been kicked further into the long grass and may emerge in Spring 22.)

La Scozzeze was a student online Zoom production so perhaps I expected too much.  The play seemed pretty boring to start with and the cast and director failed to lift it.  Try as I might I couldn't watch it all.

 

The recent relaxation in Covid restrictions which included permission to travel without any good cause beyond one's local authority boundaries coincided with the National Theatre of Scotland's production of Ghosts.

The ghosts in question were the traces of slavery haunting Glasgow's Merchant City.  In something like a promenade performance a downloaded app on your phone would lead you through the streets listening to the story of slavery and with the wonders of augmented reality transforming the city on your screen.

Naturally I jumped at it and set off to Glasgow.  Andrew came up from Ayr.  We lunched in a restaurant for the first time since "eat out to help out" then launched into the promised land of augmented reality.  It turned out to be the dampest of damp squibs.  At location 1 nothing appeared on my screen.  At location 2 a few squiggly yellow lines which I interpreted as the bow of a ship, wrongly as I learnt later.  At location 3 nothing.  At location 4 some lapping waves at the bottom of the screen and pinpricks of white light that might have been meant to be stars. At location 5 some of those squiggly yellow lines appeared on the Museum of Modern Art's pillars and we cried  "hold, enough!"  The building should have crumbled into dust before my eyes as I discovered when I watched one of the online performances intended for those with hearing and vision problems.  I wasn't terribly excited by the audio either which Mark Fisher in The Guardian described as poetic rather than dramatic.

Casting that disappointment aside we set off in search of a drink.  That was harder than you might imagine.  Glasgow was en fête.  The streets were awash with outdoor drinking facilities all of which were crammed full but eventually we got into a marquee in Buchanan Street, navigating our way through opening accounts and scanning QR codes en route.

That's been the big excitement of the last few weeks - outdoor drinking.  I've done a fair bit in various spots in Edinburgh, some I confess where it may have been officially discouraged.

Nothing in the way of theatres, concert halls or cinemas has yet been open so I've had to fall back on the internet like everyone else.  Some good stuff some bad.  

Tennis Elbow is I believe painful and the play of that name in the Lyceum's Soundstage series was just that. 

A Splinter of Ice about a meeting between Graham Greene and Kim Philby in Moscow some years after the latter's defection was quietly engaging to someone who vividly remembers the headlines in the newspapers he was delivering when Burgess and Maclean took flight.

Pink Mist about the post conflict stresses on men deployed to Afghanistan (and their families) was very good and had echos of Black Watch about it.

Phèdre had a set that I really liked and I liked the play as much as I like all the old Greek stuff, that is not a lot try as I might.

Hymn was a bromance worth seeing.  This review tells it all.

All My Sons and Private Lives had the excellent productions that their status as classics entitles them to and Into The Woods which is surely on its way to being a modern classic had the most wonderful staging in the open air theatre in Regent's Park backed up by first-class performances.

Iphigenia in Splott was a tour de force of a one woman show in which the protagonist suffers more slings and arrows than your average punter but will not be defeated.  The connection to the old Greek stuff it was explained to me lies in the meaning of the name Iphigenia. Look it up.

I was delighted to catch the film Colette which I missed in the cinema.  It stars one of my faves Keira Knightley who deserves the Guardian's plaudits.

I suppose heartwarming is the description that we should give to Queen of Katwe a film based on the true story of a young Ugandan girl from a poor background who turns out to be an ace chess player.  It was a very enjoyable film, well produced and well acted as you might expect from Disney.

I've had my second Covid jag and an eyetest after a two year lag though it seems my eyes haven't suffered much and life has gone on. 

I enjoyed the Masters golf though I've already forgotten who won itt

The clocks have changed, Melville Drive is full of flowers, Spring is here.  The city's open spaces look prettier every day and even its citizens are a bit more cheerful.  I've been out and about more often, finding new walks along the cycle paths between here and Newhaven and revisiting spots in the south of the city that I haven't been to for ages.  I even climbed Blackford Hill one day and my knees complained for days.

Theatres and concert halls are still closed but online fare continues to be plentiful.  I enjoyed Yerma and Phèdre from the National Theatre, The Band Played On from The Crucible and Covid Fan Tutti from Finnish National Opera.  I was less enchanted by The Picture of Dorian Gray from a clump of theatres, Virtual Vanya from The Lacemarket and War of the Worlds from Arkle.  

From Scotland with Love was a documentary film full of fascinating archive material that shows just how much the country and our lives have changed over the last century and how much the spirit remains the same.  Well worth a watch and a listen to the superb soundtrack here.

The two works I have enjoyed most in recent weeks were both plays to listen to not watch.  Angela, a joint production from The Lyceum, Pitlochry Festival Theatre and others was a delicately written moving story showing the Angela of the title as a vibrant young woman whose later life is afflicted by dementia.  It's an autobiographical piece by Mark Ravenhill clearly written with love.

The other was a BBC dramatisation of Anna of the Five Towns.  It's a wonderful novel set in the industrial turmoil of the Potteries in which that turmoil is mirrored in Anna's relationship with her tyrannical father and the oppressive religious forces that bear on her.  When I lived near the Potteries in the 60s I was a fan of the Victoria Theatre which under Peter Cheeseman produced many excellent plays around local themes.  I've no doubt I saw a version of this novel there but the play that sticks in my mind is The Knotty, a musical about the North Staffordshire railway. It's an early example of verbatim theatre and I've just discovered that a recording is to be found on Youtube.

 Perhaps the oddest thing that has happened to me since I last posted is that I have been robbed of three prints that hung amongst several others in the corridor outside my flat.  One was a framed A4 print of a Jackson Pollock, one was a cheapo cheapo frame containing three Roy Leichtenstein postcards, yes POSTCARDS, and the third I'm ashamed to say I can't remember what it was despite having passed it every time I left or entered the flat for years.  A secondhand shop might part with a fiver for the lot if only the few secondhand shops that still exist were not closed by Covid.  I must assume they were taken by an impoverished lover of modern art.

The cops came and had a look around and talked to my neighbours but unsurprisingly didn't hold out much hope of recovery.  I've filled the spaces they left with even cheaper frames containing photos from old calendars that surely will not tempt anyone.

When Ewan told me he was planning to sail from St Petersburg to Venice I was mightily impressed.  Even when I learned this was Florida not Europe I was still impressed.  The voyage is over now and thanks to tracking technology a landlubber like me was able to enjoy the trip.

Since there's no scale on the chart above here's a picture that gives a bit of geographical context.

Thanks to the Covid restrictions I've not been out of Edinburgh, barely out of the house in fact let alone on the high seas but the time will come.

An early excursion when we are released will not take me very far but I must see what has been described as "the most important Japanese garden in the western world" which happens to nestle at the foot of the Ochils. Who'd have believed it?

The Japan Foundation tours a selection of films around the UK roundabout now.  I managed to see only one last year and somewhat to my surprise, because it was an animation telling a to me totally uninteresting story about a school dedicated to gambling, quite enjoyed it.

This year the films are all available online.  I booked six and have so far seen five.  I'm not ecstatic about any of them but I enjoyed the family drama One NIght well enough and I found Labyrinth of Cinema unusual and engaging though it was too long and a better knowledge of Japanese history than mine would have helped.  Miyamoto and Soirée I didn't enjoy much. A lot of screaming and fighting.  Farewell, billed as a madcap comedy failed to raise so much as a titter and I couldn't bear to sit through it all.  There are thoughtful, well informed and extensive reviews of those films on the internet that find a lot to praise in them so hunt them out rather than take my brusque, ill informed and partial view.

After Shrapnel came Roulette.  This figment of Claire's imagination was a mating game, played on Zoom but this time in the form of a webinar which allowed participants to control the order of events and pick a winning couple.  My participation was limited to prompting at some rehearsals being too far over the hill to have been considered when it was being cast.  When the senior citizen remake comes up though!

I enjoyed a TV series - The Serpent.  Based on real events it was about a French criminal who went off to Bangkok and got into the business of robbing young backpackers in Thailand and other parts of Asia.  He murdered most of them. Although l say I enjoyed it I found it quite disturbing and I was very glad to learn from the credits at the end that he's been in prison in Kathmandu for some years and is likely to stay there.

Prompted by hearing Sophia Loren on Desert Island Discs I watched a couple of her films which were available to stream through my subscription to the British Film Institute.  One film was Two Women, a serious film about a woman and her daughter caught up in the miseries of the final days of World War Two.  She got an Oscar for that.  The other (Marriage Italian Style) is a delightful comedy in which she plays opposite Marcello Mastroianni, an actor I admire a lot.  He plays something of a rogue but she gets the better of him in the end.

The Thursday night theatre crowd gathered for Roulette and has also watched The Poltergeist, a very well performed hard hitting tale of a young man's disappointment at how his life has turned out and the resentment he feels towards his family.  It's a painful tale brilliantly told.

Good Grief was a double-hander and a much more convential story of love and loss.  Well enough performed but not that exciting.  The most exciting double-hander of love and loss playing recently however has been the Sturgeon and Salmond story.  I found the committee hearings riveting.  Will heads roll?  Will the goverment fall?

Here's a poor delivery rider trying to read his phone to find out where he's got to struggle to next through the snow.  Luckily for him the snow only lasted for a few days.

Winter sports resorts throughout Europe and in Scotland as well have had buckets of snow this winter but thanks to Covid have made no money from it.  Competitions have continued but without spectators.  I've been watching the World Alpine Skiing Championships from Cortina which happens to be the last place I went skiing so I've actually skiied on some of the same snow.  Not so fast nor on the steeper sections but still.

I've also tuned in to the Australian Open Tennis.  There they had spectators (a fraction of the usual number) until a case of Covid turned up and the state of Victoria closed down.  

It's carnival time but most places have cancelled their usual festivities including Venice where friends of mine tell me the city is much pleasanter without crowds of tourists.  (There are still a few and shops, bars etc are open during the day).  I can sympathise with that view but on the other hand as a tourist I like the liveliness of crowds.  

My chums have been having some instruction in Italian from a school where I spent a week in 2015 and have discovered that I feature on the school's website.  

On-line theatre going continues.  We visited the Globe to see Two Noble Kinsmen.  This is a silly tale part written by Shakespeare but it's a jolly romp with lots of sparkling performances.  Two one-acts from Mull theatre were very good if a little serious.  

A tale of murder by the name of Traces set in Dundee was well told on BBC iPlayer and I owe some TV channel(s) or other thanks for The Post and for Snowden.  The former stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks and tells the story of the publication by The New York Times and more particularly by The Washington Post of what became known as The Pentagon Papers.  These revealed systematic lying by the US government about the Vietnam war.  I'd seen the fim before but it was well worth a second viewing.  

Snowden I didn't know.  Apparently it didn't do too well at the box office but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It tells the story of Edward Snowden who leaked classified information about mass surveillance by the US government to the press, The Guardian in fact.  Naturally the US wanted to prosecute him and naturally he tried to flee their juristiction.  They revoked his passport and he got stuck in Moscow en route to warmer climes.  The poor chap is still there.

The most ambitious and most unusual show I saw online came from the Manipulate Festival.  Called The End of TV it tells a pretty straighforward story of industrial decline and its effect on an old lady and a younger one whose paths intersect.  In short it's the death of the American dream I suppose.  It's well described and reviewed here.  I felt it was much more medium than message, too much more.

Since I last posted I haven't done anything quite as exciting as the walk I described then.  With a Covid 19 jag in prospect (mine is due on Wednesday) I've been keeping an even lower profile than before, thinking it would be more than annoying to catch it now.  The weather has helped.  It's been largely inclement so there has been little temptation to go out.  I shop infrequently and early.  That's a habit I'd like to keep going when life returns to normal but will it ever return to normal.

Fortunately entertainment and diversion has continued to be present in abundance and I've collaborated ever so minorly in Claire's latest theatrical enterprise by prompting at some rehearsals.  Roulette presents on-line dating encounters and it promises to be a fascinating show in which the sequence of events is determined by audience votes.

More conventional shows that I saw in January were:

Sunset Boulevard from The Curve in Leicester.  This was a beautifully presented Covid safe version of the Lloyd Weber musical, itself based on the Billy Wilder 1950 film, that the company had staged a year or two ago.  Billed as a concert performance this production was fully costumed and while basically performed in the round it took full advantage of The Curve's auditorium to expand the action outward from the central stage.

Swingin' the Dream from the RSC.  This was more truly a concert performance, and was what's more billed as a work in progress.  The original show of this name was a 1939 Broadway jazz infused version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Despite the strength of the cast and the music it folded after only 13 performances and almost no traces of it persist.  What the RSC, in collaboration with the Young Vic and New York's Theatre for a New Audience, are doing is putting together the fragments that we do have.  It was fun and I hope they get further.  The Guardian has an interesting article about it and an even more interesting photo of Loius Armstrong as Bottom surrounded by the fairies. 

L'École des femmes from the Odéon Théâtre de l'Europe. A modern dress #Metoo version of Molière's comedy about an older man raising a young girl to be an innocent and free from guile marital partner for him when she's just the right age.  Of course a young man crosses her path and the best laid and all that.  It's still available on vimeo with subtitles and worth the watch.  I first saw this play at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 1981 with Pierre Arditi playing the old man. I'd gone there with the theatre going group from Paris that I was member of.  They arranged group tickets for shows, fixed transport and hotel etc.  I think it was probably only for a long weekend but it was a great excursion.  I don't remember much about the production.  It took place in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes and involved a trapdoor.  That's all I remember. Pathetic.  Since then I think I've only seen Liz Lochead's version, Educating Agnes.  What I remember about that production was that it was not wonderful.  I don't think I've seen Kemp's version, Let Wives Tak Tent though I'd like to.  Molière seems to work well in Scots.

Dalloway from Dyad Productions.  A film of their Fringe production it's a one woman adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel.  I thought it was excellent and I'm not a great fan of one person shows but Rebecca Vaughan portrayed the characters both male and female extremely well.  Subtle changes in the way she held herself and well controlled changes of voice brought the disparate protagonists to life.  I also enjoyed the text.  I haven't read the novel and I don't suppose I ever will even if I bring into action my retirement at 80 plan that envisages me doing nothing but read thereafter.  It's still available, click here.

I watched a handful of zoomy shows from the vast selection at Online@theSpace.  They entertained but haven't stuck in my memory in more than a fragmentary way.  What's new there I hear you say.

The National Library of Scotland have brought their talks online like so many organisations and I attended a couple but found them unexceptional, nuff said.

Claire organised an online Burns Supper which was great fun.  There was no actual supper.  I nibbled some bread and cheese and imbibed a fair swallie of usquebah.  We had a Scottish themed quiz.  I came last equal.  Siobhan sang a song.  I recited/read the Address to the Haggis and Tam o' Shanter.  

More Burns came in the shape of a book by John Cairney that Fiona sent me.  It's an account of the years he spent doing a show or rather shows as Burns around the world from it's beginning at the Traverse in 1965.  I devoured the book.  I enjoyed all his stories and was more than a little tickled at his account of meeting Brian Aherne in Geneva for it is to my mother's admiration of him that I owe my name.  

The usual New Year festivities were cancelled this year though some unofficial fireworking took place on Calton Hill at midnight on New Year's Eve.  Pretty extensive in fact and with some very loud bangs for half an hour or so.  The police must have decided in a spirit of hogmanay bonhomie to let it fizzle on and out rather than close it down.

The official celebrations took a different and beautiful form.  150 drones lifted off from a Highland location and made pretty pictures in the sky to the accompaniment of music and poetry.  The screenshot above is an example.  You may object that the Forth bridges are not Highland bridges and of course you are right.  The patterns were woven up north but some were superimposed on equally beautiful filming of Edinburgh and the bridges where drones buzzing around would have contravened who knows how many byelaws and regulations.

I don't know how long the videos will remain on the web but it really is worth taking a look at the display and the fascinating little "behind the scenes" video.  Click here and prepare to wonder.

Earlier in the evening with my theatre viewing chums I watched Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art.  It's a play within a play structure that portrays the (fictional) meeting of W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten after a twenty five year rancorous gap.  Wikipedia covers all the bases in explaining the plot, the themes dealt with and the critical reception both of the original production in 2009 and of this 2018 revival.  I suppose I was entertained but I wasn't overly enthusiastic, probably because none of the themes particularly engage me.

I'm hard to please but easily moved by sentimentality of which there was none and which is also scarce so far in Mad Men, the first three seasons of which I received as a Christmas gift.

I've finished the first season and am warming to the show.  I found it very difficult to enjoy earlier on because I despise almost every character.  Their attitudes and behaviour are awful and I'm dismayed to think that they were tolerated even encouraged in the bad old days around 1960.  Then in my teens I was oblivious to it, but maybe Madison Avenue's habits were not mirrored in Kirkcaldy.  Nonetheless the series is getting a grip on me. 

There's been a little snow around and on one snowy morning I went out for a stroll, camera in hand looking for some snappable views.  The streets were fairly empty as I walked through the New Town towards Canonmills and I loved this gate with its built in address.  Alas it's now known prosaically as 35 and 37 Rodney Street and no art or craftsmanship has been deployed in informing us of that fact.

But more people were around as I took the route from Canonmills (where the fruit and veg shop, the friendly cafe and other little businesses have been obliterated in favour of yet another character free block of flats) by the river towards Warriston and St Mark's Park.

The reason was obvious as I got closer, lovely snowy sledging slopes covered in kids enjoying themselves while groups of their adult handlers stood around chatting.  I narrowly avoided being swept off my feet by one young lady bombing her way across my path towards the Water of Leith.  She managed to stop in a flurry of snow and apologies a lot further short of it than another youngster I watched who ended up inches from the edge.   

I threaded my way through the happy throng to encounter more people coming into the park from the other direction.  I hope for their sake and mine that they were all free from infection.

Time has rushed on since I last posted.  Most of my regular commitments faded away as the Christmas holiday season approached but they've just been replaced by a greater consumption of radio, TV and internet based couch potatoism.  No long healthy walks to speak of but occasional forays to local beauty spots such as Princes Street Gardens, Lochend Park, Leith Links and Porty Promenade,

But I'm happy to report that some of the slack has been taken up by The Antiquary which together with other books purchased earlier in the year has been sorely neglected.  I find Scott a bit heavy going (not quite as heavy as Dickens) but sticking at it I should finish it within the next few days.  His stories are excellent but tend to be overlaid with meanderings that suited the tastes of a 19th century audience (understandably) but nor mine.

I'm surprised that unlike Dickens and Austen, Scott has not attracted the attentions of film and TV adaptors to any great extent in recent years.  

I haven't seen much theatre worth writing home about but I have enjoyed some excellent films.  Most recently Some Like it Hot and Calamity Jane which featured amongst the BBC's festive offerings.  The tale of two musicians fleeing from Chigago gangsters by disguising themselves as women and taking off for Florida in a female band is surely one of the most entertaining films ever made with stellar performances by Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

The Deadwood Stage, My Secret Love and The Black Hills of Dakota are songs I was very familiar with but I'm not sure that I knew they came from Calamity Jane, which I don't remember having seen before.  Doris Day is brilliant as the deerskin clad, pistol toting, tall tale telling cowgirl in love with the wrong man who sets out to save the local saloon keeper's skin by bringing a famous stage performer whose cigarette card picture has set the men of Deadwood's pulses racing, to sing and dance in their very own town.  She gets the maid rather than the madam but everything turns out fine in the end.

There seem to be several films called Adoration.  The one I've recently seen thanks to my Bfi Player free trial is about a teenage couple. He lives with his mum in the grounds of a mental institution.  He becomes obsessed with a girl patient.  They run off together and bad things happen since, despite her claims that the world is plotting against her she's obviously nutty.  I thought the film was nutty.

From the same source came two excellent Japanese films.  In Departures a young cellist is forced to return to his childhood home town to look for work when his orchestra goes bust.  He gets a job whose nature he conceals from his wife and which causes his best chum from the old days to cut him.  As an encoffiner he finds himself preparing bodies for burial.  As shown in the film this is a beautiful and tender ritual and his wife, who has shot the craw when she discovered what he does, is reconciled when she sees him at work on his own father who had also shot the craw from the family home when the cellist was a child.  It is a beautufil, delicate, tender and moving film though as the Japan Times makes clear fiction and real life don't always coincide.    

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian says of Still Walking " this gentle, lovely film is impossible to watch without a lump in the ­throat."   I entirely agree so I'll let you read what else he has to say rather than stumble through a description of mine.

I'm going to pass over the German film festival with this screenshot of the films I watched.

They were mostly OK though I'd give Naked Animals a bodyswerve if it ever comes your way.  An intriguing aspect of the festival was that the two films that I had to pay for, the others being free, I had to book via Ayr Film Society.   It was something of a revelation to read that they've been going for almost 50 years and to skim through their programme.

Diana Rigg died this year so a number of TV programmes have marked that by repeating interviews and showing things she was in.  In Mother Love she played a woman whose anger at the break-up of her marriage became an obsessive need to keep her son away from all contact with his father. He sees him in secret and when he marries persuades his wife to go along with the deception.  Of course it all unravels and chilling consequences arise. Flashbacks helpfully show us that Diana's character was not very nice even when she was a little girl.  

Scottish Ballet produced a film that melded parts of their Nutcracker and The Snow Queen productions together and fixed the blend by the device of having a young boy wander into a theatre and come across characters from those ballets.

Dancing of an entirely different sort came from a BBC Alba programme about the Moulin Rouge. This was a 2019 programme that followed the activities of three Scots girl who dance there during the celebration of the institution's 130th anniversary.  A fascinating programme. 

In his day he was the highest paid entertainer on the planet and would surely have applauded the enterprise and spirit of our girls at the Moulin.  Radio Scotland celebrated the 150th anniversary of Harry Lauder's birth in Portobello with an absorbing look at the man's life and work.  The closing moments of the programme in which we heard an orchestrated version of one of his most famous songs contained a message for these Covid times.

                                Though the way be long  

                                 Let your heart be strong

                                 Keep right on to the end of the road

This is a corner of my lounge transformed into a set with lighting rig for my appearance in Shrapnel, the play that Claire wrote about life under lockdown and which was presented online to quite a substantial number of people.  The cast of eight were together in a Zoom meeting acting away while Claire's dad magically scraped the appropriate combinations of characters for each scene out of Zoom and fed them to the world via Youtube.  The whole thing was topped and tailed by scene titles, music, cast list and so on plus an invitation to donate to our chosen charities.  The critical reception was quite good and audience reaction very positive.

Here's how the audience saw it.

After that finished I returned to being a consumer rather than a provider of entertainment.  I watched the last of my Trollope DVDs - The Warden and Barchester Towers, wonderful stuff with a sublime portrayal of the slimy Mr Slope by Alan Rickman.  The films were shot at Peterborough Cathedral and coincidentally I had just seen a TV documentary which had whetted my appetite for a visit and the DVDs reinforced my wish.  As soon as Covid lets up I shall make a plan.

The Citizens streamed a filmed performance of Fibres.  The play is about how a man's exposure to asbestos affects himself and his family years later.  Not a cheerful subject but a good production and the writer slipped in a reasonably happy ending. 

The SCO continues to provide music online and their concert featuring music by Anna Clyne and Benjamin Britten was delightful.  You can listen here and then maybe drop them a bob or two.

There's been a French film festival on and I watched two features and a collection of shorts.  La Bonne Epouse was a feeble comedy about an institution preparing girls to become perfect little wives.  It ends with the girls, the headmistress and her nun assistant heading for a national homemaking exhibition in Paris just as the 1968 student disturbances were getting underway.  I forget how it happens but they throw off their bourgeois carapaces, abandon their bus and stride through country lanes determined to join the revolution, dancing and singing the while in what, like the pastel shades the film is shot in, I took to be a nod to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.   

Felicità was a degree, but only a degree, more up my street.  Ex jailbird father and eccentric mother who enjoy pranking one another and pre-teen daughter Tommy who doesn't want to be late for the first day of term get into scrapes of one sort or another. They need to flee the country but delay for a day to let Tommy achieve her wish. Dad gets her there in time in a stolen car, goes back to jail but the loving family is reunited when he comes out.  Not very good nonsense really. 

Of the ten shorts two were excellent, two very good.  No descriptions but names and trailers that may jog my memory at a future date.  Pile Poil,  Une Soeur, Mon p'tit Bernard, Le Chant d'Ahmed, 

I saw a weird thing called The Kids are Alright by an outfit or three called  Encounter, Fuel & Northern Stage in which a man dressed as a woman danced around a small patch of grass, shrubs and trees outside some houses pursued by a woman who was mostly bent double and from time to time used an American accent to contribute to their dialogue.  From looking into the matter it seems I may have seen only the third act of a play dealing with bereavement.  Indeed the dialogue which I thought echoed Becket in its incomprehensibility but lacked his humour did include references to death.

Chagall's painting and other art works are lovely but that hardly seems sufficient to explain why someone would write a play that relates the events of a period of his and his wife Bella's life.  It was charmingly done and I suppose made points about the value of art, freedom of expression, anti-semitism and whatnot but The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk didn't do a lot for me.

But I enjoyed it, as I did a winetasting on Zoom which didn't do a lot for me either given my nasal inadequaces and my insensitive palate. 

On the film front I scooped up a Black Friday bargain.  The British Film Institute who inundate me with emails and whose beguiling catalogue has long tempted me extended their free trial subscription offer by a month so I signed up.  So far I've focussed on Japanese films but there are lots more goodies available.

Off to Perth concert hall tomorrow (virtually) to join the SNJO in celebrating their 25 years of existence.

 

I was out the other day and came down the Mound where the Christmas tree is rather forlornly waiting for its lights.  A good metaphor for life under Covid.

Not that my life has been particularly lightless with so much going on online.  The Venetian Twins, abandoned at a late stage of rehearsals in March is now back in rehearsal on Zoom with a target production date of March 2021 and Shrapnel, in production via Zoom and Youtube as I write, has occupied me for the last few weeks.   

I was fairly sure that no other amateur group was producing anything online for the public but then I came across The Bachae.  However since this is a production by final year acting students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to my mind it qualifies as amateur only in the strictly "not getting paid" sense.  Ancient Greek theatre can bore the pants off you but I thought this was a first rate production and it held my attention.

It was well acted, beautifully costumed and subtly lit. It looked lovely throughout with the single exception of a rather tacky looking plastic sheet stretched between two towers for one scene.  A gauze suspended from the flies would have looked so much better.

What didn't hold my attention terribly well was Chichester's production of Crave by Sarah Kane.  The critics raved about it and I bow to their opinion, humbly admitting that the sight of a poor actor beating their head on a moving walkway and moaning with despair didn't move me.  Hopefully in the dark of an actual theatre in the midst of an audience gripped by tension I'd have felt diffferently.

I've just watched Lament for Sheku Bayoh from The Lyceum.  We might think of Sheku as Scotland's George Floyd.  He died while being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy some five years ago.  What exactly happened and why is still clouded in a fog of contradictory assertions.  The Lament doesn't give an answer but repeatedly and powerfully asks the question and broadens the landscape to probe racialism in Scotland.

What stikes me about this case as it has in other circumstances is the length of time wasted in enquiries behind closed doors, reviews carried out by interested or partial parties before a full public enquiry which it was obvious from day 1 was needed is launched.  The good news is that that has happened.  The bad is that it is expected to take several years over the job.

The Portrait Gallery is one of my favourite spots so I hastened to visit when it reopened.  They've set up a Covid safe route around most but not all of the gallery and I enjoyed seeing again so many historical characters, wondering every time how life was for them and in their day.  One lovely portrait is of Allan Ramsay's second wife and this brief Youtube video fills in some interesting background to their relationship.

I'm an occasional attendee at gallery events and talks but despite much such material being made available online I'm failing to keep up.  I saw an interesting talk from Washington about their gallery but there are many more that I've missed.

I had a flu jab recently which I'm hoping was a dry run for a Covid inoculation, but be that as it may it took place near Easter Rd stadium which is a stones throw away from Lochend Park which I had never visited, so I went. Like Pilrig park earlier this year it was well worth the effort.

Another thing that was well worth the effort, not that much effort was involved, was to attend the Zambia Society Trust AGM.  I've been a few times in person and combined the trip with a visit to friends in Brighton or my brother in London.  My Brighton chum is now living in Lusaka so I wouldn't have seen him even if a trip to London had been possible.  The online meeting was very well organised and I did see a couple of chums in the gallery view but we didn't communicate.  There was a good canter through the various projects that the Trust supports.  In the grand scheme of things they may be small beer but they do an enormous amount of good.

In additon there was a fascinating presentation about work being done (not by the Trust) to extend the tourist potential of Livingstone.  Every tourist who goes to Zambia visits Victoria Falls but the town of Livingstone which is only a few miles away doesn't benefit a great deal.  Yet it is of significant historical interest and this project aims to build on that by restoring historic buildings, developing a tourist trail, deepening relations with organisations such as the David Livingstone centre in Blantyre and so on. The work that has been done so far at the museum is impressive.

The last time I went to the AGM the London Jazz Festival was on and I went to several events with David and Sally.  This year it was online.  I loved Bill Laurence playing piano at Ronnie Scott's, the saxophone of Samuel Eagles and the band Still Waters.  I wasn't quite so keen on Liber Musica but not to the same extent as the person whose comments on the live chat were deleted as they posted them.  On exasperated fan eventually said "why don't you just listen to something else rather than slag off these musicians".  Very sensible advice.

There was some homegrown jazz to enjoy as well.  Playtime gave us an excellent Mingus tribute from Pathhead village hall and a group of talented young musicians present a concert celebrating Art Blakey at the conservatoire.

The amazing resource that is the BBC iplayer gave me my treat of the month, a Japanese film called Our Little Sister.  Tender, moving, joyous, a real cinematic jewel.  It is set in a seaside town of under 200,000 people not very far from Tokyo which made me think that if and when I manage to do a language course in Japan it would be much better to do it in a place like that rather than in a major city.