Got onto the stage at 9.30 last night for a tech before tonight's performance. All went well so tonight we do our one performance. Of course if we do it well enough we'll have the excitement of taking the show to Cupar Corn Exchange at the end of March. The last time I was in Cupar Corn Exchange must have been in the late 50s for the jiggin.

My brother asked me how we had done in the Bafta/Orange 60 second film competition. I had to admit that we got nowhere but my curiosity was aroused so I had a look at the winning film. It's really good and cleverly adopts the 60 motif. Have a decko.

Just for comparison here's ours. Strange that they both feature candles being blown out. We were surely on the right track.

Anyone who knows me knows that I can't abide litter. A large metal piece of litter turned up outside the front door a few days ago, a LIDL supermarket trolley. It failed to disappear so yesterday I decided to do something about it. My thought was to ring the nearest LIDL store and ask them to remove it. Well they don't list their stores in the phone book and although you can find the stores on the internet there are no phone numbers. I did find a blog for LIDL lovers though. I have one LIDL-loving friend but out there is a whole community. To give them their due the blog is not wholly hagiographic. They do tell you which products to avoid.

No joy with the phone then so I set out this morning to push the trolley down to the store at the Foot of the Walk. I felt a bit of a twat but raised only one comment, which unfortunately I didn't catch, from an inebriated baglady. At least I thought I'll get a quid for my trouble when I slot the trolley into a rank of its fellows. No such luck, the quids had been forced out of all the slots I could see. Clearly there are LIDL haters too.

Work in Progress is the name of a one-act play in which I'm exposing myself this week. It's the Grads entry for the SCDA one-act festival. The play consists of a dialogue between the writer of a piece of detective fiction and his characters. It's being done in the style of the 1940s film noir. Private eyes in those days were cleanshaven thus the exposure.
Roll on Friday when I can start protecting myself against the winter winds again.

Mr. Abu Bakr may not be 100% right about Britain being a police state but the legislation that is meant to keep terrorists and other baddies from moving their ill-gotten gains around doesn't half get your goat.

I've earlier mentioned my difficulty in opening a savings account. It's got worse. They have now asked me for documents which for perfectly good reasons I can't provide. Either a personal cheque drawn on an account in my name with another UK bank. Why would I have another current account in the UK? Isn't that more a money launderer's trick. Or a tax document for the current or the next tax year that matches my application details. Well I haven't got around to telling them that I'm here yet so those documents have a Manchester address which is not one of the addresses in my application.

So to review the situation. I cannot transfer a small amount of money which they are holding in one of their piggie-banks into another of their piggie-banks. This from the bank where I have had an account for over 40 years, a bank where I was once an employee, a bank who lent me money to buy a house and, the final irony, a bank that rang me a couple of months ago when I temporarily had a largeish sum in my account and asked if I'd like them to transfer it into a savings account.

Of course if you complain they shrug their shoulders and say that they don't make the rules, they just apply them. What a pity they weren't drafted in to look after the pallets of 100 dollar bills sent to Iraq.

Whew!

All pictures back in place. That was exhausting.

Various people have told me that they don't see my pictures and I suspect that's because they were stored on another webspace, not on Blogger's servers. So I've decided that when I put them back I'll try to get them onto Blogger's server. That means I won't be able to put them back "en bloc" but will have to edit each post that has a picture in it.

I've started successfully and am working backwards.

I've accidentally deleted all the pictures from this blog today. What a twit. I'll see if I can get them back.

Tangled up in the war against terrorism and money laundering today.

I decided to open a savings account with the bank that I've had a current account with for over 40 years. I went on-line. That needs three separate passwords so you'd think they had some authentication of who I was when I got through. I filled in the form as best I could. Like most computer forms it really needed a box where you could write an essay explaining why the answers you'd given were not quite the answers you'd have given if their form hadn't been modelled on a strait-jacket.

So today I got a letter. OK life can't be paper-free, they need a signature.

The letter also said, and I quote "We are required by law to confirm the identity and address for all new and existing customers. For this application we require one original copy (we are not able to accept photocopies) from each table shown overleaf."

Well no tables were shown overleaf so I rang them. The perfectly pleasant young man having used the lucky thirteen digit application reference number from the letter said that he couldn't quite understand why the system was demanding a proof at all but it was. He asked that in that case, although it might seem a little daft would I be so kind as to enclose a bank statement with my signed form.

Salmon returning to spawn in the river of their birth? Coals to Newcastle? Can this protect us from Osama?

Used my Scotland wide bus pass yesterday to take a trip to Dundee to see a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The journey up was a bit long though it was a nice sunny day to contemplate the beauties of rural Fife. The return journey via Perth and the M90 was much faster, not wildly longer than the train.

The theatre was full to bursting. It took a few minutes for my fear that the show was going to consist mainly of amplified noise to prove unfounded and I settled down to enjoy it.

It was a production with all its innards on show; techies squatting on the stage amidst sound boxes, microphones and mixers, child dummy wiggling its legs with the help of an actor, asm doing baby gurgles into a mike, actors pottering about in the visible wings changing hats and so on and so forth. The text was more currently colloquial and relaxed than ours. It suited the production style, but why change Grusinia to Georgia - an imaginary setting to a real one?. Interesting that in Act 2 at least (with which I'm more familiar) they had chosen to cut it in much the same places as Claire.

The overall acting style was high energy and full frontal. There were some lovely broadly drawn inventive characterisations and a co-ordination of actor and effect which I admired. I'm thinking of the soldiers marching for example or the precise crack as the messenger unfurled her arm to place a letter in front of the governer.

To play the bandit Irakli as a yardie was inspired and I just cracked up in the opening scene of Act2 as the Grand Duke sprayed Azdak with cheese. Bringing the audience in to share the pleasure of his retaliation we could have been at a pantomime and that didn't seem out of place.

On the other hand I thought the final court case where the fate of the child is decided was underplayed and lacked tension. There and in other places too I felt some lines were not delivered clearly, or is that my hearing starting to go?

A great show though with ideas aplenty to borrow.

With Oscars in the offing I'm keen to see as many of the contenders as I can so as to measure my evaluations against those of the Motion Picture Academy. We don't always see eye to eye. Today after two failed attempts I managed to get to The Queen. I was quite prepared for Helen Mirren's excellent performance but not for what a really good film it was. The mingling of fact and conjecture was brilliantly done to produce an interesting, absorbing and at times moving story. Helen Mirren aside, the man of the match for me was Roger Allam as the Queen's secretary. He could have a solid future in deference and tact training.

I well remember the British public's mass display of grief at Diana's death. It so happened that the weekend she was being buried was scheduled for the implementation of system changes that I was managing for a major Scottish insurance company. It was a window that wouldn't reopen again for some three months but we had to go pretty high up in the company to get permission to work, most of British industry and commerce having shut down as a mark of respect. I've absolutely nothing but sympathy for any poor girl who hands in her dinner pail so young but I didn't understand or share that mass hysteria like feeling so I could see where the Queen in the movie was coming from.

Ewan rang me this week to tell me that he had been appointed Vice President. Unlike the American government who have only one, American corporations have several so he is one of a number but it's an impressive title so I'm altering my email and mobile phone records to list him under VP. What's more he's being relocated to work out of the UK so at some stage later this year it should be the case that my two sons and I are living in the same country for the first time in twenty five years or so.

Bunked off my Italian class this morning to watch Andy Murray play Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open and what a good decision that was. It was a great match. Murray won the first set in the tie-break and was 4 - 1 up in the second when he lost the plot. He came back strongly to win the third but then failed to capitalise on a significant number of breakpoints especially in the early games of the fifth set but all in all he played a stormer. Given that two years ago we had never heard of him his rise in the rankings has been phenomenal. Surely at some point in the near future he's going to be the first home grown Wimbledon winner since the ice age.

Back in the rehearsal room our one-act is coming on. Everyone has a pretty reasonable grasp of the lines and we've got various props out to help the action. For an ex-smoker blowing rather than sucking to produce smoke from an imitation fag takes a little bit of getting used to. Of course I failed at one point yesterday and got a mouthful of cotton wool and some obnoxious powder.

Failed too to see a documentary about Leonard Cohen after the rehearsal. It was sold out by the time I got there. That's the second time this week I've missed a film. Clearly need to do a bit more in the advance planning line.

I got some Labour party junk mail today. It was pretty self congratulatory in tone throughout as these things tend to be. For example they beat their breasts with satisfaction at reported praise for Lothian buses. Not sure to what extent the Labour party has played a part in providing our good bus services but if they have, all credit to them. It set me musing a little. It may be a great service but they have the weirdest shift patterns. Is it that my natural travel rhythms match driver changes? I was on three buses yesterday and on each occasion experienced a change of driver. Such a 100% hit rate is unusual but I suspect that my daily average is around 50%. What's the statistical probability of that do you suppose? Is it like tossing a coin, 50/50 every time? Or like love at first sight, 100 to 1 against?

Answers on an electronic postcard please.

I thought I had better put in my tuppence worth to commemorate the passing of the Act of Union by the Scottish parliament on 16th January 1707. A lot of books have been published this year analysing the events that led to the Union, assessing the strength of opionion for and against at the time and evaluating the benefits that have or have not accrued to the two countries since. I confess that I have read none of them despite intentions to the contrary.

There is lively discussion in the media on both sides of the border about where the Union goes from here. Will the SNP win in May? Would the Scots vote for independence if it were offered? Is there an answer to the West Lothian question? Do the English want a parliament of their own?

The Scotsman has published some good stuff and they are sending a van round the country to take what they call "The Nationhood Debate" to the people. I'm planning to go to a couple of events at the university in March to hear what various luminaries have to say.

Personally I have no problem thinking of myself as Scottish, British and European more or less in that order and while I have no doubt that Scotland could thrive as an independent state I don't see independence as particularly desirable. Should we not be looking for ways to come together in the modern world rather than draw apart? Devolution has given us the opportunity to go our own way in building a society for daily life in accordance with our own values, traditions and ambitions. It seems to me that we should develop that opportunity to the full and at the same time draw from and contribute to the British state and the European Union.

The flag images came courtesy of World Atlas.

At Barbansais we have a large expanse of grass. Quality-wise it's more of a field than a lawn. You can be sure that efforts to remedy that would be frustrated by moles. Every so often we stand in dumb rage staring at their nocturnal ravages and rush off to finger the multitude of anti mole potions and devices on the DIY shop shelves. There are so many to choose from and all are declared useless by those who have tried them. According to neighbours strychnine soaked worms are the only sure solution although one friend swears by clobbering them with bricks.

You can imagine then how much I sympathise with the poor German chap who electrocuted himself this week when he connected a high voltage power supply to a row of metal stakes that he had driven into the heart of the moles' galleries. In case you get the wrong impression it wasn't our moles he was after.

Some years ago I was kept awake by grey squirrels running around in my loft. It took months and the failure of lots of cunning catching devices before the problem was solved by blocking every orifice with inedible glass fibre to keep them out. It was illegal to kill them so even if you did catch them you had to let them go and of course they would just make their way back into your nice cosy loft. I've loathed the little creatures ever since.

I was surprised then, but pleased, when gunshots around the cottage I was in with friends near Hawick turned out to be the local gamekeeper exterminating grey squirrels. It seems that if you are in an area where red squirrels are being driven out by grey ones you can kill the little beasts. I call that enlightened. I wonder if there's a bounty?

Back in the land of culture and refinement the mini movie I appear in in Charmaine's pursuit of a Bafta (well a sort of mini Bafta) is now on the web. Go to Bafta 60 Seconds and browse the film gallery (Scottish region) to marvel at "Cold" by Yerkelmarr. The comments viewers have left are at least as entertaining as the film.

If the film seems short don't worry she's planning a "director's cut" and these as I'm sure you know are always much longer, and naturally much more satisfying - for the director at least.

I had a very pleasant few days in the Borders with some old school friends. We've got into the habit of meeting up every so often. Sometimes just for a meal, sometimes for a couple of days, and most elaborately a year or so ago for a week together in Croatia.

We did nothing very active. Most of our time was spent loafing about the house drinking and chatting. The girls inspected various cashmere outlets and I found myself, after a disappointing visit to Hawick's Saturday market (more of a car boot sale) having a potter around the town with Bob and Caroline that included factory shop visits. They bought a few things but despite being sorely tempted by some of Pringle's delightful golf shirts I resisted. I must sneak back sometime when the budget allows.

One evening we ate a good dinner, served in a warm, comfy dining-room by friendly staff at the Mansfield House Hotel. The place seemed to be empty apart from us. Let's hope that this was unusual else they'll be out of business before long and I can't think that they deserve that.

I got back to Edinburgh on Sunday in time to start rehearsing Work In Progress. It's the Grads entry for the SCDA One Act Festival. The most exciting thing about the rehearsal for me was that I discovered that the one member of the cast I didn't know was the daughter of a girl I was at school with. One of those small world moments.

I've been trying to post since I came back from Keswick after Christmas but Blogger has been out of action. It's up and running this morning but I'm off to Hawick shortly for a few days with some school chums so there's no time to write much.

Let me just wish anyone who reads this a Happy New Year and leave you with a picture of the Lake District countryside that I was able to take on the one day the mist rose above ground level.

Last week's highlight was undoubtedly the arrival of my sofas. Something comfortable to sit on after twelve weeks of hard wooden folding chairs. I'm celebrating by having some friends round for dinner on my birthday. Let's hope they don't spill their wine.

With the approach of Christmas social events pile up and I had three outings for food and drink including one with Arkle, a local amateur drama group, where they announced their programme for 2007. The only one that seemed to offer a possible role for me is in the Fringe and I'm not likely to be here to rehearse in time for a Fringe show. However I have been cast in a one-act play that will be the Grads' entry for the SCDA one-act competition in February. I'm playing a Philip Marlowe type private eye. I see it as challenge that will hopefully be helped by some cunning make-up and costume.

The golf course does not beckon in this weather and I've been missing the exercise it offers. I'm not a fan of chlorine laden pools and don't much like swimming anyway so this afternoon I thought I'd try the ice-rink. When I was a kid I loved skating and it came in useful once to get my own back on a lad who bullied me a bit. But during the last 50 years I can only remember skating on a handful of occasions and the last was about twenty years ago so I was very pleased to find that I could get round the ice. I even managed a reasonable turn of speed but essential manoeuvres like avoiding other skaters were more difficult. Skating backwards proved tricky and a nice sideways slide to a halt remained a dream. I can do it on skis why not on skates. One other difference from skiing - ice is a lot harder than snow to fall on. Ouch.

I met up for dinner with some of my former FI/Xansa colleagues about ten days ago. The torch on my mobile phone came in handy to supplement the faintly flickering candles but once the menu had been read we were able let our tired old eyes relax. The food and the company, not to mention the wine were very agreeable. Try The Outsider yourself sometime.

A production of Scrooge starring Ian Aldred who played in Caucasian Chalk Circle provided a very enjoyable musical evening to open the run up to Christmas and the following night I went to a Grads improvisation show. Teams of three or four actors are given a small number of parameters by the audience and have to build a sketch with them. Nine times out of ten they produce amazingly inventive and entertaining results. The first time I saw anything similar was in Paris and I was very sceptical when the friend who was in that group assured me that it was not rehearsed. Now I know that while not rehearsed they do have something of a structure to work in and they practice a lot but that knowledge has not dimmed my admiration. I prefer a nice solid script to work with myself.

The weekend finished for me with a double bill of black and white classics at Filmhouse. Riffifi is a great crime movie with an absorbing dialogue free safe-cracking scene. Morality triumphs since even the best of the baddies dies in the end. Dialogue is the star of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely, confusingly called Murder My Sweet in the opening credits. Unfortunately I missed rather a lot of it because I dozed through much of the film. I couldn’t even summarise the plot. Still what I did see and hear was cracking stuff. It’ll be on the tele some wet Sunday I expect.

Had the Dicksonfield Owners and Residents Association AGM been longer I might easily have dozed off but it was very short. There was hardly anybody there and not much business. It’s a pity that something of a festive nature had not been organised. I know that social interaction is not the object of the organisation but maybe socialising would create some community spirit which in turn would help achieve the objectives. I should get off my butt and do something about it I suppose.

On Tuesday I went down to Manchester. It rained cats and dogs almost all the time I was there but I had a good time. The highlight was probably the Royal Exchange'sproduction of Cyrano de Bergerac. It’s an absolute joy of a space and the company always make terrificly good use of it. Proscenium theatre seems so distant and unexciting in comparison. Caucasian Chalk Circle is a good example. Claire extended the use of Adam House’s stage and auditorium as far as I’ve ever seen done but it still wasn’t a patch on theatre in the round for impact.

In addition to visiting Alan the plan was for Karl, in town for a conference, and I to meet up with Pam and Ron, who live in Harrogate, in Leeds for a meal. I made the final arrangements with Karl by email, copying the emails to Ron. Karl and I met, walked briskly to the station and got on the earlier of the trains that I had told Ron to expect us on. I rang his mobile from the train with no joy. They weren’t in Leeds when we arrived and there was still no mobile response. It turned out they were still at home having not read their email for some time. A shame but Karl and I had a good Italian meal and then re-crossed the Pennines.

That was a train ticket I could have done without but at least I got some value from it. Another ticket has proved entirely worthless. I bought tickets for Connor and I to go to the Lakes at Christmas but he is now down south and will travel from there. Virgin refused a refund so I thought I’d try selling them on e-Bay. Blow me but they’ve zapped my listing. Apparently Section 129 of the Railway Act of 1993 makes it a criminal offence for me to sell a ticket. Doesn’t seem fair does it? I’ll just have to wrap them up and give them to Connor for his Christmas.

While in Manchester I spent a wet afternoon in the Museum of Science and Industry looking at lots of fascinating stuff including a demo of various machines involved in the cotton business. I came away with a pocketful of samples of material produced at different stages of the journey from plant to cloth. The evidence of the great wealth generated from the cotton industry is all around in the shape of buildings, not least the Royal Exchange where Cyrano was played, but what a hell on earth for the workers.

I visited the Whitworth Gallery to see an exhibition of wallpaper through the centuries. They claim to have one of the largest collections of wallpaper in the country if not the world but judging by the quantity on display they must be big fish in a small pond. However I liked the wallpaper a lot more than Douglas Gordon’s installations on show at the National Gallery in Edinburgh that I gawped bewildered at in the hour I had to spare before I left for Manchester. That Turner prize has a lot to be ashamed about.

When a show is over life can seem a bit dull for a while so it was good to shoot off to Poland so soon. It was also I'm sure a welcome relaxation for those who, unlike me, had been doing fulltime jobs at the same time as the play.

We arrived in Katowice in the dead of night and taxied into town passing through some rather dark and ominous tumbledown streets to get to our hotel. The area didn't seem nearly as threatening the following morning when I went out for a stroll before breakfast though it did have a touch of that bleakness that I associate with eastern Europe under communism.

I came upon a funeral and was most impressed by the undertaker's men's outfits. As they took the coffin into the church a trumpeter played a suitably mournful tune. It was a pity he wasn't also dressed for the role.
We took the train to Krakow later in the morning and found a perfectly lovely city. There are lots of pictures and information about the city here so I shan't strain my limited literary powers to describe it.

We had a very pleasant little flat a few minutes walk from the main square in the sort of building that is typical throughout continental cities but just doesn't exist here. I suppose it goes back to the basic Roman villa where the accommodation is built around a central courtyard.


Krakow is crowded with attractive bars and cafes where we enjoyed delicious meals and snacks. Here's a typical offering from one of the city's oldest establishments in the cloth hall which takes up a large part of the centre of the main square.

In between eating cakes and washing down delicious meals with malty Polish beer (which I hope is available from my local Polish deli) we naturally did some sightseeing. The castle and cathedral were well worth visiting. The only disappointment being that the fire-breathing dragon who lives in a den deep in the bowels of the hill on which the castle stands hibernates. To see him in action you need to get there between May and October. There was a very interesting theatre museum and a fair bit of theatre going on. If our Polish had been up to it we could have chosen between "No Sex Please, We're British" and "Endgame". It wasn't so we made do with the museum and another museum where the work, including stage designs, of a Polish polymath was on show. He painted, wrote plays, made furniture, designed this that and the other. A talented chap called Stanislav Wyspiański. There are lots of other museums if you can stand the pace.

This is a view of part of the complex of buildings on Wawel hill. The picture is mostly cathedral but there's a bit of castle.
Our chum Wyspiański had big ideas about enhancing the hill with the addition of a hippodrome and a Greek theatre to create what he saw as a Krakovian Acropolis but didn't get any further than we did with Edinburgh's Parthenon.

Of course the museum that everyone who goes to Krakow has to see is Auschwitz, though I have to say I didn't think of it as a museum before I went. We were accosted at the station by a young man called Daniel who persuaded us to let him take us by car. He took us straight there, waited while we went round, took us on to Birkenau, waited again and then ran us back to Krakow. That was a lot easier and more comfortable than the train/bus route and in to the bargain he was friendly and informative. It reminded me strongly of how my tame taxi driver in Cairo would run me miles out of town to a golf course and just wait around till I was ready to go home.

In Auschwitz there are various displays in the buildings, piles of forlorn artificial limbs, stacks of suitcases and so on purloined from the prisoners and retained long after their owners were disposed of. The mechanics of everyday life and death in the camp are spelt out. Individual countries explain how their citizens were affected. The French for example have a very fine display detailing how Jews were rounded up and shipped off. One room is full of family photographs, mostly of children all of whom were systematically put to death.

Going around Auschwitz is clearly not an especially jolly experience but I found Birkenau much more chilling. The fact that it was previously an entirely respectable military barracks lends Auschwitz an air of normality which is missing from Birkenau where the buildings are more like battery farm sheds and were constructed specifically to house people destined for extermination. With all its displays and explanations Auschwitz is very much a museum whereas Birkenau is left almost unlabelled to speak for itself and you feel could have been abandoned by its masters only yesterday.
You can see in this photo how desolate the place appears. It's a view probably familiar to you from films and documentaries of where people spilled out of cattle trucks after an airless, foodless, waterless journey of several days to be herded into huts or straight to the gas chambers. The strange thing was that when I stood there I found it easier to imagine how proud the Nazi overlords must have felt of their work than to imagine the despair of the damned.

The hope in keeping these places intact is that they will act as a reminder of how awful man can be and prevent future massacres. To date with the Balkans, Ruanda, Darfur and countless other genocidal conflicts we can't say the policy has been too successful. I heard on the radio this morning an apposite quotation from Brecht. In speaking of Hitler he said "The bitch who bore him is still in heat." Alas.

The last week has been dominated by The Caucasian Chalk Circle despite the fact that it has occupied only a few hours of each day.

The second dress went pretty well as did all the performances. There were a few hiccups here and there, some of them to be laid at my door but on the whole the show felt good every night and the audiences while small were very appreciative.

Obviously I didn't see much of it but I was able to watch and listen to a very beautifully presented and performed scene towards the end of act 1 as I waited to stumble down the aisle to spend the interval on stage. If much of the rest looked and sounded as good then Claire has done an excellent job.

For the interval to start just as a new character appears on stage clearly offers scope for confusion in the minds of the audience. It also caused a little consternation in the more traditionally minded front of house staff. I don't know which of these situations Claire enjoyed more.

One cast member's parents decided that my interval activities, which included darning and doing an imaginary crossword and falling asleep fell into that ultra modern category - performance art. Didn't I just love that.

So show over. Director is catching up on her diary of the production. When she's finished I must read it all at one sitting.

I've spent the last two days at the cinema watching Italian films. Tonight was three hours of La Dolce Vita in black and white. You got your money's worth forty six years ago. Made today it would doubtless feature lots of sniffing but these people managed to be hedonistic and vacuous on no more than fags and booze.

I'm off to Poland this evening for a few days so hope to have lots of interesting things to report on my return. I don't want to have to fall back on the story of my hunt for extra curtain rings.

Readers will see that the previous post gave rise
to a comment which, inter alia, takes me to task for the infrequency of my postings. That’s fair and I again promise to do better but I can’t help thinking that it is the finger of irony that points out that I have not yet shared with you the story of the warped table.

The table whose arrival I have already reported was fine until after a few days the central portion of the top started to curl at the edges. After a few more days it rocked when you put your elbows on it; bad manners I know but a tabletop should be able to cope. After a week lots of daylight was clearly visible between the top and the frame, as you can see in this picture.

I went off to Habitat to complain. They were as good as gold and promised me a new one without hesitation. I admit I was relieved because I had not relished an argument over what degree of warping might qualify as acceptable in their eyes.

Lo and behold after a few more days the table started to uncurl. By Saturday last it had reached a state I felt was ok so I popped into Habitat on my way to the Lyceum and cancelled the replacement. I suppose it was just coming to terms with its new environment.

I was on my way to the Lyceum to join a Grads group going to see Schiller’s Marie Stuart. I was disappointed. I liked the austere setting but the cast failed to move me. Years ago in Kitwe I was in a production of the play that I hope communicated more emotional intensity than this one did. Of course it may have been the Heisenberg principle at work so that I cooled it down while it stayed on the boil for others.

Though I can’t remember too clearly I think we had an on-stage execution which was surely more fun to watch than the genteel procession down a stair to offstage oblivion that the Lyceum gave us. And doesn’t history tell us that she went to her death in a blood red robe? I’m sure our Mary slipped off an outer garment to reveal a red robe as she mounted the scaffold. The Lyceum gave us a trace of red peeping out under a white dress.

Here’s what one site has to say on the subject. Points for historical accuracy to Kitwe I’d say.

Much more engaging was the production of Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey that I saw at the Citizens in Glasgow the previous week. The final scene that leaves the tenement room and its inhabitants looking like a shipwreck to which humanity barely clings was brilliant.

I’ve also seen some art recently, and been to Red Road, the film that won plaudits at Cannes and lots of Scottish Baftas. It was good but must surely have had little competition to win so many.

Hallowe’en is long past now but I revived my fifty year old skills in tumshie lantern carving and dressed up to go to Claire’s party where we were treated to delicious but foreign fare in the way of pumpkin soup.

Back home there is still nothing soft to sit on but my shelves are up. The few books I didn’t give to Christian Aid last winter are in place and all my CDs are sitting comfortably waiting for me to invest in a player. Yes I’ve given that away as well. It was rather old and getting a bit noisy and what’s almost as important was too bulky for my slimline shelving.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle is almost upon us. The technical rehearsal last night was lots of fun. That’s the first chance lights and sound have to practice their art and the actors get to blunder around the stage. It may seem a bit shambolic to the outsider – “Do you see that sky getting red over there?” It says “Yes” in the script but I hate to lie. By some miracle though it will all be sorted out by opening night. We have the luxury of two dress rehearsals, mitigated somewhat by the fact that not all the cast can do both.

I was provided with handcuffs last night for one scene but they’re flimsy plastic gadgets which don’t look convincing and which I’m bound to break so I bought a length of chain this afternoon to add weight to the performance. It will be handy for the director to beat us with if we fall short of her artistic vision.