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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Andy Ross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the story of a young couple who appear to have lost a child and whose lives are taken over by a rather odd family living next door whose early friendliness turns into an intense and unsettling intimacy.  It's shot through with humour but a darker, disquieting flavour never dissipates and at the end a changing of places leaves you wondering what was real and what was imaginary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the whole is really wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've still to try it.

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

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

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

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

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

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