I've rather neglegted the Fringe this year and it didn't figure in my final flurry of activity over the weekend.  I went to a concert and two Book Festival events.

Mahler's Eighth Symphony - this is a large scale choral work which filled the Usher Hall stage and choir stalls.

I enjoyed it when it was loud and when it was pin drop quiet but got a bit bored by the bits in between.  People I spoke to afterwards complained that it was very loud.  I think my seat high in the Gods and well to the side reduced the impact.

Lost Countries - a Danish architect who walks the beaches of Europe and collects stamps added to those hobbies an investigation into countries that no longer exist.  He's produced a book called Nowherelands that gives us the rundown on about fifty of them such as Indian princely states swallowed up after 1948 and a country that existed briefly (long enough to issue stamps) under Laurence of Arabia's tutelage until it was snaffled by the Turks and others.  It was an interesting talk and it's a very pretty book but it strikes me as a mini coffee table book that if I bought I should only occasionally glance at.

Monsieur X - now here is a book that I probably will buy but I'll wait for the paperback edition due next March.  Hardbacks take up so much space as well as money.  Anyway it's the story of a French aristocratic follower of the sport of kings who took on the state betting behemoth and took them to the cleaners over a period of years.  His lifestyle as well as his betting was distinctly racy.  Alas he met his comeuppance, the exact nature of which the author did not reveal for fear of spoiling our enjoyment and his sales.

So that's the festivals done and dusted.  I don't think my strategy of not booking up Fringe events in advance worked out terribly well but maybe it was rain and lethargy to blame.

Today I went to a public consultation event about plans for the development of the waste treatment site at Powderhall now that the plant is no longer in action.

It proved to be a more immersive experience than I had anticipated.  Once I'd absorbed or at least looked at all the information on display I was asked to fill in a feedback form.  As well as asking for comments I was provided with coloured pencils and a diagram of the site and invited to map out what I thought should go where.

Blow me when I handed it in a number of cheery urban planners laid out my ideas on a model. It was great fun and my idea for a sculpture and/or a playpark echoing the site's past as a greyhound track and a speedway venue with some bin lorries thrown in raised a laugh or three.

The green is parkland and sports facilities, the orange is housing, the blue is retail and offices.  The white at the entrance to the site is my sculpture/playpark.  What fun.

The Sunny Side of Science - Michael Brooks and Tim Radford are committed to advertising the wonders and beauties of science to the widest possible audience and the Book Festival crowd reacted as they would have wished; with appreciation and pleasure.  Answering questions the speakers both emphasised the vastness of what we don't know despite the vastness of what we have created - Huddle telescope and Large Hydron Collider being but two examples.  Talk of black holes and multiverses reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld's known and unknown unknowns.

Des canyons aux étoiles -  described as Messaien's mystical celebration of the breathtaking natural marvels of Utah this work employed quite large forces including a wide range of percussive instruments one of which, the geophone, Messiaen invented specially for this piece.  There was a lot of sound to try to get your heard around, a bewildering variety in fact.  On my one and only trip to Utah the place seemed majestically quiet rather than noisy so I can't say that I saw a direct relationship but I guess all that could have been going on his head.  I enjoyed the first half hour or so but that was only a third of the way through.  My poor little brain tired progressively as time went on.

Home Truths - Robert Peston's distinctive delivery, mastery of facts and incisive questioning are amongst the joys of British political broadcasting.  He's written a book called WTF? in which he puts forward an analysis of what he thinks has gone wrong with Britain in recent years and why and what we might do to make things better.  He deployed all his gifts in racing through an invigorating and often humorous presentation and dealt succinctly with audience questions.  Politicians please copy.

Visions de l'Amen -  Messaien again but only two pianos and not quite as long as Des canyons aux étoiles and a very different reaction from me.  I thought it was absolutely wonderful, a thrilling high energy mountain range of gorgeous sound that finished with the Queen's Hall audience held in limbo while the last notes slowly faded to be replaced by tumultuous applause.  The first half of the concert had featured a sonata for two pianos by Brahms.  Pleasant enough at the time, it seemed old-fashioned, lumbering and dull once we had heard Messaien.

Rocio is back from her summer in Spain so my sax lessons have resumed, for which I am jolly grateful.

La Maladie de la Mort - I was pretty certain that my response to this show would prove shallow when more accomplished minds were turned to it. Sure enough what I dismissed as base metal Lyn Gardner deemed, if not pure gold then 19.2 carat.  Her successor at The Guardian, Kate Wyver was only slightly less enthusiastic. Flora Gosling however, in The Wee Review to which our own celebrated cmfwood contributes, came close to supporting my opinion, being just a tad too generous.

The English in Modern Scotland - Tom Devine, who must be every Scot's favourite historian, gave a sparkling talk at the Book Festival outlining what he argues in his contribution to New Scots, a book about immigrant communities here.  He reveals that from being a country of net emigration for centuries Scotland has in recent decades become a country of net immigration and that not surprisingly (perhaps?) most new Scots are English born.  They represent now (if I have remembered the figures correctly) a little under 10% of the population.  Contrary to some beliefs they are not all retirees buying up homes in the Hielands to the disadvantage of the locals but the vast majority are workers contributing significantly to economic growth.  He said that the university sector in particular owes a debt to them in achieving a position in which five of our universites are ranked in the top 200 out of a worldwide total of 26,000 institutions of higher education.

The festival second week saw the Book Festival get underway so I've been there as well as to some Fringe and International Festival events.

Pleasures in Prose - the Book Festival is celebrating Muriel Spark's centenary with a number of events but I've only been able to fit one of them into my schedule. The organisers obviously expected a deal of interest and put it in their biggest space but to my surprise and no doubt their's the place was half empty.  Alan Taylor led a lively discussion with writers Louise Welsh and Zoe Strachan focusing on the place of sex and shopping in Spark's oeuvre and life.  It was excellent.  Why were there so few people in the audience and particularly why only a handful of men?

Job-Cher - a fun show about a Cher tribute act. Not you would think natural territory for me but I had a friend in the show.  It was very lively and very entertaining, thoroughly enjoyable.  It also introduced me to the splendid restoration work that has been done on Riddles Court. I'm encouraged to visit after the festivities.

Rome, Sweet Rome - I was a minority of one in the audience crammed into the Spiegel Tent to hear Lindsey Davis talk about her crime novels set in ancient Rome. I'd never heard of her or her books but everyone else knew them by heart.  It was like being at a cult meeting.  She spoke very well and the books sounded fun so I popped into the bookshop afterwards and found the first in the series, The Silver Pigs. I enjoyed it well enough but don't see myself lapping up the score or more that followed.

Maths, Magic and the Electric Guitar - despite my relative lack of academic success with mathematics I find myself drawn now and then to the subject.  David Acheson gave a light-hearted presentation of a number of mathematical ideas that do seem to verge on magic and polished it off  with a stomping guitar solo illustrating for those with very keen ears the formula that defines the frequencies of the harmonic vibrations of strings -
   
Famous Puppet Death Scenes -  Hard to know why I decided to see this show.  It did get five star reviews but that was I think back on their home ground in Canada. The press here were a bit more restrained.  It was very well done and had it been half an hour long I might have sung its praises but it wasn't so I won't.

Catriona Morison - an Edinburgh girl who is the first and only Briton to have won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition gave a lovely recital at the Queen's Hall.  Her voice ranged from quiet and sweet to loud and powerful in pieces by Brahms, Schumann, Mahler and Korngold.

Stories of Africa - two young female novelists, one from Uganda the other from Zimbabwe talked about their books and more widely about the worlds they grew up in and the influences that had operated on them.  Jennifer Makumbi's Kintu is a story that follows a family from the 18th century to the present day but misses out the colonial era and Idi Amin which the Guardian reviewer suggests delayed its publication in the UK. In contrast Novuyo Tshuma's House of Stone takes her country through Cecil Rhodes and colonialism to Mugabe's reign. 

We Need to Talk about Africa -  non-fiction this time but some of the stories told in Paul Kenyon's Dictatorland beggar belief.   Reviews of the book declare it to be a little lightweight which can't be said of Tom Young's Neither Devil nor Child.  He's a lecturer in politics and economics who argues that western interaction with Africa is doing more harm than good.

Laugh Out Loud (Cry Quietly) - is one of Arkle's Fringe shows. It's about internet dating which is certainly not my thing. Although I found some of it quite amusing and some of the performances admirable I wasn't convinced that the text was worth the effort. Here's a very fair review.

You Remind Me of You - Arkle's other show.  A much more coherent text but with its frequent changes of location better suited in my view to film than stage.  Mind you they had an ingenious way of handling the props in scene changes.  It got a very good review so while I wouldn't go all the way with it I don't want to rain on their parade.

Portrait of a Marriage - a super session at the Book Festival with John Bellany's widow Helen talking about her life with him.  Chaired by the admirable Richard Holloway who teased out some gems.

The Beggars' Opera - a 21st version of John Gay's 18th century ballad opera.  I enjoyed the show but much prefer Brecht and Weil's version.

Xenos -  the renowned choreographer and dancer Akram Khan in a visually stunning work.  I was somewhat too far away in the gods to feel as much part of the show as I would have liked to.  It was nonetheless a gripping and absorbing evening. 

Skirt finished its run on Saturday having filled 95% of the seats available over the week and having garnered a four star review.  Thus it can claim success with all due modesty.

The Grads other show, Much Ado about Nothing, played to pretty full houses for most of the week as well, deservedly so, and is off next weekend to strut its stuff at The Dell in Stratford in the RSC's summer programme featuring amateur and community groups.  Let's hope the rain holds off.

A quick rundown of the stuff I have seen since the festivals kicked off:-

First Snow/Première Neige - a joint production by the National Theatre of Scotland and two Québecois companies.  About indentity both personal and national it was well received by the critics but I didn't much care for it.

Scottish Saxophone Academy -  their youth summer school presented a lunchtime concert in the superb acoustic of St. Mary's Cathedral.  They played a delighful variety of music extremely well and we had the additional pleasure of hearing the American saxophonist David Milne guesting with them.

The Antiscians - billed as being inspired by some fairy tale or other it might best have featured in the children's section of the Fringe programme.  A tale of two girls raised separately by a warlock/wolfman. One sleeps by day and learns to feel and be gentle.  The other sleeps at night and learns martial skills by day. They eventually meet, bond after initial distrust, learn they are the results of the warlock/wolfman's mating with a robin and deliver the unassailable moral message that difference is OK.  I should mention that one is black the other white.

Casanova Dreaming - a well staged, well directed, well acted, beautifully costumed show in which Casanova is visited by his much older self who in a series of vignettes warns him against the errors that await him and advises him to enter a monogamous marriage.  We know he doesn't of course. I can't say that I found the content of much interest.

Babyface - now this was archetypal Fringe bollocks.  A young woman did a lot of jumping about, birled a baby's high chair over her head, made baby noises, squished baby lotion about while extolling its virtues as a skin treatment, changed her clothes a few times into those sutable for various stages of childhood, prevailed upon a couple of audience members (me included) to participate embarrassingly and finally let us go in a cloud of baby powder.

Big Aftermath of a small disclosure - a bit like Casanova Dreaming I didn't think much of the content but I did enjoy the style both of the text and of the production. A man announces he is thinking of moving away and this leads to the disintegration of his small friendship group. Like The Stage I'd give it three stars.

Love's Labour's Lost - this was a fun production by a youth group of a Shakespeare play that I don't believe I've ever seen.  Some of the kids showed real potential and the whole company worked well together.

Don't Knock Your Granny - from the other end of the age spectrum a group of mature Australian  ladies presented a song and dance show that had a bit to say about a number of things including a lot about the abuse of the elderly.  I admired their chutzpah but was glad the show wasn't much longer than it was.

Ciara - this is an excellent piece by David Harrower that I saw at the Traverse some years ago.  It's a one woman show whose protagonist is the art gallery running daughter of a now dead Glaswegian gangster.  Like any one person show it presents immense challenges to both performer and director in building a structure that moves the story along with appropriate changes of pace, of movement, of expression, of intensity while remaining firmly on track and keeping a grip on the audience.  This they did.

Autobiography - the first EIFF show I've been to. An hour and a half of dance from choreographer  Wayne McGregor.  All very skilful but I found it somewhat cold and didn't much appreciate the boom, boom soundtrack.

The world premiere of Skirt enjoyed an enthusiastic reception from a completely sold out house last night.  The show went very well and was unblemished except for the contrary behaviour of a champagne (well champagne substitute) bottle whose cork popped prematurely cutting a couple of  lines.

Friends I ate with afterwards declared themselves well satisfied with the show and found the script admirably true to life.  So big congratulations to its author Ms cmfwood.

This is me rather a long time ago at an airshow at Leuchars.  Apart from this souvenir my abiding memory is of going around the airfield with my chum Graham collecting empty lemonade bottles and claiming the deposits on them.

Fast forward several decades to the 2018 airshow at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune where I learnt that instead of just sitting on an aircraft wing kids of the age I was then have been building an aircraft.

OK it's not a sleek and powerful jet fighter, and is perhaps all the better for not being one, but a kit assembled by pupils at Kinross High under the aegis of Aero Space Kinross, an ambitious project to create an aviation and space flight visitor attraction there.


East Fortune airfield was packed with enthusiasts, so much so that I decided that rather than join the interminable queues to see inside Concorde and other aircraft I'd go back some other time when it has relapsed into just being the site of the National Museum of Flight.  So I wandered around the various exhibits and then watched impressive displays by the Red Arrows and other aeroplanes including some quite historic models.

I heard an interesting talk by Tracey Curtis Taylor whose mission in life is to recreate the pioneering flights of such female aviators as Amy Johnson and to inspire young women to enter the world of aviation.  She had an amusing anecdote about being told off by the Livingstone airport authorities for her cavalier behaviour flying around Victoria Falls.  She was told that while that sort of thing might be acceptable in the UK "here in Zambia we have health and safety".

Nothing that I went to in the Jazz Festival was other than enjoyable but in addition to Martin Kershaw's concert that I reported on earlier two others rose to the top of the pile.

The young Mark Hendry is clearly a talent with an exciting future ahead of him.  He had written two pieces for an ensemble of twenty three players, in essence a chamber orchestra with saxophones and drum kit ousting classical woodwinds and percussion.  His Endangered Species suite was a thoughtful, reflective and melodious piece that contrasted vividly with the jagged, piercing dystopian screeches of 1984, written in response to Orwell's novel.  Great stuff warmly applauded by an appreciative audience.

Martin Kershaw popped up again, this time with Dave Milligan, Calum Gourlay and Alan Cosker as a member of Colin Steele's Quintet.  They played ninety minutes of Colin's music (some written in collaboration with Dave Milligan).  Apart from one number that harked back to New Orleans it was straight ahead modern jazz of great quality.  It was the last gig I went to and finished my festival on a suitably high note.  

The Napier Jazz Summer School has been on this week and although I didn't take part this year I had it in mind to go to their concert but for one reason or another I didn't make it.

I have been to some other Jazz Festival gigs though and have more booked for this weekend.  The only one worth reporting so far was Martin Kershaw's.  He'd gathered a few locally well known players together to present the world premiere of a piece he's written called Dreaming of Ourselves.

The title comes from a book by David Foster Wallace who died ten years ago and the music and the concert were in tribute to him.  I've never read any of his work and he sounds a bit of an oddball to put it kindly and I can't say I understand the process of creating music in response to anything; person, book, scenery or whatever.

But the result in Martin's case was super.

The rest of the week was equally wonderful and the journey home, via Munich this time, was equally tedious.

I happened to be in a bar with some American musicians during the latter stages of the Croatia-England World Cup game.  Foolishly they were relying on my football expertise to help them follow the match.  Despite that they enjoyed it and joined in with the general Croation delirium when the final whistle was blown.

They didn't go to the extent of jumping into the nearby fountain like this lot though:

I imagine that many of these bathers, having dried themselves off, were amongst the hundreds thronging around in Zagreb airport at 5am on the following Sunday en route to Moscow.

The journey to Zagreb was tedious, involving as it did hours hanging around Cologne Airport. I did have Muriel Spark's first novel for company and am encouraged to work through more of her oeuvre.

The journey was worth it though. The first day of the Sax Congress was wonderful. I believe their are 1500 participants and over 400 recitals, concerts and other events. Very like the Fringe except that one ticket at 160 euros gives me access to all 400. That's up from 100 three years ago but I'm not complaining.

Numéro Une or Woman Up as it is known here is a feminist drama.  It tells the story of a woman already well up the business ladder who, boosted by a group of women whose mission is the furtherance of the sisterhood, is persuaded to have a go at getting the top job in a company from the CAC 40, the French equivalent of our Footsie 100.

Her hospitalised philosophy teacher father is somewhat sceptical about the business world and her American husband fears for his own career.  Indeed he loses his current job as collateral damage in the machinations that are unleashed.

Sad to say there are lots of machinations and dirty tricks not only from the entrenched interests that oppose her but from her side also.  She succeeds only by stooping to the underhand ways of the male.

I don't think that's a very encouraging or edifying message to women doing their best to break through the glass ceiling.

Peter Sellers has always been one of my favourite actors.  I've enjoyed lots of his films but had never seen Being There in which he plays a simpleton whose deadpan delivery of trite statements about the seasons and gardening are taken by the rich and powerful to be insightful metaphors that illustrate the ills of the world and how to resolve them.  It's very. very funny.

When I went to see Man of Iron I thought I was going to a documentary about Lech Wałęsa, the founder of the independent trade union Solidarność.  Instead it was a drama dealing with the period and the struggle to bind the shipyard workers together and the personal stories behind the events.  I've no idea how true to the facts it was but I didn't care for it much as a film. That's probably a hanging offence because I've since discovered that it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1981.

It contains a lot of shouting and ill-tempered squabbling and weeping women, none of which moved me in the slightest.  All of which struck me as melodramatic over-acting.  That no doubt is my insensitivity at work but there we are.

That's the Film Festival over for another year.

Another film I could well have done without seeing was Pushkar Myths.  I know very well why I chose it.  The Pushkar camel fair has always been high on my list of things to see before I die so a documentary about it seemed a good idea, either as an appetiser or as a means of saving all the hassle of actually going.

Someone said at the screening of another film that there is too much verbalisation nowadays in what is essentially a visual art.  Let the pictures tell the story.  I have a lot of sympathy with that view but in a documentary it's generally helpful to back up the pictures with some words.  That's maybe what the makers of Pushkar Myths were trying to do but none of the words were a direct commentary on the pictures.  They were mostly rambling, and to me barely comprehensible, stories about the Indian gods with a lot of old testament style X begat Y and Y begat Z...

The story the pictures did tell was of a fairly chaotic gathering of people and beasts.  Some of the pictures were great, folk dancing displays for instance or haggling over a best cow in fair competition.  But not all.  A ferris wheel is a ferris wheel is a ferris wheel in India or in Cowdenbeath.  And the camels figured hardly at all.

While Pushkar Myths may have given me the hump Testament repaid my small investment in time and treasure manyfold.  Made in 1983 it's the story of the effects on a typical, not to say stereotypical American family and their small Californian community after a nuclear attack on the country's main cities.

The director, Lynne Littman, was at the screening and was visibly moved when she came on for a Q&A.  She said she hadn't seen the film for 25 years and that as she watched she blushed at everything she thought was wrong with it, every family cliché, every overdone moment, every obvious emotional trick.  But she could not help herself from being stirred.  Neither could the audience. 

Saying she'd been scared at the possibility of nuclear annihilation when she made the film her one regret was that given the present regime in America it seemed to be relevant still.

Going through this year's Book Festival programme I identified 57 events of interest.  Over time I managed to cut that list down to a more manageable not to say affordable 12 and when booking opened yesterday got a ticket for all of them.

I think my choices are quite firmly based which is not always the case.  As I sat in the Filmhouse watching Cosmic Eye I wondered what had driven me to choose it.  Animation is not my bag for a start.  It must surely have been the advertised contributions of Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie that made me ignore the "rarely screened gem" warning in the festival brochure. Fortunately an afternoon Campari and soda taken to celebrate the arrival of a small table for my balcony induced a fair degree of eyelid droop so there was no lasting damage.

Terminal is all style over substance but none the worse for that.  The director told us that they had wanted to create a neon drenched noir thriller set in a dystopian city that had a London flavour to it.  With a caveat over just how thrilling or not it was, they succeeded.

The cinematography, music, costumes and performances are excellent.  The locations like the deserted railway terminal, the vast industrial building with a bottomless pit at its centre and others are all lit and dressed atmospherically.

But the plot advertised as complex, travels more along the familiar paths of the genre.  Its double crosses and reveals, its denouement's echoes of gathering the suspects and explaining all (albeit there's only one left) hardly breaks new ground or strains the spectator's brain. That may or may not be a good thing in the cinemagoers' eyes.  I hope it's a good thing because the film is fun and deserves to do well.

I absented myself from this afternoon's screening of Fritz Lang's 1931 thriller M  to enjoy the current heatwave but I sacrificed sun for cinema yesterday.

First on the agenda was a set of seven short films grouped under the title Where's Your Skirt? That was in fact a line plucked from one of the films. It was not altogether representative of the group though four were about girls and one featured a boy in a negligée. I guess it just appealed to the programmer.  Brief notes so I don't forget.  They were all well crafted and interesting whether lighthearted or serious. 

Winter with Umma - Thirty year old still a student in Edinburgh while her brother is getting married back home in Korea. Can a visit from her mum help her into adulthood whatever that is?

Salt and Sauce - A girl unhappily stuck helping in the family chip shop while friends escape to college or the big bad world.  She likes taking photographs.  A middle-aged lady customer admires them and reveals that she once toured as a provocatively clad magician's assistant. Get up and do what makes you happy is her advice.

Some of these Days - A young German interviewing his grandparents who were school children under the Nazis and adults in the GDR. His grandad's passion was jazz. Sanctioned for playing records to his friends at school things got better in the early post-war years and then jazz became unGerman again.  Grandad sees things getting worse today.

Three Centimetres -  Four girls, friends, take a ride on a ferris wheel in Beirut. Their chat and banter is mostly about sex.  One comes out as gay.

Bo & Mei -  A recently bereaved Chinese runs a dry cleaning business. He forbids his son Bo to help his sister do the dishes.  He insists Bo drinks beer with his meal. But Bo likes lipstick and is found in  a négligée left for cleaning by a client who objected to the Chinese music playing in the shop.  When she returns to collect it they turn up the volume.

Homage to Kobane - The camera sweeps around the ruins of Kobane while a voiceover reads a letter written by a girl fighter to her mum while she waited for death.

Good Girls - A St. Trinian's style group of girls is rounded up reluctantly for a photograph, one of them skirtless.  The director, asked what inspired her said it was her nice pink jersey and lo that became part of the school uniform.

After the screening of Meeting Jim half a dozen of those involved in making the film lined up and declared their devotion to him.  Jim Haynes is clearly a man with charm which for someone who says that his main interest in life is and always has been people is not surprising. In Edinburgh he helped galvanise cultural life in the 60s with his bookshop in Charles Street, the founding of the Traverse, the Writers Conference and so on.  When he moved south it was our loss and London's gain.  He then moved on again to make Paris his home and maintained his people centred philosophy with his legendary Sunday dinners.

All of this and more is capably told in the film which seamlessly knits together archive footage (including an interview with a onetime philosophy tutor of mine) and new material. That new material is in fact a couple of years old since the editing process stretched over two years.

For those new to Jim Haynes the film will be a revelation. For those familiar with his story it is a confirmation of the debt owed to him by many, not least those of us here in Edinburgh.

My last film of the day was a well told and gripping story of intergenerational conflict in a Pakistani family living in Norway.  From the opening scene in which the heroine runs through snowy streets to ominous music to meet whatever curfew has been imposed on her you know that bad things will happen.

And so they do.  Surprised in an embrace with a local lad she is carted off to Pakistan and dumped on relatives.  Naturally she rebels but after a while seems to be softening and indeed developing feelings for a young man I took to be a cousin.  Alas disaster strikes when she and cousin fall foul of relationship norms.  Dad come out from Norway and invites her to commit suicide.  She doesn't but auntie refuses to keep her so back to Norway she goes.  She lies to the child protection agency about her treatment by her family to protect them.

Their next move is to organise marriage to a suitable chap in Canada.  Suitable from the family's point of view.  But for Nisha this is the last straw.  Without giving anything away I can say that the film ends hopefully.  

I may have made What Will People Say sound a bit trite but it's not.  You need to do a bit of suspending disbelief.  You'd very probably hide your involvement with friends and activities that your conservative family would disapprove of but very improbably smuggle a boyfriend into your bedroom even if it was just for a cuddle.

That aside the conflict is real as are the dilemmas that young immigrants find themselves in and the film deals with all of it sympathetically and movingly.

A good day at the Film Festival yesterday; top marks to two out of four, less enthusiasm for the others.

In the closing years of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th Frank Brinton and his wife Indiana from Washington Iowa toured their Entertainment Show.  For the small communities they visited it was a magical trip out of their everyday world through lantern slides and moving pictures.

The Brintons kept everything, not just the slides and films but projectors, playbills, press cuttings account books, the lot. Thousands of items that lurked in a number of basements until over thirty years ago they came into the hands of Michael Zahs a teacher in Washington sprung from generations of Iowa farming stock.

Saving Brinton is a fascinating documentary that as the directors said at the Q&A started out with its  focus on the film history material which Michael strove to rouse interest in over all those years but which became more the background to a story about Michael and the community of rural Iowa in which he is rooted.

It's a wonderful film and Michael's a wonderful chap but he seems to have only one tie, seen several times in the film and worn on his visit to the festival.  It features Grant Wood's painting American Gothic.  Not a pretty tie in my view.

On to a second excellent film.  This time it's a Scottish movie about a highland hunting trip that goes horribly wrong.  That's as much of the plot as it's fair to give away The trailer reveals too much in my opinion so don't look for it.  The film is either a thrilling drama or a dramatic thriller but either way it's intense, quite scary and undeniably dark.  Called Calibre you can see it on Netflix from Friday.

It features in quite large letters in the credits a girl I recruited to do costumes for a show I directed some years ago.  She was at art college at the time and it's lovely to see she's making her mark in an intensely precarious industry so a sixth star to the film for that. 

I was looking forward to seeing Ornette: Made in America.  Otherwise I wouldn't have a bought a ticket would I?  1959 is regarded as one of, if not the most creative year in jazz history.  Ornette Coleman's free jazz came onto the scene then and although it's definitely not my favourite flavour I was interested in learning more about the man and his work.  I don't think I did although the film features Coleman's work for jazz players and symphony orchestra, Skies of America, that I'd like to hear in its entirety.

It's not a new documentary by any means (1985) and was in the festival as part of their celebration of American women, the woman in question being the director, Shirley Clarke.  She's billed as an experimental filmmaker and this is not a straightforward talking heads documentary though it's more the technical treatment that at times got in the way of my enjoyment.  There are sections with very rapid cross-cutting and in particular a monologue by Coleman against a dark background bombarded by coloured lights going off and on that I found quite dizzying.  Indeed I was just a little unsteady on my legs as I left the cinema, rather like coming ashore after a few days at sea.

I have mixed feelings about Never Leave Me.  The film is about Syrian child refugees in Turkey.  That's potentially both a politically charged and a tearjerking subject but the director takes no political position whatsoever.  Politics is never mentioned.  Nor is it a polemic on how terrible their plight is and how something must be done with illustrations and soundtrack to match.


It shows the children behaving in what might be considered a "normal" way, playing, squabbling, forming friendships, bunking off school and so on against the ever present background of the loss of home and parents.  The one thing they don't lose is hope.

As the end credits tell us these are real children playing themselves and so far there are no happy endings.

Why are my feelings mixed?  I think the film for me falls unsteadily between drama and documentary.   There is not enough examination and analysis of the situation to be a satisfactory documentary but neither is there a strong enough rise and fall in the development of a storyline to make it a satisfactory drama.  Don't let me put you off seeing it though.  

It's the season of summer concerts from local bands and Dunedin's, in which I will be playing, is on in a couple of weeks.  Cue for publicity --

Some of my friends play in the Edinburgh Concert Band and I went to their Summer Sparkler.  It was an excellent concert and not the least of their treats was the world premiere of a piece called Step-Up written for them under the Adopt a Composer scheme .

Naturally the composer, Gaynor Barradell, was there and gave us a rundown on the inspiration for the piece and its form.  "It's an imaginary journey by bike through Edinburgh's streets, dodging traffic, pedestrians, tourists groups, spilling across steps and closes, reaching the Scottish Parliament for some trickery on the concrete walls and benches, then climbing the stoney paths of Arthur's Seat, reaching the summit, legs and lungs burning from sheer exertion."

Well I got the bit about traffic at the beginning but I can't honestly say that I would have interpreted the rest unaided and indeed even aided as I was.  But I enjoyed the music.  I thought it was an exhilarating and tuneful piece.  I loved the final moments when one of the percussion players whirled a rope around her head.  It may have been a special musical rope I suppose rather than any old rope.  But in either case the quiet sound it produced was surely meant to represent the slow revolutions of a tired bicycle wheel.

Rehearsals for the Fringe show I'm in are underway.  It's called Skirt and is a feminist drama.  Cue for more publicity but I don't have a flyer yet so I'll direct you straight to the Fringe booking system
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/skirt

I play a somewhat unlikeable party functionary up from London to persuade my party's leader in Holyrood to ignore her loyalties to family and friends and come south to head up the opposition in Westminster. It's a lovely part.  I'm not copying anyone in particular but am taking inspiration from various slimy creatures from all parties.

That brings me to a book recommendation.  The Lies of the Land by Adam Macqueen is a wonderful compendium of the prevarications, half truths and downright lies of politicians and other state actors at home and abroad.  It ranges from Churchill to Trump and is a must read for the sceptical and the trusting alike.

The Film Festival got underway last night and its opening screening of Puzzle was graced by the presence of its director, Marc Turtletaub, and its star, Kelly Macdonald.  It's a super film, really warm, gentle and funny in which Macdonald's character moves from being the quiet housewife whose every action is directed towards the comfort of her husband and sons to being a person realising her innate talents and expressing her individuality.
  

I was invited to a reception held last night in the Scottish Parliament to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Young Lyceum.  I'm sure I owe my invitation to my sons whose Christmas presents a couple of years ago were replaced by a donation to help fund the participation at the Lyceum of youngsters who would otherwise not have had the means.

We were ushered through the building to the garden lobby where various politicos and journalists buzzed about on their everyday business.

Then some MSP chappie whose name I didn't catch and whose face I didn't recognise kicked it off, apologising for the absence of the culture minister who was doubtless at a higher level beanfeast.

David Greig with the assistance of a couple of youngsters made a brief speech.  We were then treated to a performance of sorts by the multitudes of the Young Lyceum disposed about the steps leading down from the chamber.

It wasn't a lavish affair but there was enough vino and vol au vent to ensure I left on the tipsy side, though not too tipsy to forget to recover my mini swiss army knife wrested from my keyring by the security staff when I arrived.

There were a couple of old friends there and through them I made some pleasant new acquaintances so all in all it was a good evening.

This is the lovely Tulchan Lodge in Perthshire where I spent a recent weekend with friends. It took my taxi driver a while to find it but near midnight it was located thanks to a tipsy weekender on the lookout for a stripper.

Here's the view from the garden.

The same hills at sunset.

Nearby was Loch Freuchie which some of us walked round on the Saturday afternoon. Seven miles delightful walking in warm sunshine (or a somewhat tiring trek for the less fit amongst us) .

Insurance policies nowadays on renewal have to display prominently the current premium as well as the premium required to renew the policy.

I got a renewal letter recently that showed those two figures side by side. Old premium £37 odd, new premium £84 odd.

I rang, declared my dissatisfaction with a 220% increase and suggested a rethink.  After a bit of haggling I got a new offer of £44.67.

That's miles better but it's still a 20% increase for no good reason.