This is the most exciting photo I took in Oristano.  It was a mistake to go there, or at least half a mistake.  I wanted to take a trip out of Olbia to see a bit more of the island.  At first I planned to take the train down to Cagliari the capital, where incidentally I once applied for a TEFL job back in the day, but that seemed too long a trip so I decided on Oristano halfway down the west coast.  Sadly I didn’t investigate a bit further.

The trip down was pleasant with a variety of scenery, vineyards, olive trees even evidence of cereal crops.  Maybe that’s for their Sardinian whisky.  I saw bottles on sale but didn’t buy nor try.

The town though was disappointing.  On the coast it may have been but actually a wee bit inland and the beaches according to Google were an hour away by bus.  Google also told me that a bus was expected any minute in the piazza that I was in.  I looked around for a bus stop, couldn’t see one, so asked a couple of locals who were idling in the shade.

They declared that the stop was down a street off the piazza and argued about which street.  Eventually they reached a consensus and I set off down the street eyes peeled.  As I peered up an even sider side street the whoosh of a bus came from behind.  I’d missed it.

Well my spirits flagged.  I wandered about a bit.  There didn’t seem to be any town centre to this place and no signs pointing anywhere.  There was incessant vehicle traffic but no pedestrians.  I found a little café and had an uninspiring tuna sandwich on plastic bread and a coffee.

I decided to cut my losses and get the next train back and headed for the station.  It was now breakfast time in Houston so I gave Ewan a ring to say Happy Birthday.  As a consequence of having returned to employment  he was at that moment driving to his office poor chap.

Next day was moving day.  After a fair amount of palaver and hanging about I got on a bus heading for Santa Teresa Gallura.  It was a lovely trip, beautiful coastal scenery, blue skies and seas strewn with little islands.  The Aga Khan had taste as well as money and business acumen when he fixed on this part of north eastern Sardinia.  Pictures snatched through dirty bus windows wouldn't have given you the proper impression.  So no pics sadly. 

From where the bus stopped in a rudimentary bus station, ie a bit of a carpark I walked down a very steep hill towards the ferry port thanking my lucky stars that I wasn’t walking up.  Why doesn’t the bus go down there?

Now I was a few hours before my appointed ferry but there was one from a different company on the point of leaving so I abandoned my already paid for crossing and stumped up 30 euros rather than hang around, there being nothing of interest to hang around for.

It's a short trip across to Bonifacio and the entry into the port is spectacular.  Steep rugged cliffs and a narrow seaway,

then what doesn’t seem more than a creek packed with boats.

When you disembark a sign points up a near vertical hill saying Haute Ville. There’s no bus-stop (not room), a taxi space (empty) and cardiac arrest waiting for me if I tried to drag my bag up the hill.

So I struck out through the forest of bars and restaurants that lined the creek which was obviously the marina., packed as it was with super-yachts, motor cruisers and the occasional sailboat.  I looked one of them up later; yours to rent for $196,000 a week plus expenses.

At the end of the line of commerce and riches (what a contrast to the one small bar and a diving school on the Santa Teresa waterfront) there was a bus-stop, a taxi stand and a little tourist train but no buses taxis or trains. 

Eventually a chap put me on the road to my hotel, fortunately almost entirely flat and only a short walk away.

The receptionist was very helpful, in the first instance by giving me a nice cool glass of water to ease my obviously knackered state.  Then he spent some time checking out buses to Ajaccio for the next day.  This had proved ambiguous back in Edinburgh.   He began with something of a tale of woe.  There aren’t usually buses on a Sunday and one of the bus companies has been in difficulty and various other unpromising bits of information.  But in the end he seemed satisfied that there would be a bus the following morning at 10.00, and so it proved.

It was a bit of a struggle up to the second floor with my bags, no lift.  But like rock climbing I inched my way up one hold at a time.

After some rest I had an enjoyable evening stroll through the marina and a nice bit of fish.

It took about four hours in the bus to get to Ajaccio.  We passed through beautiful mountain scenery.  The French don’t call Corsica l'Île de Beauté without good reason.  It’s impressive.

My hotel was minutes away from the bus station and indeed from the train station and from the port and the market and everything else.  The town centre is crowded along the gulf.  In the evening I strolled and watched and ate.

The following day I did an open top bus tour around the town centre and along a stretch of coast where as well as residential blocks there are also hotels and beaches and so on, including a large deserted plot in which stands Tino Rossi’s equally deserted villa.  You’d think that since after Napoleon he’s probably Ajaccio’s most famous denizen they’d have made it into a museum of popular song or something.   In the evening I escaped the heat in a little park where I enjoyed the sort of lounging chairs that they have in the Luxembourg gardens in Paris.

Another thing I’ve been able to do here is catch up on the Olympics on TV.  Naturally the focus is on French competitors but I saw the British win the men’s relay in the pool and with my coffee this morning watched Duncan Scott beat the French star Leon Marchand in a swimming heat.  Not sure what it was for but maybe I’ll catch the final on the boat to Marseille tonight.

Yesterday I had a much more satisfactory outing by train than my trip in Sardinia.  I went to Corsi which is in the middle of the island.  It was a major place, indeed at one time the capital given its position at the intersection of north to south and east to west routes way back when.

You had to be tough in those days or just stay where you were born because the island is very mountainous and heavily forested.  They’ve got a special forest fire brigade which I’m sure has its work cut out when misfortune strikes.

Corti itself was lovely.  It’s quite small but is a university town where 4000 students take courses so it probably gets quite lively.  The station is a couple of hundred metres below the old town and the citadel that was so important in the past.  Fortunately one of those little tourist trains is available to take you up and even bring you down again.  I took it up but walked down.  While I was up I had lunch in a restaurant with a misting system so I was periodically gently sprayed with water.  And welcome it was.  Now I’m whiling away time in the shade waiting for my boat to the continent.

Speaking of boats I made some unsuccessful attempts to go on a wee cruise.  They were either full up or too early in the morning or focused on snorkelling or just not the relaxed activity I was after.

Here it is then.  That's what Pisa's all about isn't it.  The lampost is in the shot to provide a vertical against which to display the lean.  The woman in the foreground is there because it's hard to get a shot without a tourist taking up some space. 

What else has it got?  I wouldn't altogether agree with Shelley's remark to Byron that there's nothing to beat a sunset in Pisa but the streetscapes along the banks of the River Arno are attractive and there are some very fine old buildings in other parts of the town.  The Botanic Gardens are lovely though they could do with more benches in the shade.  I also ate quite well, once very well, a black rice and fish thing. Yummy.

I also ate well in Lucca.  My top meal of the trip so far; zucchini flan, rabbit pie with roast vegetables that called for a new definition of roast.  Now Lucca is justly famous for its walls.  I caught sight of them as I drove by twenty years ago or so and now I've returned and walked atop their 4 kilometre length.  Despite a fair bit of shade the heat was tiring so a bottle of fizzy water went down a treat.

I meant to take a trip to Siena where I've never been but despite the attraction of a couple of hours in an airconditioned train the thought of tramping around historic bits and bobs in 30 something degrees put me off and I did a lesser amount of pottering about by the seaside in Livorno and Viareggio.  

I'm not much of an opera buff but I quite fancied going to an open air performance at Torre del Lago where Puccini built a villa.  However though it's easy to get to it's impossible to get back to Pisa by public transport when the show ends.  I went during the day instead.  It's a lovely spot and I was looking forward to seeing round his villa.  But like so many continental museums etc they don't seem able to cope with seven day a week action.  So it was closed as was the souvenir shop (no loss there) and all but one of the refreshment spots.

Now I'm in Olbia on Sardinia.  I got here on a big boat and it took all day.  It then took quite some time to get from the port to my hotel.  That involved conversation through a glass screen that no doubt was installed as an anti Covid measure but which seemed to be soundproof.  I was eventually able to make out that there might be a taxi around in 45 minutes or so.  Then I struggled with Uber and on my second or third attempt when it looked as though with one click it would be done I spied a bus.  I clicked cancelled and dashed across and jumped in.

Luckily I had some cash because unlike Tuscany no card payment.  Lucky for a couple of young backpackers as well because I was able to make up their slight shortfall.  I don't know where they were going or how long for but judging by the size of their rucksacks they had each brought a kitchen sink.

So today I pottered around Olbia with the help of the old-fashioned bus day ticket bought in a tobacconists.  You don't punch a hole in it or have it stamped though.  Now it's held against a screen till there's a beep.  There's also a system similar to one I laboured over in Trieste two years ago that requires downloading an app etc.  More about tha later perhaps.

Anyway Olbia is quite pleasant with some lovely little shops and cafes and quality stuff as compared to the absolute tat surrounding Pisa's monuments.  There's also a lovely park where I spent some time and the waterside where it's pleasant to walk.  Having rested in my hotel room and written this I'm now slipping out for an aperitif. 

I took several snaps of this line-up but didn't manage to catch Nirek Mokar upright.  All the fault of the speed of light compared to my finger speed I expect.  He's a 21 year old boogie-woogie pianist from Paris and the generations behind him are his Boogie-Woogie Messengers, respectively from left to right, sax, drums and guitar.  I heard them play on the first night of the Jazz Festival and enjoyed the gig.  I'm not going to many gigs this year and decided to see only people I'd never heard of, preferably foreign.  The strategy has worked out well so far.  I've enjoyed them all with only one to go.

As a reminder to myself and in case you fancy judging my selection the others are Rosalind Orr, Nabou Claerhout, Cili Marsal, Kristina Barta and Theo Croker.

The Dunedin Wind Band held its end of term Summer concert which went well.  We're supposed to be relocating to a different church hall next term but I don't know where yet. It's a consequence of the continuing reduction in churchgoing whereby congregations amalgamate or churches are sold off for other uses.

Mostly in the last several weeks I've watched tennis on TV.  Thanks to the weather I haven't missed out on balmy days in the sunshine.  I hope to catch up on that when I go on holiday. Thanks to their roofs the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club got through their championships.  You have to wonder how they did it before the roofs when play took place on 13 days not 14 and there was no tie-breaker.  But they did because I saw it happen.

Apart from that I enjoyed a BBQ at Claire's and a brunch at Siobhan's where I met some very pleasant people from her French Yakety Yak group.

Other entertainment included a number of forgettable TV series.  I realised from the first frame of one that I'd seen it before but in all six episodes there was only one other frame that had stuck in my memory.  I wonder what had displaced it in my little grey cells.  Then there was a morning spent letting physio students loose on my supposed hip replacement.  Fun and hopefully useful.

 
The Japan Foundation has a similar remit with respect to language and culture from the Japanese government as the British Council has from ours.  The London office organises an annual touring film festival in the UK which I posted about earlier in the year and this month, organised I assume by Tokyo, a worldwide free of charge event in which a selection of films and TV series is available on the internet for a limited period. The precise selection varies by country.  

In the UK there were over a dozen films online for a fortnight with two TV series following on for a second fortnight.  I saw all but one of the films and would have seen that one had I not miscalculated the expiry date and time.  The TV series remain unseen so far.

Since I also watched a lot of the French Open Tennis Tournament I'm approaching teenager levels of screentime this month.  There were some engrossing tennis tussles but the matches that I thought were the most entertaining to watch were the men's and women's doubles finals.

Coming back to the films the two posters above are of two excellent films, different in almost every particular but linked in one respect.

On the left is We Made a Beautiful Bouquet.  It's the story (fictional) of a young couple who meet, fall in love, live together for five years.  Then as romance wears off and various difficulties arise they consider whether the next stage in their lives should be to marry, have children and settle into family life.  They (primarily the young woman) reject the idea and part fairly amicably.  It was in my view a really fine film.

On the right is another love story but of a rather different kind.  First of all I Go Ga Ga: Welcome Home Mom is not fiction.  It's a documentary about the film-maker's parents as her mother succumbs to dementia and her father takes on all the domestic burden and cares for his wife.  She has a stroke and goes into hospital.  Now in his nineties, bent double he pushes a sort of zimmer to the hospital to visit her every day and consistently urges her to get better and return home.  She does start some rehabilitation but has a second stroke, is transferred to a long-term geriatric unit where she's bedridden.  He continues to visit daily.  At 98 years old he undergoes an abdominal hernia operation and the day after surgery is on his feet starting rehabilitation so that he will be fit to care for her when she gets home.  What a man.

His wife's condition deteriorates and ultimately she dies with husband at her bedside.  In the Japanese fashion he creates a little shrine in their house and carries on alone. There's a small celebration and presentation of a scroll from the mayor on his 100th birthday shortly after which the film ends.  Touching doesn't say the half of it.

All the other films were of interest one way or the other but my outright favourite for entertainment was The Handsome Suit.

Here's the poster

 

The simple story is that a not very good-looking but exceptionally kind and lovely chap believes that his appearance puts people off and despairs of ever finding true happiness.  He gets hold of a suit that when he puts it on turns him into a handsome hunk.  All sorts of thrills and benefits come his way but ultimately as you might guess true happiness comes when he finally reverts to his proper self.

The film is brilliantly done.  It's colourful, riotously funny and tearfully smaltzy.  So good.

In the theatre I enjoyed the Lyceum's Sunset Song.  The stage was nicely turned into the ploughed fields of Kinraddie and there were some good touches in how they handled things like the father beating his son.  The "gender blind casting" wasn't too much of a pain in the tonsils but the ideas expressed about it at the post show discussion (first I've been to in a while and very enjoyable) didn't seem terribly cogent.  By the bent or otherwise the acting was excellent and the cast made the closing scene of the play very moving.

The National Theatre of Scotland's Maggie and Me at the Traverse was a brilliant production.  Acting, direction, staging etc was great.  It was inventive and imaginative.  But it raced on without engaging or moving me.  Claire wrote a very good review of it and her summing up hits the nail on the head -  "It’s great fun and – makes for great theatre – but for the generations of people who see themselves in Barr’s story, his quest to find himself could be given a little more room to breathe."

 

The RSNO's last two concerts of the season were very good.  The penultimate concert was rather poorly attended.  Who knows why.  A little gem of an overture from a lady called Bacewicz, a Saint-Saëns piano concerto, a symphony from Lutoslawski. All rounded off by Ravel's Bolero.  All except the last unknown to me but all a rewarding listen.

In contrast the following Friday the Usher Hall was bursting at the seams, not only with audience but also with 165 musicians, 132 singers, 18 timpani and four brass bands.  The work was Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts one of those giant choral pieces that I like to hear.  This one was new to me but it lived up to the forces employed.  At the same time, as for example in the Sanctus, the piece was gentle and so quiet that the proverbial pin could have been heard.

 

Before the concert I managed to have a drink at Whighams with friends up from Wales for the weekend for a wedding.

 

Ballet Black are a group I've missed for one reason or another on their visits to Edinburgh so I was glad to catch them this week with their double bill Heroes.  As is often the case with modern dance, while I generally enjoy and admire the stuff as I did this show I come away a bit in the dark as to what it was all about.  I turn to reviews like this one to tell me.

 

I was pleased when I read it that the reviewer had no more idea than I had about where all those crowns came from.  Magic?

The end of term approaches for students at Napier and once again I had fun being the father of an obstreperous post-operative cerebral palsy daughter in a patient simulation exercise for physiotherapist hopefuls.  Next week it's my hip replacement routine.

 

Siobhan has recently reached the magic bus pass age and a group of us celebrated with her by enjoying Contini's tasty food and tasty wines.

 

Like Contini's Vittoria's is an Edinburgh institution.  It's Leith Walk restaurant has recently undergone a transformation that was not necessarily devoutly to be wished but llooks as though it's a commercial success.  In essence they've cut the place in two.  One half, entered from Brunswick Road, is the old Italian restaurant albeit somewhat remodelled.  The other half which delights in the name The Brunswick Book Club is entered from Brunswick Street with its overflow of outside tables.  It's a pub with food.  Not Italian food. Books are a gimmicky way of presenting the drinks menu and the bill.

 

Ewan and I ate there on the eve of his return to the States.  The food was fine.  The service was excellent. The ambience was pubbish, they held a quiz as we ate.  I doubt that I'll be a frequent customer with the possible exception of having a drink at the outside tables on sunny days.  

Finally

Almost all the UK selection from the Japan Foundation.

My irises came out, stood tall and looked lovely for a while until the summer winds and rain did for them.  I think size and numbers may be the answer so this autumn I'll plant a lot of the small ones as well as more tall ones.

Casting a look back to the Beltane celebrations on Calton Hill here's a group who'd gone to the trouble of dressing up for the event.

To celebrate a number of big birthdays (80/60/40) there was a family gathering for a week in a big house on Anglesey.  The picture below hung on the wall in the first floor kitchen/dining room.  It's a fair representation of the landscape visible from there but fortunately not of the weather we experienced.  We had very little rain but there was rather a cold wind most of the time.  Ironically not on the day we left when there was not a breath of wind and a warm sun shone from dawn onwards.  Also visible from that window were the railway line to Holyhead and an RAF airfield so it was a fine spot for train/plane spotters but a noisy one as jets and turboprops roared over the house on allday training activities.

 

Mostly we ate in (others cooked) but had two good meals out.  I'd especially recommend Ocean's Edge in Holyhead if you are down that way. 

Other members of the group were more active than me but I did have a little walk or two and visited a beach.  I spent more time reading and watching tennis from the French Open.  I read an Alexander McCall Smith book. The first of his I think that I have read in its entirety; pleasant, relaxing, somewhat whimsical.  It didn't however inspire me particularly to dive into his immense oeuvre.  A more riveting read was The Saddled Cow by Anne McElvoy about the last days of the GDR and the first couple of years of the reunited Germany.  She studied German at university and enterprisingly spend her year abroad in East Berlin rather than in the rarefied air of Heidelberg or the cake heaven of Vienna.  She then returned after graduation as a correpondent for The Times. 

I visited many of the North Wales beauty spots when I was a kid thanks to visits to my aunt in Liverpool but had never visited Anglesey.  It's an attractive spot where I'd be happy to go again.  

Before the trip I saw the Grads production of The Fastest Clock in the Universe which I enjoyed.  Thom Dibdin gave it a very complimentary review which it thoroughly deserved.  The Blue Remembered Hills from Leith Theatre was also enjoyable but friends I went with felt it lacked the killer edge they associated with earlier productions they had seen.  As it happens BBC4 has just shown the original TV play by Dennis Potter.  I hope to watch it via iPlayer for the sake of comparison.

The Cameo screened a documentary about what they grandly titled Billy Connolly's tour of Ireland in 1975.  Good on him for braving Belfast at that time but two shows there and one in Dublin hardly adds up to much of a tour.  I much prefer Billy in 1975 to Billy in his later years and I enjoyed it though I’d have liked more of his actual performances rather than backstage chitchat.  The credits held a name I hadn’t heard for a long time, not someone I knew but the former partner of a girl I knew in Zambia.

In company with many hundreds of others I went up Calton Hill to the Beltane festival on the eve of Mayday.  I don't know if lingering till dawn to sink your face into the dew was part of the programme but I didn't linger.  Indeed I didn't even linger for the promised midnight bonfire, my feet being knackered with all the hanging about.  Nothing much happened before 9.30 but the publicity led me to think that more than wandering around people watching would be on offer from 8pm.  It wasn't.  Being unable to stand on the same spot, no matter the reward, for an hour and a half, by the time the main display got going I was at the back of the crowd as my picture shows.  But it was worth going.  Maybe not again though.

Before going to see Swan Lake with Claire we wondered whether we had seen this Scottish Ballet production before or not.  Within a few minutes of it starting I was sure we hadn't and she was sure we had.  When the black swan and four masked retainers came on I realised that we had seen it.  That was eight years ago mind and memories do dim.  Well mine certainly do and in any case I thought it was pretty forgettable then and my opinion didn't change on a second viewing.

The music's great though and I've heard some other great music from our orchestras in the last couple of weeks.  The RSNO and SNJO did a joint concert.  They gave us Ellington, Gershwin et al. The jazzers opened the show playing by themselves, then the two orchestras plus Makoto Ozone played together.  He straddles jazz and classical easily.  In the second half it was the RSNO only playing Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, to my mind the best part of the evening.

At other concerts the RSNO played Vaughan Williams including inevitably The Lark Ascending which is always worth hearing and the SCO finished off their season with Elijah by Mendelssohn.  I love big choral works and this was terrific.  The choir produced the most powerful and dramatic waves of music yet were able to draw back and sing softly and delicately as well.  The soloists were excellent, especially Roderick Williams who sang Elijah and Maxim Emelyanechev conducted with his trademark vigour and complete involvement.  This review says it all.

I had dinner with my friend Isabel and a chum of hers one Sunday evening.  They were setting off with Rabbies Tours to Lewis and Harris on the Monday morning and had flown up to spend the night here.  We had a fine dinner at Howies in Waterloo Place and chat and whatnot.  I reassured them that the long journey to Ullapool in a minibus would allow such an opportunity to see Scotland's wonderful scenery that it would be a joy.  I felt for them when Monday morning dawned in a blanket of solid rain. 

No such rain spoilt my outing with The Friends of the City Art Centre, in a bigger coach than Rabbies, to Cockenzie House and Marchmont House.  Cockenzie House is only a short bus ride away with a stop at the door but Marchmont is miles away and not on a bus route, though if you read the Wikipedia article you'll discover it had its own station.

That's not the only difference. The original owner of Cockenzie was a Seton who was out in the '15 and forfeited his lands as a consequence. The house's subsequent owners were associated with foreign trade and coal mining and salt production.  The battle of Prestonpans took place on its doorstep and it was used for storage by some of the forces involved. The house is not particularly grand. The fine rooms shown in this article must have been altered or be private since we didn't see them.  Marchmont on the other hand is a Palladian mansion set in enormous grounds with extraordinarily grand rooms.  Its owners wealth came from land.  Its tree lined entrance avenue is a mile long.  It's jammed full of artworks of all sorts, a bit like the Burrell Collection but perhaps less randomly collected.

I made my first ever 999 call the other day.  Heading for my back door with my shopping from Sainsbury's I found a body lodged between the paved pathway and the retaining wall of the parking area.  A young chap, maybe around thirty with a big bump on his forehead, a near empty bottle of whisky under his arm and a backpack nearby.  He was out for the count but breathing.  I couldn't rouse him.  An ambulance, in fact two, turned up very quickly.  They had a quick look at him, found that he had a wristband with his name on it and some sort of medical patch on his leg, a mystery to me, then declared that a wee trip to the Royal was indicated.  I didn't wait but continued up the path to my door.

The Grads are 70 this year.  Claire has written a show for the occasion which will be put on in December.  It's based very loosely around the Baba Yaga legend.  There was a reading of her draft at the weekend which everyone present enjoyed.  It should be fun.

It's a long way by tram but as you've no doubt guessed this is commerce not transport.

It's advertising the opening of an Edinburgh branch of the Japanese clothing company Uniqlo. It makes a change to see a shop opening in Princes Street rather than closing these days and this is a good brand of clothing (I bought a nice shirt from them in Tokyo) but hundreds have been queuing to get in.  I passed it on the bus the evening before the opening and people were queuing then and being admitted, just to have a look around and perhaps by invitation but all the same what a fuss.

Now that the successful run of Cyrano de Bergerac has finished I can focus on being theatre audience rather than participant though in truth I have managed to see a couple of good shows quite recently.

I nearly missed James V : Katherine which seemed to have crept into being a sell-out tour of Scotland with no publicity at all.  It was written by Rona Munro who gave us the excellent "James" plays.  It's not a continuation of that sequence, moving us on from James IV.  More's the pity you might say but perhaps such a sequel will come in time and maybe even a move into British history with James VI and I.

During James V's reign one Patrick Hamilton was burnt at the stake in St Andrews for heresy.   He's generally accepted as being the first martyr of the Scottish Reformation.  I learnt about him and other martyrs such as George Wishart at school, but not about Patrick's sister Katherine.  It's her this play is about.

She was also tried for heresy but less publicly than her brother, was persuaded to recant by the King and went off to exile in Berwick on Tweed.  That much history tells us but the drama that Munro invents pits Katherine's determination to uphold her protestant faith as her brother did his against the mutual love between Katherine and her sister-in-law.  

Reviews have been mixed. The FT was enthusiastic, Clare Brennan disappointed and Mark Fisher middle of the road. I liked it.

The Girls of Slender Means at The Lyceum I liked a lot.  In short I thought it was terrific.  The material to start with is intriguing, a female only boarding house in London just after the war peopled by young women of different characters and ambitions.  Described in the novel thus "Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenuous, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means."  The cast are first class, the staging is poetry in motion and the audience were moved as well.

Mark Fisher liked this one rather better but the review that attunes best with my reactions is from The Stage.

Socially I had a good evening at a surprise birthday party for Ross's 50th following hard on a non surprise one a week earlier.  I played my part by stumping up for two birthday cards.  The surprise one was held at the Raeburn in Stockbridge.  It was the first time I'd crossed their threshold and I was favourably impressed by venue, drinks and snacks.

There's been a lot written about Emma Raducanu since her meteoric rise to fame when she won the US Open in 2021.  Many like Jawad Iqbal in a recent piece in The Spectator entitled "The Tragedy of Emma Raducanu" have rightly pointed out that her rise was very quickly followed by a fall and not only has she seemed to be dogged by ill-health or injury but that every recovery therefrom has failed to be sustained.

He opines in his conclusion that "No one will ever be able to take away from her the glory of her US Open triumph, even though the chances of her becoming a tennis great in the mould of Serena Williams appear far-fetched. For now. Being a multimillionaire may prove compensation of sorts."

He may be right but when she plays well as she did in the Billie Jean King Cup Qualifier earlier this month she displays all the determination and guts that we associated with Serena Williams.

Now it's time for snooker.

The EIF programme was released a couple of weeks ago and they organised a few taster events around town to whet our appetites.  Here we are waiting for the rain to go off so that some young dancers from Scottish Ballet can strut their stuff in St Andrew Square.  They eventually did so to the severe detriment of the grass.  Had it been football the pitch would have been declared unplayable. 

I've booked only half a dozen EIF shows.  I'm sure there are more that are worth seeing but I'm holding my fire for now.

It's taken a while but Hamilton, which premiered in 2015, has now made it to Edinburgh.  It's garnered five stars reviews everywhere it's been and the Edinburgh run has sold out.  It's undeniably a magnificent spectacle but, leaving aside George III whose cameo was great, it wasn't until the second half that I began to enjoy the show.  Prior to that it was all too loud and my brain found it hard to pick out the rapped lyrics from the frenetic kerfuffle so that following the story wasn't that easy.  They appeared to repeat the wedding scene for instance and I suppose that was explained but I didn't make out why.

Now there was still loud stuff after the interval but not all the time.  It was much less shouty.  And there was more variety of pace, more of a tale to follow and emotions to feel.  So I left the theatre feeling that my money had not altogether been wasted.

I've seen Bartok's opera described as a gripping psychological drama.  It may well be although I think the stony-hearted cynic in me might find it, as I found Emma Rice's Bluebeard at The Lyceum, a not very engaging melodrama.  

The Motive and the Cue on the other hand whilst it leant towards caricature was a more polished melodrama with some fine acting particularly I felt from Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm a longtime Shostakovich fan and his Fifth Symphony has always been a favourite so I knew I'd enjoy an evening at the Usher Hall in which it featured.  And so I did but it was paired with a piece I'd never heard before and which I'm keen to hear again.  This was the Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson's Violin Concerto and fittingly it was played by Nicola Benedetti for whom it was written.  Tremendous stuff.

I had the opportunity to hear another favourite, Maxwell Davies' Orkney Wedding  with Sunrise also at the Usher Hall. It's ending with a fully kitted out pipe major parading through the hall and onto the stage is a surefire crowd pleaser.  On that evening there was also a new short choral piece by James Macmillan, a setting of a Burns poem, that was very sweetly sung.

Socially I celebrated Ross's 50th birthday at a pleasant dinner party and tried to have a chocolate drink with Siobhan at a new place called Knoops.  It was however stowed out so we settled for a coffee over the road at Victor Hugo until they threw us out as they drew the blinds down at 4pm when we repaired to Contini's.

Rehearsals for Arkle's Cyrano de Bergerac are keeping me busy.  Opening on April 24th get your tickets here.   

 

I had an interesting couple of hours at the synagogue recently thanks to a visit organised by the Friends of the City Art Gallery.  I've always thought it a fine building from outside and it proved to be equally fine inside.  We had a talk about the history of Jewish settlement in Edinburgh and the development of their places of worship that culminated in the construction of the synagogue in Newington.  

Instrumental in the building of the synagogue in the 1930s was Salis Daiches whose son David, became a much admired literary critic and historian and occupied academic posts here and in the USA.  He wrote a beautiful book called Two Worlds about his childhood in Edinburgh.  The two worlds of the title are of course the Jewish and Gentile societies of the inter-war years.  

I read it years ago but it's most likely out of print nowadays.  Libraries have it and second-hand copies can no doubt be found.  You can also read it online here.  I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who has ever been a child.

Glimpses of old Edinburgh have appeared in my neighbourhood recently when the refurbishment of Vittoria's and of a shop nearby revealed the gold lettered titles of the shops that occupied their premises in earlier years.  Stationery and Fancy Goods Warehouse was one I particularly liked and I was intrigued by the partial title Portmanteau......, the rest being illegible.  Another was Cabinetmaker &.  And what I wonder.

Illegible I would have thought to most spectators and TV viewers was the advert for sports betting that appeared intermittently on the electronic boards around the pitch in Arbroath when they played Raith Rovers there a few weeks ago.  It was written in Katakana, one of the two phonetic scripts used in Japanese.  The cameras didn't ever focus on it long enough to let me write it down accurately but this is roughly what it looked like スポーツ・ベティング.

Maybe there's a large appetite for Scottish football in Japan but if there is I'd have thought it would have been for those teams in the Premiership like Celtic and Hearts that have Japanese players in their squads rather than for a tussle between the top and bottom teams from the Championship.

That's why I, who don't have much interest in football, was watching.  My hometown team were in an excellent position to return to the Premiership at the end of the season after 27 years absence and a game against bottom of the league Arbroath  would surely not impede their progress.  When they went two nil up a win seemed assured but plucky little Arbroath, as we surely must style them, didn't roll over and came out 3-2 winners.

My lounge and hall have moved up to the top league after repainting and recarpeting.  What an effort it was to get stuff moved out and back again.  I'm taking the opportunity to get rid of books and other things though.  I agonised for a while over a carpet choice and although I was very happy with my choice in the showroom my heart did a bit of a double take when they came to install it.  Now furniture etc is back in place I'm much happier with it.  

The logic seemed to me to have the painting done before the carpeting but handling the carpet produced quite a lot of scuffs on the walls.  The fitters treated the worst of them with pads called wonder wipes that just made them worse and I've ended up painting over them.  The end result is not wonderful.

On a cheerier note I've enjoyed a lot of music in the last few weeks.  Good jazz from the SNJO and the TSYJO, an entertaining combination of the Big Noise from Wester Hailes with the SNJO and a couple of excellent concerts from the SCO.  They played Beethoven's 7th Symphony at one.  That's surely amongst the brightest and most joyful music he ever wrote.

Another of their concerts with Pekka Kuusisto was magnificent.  It brought five stars from the Guardian and I wouldn't disagree in any way. 

I've seen more from the Japanese film festival that is showing films throughout the UK, from Kirkwall to Exeter.

Hoarder on the Border (断捨離パラダイス)  This was a mildly amusing story of a guy who's not making it as a pianist and gets a job with a company that clears out rubbish strewn houses.

Sabakan ( サバカン)  A really lovely film about two ten year old boys who become unlikely friends and their activities together during one summer.  It's framed by one of them as an adult remembering the past.  

Ice Cream Fever (アイスクリムフィーバー) Like Winny, for some unaccountable reason this was shown in a small square aspect ratio on the Cameo's already small third screen.  That's a shame given that the colour and costume and set design are strong points of the film.  The story or stories are about the relationships between the characters.  A niece and her aunt; a former designer working in an ice-cream shop and a customer. I enjoyed the film's style and mildly enjoyed the narrative.

Finally here's an ad for the play I'm rehearsing now.  My parts are very small so stay awake and alert if you come or you'll miss me.