I found myself impersonating a youth the other night.

As I queued up to buy a ticket for an RSNO concert a chap offered to sell me one that was spare because his chum was not going to be able to make it. I assumed that he was selling it at half price in an attempt to minimize his losses. Later I discovered that I had in fact purchased at full price an "under 26" concession ticket.

The fact that I passed the ushers' scrutiny I find most encouraging.

I caught the Grads production of Twelfth Night on Friday and was glad to have done so. It was pretty good although it won't efface from my memory the version in the style of a 40s musical that I saw the students of the American University in Cairo do some years ago. I absolutely adored that one. At the other extreme the most stupid version I can remember seeing was an Italian one in which amongst other nonsensicals the director found an incestuous relationship between Viola and Sebastian.

Gordon didn't go down such a silly path but was quite inventive, if not with the characters then at least as far as the presentation was concerned. I suspect that for some effects he peeped over the shoulders of giants as it were. But where would any of us be without giants. I've certainly found them helpful more than once.

For those of you who missed it click here.

If Shakespearean comedy is not your bag but you like a good laugh check out Burn After Reading. It's a hoot and in contrast to the intellectual who reviewed it for Newsnight I found the plot perfectly easy to follow.

I think even Hugo Chaves would enjoy the Venezuelan joke.

I renewed my acquaintance this evening with Belhaven Best. What a delight after five months slaking my thirst after golf with Kronenburg 1664 and similar bilgewater. There is a chap in the Creuse, an Englishman, who brews what I'm told is a decent drop although I have never got around to tasting it. I shall check it out and if satisfied insist as a condition of renewing my membership that Les Dryades stocks it.

Nursing the first pint of Belhaven I made the acquaintance of Bobo Stenson and his trio, or at least of his music. He plays piano in that jazz marriage made in heaven of piano, double bass and drums. What's more he plays my favourite kind of jazz. I expect it has a name although I don't know what it is. It's the antithesis of trad although it doesn't lack rhythm or melody. Maybe it's the absence of stomping that makes the difference. The sound is crystal clear and clean. I expect you have to say it's modern despite one of their numbers being by Purcell.

Despite loving modern jazz I'm a sucker for costume dramas about the wonderful days of yore when honest yeomen doffed their caps, and butlers and pantrymaids ministered to the needs of the gentry. So visually I adored Brideshead Revisited with its beautiful twenties/thirties costumes and sets and stunning glimpses of gracious living in town and country. But I wasn't so engaged by the presentation of the characters and the story. I'd recently read the book so I was aware of the fact that a few liberties were being taken to condense the whole thing into movie length. No big deal perhaps for a straightforward narrative but Waugh's tale is quite dense and time is needed to allow us to accompany Charles in his journey of discovery through friendship, love, life and religion.

I'll just have to get hold of the highly praised 1981 TV version which I've never seen and which covered the same ground about five times as slowly.

The tooth I had trouble with during the summer was pulled out with much effort last Monday. I was impressed that it came out at all because there had seemed to me so little left to get a grip on. Even more impressed in that my dentist is a little slip of a lady.

The absence of sticking out tooth caused her to spend a lot of time screwing down into the depths of my jaw with the dental equivalent of a bradawl to give access for her pliers. The remains came out a little bit at a time after much twisting and rocking and tugging for each section. As a bonus she took out a little fragment of a previously extracted tooth that an earlier dentist had overlooked but that my tongue has constantly sought for several years.

Thanks to the miracle of anaesthesia I felt more or less nothing but she told me to take painkillers even before the numbness had worn off so I thought I was in for it. In fact it wasn't too bad but it gave me an excuse to sit around for a couple of days in my pyjamas nursing my jaw and occasionally rinsing out the bleeding gap with a salt solution.

During which time I got hooked on the snooker tournament and barely left the telly all week. I did manage to drag myself away on Saturday night to hear Carlos Arrendondo sing the songs of Victor Jara and Violetta Parra as part of Edinburgh's Hispanic Festival, grandly named but only a handful of events over a weekend. Carlos ran a very enjoyable Latin American culture course that I did years ago. He's intensely passionate about Latin America music in general and his Chilean roots in particular and did justice to the songs although I really prefer listening to him singing his own material.

I don't prefer it so much, even as a bit of a Chilephile myself, that I was willing to miss the snooker final on Sunday night in favour of hearing him again though. It's always exciting to see someone who's well behind in a sporting contest get back into contention and Ryan Day fought from 7 - 2 down to nearly drawing level in the 16th frame but John Higgins won it and took the next frame to clinch the match. Great for him to win in front of his home crowd but being more often a plucky loser myself I felt for the Welshman.

Now that's over I've no excuse. Must get on with something.

It looks like that thanks to Gordon I'll soon own 60% of my own money in RBS. That's cool.

Tuesday was a lovely day so I put on my golfing shorts and met some friends for lunch in the open air at one of our favourite trucker stops. In the afternoon on the golf course the temperature topped 25 degrees which is not bad for October.
No-one is lunching on the terrace in this picture taken the following much dreicher day as I drove north and homewards . The weather brightened up shortly afterwards and I enjoyed delightful autumn colours and mild conditions until after eight hours of otherwise tedious driving I got to Dunkirk.

I crossed early yesterday morning by Norfolk Line, who incidentally I see are taking over the Rosyth - Zeebrugge service in the Spring. Good for them. The drive from Dover to Edinburgh was a bit less bedevilled by traffic jams and road repairs than it has been in the past but it still took more than nine hours and I was glad to collapse with a cup of tea before unloading the car.

Waiting for one of Connor's excellent home made Chinese dishes I relaxed with a G&T having been made aware of alcohol by a couple of giant billboards as I came along Seafield. Alcohol awareness week actually ends tomorrow but I think I can be relied upon to keep the faith thereafter.

These French country people have their sayings, one of which is: "it's at the end of the fair that you count the cowpats."

So this being the end of the fair as far as my competitive golf is concerned for the year here's a wee picture of the state of the cowpats.
Thanks to the French Golf Federation's records I can go back on my scores to day one, but this graph starts at the high point of my career, three years ago, when my handicap hit 22.4.

(For the benefit of non-golfers let me explain that the objective is to minimize rather than maximize the number of cowpats so a rising line on a graph is unwelcome.)

Of course I am bound to do much better next year, which thought reminds me of another local saying: "don't count the eggs while they are still up the chicken's ...". Well let's just say "before they are laid."

The old man across the road was 90 last week. Although he's as bent as a bow and uses a stick he's constantly active. He goes up and down from dawn to dusk between his house and his garden, where he digs and plants and labours quite against his doctor's orders. He also takes an hour-long walk out of the village every morning. And as a major plus he's still got all his marbles.

We gave him a card and a bottle of champagne and I expressed the hope that we would see him celebrate his 100th birthday in due course. He hummed and hawed and shuffled uncomfortably just as my aunt used to do. She would declare that she didn't want to be 100 but when pressed couldn't or wouldn't set a time limit.

Let me put in down in black and white; I do want to be 100 and I want to be it as soon as possible while I'm still able to read the Queen's telegram.

Why should a damaged bottom tooth cause an agonising pain in the cheekbone?

I don't know.

Is there a more agonising pain in existence?

I don't want to know.

This interesting looking building, whose contents are also interesting, is the museum at the Gallo-Roman site of Argentomagus. The site itself is somewhat underwhelming compared to the likes of Pompei or Ostia. With respect to visible remains it's more like the Antonine Wall but with a bit of imagination you can see the Legion of the Ninth disappearing into the mists of the Creuse valley.

It was one of the spots covered during Alan's visit when I tried to go where I had not been before. Having cracked the business of checking museum hours before setting out we also visited Argenton's Museum of Shirtmaking and Masculine Elegance where as you can well imagine we felt thoroughly at home.

Gueret's museum was the final stop on Alan's culture packed visit. Despite its proximity it was the first time I had been inside. It's a museum very much in the old style and the natural history section in particular with its displays of stuffed animals in "typical" poses reminded me strongly of Kirkcaldy museum in the fifties.

From their plaster models of reptiles and amphibia I learnt that the creatures that had concerned me in the grass earlier in the year were not venemous vipers but harmless slowworms. The trick to identification is apparently to observe their eyebrows. If present then it's a slowworm. If absent it's a snake. Or is it the other way around?

Nature took revenge on me for that mistake a couple of days ago when a wasp stung me on the thumb as I bent down to pick up the toaster. My thumb is red, swollen and uncomfortable and to make things worse I still haven't worked out what the wasp could have been looking for in the toaster.

Les Dryades is hosting a regional competition this weekend and yesterday I was one of several members giving a hand with the running of the event.

In my case this meant semi hiding behind a bush (so as not to distract the players) on a hole where it can be troublesome to find balls at the point at which they are likely to land.

The only fun is to jump out from behind the bush and give one of these cunning signals, especially the "ball out of bounds" one.

But none of the 75 players put a ball out of bounds on that hole yesterday though many normal players do. My fellow commissaire spent dull moments ferreting around in the bushes and came away with 10 balls.

The other compensation is normally a free lunch but the club is apparently too strapped for cash at the moment. I had to make do with a coffee and a pain au chocolat on arrival and a glass of wine with my lunch.

But at least I'm not doing it today in the rain. Yesterday we had sunshine.

The French can do tacky seaside just as well as anyone else. Witness the décor of my B&B room at the weekend. I lost count of how many items bore a nautical or seaside motif but we are talking somewhere between 15 and 20.

The little circle that looks like a lifebuoy is in fact a window. You can look through it into the toilet and see what I reckon was the most tacky item (not counting any temporary occupant).

Here it is. Toilet paper manufacturers have clearly missed a trick by not being able to provide a suitably naff paper so the interior decorator has had to make do with a little floral pattern. On the other hand maybe it's an oblique reference to the Mary Rose.

All the rain this summer has allowed my
various flowers and plants to flourish. These white begonias have done particularly well. I'm also pleased with the green creeper in the picture. It started the season as a surviving smidgeon from last year deep in the interior of the pot.

My Edinburgh garden has done just as well as you can see from the picture kindly sent to me by Claire.

I hope the rain stays off for the next few days because I'm off to the seaside to play golf. Yo ho ho and a bottle of nice red wine.

To supplement the efforts of the estate agent I have converted the Barbansais site into a "House for Sale" site. I hope to link it to various sites that list French properties.

I think it looks very smart but remain to be convinced that it will attract any punters

We have at long last put the French house in the hands of an estate agent. He seems quite optimistic about selling it promptly despite the legion of other properties around here that have stood empty and unwanted for years.

When he was writing down the particulars he said that this little room, of which we are very proud, was so small that it would be illegal to call it a bedroom. I do hope that it is nonetheless legal to sleep in it otherwise we have criminalised several visitors.

I made use of a brief encounter with a TV set yesterday to watch some Olympic action. I was pleased to see that although not technically represented Scotland did well in the women´s 100 metres where Fraser, Simpson and Stewart took gold, silver and bronze in Jamaican colours and a Ms Ferguson-Mackensie featured further behind.

England or Team GB to give it its proper title took 6th place thanks to Jeanette Kwakye.

I have not taken up hunting. This is a golf trophy. It was not awarded for prowess at the game but is mine by virtue of my luck in the prize draw held after the competition I played in yesterday.

I’ve had a run of ill luck in raffles and the like since I won a bottle of whisky circa 1960. This prize confirms that the run continues.

My neighbour has been incensed this summer by the chopping down of woodland that has taken place around the village. I can't say I'm keen on it myself.

This is no harvesting of managed forest but more the wholesale destruction of natural woods leaving the land looking wasted.
It seems that if you own a tract of woodland you can do what you like with it and my neighbour maintains that greedy landowners are cashing in on a shortage of timber.
Could this be the Creuse's contribution to the rape of natural resources throughout the world brought about by the rise and rise of the Chinese economy?

If there is a silver lining to this cloud it is that on approaching from the bourg you now get quite a nice view of the village.

Is it reasonable to suppose that one of Josette's hens squeezed its business end into this hole in the wall above the woodpile and laid an egg?

I’ve seen a couple of vehicles with British registrations pass my door recently so when I answered a knock this afternoon to a pleasant looking man and woman I was all smiles when the lady enquired in an obviously English accent “Etes-vous anglais?”

I assumed they must be one of the two sets of British people who have bought properties in Barbansais in the last twelve months or so. As is my wont I made a good-humoured admission to being British but not English. (Will they never learn those Sassenachs?)

You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather when I learnt that they were English Jehovah’s Witnesses who, having retired to the neighbouring hamlet of Bazanges, are intent on spreading their faith about a bit.

To be fair they were very pleasant. We chatted for a while and they made a half-hearted effort or two to get me worried about the end of the world. I brushed those off. They didn’t insist on supplying me with copies of the Watchtower before they moved on, presumably in pursuit of the owners of the British registered vehicles aforementioned, so I really have no cause to complain.

All the same the sooner this house is sold the easier I will rest in my bed.