My DVD player seemed finally to have become immune to my coaxing strategies and refused to open its drawer whatever I did so I bought a new one.  Trying it out for the first time I took the opportunity to view two discs that have remained in their shrink wrapping for some considerable time.

I'm not sure how I acquired either of them.  I think Masters of European Football IV must have been a freebie that I've been too weak willed to throw away.  It purports to be a set of profiles of a dozen famous footballers but it's really just a selection of their shots at goal.  By the time I'd watched six players my boredom threshold had been well and truly breached so the remainder will remain  a mystery.

Jeane Manson is an American singer who made it big in France.  So big that she had to sell her house and horses in Normandy and retreat to a but and ben in Spain to pay off a tax bill.  I don't think that put her too near the poverty line though.  Anyway at some time she cut a DVD singing Christmas songs with a Red Army choir and I have it.  How did I get it?  Well at Barbansais there wasn't a lot to do in the evenings. The supermarkets and FNAC often had deals on DVDs, five for a tenner and so on.  I think I must have picked up this DVD as a make-weight in some such deal.  It's not to my taste though.  I only managed to get through it by fast forwarding.

But I still haven't managed to throw either of them out.

This is a sight familiar to all visitors to Glasgow but it's not the only way in which traffic cones can be diverted from their designed use by the citizens of that fine city.

At the Argyle Street end of Buchanan Street the other day I saw a member of a busking group playing a cone rather in the manner of a didgeridoo.  At intervals he pounded the pavement with its base thus exploiting its percussive possibilities as well.  How long before the weegeehorn takes its rightful place in the concert hall at the other end of the street?

I was in Glasgow for my periodic school chum lunch after which we went to the exhibition on Mackintosh's architectural career running until January at the Hunterian.  A lot of it was fairly familiar because there are really only a handful of designs of his that turned into actual buildings.  More's the pity when you compare his three imaginative designs for a small gate lodge that were rejected in favour of a dumpy cube, no doubt practical but yawningly boring.

The new cultural and education seasons are now well underway and I have been putting my bum on the seats of various theatres, concert halls and classrooms.

The Lyceum has a very sparkling looking set of worthwhile plays this year with a brand new show for openers.  Kill Johnny Glendenning garnered a fistful of four star reviews and the audience at the performance I attended clearly loved it.  I thought it was dire.  It always pains me to see such talent, hard work, skill and money devoted to trivia.  But with those reviews it will hopefully have brought many punters in and filled the theatre's treasure chest and with any luck those happy punters will come back to see the better stuff that's on offer.

Mahler and Shostakovich are amongst my favourite composers and have featured in the concerts I've been to so far.  I'm not particularly familiar with Bruckner and thoroughly enjoyed his massive 7th Symphony.  Apart from a short burst of cymbal clashing and frenetic triangle bashing in the third movement there is almost no percussion but with seventeen brass players on hand he gets a great deal of noise out.  Perhaps the piece I've enjoyed most though and which was completely unknown to me was Christoper Rouse's Flute Concerto.  It's absolutely lovely.  There are several performances on Youtube.  Try this one.

It almost makes me want to have a go at learning to play the flute but I've already launched on a Clarinet for Beginners evening class.  I so often see saxophonists double on clarinet that I'd thought I might have a go.  So far (two lessons in) it's not been too tricky and my fingers still go to the right places on the sax so no adverse impact yet.

One of my sax endeavours has just collapsed.  The guy who was running the U3A jazz improvisation group has packed it in and I don't think anyone else in the group is capable of replacing him.  I'm not too disappointed.  I got into it more or less by accident and my improvisational skills and knowledge were manifestly inadequate for the repertoire.  The improvisation work I do with my teacher is more in tune with my abilities and with the passage of time, touch wood, I'll be more up to the job of playing in a group.

But now I've got my Wednesday afternoons back and am already looking forward to devoting some of them to going to the cinema, something I've neglected for a while.  Mind you I'm not neglecting it this weekend.  I saw A Most Wanted Man yesterday, an excellent spy movie and then sat up late to re- watch Shine with its brilliant central performance by Geoffrey Rush.  David Helfgott, the subject of the film was troubled by mental illness and La Herida which I saw earlier in the evening screened within the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival also dealt very interestingly and movingly with the topic.

Moving too was the plight that many of Edinburgh's 20,000 odd Spanish residents find themselves in as depicted in the documentary En Tierra Extraña, another of the festival films.  Unable to find work at home many thousands of young Spaniards have gone abroad, many of them to Edinburgh where despite having enough degrees to throw a stick at they knuckle down to working as cleaners, dishwashers or whatever.  And they are not all young.  The people featured included a 52 year old woman with hardly a word of English who left hearth and home to look for better things.  I recognised one face on the screen as a man who drives the airport bus.  I don't suppose having a PhD (or whatever qualification he has) hinders him but it might be seen as a waste.  It's certainly a waste of the treasure spent by the Spanish state on education. I haven't found anything in English about it on the web but if your Spanish is up to it here's an article.

On the dance floor I have not been but a touring production of Top Hat was and so was Scottish Ballet.  I enjoyed both shows very much.  Richard Burton's deep rich voice reciting poems by Dylan Thomas in Scottish Ballet's Ten Poems ran the risk of overshadowing what was happening on stage but the choreographer and dancers rose to the challenge  of interpreting the poems as we listened.  This was paired with The Crucible.  Now I've been in Miller's play and know it quite well so I understood what was going on but there was no way in which a stranger to the story could have followed all its narrative thread, partly because it wasn't all there of course.  What could you do in 40 minutes.  But it was compelling and beautiful dancing so who's complaining.  Not me and not really The Guardian.

Top Hat was an entirely different kettle of fish and the entire story such as it is fitted comfortably into the evening.  I loved it and some may accuse me of double standards because if Kill John Glendenning is trivia then surely Top Hat is too.  True it is as they say not Shakespeare; but even taking away the music, the well-known songs, the well-worn old jokes, the wonderful dancing, and the sheer glitter of it all there is a kernel of human feeling and reality that the Lyceum's play simply lacks.

In addition to celebrating Rocio's 50th with some 36 hours of what seemed like continuous eating and drinking I managed to do a little tourism.  Spanish railways do an equivalent of our Senior Railcard, only at one fifth of the price and giving discounts of up to fifty percent on fares which are to British eyes already very affordable.

Birthday party eating and drinking

A gate to Badajoz

That's the sort of roundabout I admire

Roman theatre at Merida

View from the stage

What was that line?

Ibn Marwan

A panoramic view of the 18th at Gleneagles yesterday.  Not much golf going on, just waiting for some practicers to turn up.

The end of the Festival has not brought theatrical life to the crushing halt that might have been expected.  Apart from the very exciting referendum, whose denouement I was able to follow on Radio Scotland from a bed in Badajoz thanks to the internet, there was the wonderful Blabbermouth, a 12 hour NTS marathon of words and music that passed like a 100 yard dash on the eve of said referendum.

Duart Castle - Mull

Before that and slightly less wonderful in my view was their In Time o' Strife and on the beautiful island of Mull the very entertaining  The Greatest Little Republic (In the World), which when it started I thought was going to be a comedic satire on Scottish independence but as the Herald review explains turned out to be a much darker piece.  There was comedy on Mull in the form of The Weepers  by Rachel Maclean but after I read the very detailed handout describing the film it was clear that my artistic sensibilities had not been finely enough attuned to see beyond the bleeding obvious.

There's a lot of bleeding and other goriness in Titus Andronicus which Grads are presenting in the Spring.  It's a play I knew nothing about until we had a read-through this month.  It has a high bodycount and I spent a lot of the time wondering which of the many deaths I might be privileged to demonstrate but came to no conclusion.  In Festen, now in rehearsal for production later this year, I'm not meant to die but I am old and the vigorous conga dancing might just finish me off.

I was in Spain for a 50th birthday celebration and hoped to go to the theatre in Madrid on my way home but Monday tends to be the day of rest in continental theatres so I missed for example seeing Duet for One that I played in years ago, so would surely have followed the Spanish version easily enough.

With the Spanish birthday girl

There's a lot to admire in Ubu and the Truth Commission; the mixture of archive footage and animation, the coordination of that with the action on stage, the puppetry, the slick stage management.  And how on earth did they manage to get that vulture squawking and flapping its wings let alone the whirling microphones?

The victim and witness statements were harrowing (were they verbatim testimony?) and the distance given by hearing them delivered, as I expect they were in fact, in translation as the witness spoke in their own language heightened the feeling of amazement at how cruel human beings can be to one another. 

A white Ubu who personifies the apartheid regime and its enforcers gives us all the grossness, selfishness and evil of the original as he scurries about trying to hide his misdeeds and make up his mind about revealing all to the commission.

I've always thought of the truth commission as a really noble concept and had the impression that it had served South Africa well.  But this play seemed to me to present an altogether bleaker vision of its effect and as Ma and Pa Ubu sailed away into the sunset of a better tomorrow I had no confidence in it being better for anyone.

Wikipedia has a very long and detailed article on the play for searchers after more and undoubtedly truer analysis.  

One of the problems of having visitors at Festival time is that even the gaps between events tend to get swallowed up being sociable.  That's my excuse for not having written anything about what I've been to in the last several days and now I can't be bothered to write very much.  But I want to have a record so here are some brief notes.

Another Kronos Quartet concert in which one piece by a former Beiruti featured recordings of bombs and gunfire made during the Lebanese civil war. At this time of WWI commemoration it was a powerful reminder that the war to end all wars didn't.

Ever since I encountered Vita Sackville-West in Harold Nicolson's diaries in the 60s I've been mildly fascinated by the Sackville-West family.  I thought her goings on were on the odd side but there are other interesting skeletons in the family cupboard and Robert Sackville-West has taken some out and given them an airing in The Disinherited. It is a sad but fascinating tale of illegitimate children and family squabbles with which he entertained a packed Book Festival tent.  It's on my Christmas list.

Another author, not so well known and whose tent was not quite so tightly packed was Phil Adams who read us his entry to the City of Literature Story Shop competition.  The engaging little tale of a salmon and a bear had to fight hard to be heard above the torrential rain beating down on the spiegel tent but we all enjoyed it as we did the Prosecco downed by friends and family in celebration afterwards.

The Royal Overseas League runs an annual music competition.  This year's gold medal winner was a saxophonist and I went to hear him in a programme called Sax before Midnight.  It was a mightily varied programme that finished with the always appealing and melodic tangos of Piazzola.  He started however with a piece by Stockhausen, renowned in my mind for his Helicopter Quartet and for his general oddness.  If I heard Im Freundschaft correctly though he had a sense of humour, as did the person who dressed in a bear suit to play it on bassoon.

When it was suggested that we go to see MacAulay and Co. being recorded for BBC Radio Scotland I reflected that I could just as well have stayed in my bed to listen to it but I went along and rather enjoyed it.
 
The Pure, the Dead and the Brilliant by Alan Bissett explores the issue of Scottish independence from the point of view of  some mythical creatures of folklore, a selkie, a banshee, a bogle and a demon. It's very funny and doesn't take itself too seriously though its conclusion that independence is the way to go comes as no surprise.  The audience are caught up in the general hilarity and from where I sat I could see only one NO vote amidst a sea of YESs as we waved our programmes, folded to show the appropriate page, at the end.

One wet evening we set off to find some folk music.  The Royal Oak was our first port of call.  We couldn't find a gap in the crowd listening to free music in the main bar so dived downstairs and parted with a very modest sum to be entertained for an hour or so by a trio of young and accomplished players.  I've forgotten their name but I'd go again.  We spent an unsatisfactory time in Sandy Bell's afterwards where I doubt if even the musicians could hear themselves then went through various musicless pubs and ended up at the tailend of a free, funny and filthy comedy gig.
 
Crammed onto the tiny stage in the Jazz Bar were eight musicians who gave us a terrific version of The Rite of Spring.  If it sounds discordant said the leader Dave Patrick talking about their work on the piece just think what it sounds like when it's not played properly.  Of course in this case it's the dissonance that gives it character and according to this piece in The Telegraph was probably a major cause of the riot at its premier.

The first play I went to at The Fringe this year was by Marivaux and I was delighted to find that another of his plays was being performed.  I was even more delighted when I saw Games of Love and Chance.  This 18th century romantic comedy in which mistress swaps place with her maid to observe the man destined to be her husband and he does likewise with his valet had been transported to the 1920s and its comedy stretched to farce.  It was terrifically well acted and I look forward to seeing another TwoSquared Productions show next year.

In a bare basement corner of Summerhall an audience of a dozen or so stood for an hour around a long low narrow table.  At one end a nurse, at the other a soldier, each only inches away from us. The play consisted of periods of action simulating men rushing forward under fire followed by periods in which letters full of love, hope and longing were exchanged.  The horror of the war was simply but powerfully shown.  At a whistle blast from the nurse the soldier began an attack.  He rocked back and forward with ever increasing urgency, willing himself to get to the wire and focussing his mind on the future he hoped for while she created the noise of war. The attack culminated in the actor throwing pieces of liver at the wall.  The attack over, the nurse collected the pieces of liver and sorted them into "dead", "blighty" and "fixed, back you go".  Eventually after one attack a letter comes from the War Office, "killed in action".  When The Flood was over there was rightly no curtain call and no applause. 

Fortunately liver wasn't on the menu of the excellent meal we had afterwards in The Royal Dick.

The last play of my Fringe going (one EIF play to go) was definitely the oddest and rivalled the cosmonaut play in its ability to fail to communicate anything to me.  Lippy started with a very nicely observed and humorous after show discussion about a play we are supposed to have just seen.  Then we see a play in which four women variously ferret about in bin bags full of shredded paper, hang over tables, squat on buckets and ultimately I believe die from starvation.  They don't say very much in the course of the action.  It seemed to me the sort of play Salvador Dali might have written.  Proper theatre critics have made some sense of it and I much appreciate Lyn Gardner's review in The Guardian for articulating much of what I felt about the show.  

A late night session at the Jazz Bar featuring the Russian trumpeter Valery Ponomarev backed by a galaxy of local jazzmen was excellent entertainment although I found Mr Ponomarev's insistence that we all applaud and clap along a degree less amusing than he did.

Eager to get the lowdown on collateral debt obligations and the like I went to hear John Lanchester on his book Money Talk: Nonsense Versus Bullshit.  It was very amusing but a serious and cautionary tale nonetheless.  What a balls-up it's all been since the smart money men started selling mortgages to people with no hope of being able to keep up the payments.

I confess to never having read anything by the great Thomas Mann although I have seen his work in the form of the opera Werther and the film Death in Venice.  His son Klaus was also a writer and according to Alan Massie while Thomas was interesting as a writer Klaus was much more interesting as a man.

So much more interesting to Massie that he has written a novella called Klaus which is a fictionalised version of his life.  So interesting was his talk on the subject that I have bought the book and placed it on my pile of unread masterpieces for later consumption.

Eagerly looked forward to have been the James plays, a trilogy by Rona Munro about James I, James II and James III who were kings of Scotland in the 15th century.  This is a joint production by the EIF, the National Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland and all three are directed by Laurie Sansom who took over artistic direction of  the NTS quite recently.

I saw them in a oner yesterday and thought they were stunning.  Check out the broadsheets for reviews, most of which are very favourable.  My favourite of the three was James II which the critics favoured least.  So much for the critics is what I say. 

To properly enjoy a Festival day you've got to feel that you're packing a lot in.  I did my best yesterday with a day weighted on the musical side.

I kicked off with an excellent show by Shrewsbury and Severn opera.  The Lost Domain is a dramatisation of a novel by Alain Fournier who was killed early in the First World War.  It's a story of youthful love and the search, ultimately unsuccessful, for the happiness of the past.

The young cast sing, dance and act with skill and commitment.  They faithfully convey the emotional truth of the tale in a well choreographed, costumed and staged production that makes good use of projection on the cyclorama, that sweeps on and off simple but effective settings and is an object lesson in how to deploy a large cast on the Adam House stage.

Music and lyrics?  Excellent.

I must read the book thought I and lo and behold it's a school text in France freely accessible here.

Then I nipped across to the museum to enjoy a free concert by the Erskine string quartet. The Erskine in question is the sixth Earl of Kellie, an 18th century composer and they played some of his music as well as some 21st century classical stuff and rounded things of with an arrangement of two of Phil Cunningham's accordion pieces.  Nothing if not eclectic.

Down at the Book Festival I enjoyed two authors talking about their books on 21st century India.  It's 30 years since my sole visit to India and there have been such momentous changes that it would probably spoil my memories of the place to go back.  Asked why, given the not so very nice picture of many aspects of life in Delhi he paints he continues to live there, Rana Dasgupta pointed to the energy of the city.  All is change and forward movement.  It makes Europe seem effete and worn out.

John Keay's Midnight's Descendants sounded a good read too if rather more academic. 

The Kronos Quartet have long been amongst my favourites.  In a show called Beyond Zero they played rather mournful music, initially alone, and then accompanied by a film collage of First World War archival footage of troops parading, troops embarking, troops attacking, tanks lumbering over the landscape, biplanes dogfighting and suchlike nastiness.

It certainly left you in no doubt that the war was a sad and bad thing but then personally I was in no doubt about that beforehand so it was perhaps a case of preaching to the converted.

You'd expect film of that era to be jerky and spattered with little black spots and similar noise but here a great deal of artificial blemishes had been superimposed in the manner of rapidly changing semi opaque blue and sepia Rorschach tests.  The effect was no doubt wonderfully evocative of the blast of bombs and gunfire but it pained my eyes to the extent of spoiling the show for me.  The wildly enthusiastic applause proved me to be in a minority.

Before I got to Kronos I stopped off in the New Town to see a friend's art exhibition and was treated to a glass of wine.  I'm sure that was a friendly gesture rather than a marketing ploy. I left empty-handed not without regrets over a couple of the pieces.  I could have made an offer I suppose.

Theatre Alba can be relied upon to produce something worthwhile in Duddingston Kirk gardens and proved that last night with their production of Robert McLellan's Mary Stewart.

Unfortunately the climate can't be relied upon to provide pleasant conditions in which to watch an outdoor show and so it proved.  I had taken the precaution of putting thermals under my cords and wore a down ski jacket and a Helly Hansen cold weather sailing hat so I was well equipped to stay warm and to withstand the rain that drizzled periodically during the first act, poured down during the interval (we were under cover then) and drizzled continuously throughout the second act.

There were not many of us there but we all stuck it out as of course did the actors who delivered a fine performance of an interesting play.  Theatregoers are more familiar with Schiller's Maria Stuart and the Donizetti opera based on it.  Those cover Mary's imprisonment in England and her execution and include a wholly fictional meeting between her and Elizabeth I of England.

McLellan's play covers ground which I imagine is as familiar to Scottish school children today as it was in my childhood.  Essentially it deals with her struggle to maintain her authority over the quarrelsome and self-serving Scottish nobility as a Catholic monarch, a very young and inexperienced one, in the early and fervent days of the Reformation.  It opens just after the murder of Rizzio, explores Darnley's repeated efforts to be given the crown matrimonial and her resistance to that, Darnley's murder, her subsequent marriage with Bothwell and ends with her setting off to imprisonment in Loch Leven.

Her personal and political lives were both steeped in tragedy and nowhere was that better illustrated in the play than in the scene in which Bothwell enumerates all the forces that are arrayed against her from her former friends in France, her cousin Elizabeth, the protestant church in Scotland, most of the Scottish nobility and even her (half) brother James.

The cast were mostly Theatre Alba regulars and worked well together.  Andrea Mckenzie made an excellent Mary, exceptional given that she took on the part at very short notice.  Of the others I particularly enjoyed Robin Thomson's devious Maitland whose surface humour concealed an ice-cold calculating interior.  His chuckled "hoots, toots mon" could well find a happy home with me in future.

There was so much communicating going on behind me between two young women at Mercy, Mercy, Mercy that I eventually lost patience and suggested that they delay their conversation till the music was over.  Nobody expects to listen to jazz in a sepulchral silence but continuous chatter seems to me to defeat the object of going to a concert in the first place.  And as far as I could judge they were the only people in the Jazz Bar behaving in that way.

That was the only blemish on an hour and a half of music associated with Cannonball Adderley and his band.  Most of it from the 50s and 60s, much of it composed by his brother Nat and other members of the band.  In this line-up Nat's place was taken by Colin Steele and Cannonball's by Martin Kershaw.  It was excellent.

The Middle East could do with a little bit of mercy, mercy, mercy at the moment but none of the speakers at the Book Festival event on the middle east that I went to offered much prospect of that.  It was an interesting but sobering hour.

Mercifully there has been more music on hand to keep festival goers cheerful and I much enjoyed a late night show by the colourful Caribbean tenor saxophonist Arturo Tappin whose uninhibited and vigorous set was something of a contrast to the more restrained afternoon presentation by a sax quartet from Glasgow.  Who ever thought Weegies could be restrained?

My own show finished yesterday.  We got quite reasonable houses, quite a reasonable review and the show got better as the week went on.  It seems possible also that our efforts may be the talk of the cabinet table when they reassemble and swop holiday experiences if the Foreign Secretary enjoyed himself on Friday.  Of course if he didn't (the play has a few unkind words to say about politicians after all) he might point to it as the sort of crap you encounter on the Fringe.

Rumours by Neil Simon was our stablemate in the Royal Scots Club and I saw their last show last night.  It's a cracking comedy of a farcical nature and the cast made a great job of it.  A nice note to leave the venue on.

One strategy when looking for the silver threepenny bits hidden in the plum pudding that is the Fringe is to look for authors whose work you like or admire.

That worked well for me with David Mamet but I came a cropper with David Greig.  I really found The Cosmonaut's Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union difficult to enjoy.  The staging of it in Riddle's Court didn't help.  The rule there should be don't let your actors sit down because no-one beyond the front row will be able to see them, and above all don't let them lie down.  In this production they sat down a lot and lay down now and then.  To be fair the cosmonauts themselves were clearly visible throughout on an elevated platform but it would all have worked better if the audience had been elevated.  Raked seating next time please.

Now as to the play itself I didn't have much of a clue about what was going on so turned to the internet when I got home.  The Guardian's review of a 2005 production says "....it is pretty hard work for the audience...".  I agree.  But what's it about?

Well it seems communication and in particular the failure to communicate is the theme.  So I must congratulate Mr Greig on his success in failing to communicate with me.

A two hour ukulele workshop in the hands of cabaret diva Tricity Vogue was a tempting proposition at the weekend but I plumpted for Madeleine Smith and Seamus Heaney instead.

I Promise I Shall Not Play Billiards opened with three women circling a seated fourth.  All were dressed in similar mid Victorian costumes of crinoline skirt and voluminous blouse.  The similarity didn't end there because each of them took the part by turns of Madeleine Smith, accused of murder in mid 19th century Glasgow.

It was an interesting presentation but failed to tell me much more than I already knew about the case, which was damn little.  So even now I am scurrying to Wikipedia to find out more including I hope the significance of the title.

In A While with Seamus Heaney we were led gently through the poet's life and works by an Irish actor whose mellifluous voice had an unfortunate soporific effect on me so that I am unable to properly report on the show.

No-one could have dozed off during David Mamet's highly charged and loudly argued Race.  This 2009 play is set in a lawyer's office where the multi-racial partnership is approached by a rich white man seeking to be defended against an accusation of raping a black girl.

It has all of Mamet's clever plotting and linguistic virtuosity as the characters collide against one another at high velocity and the story twists and turns.  The complexity of race relations, of how to deal honestly and fairly with one another without prejudice, special pleading or special treatment from one side or the other is expertly, humanely and wittily explored.

The context is the post civil rights America of today but this South African company no doubt seized upon the play as a vehicle with which to reflect on relationships within their own post apartheid  society.

Back in Britain meanwhile the European debate goes on and Anthony Giddens at the Book Festival gave an interesting talk that got away from our perennial preoccupation with perfidious Brussels laying down anti-British rules about straight bananas and the like, to reflect on Europe's place in the  context of today's highly connected and highly interdependent world.

He has of course written a book putting forward his ideas and it seems to me that it would be a good idea to have a copy of Turbulent and Mighty Continent delivered to every home in the land in time for the citizens of the UK (or perhaps by then it will be just the rUK) to reflect on the bigger picture before they cast their votes in favour of or against straight bananas.

No mikes were in evidence in Blackwells bookshop where Trinity College presented a selection of pieces from their latest syllabuses.  Piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone were all played by Trinity staff and a local music teacher treated us to a set of traditional Scottish fiddle tunes.

Introduced as having achieved unbelievably high marks in her grade 6 exam a sweet little girl from Heriot's delighted the audience with a haunting harp melody.

The concert was free and I even came away with a goodie bag.  The contents were not wildly exciting but I always have need of a biro that hasn't yet run out of ink.

On the way home from FOH duties for the Grads  I popped into a free standup comedy show.  At most standup shows it's blindingly obvious that the Fringe exercises no quality control over participants and this show was no exception.

Thanks to the couple of glasses of wine I'd had earlier in the evening though I found it mildly enjoyable and eagerly seized the opportunity given to me to grunt fiercely into a microphone as one comic drew his audience into his act.

On the Fringe a full house at any time is a consummation devoutly to be wished but to sell out at 10.30 in the morning is such stuff as dreams are made on.

Yet there we were yesterday, around fifty of us, crammed into Valvona and Crolla's little back room for Larkin About where we spent a delightful hour in the company of two actors and two musicians sharing Philip Larkin's passions for poetry, jazz and women. 

You could call it the secret life of a librarian only it doesn't seem to have been very secret even in his lifetime judging by the letters he wrote to his various women and to male friends, let alone what he revealed in his poems.  Randy isn't the word for it. Hard to tell from this show whether he was a likeable person or not but certainly interesting and I'll be off to the library in the fullness of time for a volume of his poetry and a biography.

One minor criticism.  What was the point in such a small room only three rows deep of miking the performers?

Is this a typically botched photo from my phone or is it the world being smothered by a dark cloud of evil?

I maintain it's the latter since I snapped it while watching In Search of Vanished Blood, a video presentation on the walls of the National Gallery of Scotland late on Monday night that was part of the Lights Out commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

The video was accompanied by a soundtrack of whining shells, air raid sirens and exploding armaments rivalled briefly by the Tattoo fireworks until not long after it started there was a very loud bang and all went dark.

I hung about for a bit but had had enough by 11 so don't know whether they got the show back on the road or not.

There was blood, albeit in the shape of red fairy dust, on show in the Grads production of The Duchess of Malfi that I saw earlier in the evening.

Now I know this play is regarded as a Jacobean masterpiece but frankly I think it's a load of cobblers not redeemed by poetic language as can be fairly claimed for some of Shakespeare's more nonsensical work.  So that tends to colour my view of any production including this one.

In the director's notes she says that she sees the play as a Hammer horror movie and with blood and gore splattered over the screen, wolves howling in the moonlight, madmen stumbling along the dimly lit corridors of Transylvanian castles to the sound of clanking chains and distant screams the show has a chance.  But not, for me at any rate, in the well lit and comfortable auditorium of the Royal Scots Club.

More to my taste was the other Grads show on view at the same venue this week.  The Wonderful World of Dissocia presents itself initially as a gleefully anarchic and absurdist romp, beautifully lit and energetically performed by a team of actors on top of their game. 

The sting comes in the second act. Fortunately the lights went down before I had properly read the programme because the director's note on the play gives away what to my mind should be the shock of realising what it's all about.  So if you go, and I thoroughly recommend that you should, don't read the programme until afterwards.

For tickets https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/duchess-of-malfi and https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/wonderful-world-of-dissocia

Festival going kicked off for me on Friday with a production of  Marivaux's The Dispute at the ever interesting Summerhall.

The story concerns an experiment to find out which of the sexes is the more fickle.  Four children, two male and two female are raised in isolation and at around 18 years of age are released, find one another and social interaction begins.

Lo and behold la donna e mobile, but the lads are just as bad.  This was a very nice production with good use of video and sound and fine acting.  I was intrigued though by the male bonding activities of the two boys.  Play fighting and general horsing around seemed authentic though I can't say I was much into that myself.  But they also jump and bang their chests together.  That's something I've never done nor seen done, except in another production of The Dispute that I saw at the Traverse not that long ago.

This coincidence sent me scurrying first to my own copy of the play then to a facsimile of the original text to see whether Marivaux's stage directions include chest banging.  No they don't. Ils sautent is all he says.

Somebody is copying somebody.  No harm in that.  I've done it myself.  

Showing the way

Like synchronised swimming, rhythmic gymnastics strikes me as utterly daft but you have to recognise and admire the skill of the people doing it and the huge effort it must take to achieve proficiency.

The bits I saw of it in the wonderful SSE Hydro on the first day of the Commonwealth Games could be described as hell of a hard hula hooping and cleverly complicated keepie uppie.  Even at the height of the hula hoop craze of the 50s I couldn't manage more than a few simple rotations round my midriff so I did appreciate what these girls were doing (it's a girls only event) but I still think it's daft. 

Scottish number one in action

Glasgow was enjoying tropical weather that day and I lunched in the open air by the banks of the Clyde before heading for the squash at Scotstoun. This was terrific and caused me to regret that I ever stopped playing.  I suppose I wouldn't last five minutes if I started again but they say racketball is a game kinder to the more mature.  Looking at that video I'm not so sure.

Doubles in the glass

I've often wondered how on earth you could ever play doubles at squash and now I know.  The first rather obvious point is that you need a bigger court.  At Scotstoun three singles courts became two doubles courts by sliding the walls of the middle court towards one another and the glass box show court expanded sideways.  The players keep mostly to one side of the court and the game seems even faster and furiouser than singles.

When I played the scoring system used required a player to win serve before he could score a point but that is now an alternative to the standard system in which a point is scored on change of serve as well as during service.  That should reduce the length of matches and most of those I saw on my two visits took less than 30 minutes but one very exciting singles (won by Scotland) went on for an hour and a half.  That match plus a ladies doubles between Malaysia and New Zealand were more than enough value for the ticket money.

Scotland beating Malaysia

Another energetic racquets game that I used to enjoy playing is badminton.  The Commonwealth Games badminton is being played in the Emirates Arena, again a splendid venue.  It's just across the road from Celtic Park.

I was a bit disconcerted when I went in.  Four courts were simultaneously in action.  Four umpires were shouting out scores.  The public address was urging us to applaud teams as they left on completion of their matches and welcome new teams coming in.  The answer seemed to be to concentrate on one court and allow your attention to wander now and then.  Fortunately Scottish players were in action which gave me a focus and although they were outclassed in a couple of cases the mixed doubles match was a closely fought and exciting game in which we beat Malaysia.

Unbelievably he saved this

In addition to all of those I went to men's hockey and saw Australia drub Wales and India beat Scotland by a similar score although it was a much more closely contested game.

Guess the sport

The sport I originally set out to see was Artistic Gymnastics.  I only got a ticket in the second sale when unrequired reserved seats were released and although all the seats in the Hydro have a great view some are greater than others and for this event mine was one of those.

Just a blur

Up off the floor

Like the badminton an awful lot was going on at the same time.  Vaulting, parallel bars, high bar, beam and floor exercises. I used to be proud of my cartwheel and my handstand but how anyone can do a back somersault and land on a 4 inch wide beam defies explanation.  This was a great morning's entertainment for everyone except the poor English vaulter who despite all the soft landing mats did something nasty to himself and was carried out with his leg in a splint.

No doubt about which team this youngster is supporting

I got to another gig featuring young musicians.  These, from a school down south, were even younger than the Porty lot and there were many more of them.  With two enthusiastic teachers, one conducting and the other bashing the piano they romped through a set of big band numbers with commendable skill and presence.  I've only vague memories of musical activities at KHS but I'm sure we had nothing like this.

Billed as Woody Allen's piano player Conal Fowkes played and sang a range of numbers from the twenties by different American composers and players, some well known and some obscure.  It was a delightfully relaxing morning concert in the Tron Kirk that deserved a bigger audience.  Woody got a mention only once when for his final number Conal played a piece from the soundtrack of  Magic in the Moonlight, Allen's latest film.

I've just had a look at Conal's bio and see that the Jazz Festival organisers' Woody name dropping does him a disservice.  I also see that he was born in Zambia.  If I'd known that I'd have spoken to him at the gig.

Another delightful piano player, also at the Tron, was Paolo Alderighi who played a similar set but perhaps ranged over a longer timescale.  He finished off by playing a piece for four hands with his wife, Stephanie Trick.  It was a high speed, high octane performance and as he said beforehand, the improvisational nature of jazz adds an extra degree of danger to theundertaking.