I'm not sure if this is an art installation or a public service announcement by the galleries doing their bit to soothe the Covid stricken populace.  When I snapped it I had not been visiting that gallery, but Modern 2 its sibling across the road.

I had gone to see the Ray Harryhausen exhibition.  The man's name meant nothing to me before this exhibition popped up and I rather doubt that I've seen any of the large number of films that he worked on, given that monster movies, sci-fi and fantasy have never much appealed to me.  However the publicity piqued my curiosity so I went along.

The exhibition demonstrates his tremendous contribution to film-making.  He deployed and indeed invented many of the techniques used to combine stop motion animation and live action over a 30 plus year career that ended with The Clash of the Titans in 1981.  By then special effects techniques like CGI and motion capture suits were beginning to replace Harryhausen's methods though the basic principles persist.

Taking pictures was allowed.  I took very few but here are two.

I've been to a couple of concerts and a few films (more Truffaut) in recent weeks but the only live theatre I've seen has come courtesy of transmissions from afar.  Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt was beamed to my local picture palace from a theatre in London.  It's an absorbing family saga that draws its inspiration from Stoppard's Jewish roots and spirals down from the family's affluence and contentment in late 19th century Vienna to the poverty and anguish of the holocaust.  Not a bundle of laughs.

The other show did provoke lots of laughs and that most unexpectedly.  I had not thought that a play about a tussle between parents at the Childrens' Panel would be other than serious and well meaning.  CMF Wood's Prism via Zoom defied my expectations. Hugh Simpson's review is more severe on the production that I would be (I loved it) but he makes a lot of good points.

I was on Zoom myself one morning for theatrical purposes.  This was a reading of a play it is proposed to put on as part of a weekend theatre fest in late May. The reading was to give the author, none other than the aforementioned CMF Wood, an idea of how it might sound.  I used all my guile to snatch a look or two at the Australian Tennis Open men's final (which I had been watching before the reading) while keeping my place in the script.  Afterwards I went off for an afternoon of sax playing casting a glance at the tennis score whenever I could because I had sadly had to leave before Rafa clinched the match.

Siobhan was very interested in a letter written by Mary Queen of Scots that went up for auction this month. She suggested I went along to curb her enthusiasm should she be tempted to allocate her all to its acquisition.  This I gladly did preceded by a tasty lunch of fish and chips in the Barony and a white wine in the Theatre Royal, and followed by a G&T or two in Mather's.  What a pleasant afternoon it was.  I hope the buyer of the letter enjoyed the afternoon too.

And what a pleasant evening was a Burns supper at which I recited as I often do (at Burns suppers that is) his Ode to the Haggis.  It was not one of my finest renditions.  Indeed I think in future I'll just play my Youtube version.

Back in November I became aware that a new law was to be introduced concerning the installation of inter-linked smoke and heat alarms so I bought them straightaway but only managed to get around to installing them 24 hours before the law came into force on 1st February.  Will anyone ever check I wonder.

This week I finished putting my website back together after its mysterious disappearance some months ago.  It was a tedious job but I enjoyed revisiting old productions and holidays. I'm now having a look at some of the other websites that I created in the past, for example to advertise the sale of the Barbansais house and one I did for the Grads.  I'm amazed at my now long lost skills.

I have something of a predilection for trees in their winter glory.  I daresay had Burns turned his mind to it he could have written a rare poem in praise of them which I'd have been delighted to quote in this blog post that's being published on his birthday. In recompense my picture tips its hat to another poet worthy of a supper in his name.

January has sped past without very much happening in the little pool that I inhabit.  Ewan went home early on.  The band got back into action, joined last night by Esther who got me into thinking about the saxophone in Barbansais about fifteen years ago.  She and husband Andy have just returned to Edinburgh after some ten years in Munich.  We lunched together in Henderson's the veggie restaurant run I understand by descendants of the Henderson who opened one of Edinburgh's earliest veggie places in the New Town years ago. I had an aubergine dish that was ok but didn't measure up to the stuffed aubegine I made myself at lunchtime today. 

I had another meal out at L'Escargot Bleu where my tasty rabbit was washed down with conviviality.  I haven't had a home cooked rabbit to compare it with yet.

I was cited for jury service but as in the only other time this has happened to me I didn't have to serve.  I'm of an age where I have the right to be excused but I didn't exercise that right; not entirely from a sense of civic duty but mostly in the hope it would be interesting. 

There is a celebration of the work of Francois Truffaut on currently and I've enjoyed a handful of films from it so far.  I went to the cinema to see Les 400 Coups which despite its fame I don't believe I'd seen before.  It's a good film but quite a hard watch dealing as it does with the harsh childhood of its protagonist, Antoine Doinel, who is modeled on Truffaut himself.  

Thanks to my BFI subscription I've been able to watch the four subsequent films that follow  Antoine through adolescence, marriage and divorce.  Truffaut made the first film in 1959 and the last in the series in 1979.  In all of them Doinel was played by the same actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud.  Apart from Les 400 Coups they are all comedies and very funny.

There are another half dozen films unrelated to Doinel being shown in cinemas and I intend to see them all and indeed have already seen two, L'Argent de Poche and La Nuit Americaine.  I'd seen the latter before but remembered nothing about it other than the title and its meaning which I will leave you to discover for yourselves.  It's a light-hearted look at film making.  Jean-Pierre Léaud appears in it and plays a character very like Doinel.

So 2022 has arrived, not before time given all the crap that 2020 and 2021 have dealt out.  According to something I heard on the radio recently the human brain has a built in optimism bias.  80% of us when asked proclaim that things are going to get better,  So there.  I fall within the 80% and hope you do too.

After the heady excitement of my trip to the Highland Widlife Park life got back to normal with an online reading of a play about witchcraft. and Ewan's arrival from the States for Christmas.  Neither of these is actually normal but in these pandemic times anything untainted by Covid seems normal.

The following weekend I watched rugby at Goldenacre and via the telly the Abu Dhabi F1 Grand Prix.  I don't normally find F1 racing terribly interesting but I enjoyed this race a lot and as a knife edge finish to the season it could hardly have been bettered.  Mercedes were very grumpy but Hamilton although clearly disappointed was not at all backward in congratulating Verstappen.  If all the races were like that I might watch more often.

The pantomime at the Gaiety theatre in Ayr was streamed to the world and some of last year's Thursday Theatre group watched it.  I enjoyed it and straightway recommended to Andrew that being a resident of Ayr he attend in real life.  It turned out that he indeed planned to go with family including his young grandson but Covid cancellation scuppered the plan.

We, that is the Dunedin Wind Band, managed to hold a Christmas concert.  We had strict free from Covid entry criteria for both band and audience.  Despite my sending out around 120 emails advertising the gig the only friends who turned up were those I already knew were coming plus Steve the fireman who generally makes it.  Sarah Naish who founded the band and who was our musical director till early last year played percussion and her husband Johnny was there with his tuba.  It gave us an opportunity, denied by the pandemic at the time Sarah left, to make a little presentation and thank them both for all their work over the years.  Afterwards said friends repaired to Siobhan's for fizz and festive chat.

A couple of days later I went to the Queen's Hall to a SNJO concert.  The music was good and Tommy Smith was his usual entertaining self and we all got a free CD of Christmas jazz as we left.  Shame the audience was so sparse.

Then I went down to Keswick for a week of Christmas fun and games.  We did actually play a board game one evening that was rather fun.  Cranium involved, inter alia, drawing with your eyes shut and sculpting plasticine.  I visited the pencil museum for the first time and recommend it highly. 

I did some limited walking about, making my first ever visit to the far side of the lake but not venturing down past the theatre to the spot on the lake where I usually go.  We had an outing to Hebden Bridge where Ben has recently bought a house with a great view though thanks to the mist we weren't able to enjoy it.  But it looks great in photos.  We had a festive feast in a jam-packed unmasked restaurant in the town with various Blincoes.  We were 13 at table but thankfully no misadventure arose.

As soon as I got back I was eating again.  This time in the tiny Cafe Konj under Scotland's stricter rules.  To comply with the spirit of those I fitted in a lateral flow test in the brief interal between getting off the train and hitting the cafe.  Persian grub, friendly service and convivial company providing a splendid welcome home.

The Cairngorms seen from the Highland Wildlife Park where I'd gone to see the macaques before my adopter status runs out.  I travelled up in a bus from Edinburgh that drops you at the end of the entrance road.  Because it comes off the A9 here and there the journey turns into a bit of a bus tour.  I was most impressed at how it arrived at every stop bang on the time listed in the timetable, rivalling Japanese railways.  The driver surely knew that Japanese macaques were my objective.

This is their playground but when I arrived it was close to empty.  There are some monkeys on the far side more or less invisible to the naked eye so I decided to look round the park and come back later.  First I took a picture of the heron on that little island.

On the way into the park I'd passed a clump or two of resting Bactrian camels and a cat that

was the spitting image of the cat that lived in Fiona's house sixty years ago.  It probably does a lot of spitting when provoked because it's a Scottish wildcat.  These animals are in danger of disappearing because they and domestic cats are making whoopee together so there's a project to save them presumably by restricting their sexual opportunities.

I managed to take out of focus pictures of tigers and polar bears and of arctic foxes with fence lines across their faces but better pics of a lynx and a snow leopard 

before coming back to the macaques now out in strength where I managed to take lots of out of focus pictures.  My camera liked to focus on the fence instead of the animals behind it and although it has a manual focus feature I'd no idea how to use it.  So it was a bit frustrating but now I've read the manual so may do better next time.  But I don't want to deprive you of the monkeys so feast your eyes.  They're not all out of focus.

 

There was more and there were more animals but eventually I left the park and caught a local bus to Kingussie to catch a train home.  I was the only human being in the station and was treated to a variety of pre-programmed announcements about time table changes, warnings to "see it, say it, sort it" etc including an announcement that the next train arriving at platform 1 was the 16.08 to Edinburgh.  Fortunately I had been pre-warned by the signalman who came out of his box and shouted to me that it would in fact be departing from platform 2 so I wasn't left in the wrong place gazing at a missed train.

The Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.  This was the only Scottish venue visited by Mathew Bourne's new ballet The Midnight Bell on its UK tour.  A few of us decided to make the trip.  Illness cut the group down to two so Claire and I took the bus north one Saturday morning, got there early afternoon, checked in to a hotel, visited the museum (small but full of good stuff and with a pleasant cafe to boot), had a tasty early dinner and saw the show.  Very good it was too.  Beautifully staged,lit, costumed and danced. Athough I disagree with their opinion of the lip synced thirties numbers this review is well worth reading and has excellent pictures of the action.  

After a substantial and delicious breakfast, (I was tempted to stray beyond my usual limited regime and am glad I gave in), we pottered about the town wondering at the number of churches flanking the river till it was time to take the bus home.  A most enjoyable trip and I came away with a new bunnet as a souvenir.

I've never considered myself a G&S fan although I've enjoyed those of their shows that I've seen and had a thoroughly enjoyable evening as a reviewer's plus one at Scottish Opera's production of The Gondoliers.  It's a very funny feel good show and some of its 19th century satirical references were replaced to good effect by digs at our current public figures.

In the world of straight theatre there was a super production of Jo Clifford's version of Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream at The Lyceum.  The stage had been extended to cover the entire stalls area and give a space for the play to be done in the round, although there was a little upstage directional emphasis to allow for the fact that a proportion of the audience were in the circle rather than on stage where I was. It's a story of honour besmirched and revenge sought and what we might now call preventive detention whereby Segismundo, crown prince of Poland, is imprisoned at birth because of astrological forecasts that he will grow to be a tyranical king.  Temporarily freed to test the waters he does indeed behave badly and is put back in his box.  Meanwhile Rosaura is looking for the man who knocked her up then left.  She has revenge in mind and knife in hand.  There's lots of Shakespearean cross dressing, coincidence and cunning plotting.  Finally, again as is common in Shakespeare all is revealed and the the appropriate matches are made.    

The performances were first class.  In particular Lorn Macdonald as Segismundo turns in a tour de force.

I saw a much smaller scale but very interesting and accomplished production at The Kings.  This was The Signalman, a one man play by Peter Arnott. It's a reminiscence in later life by the man who staffed the last signalbox before the Tay Bridge on the night of the disaster and who in fact waved the train on to its fatal rails.  A very fine performance and staging.

I've heard a lot of music this month, some old tuneful favourites like Sheherazade and The New World symphony, new to me Brahm's Piano Concerto Number 1, and two more profound pieces.  Both of those were at SCO concerts. 

Shostakovich is a composer whose work I regard highly and his 14th Symphony is a dark and thought provoking piece.  Consisting of 11 songs about death linked together it could hardly be otherwise but it's a wonderful listen.

A more difficult listen was Berg's Chamber Concerto for Violin and Piano with 13 Wind Instruments.  This was the second and strongly contrasting half of a concert in which sweet romantic music from Mahler's happy days had pleased but not stirred. I couldn't call it insipid but it didn't move me that much.  Whereas I actually jumped at one point in the Berg as the pianist pounded the left hand end of the instrument. Friends said to me later that they hadn't rushed to stream it on Spotify when they got home.  Neither did I but I would like to hear it again.

Some friends are great fans of the food and wines of Turkey, the Caucasas and Iran and such like places.  They organised a meal at a tiny place in Tollcross run by an Iranian lady.  It's really a little cafe that closes its doors about 5pm and serves a party of up to eight people a selection of dishes from the region. It was lovely food and I particularly loved the way she did the rice.  I could have eaten that alone and left well satisfied.

I happened to eat alone at Rollo in Broughton Street one day because my lunch companion couldn't make it at the last minute. Lovely lunch and great service. 

The Zambia Society Trust held their AGM on Zoom again this year.  After the business of minutes, financial report etc there were two most interesting presentations.  One about the development of the Medical Licentiate programme bringing trained personnel to a large number of rural district hospitals.  We had a talk on the way ML training is being done as well as a report on a study into the lessons being learnt from the programme.  Then a presentation about Flyspec which is a flying doctor service active in the country.  Both of these as well as the Zambia Scciety itself are good organisations to help you use up your spare cash.  Just click on the links above.

I occasionally watch foreign TV channels (as much as one can given regional restrictions) and one of the best is TV5Monde.  They've been showing some films recently starring Yves Montand, either because of the centenary of his birth or the thirtieth anniversary of his death. I've watched a couple and after one I lingered on to watch a fascinating documentary.

This was about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known to his friends (and I imagine to his enemies) as DSK.  Head honcho of the IMF until he fell from grace over some sexual shenanigans the programme sought to answer the question "what's he being doing since?".  The answer is making lots of money and paying very few taxes.  All within the law, as befits a former socialist finance minister.

 

This is one of the many, many monkeys to be found in Edinburgh zoo.  The fact that he's got himself slightly out of focus by hiding in a tree doesn't hide the fact that he's not the monkey I had gone to the zoo to see.  The Japanese macaque whose adoptive father I have been for ten months courtesy of a Christmas gift is it turns out domiciled at the zoo's Highland premises. 

Notwithstanding that disappointment we had a lovely afternoon, seeing the famous pandas and the zoo's newest acquistion, half a dozen giraffes as well as those old favourites the penguins.

 

 

 

 

 We finished off the day with platters and wine at Nótt.

The RSNO held their first Usher Hall concert since the pandemic struck.  The audience were very enthusiastic even though spread out socially thinly and masked; to the extent that the opening announcement was drowned out by applause.  

The main work was Stravinsky's Firebird ballet music and before the interval we heard some lovely cello playing in Tchaikovsky's Rococco Variations preceded by the very cheerful Festive Overture by Shostakovich and a short and appropriately celebratory fanfare called The Isle is Full of Noises by Scottish composer Mathew Rooke.

You can't beat a full symphony orchestra giving it laldy and we loved it.  It's a bit comical seeing the conductor's mask going on and off as he takes his calls but heh that's pandemics for you.

I also enjoyed another SCO concert, at the Queen's Hall this time.  Again we were all socially distanced and masked, though as at the Usher Hall the bar was open and there was an interval in which to patronise it unlike earlier more tentative gigs I've been to.

They played Bach, Mozart and Haydn which was all very fine but the piece that caught my ear was Die Schöne Melusine by Mendelssohn. Wikipedia tells me that 

The piece was written in 1834 as a birthday gift for Mendelssohn's sister Fanny In a letter to her of 7 April 1834, he explains that he had picked on the subject after seeing Conradin Kreuzer's opera Melusina the previous year in Berlin. Kreutzer's overture, writes Mendelssohn "was encored, and I disliked it exceedingly, and the whole opera quite as much: but not [the singer] Mlle. Hähnel, who was very fascinating, especially in one scene when she appeared as a mermaid combing her hair; this inspired me with the wish to write an overture which the people might not encore, but which would cause them more solid pleasure."[

Well I haven't heard Kreutzer's overture but I'm happy to take Mendelssohn's word for it since I enjoyed his so much.

There was more good music at Scottish Ballet's Starstruck, albeit recorded. This was a reworking of Pas de Dieux, a ballet that Gene Kelly choreographed for the Paris Opera in 1960.  It was a lovely thing to watch and seemed to me rather like a Broadway musical without the songs.  I didn't follow the plot other than realising that two chaps were squabbling over a girl - Broadway musical again.  Later consultation of the programme online enlightened me.  It was all about Aphrodite, Eros and Zeus.  Who'd have known.

There was an interesting post show chat with Kelly's widow and members of Scottish Ballet including their artistic director Christopher Hampton who choreographed Starstruck. 

Another stage work I've seen recently was The Enemy by The National Theatre of Scotland.  This again was a retelling, this time of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.  

I very much enjoyed the presentation of the show, the combination of video and on-stage acting, the clever take off of publicity material, the twitter storm moments and more.  But I was less enthralled by the quality of some of the acting, a lack of dramatic tension and more importantly I'm not sure what the point of putting on the play was.

How exactly did they recast the play for the modern age?  They added a whiff of sexual misdemeanours and cast women as the main characters but I can't think of much else.  So was it just to point out that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?  Maybe it was and maybe that's a good enough reason.

 

We fortified ourselves before the show by eating at Ong Gie.  Korean food was new to me.  Unsurpringly it bears a resemblance to Chinese.  The meal was delicious but when they say "spicy" be warned, they mean it.

On a lovely sunny day I went out for a walk in the West Lothian countryside and this is one of the things I saw.  An unusual sight you might think but not in that particular corner of West Lothian.  I was in Jupiter Artland which as well as having beautiful woods, fine views and a magnificent country house is also home to works of art such as this.

I ventured to Modern One for some more visual art, a much praised video installation about Frederick Douglass the American slave who gained his freedom and campaigned thereafter for abolition.  He was famed for his writing and his oratory and spent a couple of years based in Scotland.  The ten screen video installation was pleasant to look at but if I hadn't already known about Douglass or watched the "making of" video next door I don't think I'd have learnt much.  Does that matter?

Back to an art form I'm more at home with I went to the Traverse to enjoy their brief Play, Pie and Pint season.  Two of the three shows were excellent.  First Rose, about Rose Reilly.  Who she you ask.  As did I.  Played  international football for both Scotland and Italy,  named female world fooballer of the year, banned by the SFA who eventually saw the error of their ways.  It's a fascinating story and was brilliantly dramatised and performed.  Then A New Life which was a sparkling musical comedy with a tap dancing baby and a serious strand about post natal depression.  The third, which I saw first was called Celestial Body.  I thought it was mildly entertaing but the story of the entrapment of a gym going washing machine engineer by the parents of a child who had died in an accident caused (?) by him failed to set my dramatic sensitivites alight.

Musically the SNJO gave their first post lockdown concert, a celebration for their 25th birthday which treated us to a selection of pieces from their extensive repertoire over those years with a series of first class solos from a number of players, not least Tommy Smith himself. 

The SCO likewise presented their first post lockdown concert in which they played two suitably upbeat and exhilarating pieces, Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto and Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony.

Although the music has a Scottish feel to it none of it is scored for the pipes but I had the pleasure of visiting the National Piping Centre in Glasgow where the sound of the pipes is ever present in their little museum.  Not in their restaurant though where Andrew and I had an excellent lunch.  My traditional battered fish and chips was one of the best I've ever had and was washed down with a very tasty white Rioja.

I've had two more eating out experiences since I last posted.  Claire and Phil treated us to an end of summer barbeque leg of lamb of exceptional tastiness.  The taste lingered but not as long as the smell of woodsmoke has persisted in my jersey.  In a less domestic setting I had lunch in The Lookout on Calton Hill.  This is an offshoot of The Gardener's Cottage down below.  The views are of course superb.  The food was excellent.  The wines were winsome enough to encourage the opening of a second bottle.  The prices were outstanding.

After lunch I wandered down to the Mound Precinct where the Homeless World Cup had been being played and where the crowd were being entertained by the Fun Lovin' Crime Writers Band with Val McDermid on vocals.

 

 

For several years I've been going to The Burn on twice yearly saxophone weekends and was delighted to be able to go last weekend after a Covid caused gap of two years.  There were about twenty of us, mostly old friends from previous gatherings there and elsewhere.  We had a lot of fun and the minor Covid related restrictions in terms of masks and so on were not such as to put a damper on our socialising.

Thanks to that socialising I missed 99.9% of the thrills of the Ladies final at the US Tennis Open.  I didn't know it was on free to air TV, though if I had I'd have had to watch it on my phone.  I had decided I'd listen to the radio commentary but lingered in the lounge and it wasn't until I was preparing for bed that I turned on the radio.  I just caught the last game of the match which had thrills enough and a very welcome ending.  What a girl!

The Dunedin Wind Band is back in live action which is a lot better than the Zoom sessions they had and that I abandonned.  The second altos who had also been playing on Zoom, but more pleasurably, have now graduated to a live get together in a studio not far away.  That was very successful and we intend to keep it up.

The weather on the day we played there was lovely and when I reached Leith Walk on the way back I decided it was too nice to go up to the flat so I wandered down the Walk till I came to the recently opened Nótt winebar.  I sat outside with a pleasingly cold glass of Reisling ( a welcome change from the standard set of Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio) and a nibble of vine leaves.  Surely not (no pun intended) the fare of Thor's granny after whom the place appears to named.

More substantial fare was consumed at La Garrigue, a restaurant I have often fancied and which I have at last entered, thanks to Siobhan.  The food was delicious.  Claire's end of summer BBQ fare was not a million miles away from La Garrigue in deliciousness even if simpler in its presentation and more relaxed in its consumption.

I've seen a few films in the last couple of weeks.  At the Filmhouse I enjoyed The Courier.  This is a spy movie that tells the story (suitably spiced up for the screen as this review makes clear ) of Greville Wynne, a British businessman who collected material from a soviet informer, Oleg Penkovsky, and delivered it to MI6 in the early 60s.  I remember the case well.  Penkovsky paid with his life but Wynne got off with an uncomfortable couple of years in a Russian jail.

Also at Filmhouse was a rerelease of the gentle documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz on a Summer's Day.  The critics found it a bit bland which I suppose it is but there's some excellent music in it, which is surely the point.

From the BFI I watched two films.  After Love is an excellent film with a brilliant central performance by Joanna Scanlan.  She plays a contentedly married woman who when her cross channel ferry captain husband dies suddenly finds that he has been maintaining a second relationship in Calais. She sets out to find the woman concerned and the film explores the subsequent events and emotions.

I enjoyed that but I absolutely loved One Deadly Summer.  As L'été meurtrier it was a big hit in France in 1983.  Isabelle Adjani is wonderful as the sexy new girl in the village who chooses to bestow her favours on Alain Souchon's quiet motor mechanic rather than on the more macho contenders.  It turns out she has an ulterior and very dark motive for her every move.  She wants to wreak vengeance on the men who made her mother suffer many years before.  I can't reveal more.

Sophia by Frances Poet was the Lyceum/Pitlochry audio play for August.  The Sophia of the title was Sophia Jex-Blake who spearheaded the drive to have women admitted to British universities in the 19th century.  It was a riveting account of the struggles she and her colleagues, known as the Edinburgh Seven, had in trying to get a medical education.  She eventually became the first woman doctor in Scotland at the age of 37, having qualified in Dublin. 

Mention of Dublin reminds me that I've had a couple of scam emails recently that were written in Irish.  I don't know how I've got onto a list of potential Irish speaking suckers but there you are.  Anyway I don't know a word of Irish but I can spot a spam without too much trouble.  See what you make of it.

"Mo bheannachtaí go léir,

Seo an dara huair dom iarracht teagmháil a dhéanamh leat. An bhfuil an ríomhphost seo bailí? Karim Alassani is ainm dom, dlíodóir pearsanta an Uasail Jovan, nach maireann, a fuair bás i dtimpiste gluaisteáin lena aon bhean agus iníon. D’fhág sé ($ 4,211,000) sa bhanc anseo.

Tá barántas agam ón mbanc chun a neasghaol a fháil, ach tar éis mo thaighde fuair mé amach nach raibh aon ghaolta aige cheana. Táim i dteagmháil leat chun an ciste seo a aistriú chuig do chuntas ós rud é go roinneann tú an t-ainm céanna le mo chliant.

Tá na cáipéisí uile agam chun tacú leis an éileamh seo.

Coinnigh an fhaisnéis seo an-rúnda le do thoil agus freagair go díreach ó mo bhosca ríomhphoist pearsanta thíos chun tuilleadh soiléirithe a fháil.

Go croíúil,"

That $4,211,000 rather gives it away don't you think.

So festivals over for another year, including this one across the road which labelled itself the Fake Fringe.  Various artistic events were held here over the weekend; none of them seemed in any way fake to me. 

I stopped here on my way home from hearing a sub-set of the Festival Chorus present a short programme of rounds ranging from "Sumer is a icumin in" to Pachelbel's well known canon arranged by their director Aidan Oliver.  His light-hearted introductions and the choir's superb singing made for a pleasant, relaxed Sunday afternoon.

Kirsty Heggie, who was performing her own songs when I arrived had a lovely bright clear voice which it was a delight to listen to.

I can't say the same for the Laura Mvula gig that I went to in the evening.  I'd heard her sing on the radio, probably in a jazz programme and was struck by the individuality of her voice and the clarity of her delivery. At the EIF gig however the sound from the band (especially a loud unrelenting beat from the bass drum) was overwhelming, making it impossible (for me at any rate) to focus on and enjoy her singing.

On the evening that I saw 1902 in the railway Arches near the bottom of Leith Walk the heid bummer from Broadway Baby presented the show with a wee statuette of Greyfriars Bobby, this being a tribute to a show which in his opinion merited far more than 5 stars.  Other critics have also enthused over this story of the travails of a quartet of ardent Hibees whose desire to get to the 2016 Scottish Cup Final lands their leader in very hot water and his brother in a hole in the ground.

There's no faulting the energy and commitment shown by the cast as they rush up and down, in and out and around and about narrowly avoiding the audience squeezed tightly into the venue. Nor are their interactions any less intense.  Faces up close they scream at one another. The fights are realistic.  Musical contributions are excellent. There's even humour and the narration of the cup final conveys all the highs and lows that float over to my flat from Easter Road when there's a big match on.

All the same it's largely a sequence of; the baddie comes in, there's a shouting match (not conducive to clear articulation), the baddie leaves.  Repeat until a death occurs. Cuts could only improve the show.

I really love short films for their concision and focus.  Usually shown in a programme of half a dozen or more the good ones hit the spot and the duds don't last long.  Not that there were any duds in the Nightpiece Film Festival programme (one of five) that I saw.  They've been coming to the Fringe for some years apparently but this is the first time I've been aware.  That was thanks to the fact that a friend's grandaughter's boyfriend had directed one of those chosen by the organisers this year.  The granddaughter's mother, father and little sister came up from England to see it and I met them before the screening.

Ben the boyfriend's film was first up.  The Ark was a well crafted piece about the eponymous  mysterious organisation that had apparently sent a couple to assasinate a woman.  I'm not sure I understood all the twists and turns that led to would be assasin number one seemingly being eliminated by assasin two at the behest of The Ark but still.

The programmes and their films are listed here.  I saw the Hearts of Darkness programme.  I wish I'd seen them all.

In the opening remarks to a Book Festival event the presenter told us "my pronouns are her and she".  She went on to tell us that one of her guests (who it transpired used the same pronouns) had written a book of contemporary feminist ghost stories.

Two thoughts crossed my mind.  One - this is surely going to be too woke for me.  Two - why have I chosen to come to this event?

Well it wasn't intrusively woke and the ghost stories didn't feature.  Two books about words were under discussion and what's more one of them was about Japanese words.  So I knew why I was there.

Eley Williams' The Liar's Dictionary is an entertaining novel (I've read it since) about a 19th century lexicographer who inserts mountweazels into the fictional Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary and the 21st century young woman who is employed to root them out in preparation for digitisation of the dictionary.

Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds, which I have not yet read, is a memoir of sorts of time lived in Japan each of whose fifty chapters is a Japanese mimetic word. Japanese is it seems second only to Korean in the extent to which words like our miaou, woof and bang-bang pepper the language.  Barton studied philosophy then taught English in Japan and ended up as a literary translator from Japanese to English.  I'll tell you what I think when I've read it.  Don't hold your breath.

Back at the EIF I went to an event consisting of two string quartets numbered 13 played by the Gringolts Quartet.  In the delightful setting of the Old Quad pavilion Mozart's String Quartet 13 strikes a sombre note.  It's not the jolly sort of stuff that he mostly wrote but has a touch of his requiem to come about it.  Dvorak's similarly numbered work however was jolly and so it should have been given that he wrote it when he had returned to Europe from three none too happy years in America.  

One of the joys of this summer has been to frequent the various outdoor drinking and eating spots that have proliferated partly but not entirely in response to Covid.  While there have been plenty of visitors in town they have not flooded us out so it's been easier to find a space.  I particularly enjoyed time spent in the Pleasance and Summerhall courtyards.

Nearly forgot.  The Grads Fringe involvement this year was online, a trio of plays.  Ripe for Improvement was an amusing encounter between a couple looking to buy a house and a seller intent on putting them off.  Guilty Animals starts with a firefighter under investigation over a fire at his ex-partners home, a fire in which she died.  The story works its way backwards through time to a point that clinches what we already are sure of.  He did it.  Going backwards can be dangerous but this play carried it off well.  The Report, clearly inspired by Grenfell interrogates the architect, the builder, the council official whose names feature in the report of some incident.  The same three actors take the parts of interrogator, note taker and interrogatee in turn. Under questioning each one presents cogent reasons why no responsibility attaches to them for the outcome of the identified failures in their area of involvement.  A clever play superbly presented and with a sting in the tail for the buck passers.