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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it's time for snooker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This fearsome creature in its tropical looking setting is in fact in Logan Gardens near Stranraer.  I made a little expedition there one weekend when they were open for the Scottish Snowdrop Festival.  There were snowdrops but I didn't find them terribly splendid.  However I enjoyed the visit to the garden which I last visited in 1967.  It's one of those gardens that benefits from the influence of the Gulf Stream though judging by some photographs of it covered in snow that's no guarantee of year round balmy weather.

I was lucky with the weather for my visit.  It was a lovely afternoon although the rest of my brief stay in Stanraer was not so blessed in contrast to my visit to that other Gulf Stream influenced garden, Inverewe, in November when it was lovely all weekend.  We met recently to discuss when we could take Osgood up to Wester Ross again and fixed on a date in June only to find later that it doesn't suit the venues that want to host the play.  Project postponed sine die.

There was a very interesting talk at the French Institute about the time Zola spend in England.  Because of his involvement in the Dreyfus affair he was sentenced to a prison term but fled to England where he spent about a year in various hotels and houses around Norwood.  The French lady who gave the talk had lived in that area and had followed Zola's steps taking photos of places he had photographed (it was his hobby), recreating them to the extent of having people pose in them where there were people in the originals.  She managed to get a blue plaque put up at one of the locations.  We also learnt something of Zola's tangled personal life in the talk.  There's a Guardian review of a book about Zola's flight and the Dreyfus affair that will tell you more.

The following week I went to another talk at the French Institute, this time about Mary Queen of Scots and this time accompanied by Siobhan who is a fan.  She I think stayed awake throughout the talk whereas I dozed off.  Thankfully, for it was very dense and very dull and intoned without light or shade.  

Fortunately the evening was redeemed by a poetry event at the National Library where the wonderful Len Pennie entertained with readings from her first published collection, Poyums.  We then repaired to the Bow Bar fur a wee swallie.

The SCDA held its One-act Festival this weekend.  I went along on Saturday to support the Grads' entry and it turned out to be a worthy winner.  Taiwan by Martin Foreman (who is himself a member of the Grads) was quite a bleak tale set in some sort of dystopian future.  A young woman turns up at a lonely house occupied she believes by a solitary oldish woman with a story about her car breaking down.  This is not true. We learn that the young woman wants to move in with her husband and children to escape the growing problems of the city.  Things turn violent, her husband arrives, the older woman's husband who the young couple didn't know about also appears.  The play advances to a grim conclusion.

Good writing very well staged and performed.

As was Two Sisters at the Lyceum.  Quite an engaging tale about forty year old sisters taking a break at a holiday park where they spent their sixteenth summer.  One sister, the serious and settled one, is there to focus on writing.  The other is looking for temporary shelter from the impact of her affair(s). The caretaker at the site is the same young Swede, now older of course, whom she had fallen for and dreamt of sharing a hippie lifestyle with back in the day.  Will romance blossom again?  Will the serious sister be diverted from her righteous path?

A twist is added by the presence of a group of teenagers who take part in the action but also read out at points memories of being sixteen provided by members of the audience before the curtain went up.

Last year the Dunedin Wind Band played at Sci-con, the event where punters dress up as characters from various science fiction works as varied as Harry Potter and Starwars and are entertained by talks and the presence of their heros and buy all sorts of merchandise and just wander arround admiring one another.  We played again this year and the gig went really well.  I wonder if we will be invited to play at a different but similar event, Comic-Con, being held in October at Ingliston.  Do they perhaps include Beano and Dandy lovers amongst their clientele?

There's a Japanese film festival on around the UK over the next several weeks.  Six films are being shown in Edinburgh and I've been to the first.  Winny was not a winner for me however.  I wasn't much interested in the subject matter despite recognising the question that it exemplified and which recurs throughout history.  Does the inventor bear any responsibility for the uses to which his invention is put?  

I have a lot of time for Japanese public toilets.  I appreciate their abundance and their cleanliness and often their architecture, so a film about a Japanese toilet cleaner sounded just up my street.  Perfect Days is not part of the festival and is directed by the redoutable Wim Wenders which one might consider a warning in itself.  Nevertheless I went to see it. Did I enjoy it?  Sort of.  I can see all the virtues that this Guardian review lays out and to a degree I share the protagonist's joy in tranquillity and simplicity.  But on the whole, especially when I go to the flicks I like a bit of action and drama.

Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony Opus 110a played by the SCO provided lots of action and drama at the Queen's Hall in its brutal and furious passages.  Even when it's quiet it's bleak. I was sure I hadn't heard it before but some parts seemed familiar.  I found out later that it was actually an arrangement for larger forces of a string quartet that I have heard several times.  On the same programme was a modern work by Magnus Lindberg that included some amazing violin playing by Pekka Kuusisto.  He always brings something wonderful with him when he comes to Edinburgh.

Unlike this reviewer I thought the encore to the Saint Saens Piano Concerto at the RSNO's Valentine's Day's concert was very well chosen and it was delightful how Trpčeski stepped back from being virtuoso soloist to almost self-effacing accompanist. 

Some of the goodies on sale one recent Sunday morning at Stockbridge market.  Every now and again I wander over that way, often via the Botanics and Inverleith Park or, as on this occasion through the New Town.  Both routes provide lots of interest to look at for the leisurely stroller.

Were I a weegie I would probably find lots of interest to look at on a stroll around the West End but as a visitor I generally make do with a virtual stroll by way of Alasdair Gray's mural at Hillhead subway station before setting off to find an eatery or to get to Kelvingrove or wherever because I always seem to have an objective when I go to Glasgow.  

Lunch with Andrew was my objective last time and we ate at a place called Brel in the aforementioned West End.  I started with onion soup which was unfortunately over peppered, but perhaps that's where Begian onion soup differs from French.  The risotto that followed was however delicious so I wasn't totally disappointed but we decided to have coffee elsewhere.

We didn't go far.  Just the other side of the lane in the very pleasant Grosvenor cinema's bar.  In the cinema itself Alasdair Gray popped up again in the form of the film of his extraordinary novel Poor Things.  We contemplated going to see it but instead strolled up to Oran Mor where we took a few snifters to the sound of a folkies afternoon jam session.

I caught up with Poor Things back in Edinburgh one evening.  I had read the book just before Christmas but whatever pictures in my mind accompanied that reading were outclassed by the phantasmagorical settings of the film.  I agree with every word that Peter Bradshaw had to say about it in The Guardian but maybe, just maybe, the book was enough for me.

Another gem of Scottish literature is Jekyll and Hyde which I saw at the Lyceum in a version adapted for performance on the stage by one person.  Fair enough you might say given that Jekyll and Hyde were just one man!  It was an excellent production technically and extremely well played by Forbes Masson.  On the other hand it was  one of those occasions when I ask myself whether all that skill, expertise and hard work could not have been better employed breaking new ground.   Dine provided Ross, Siobhan and I with a tasty tea before the show.

In January it's hard to avoid the work of Robert Burns.  I didn't try to avoid it.  Indeed I brushed up my knowledge of Address to a Haggis in anticipation of being asked to recite it at the Burns Supper that Claire is wont to organise.  I'm sure the pleasure of those present was not diminished by the omission of that recitation.  Company, chat and extremely fine haggis and trimmings made it a grand evening.

I have at last got around to visiting the new rooms in the Scottish National Gallery that have been created to better display Scottish art.  I was familiar with most of the works on display but enjoyed seeing them in the new setting and finding other works that I didn't know.  I found the sloping floors and different levels a bit odd though.  I can't see that they lent anything to the experience so I assume they must be due to something about the site.

Painting has featured at home as well.  I've had the lounge and hall painted and await the laying of new carpets.  I hope I don't have to wait too long because my spare room, my bedroom, the kitchen and even a bathroom are playing host to the furniture and other junk that filled hall and lounge.

 

It was a very dull and drizzly day when i went up to Dundee to visit the Tartan exhibition at the V&A.  Before going in I made a number of attempts at taking a picture of the Discovery none of which turned out very well.  Rain on the lens, lamposts in the way etc., so I've cropped one to get what I think is a tolerably decent shot of the rigging.

I had heard a talk about the Tartan exhibition some time ago that excited my interest but I was less excited when I went round it.  The item I liked best was a film clip from Gregory Burke's wonderful play Black Watch.  It was the scene in which a soldier is dressed by his comrades in a sequence of uniforms from the beginnings of the regiment to its deployment in desert camouflage in Iraq.  The soldier takes no active part though he talks throughout.  The others handle him as though he were a doll, turning him this way and that, upending him and righting him as required.  Tartan features in the sequence of course.

Accompanying it was a short video of Burke and John Tiffany, the director who made so much out of the powerful text, in discussion with some senior school pupils in Dundee.  One girl asked why the characters used such "forceful" language.  It's a term I intend to use from now on when effing and blinding fills the air.

Anyway the exhibition was ok and I had a pleasant snack lunch with a tasty glass of white before I got the train home.

I had a similarly pleasant fish tea, sans wine, before going to Scottish Ballet's Cinders where the wine deficit was made up.  There was an interesting talk beforehand that gave us an idea of the complexity of the endeavour.  The ballet itself was enjoyable.  The story had been tweeked a little and in some performances Cinders was a young man and the Prince was a Princess but not the night we were there.  I can't say that I felt it a great loss.  

The SCO concert I went to the other week had an eastern european feel to it with Ravel's Tzigane and Mozart's so called Turkish violin concerto and the like.  The piece that caught my ear was by Ligeti.  His Concert Românesc is on Youtube.

Arkle's Spring production this year is a version of Cyrano de Bergerac. There was quite a big crowd at the audition.  I went along in full knowledge of my nose being too small to play Cyrano and my age being too great for a Gascon cadet.  I thought maybe the baker would be within my range but instead I have been cast as the ham actor Montfleury.  That will obviously demand a great deal of acting out of character.  I'll even have to act fat!  I'm also to be a priest.

I had a very sporty day on Sunday.  It started with Djokovic's long and arduous first round match at the Australian Open.  It took him four sets and four hours to conquer the young Coatian qualifier Dino Prizmic.  He was full of praise for Prizmic after the match.  Then Ronnie O'Sullivan took the stage in the afternoon session of the Masters snooker.  He came out of that even-stevens with Ali Carter.  After some exciting downhill skiing in Austria it was back to snooker and despite Carter's best efforts Ronnie switched on his genius in the latter stages and whacked Carter 10-7 to win the Masters for the eighth time. 

I've watched a bit of tennis since then, basically just what's on when I get up since choosing a match can involve nocturnal activity thanks to the time difference.  Luckily I've seen a couple of good matches involving British players.  Katie Boulter had a convincing win over a fancied Chinese player and it was good to see Emma Raducanu back in a grand slam, clearly enjoying herself and beating Shelby Rogers.  Mind you Rogers contributed a good number of unforced errors towards that win.  It will be interesting to see how Raducanu gets on in the next round.

The unforced errors I mentioned figure in statistics that the broadcasters display at the end of the set or match together with percentage of first serve success etc.  A line new to me now appears and for which I have found, but perhaps not appreciated, an explanation.  It's "hunting 3rd shot forehands". This it seems measures the number of times the server plays a forehand stroke as their first post serve hit, indicating their desire to dictate the point.  Well did you ever?

Happy New Year to all my readers, though it's not such a happy occasion for my Japanese friends.  The picture is of me looking at a map of the Noto peninsula.  There was a small earthquake offshore there a few days after I left in April but now it’s the epicentre of a humdinger of an earthquake with effects being felt along the western coast of the country as far north as Hokkaido and as far south as Kyoto.

The peninsula is a short drive out of Kanazawa where I spent April.  It’s where my Air B&B host comes from and on that day he’d taken me on a little sightseeing jaunt with cherry blossom viewing as the main objective.

I've been following the earthquake news on Japanese television and seen pictures of damage in many places including Kanazawa.  A tsunami is likely to follow and in Kanazawa port within a few hours of the quake waves 90 cm high were already arriving.  It puts the recent bad weather and travel problems here into perspective.

Despite not having been at many band sessions this term I took part in our Christmas concert.  Friends who attended reckoned it was pretty good and an improvement on previous occasions.  I'm not much given to New Year resolutions but I'll try to pay more attention to the band for the next two terms and see if that makes our June concert even better.

This having been the festive season I've been wining and dining thanks mainly to Claire who amongst arranging other festive events insisted that having missed my 80th that my 81st should be celebrated in its stead.  So she organised and cooked a birthday meal.  It was a jolly little party and was crowned by a birthday cake made by Siobhan.  I blew out all the candles with one blow.  Mind you there weren't actually 81 of them.

Hogmanay was similarly jolly though I overindulged a bit and suffered from a gippy tummy today that kept me indoors away from the treats on offer from Edinburgh's winter festival.

About five years ago I decided that being a member of both The Cameo and Filmhouse was more of an overlap than need be so I cancelled my Cameo membership.  But Filmhouse has been out of action for a while now and although steps are underway to bring it back to life films do crop up that I'd like to see and which don't get a screening in the big multiplexes.  So I rejoined The Cameo, finding to my surprise that my account still existed.  I've seen three films there so far.  Anatomy of a Fall, which has screened elsewhere but which I missed.  Its reviews were relatively enthusiastic.  Mine would be more tempered although I enjoyed it.  

The other two were Japanese, animation to boot.  I really prefer live action but I'm opening up to animation and those two films helped.  Part of my reluctance to animation is that the films are generally for children.  Tokyo Godfathers was not and I thought it was great.  It's a story of three homeless people; an alcoholic, a transvestite and a teenage runaway who find a baby abandonned with the garbage on Christmas Eve and set out to find its mother.  Based says The New York Times* on a maudlin western it's more on the gritty realism side despite being unreal.  It has become something of a Christmas classic in Japan and the current screenings outside of Japan are in celebration of its 20th anniversary.  The Guardian, Wikipedia and The Japan Times all have interesting things to say about the film and its director Satoshi Kon who died at the age of 46 leaving only a handful of films behind.  

The Boy and the Heron is more obviously a chidren's fantasy adventure film which I must say I enjoyed very much but places like Wikipedia find a lot more in it in the way of messages and moral lessons.  Don't let that put you off.

The Royal Institution Christmas lectures are also aimed at children with the admirable aim of both arousing curiosity and interest in science and of explaining it.  I tuned in to BBC4 to watch this year's series on AI with the latter aim very much in mind.  I found things to wonder at and enjoy but I'm not sure that I understand much more from the first two of the three lectures.  In particular the mechanics of Large Language Models escape me.  But the Royal Institutions explanations are more fun than the likes of this.

I had a splendid visit to the zoo with Claire and Ross.  Since I was last there they've amassed a grand collection of this sort of thing --

Zoos are keen to flourish their conservation credentials but I think it's a bit late to get into the dinosaur conservation business.  

Of the real animals we saw I was particularly taken by the giant anteater. He (she?) put on a great display, running about, rearing up on its hind legs, scraping bark off trees and so on.  It was most interesting but it operated so fast that every picture I took is blurred and doesn't merit reproduction here.

With the pandas having gone back to China old favourites like the penguins will keep the crowds coming and I got quite a nice snap of what I believe they call a "keeper experience".

Here's a young girl doing a keeper's job for a bit and loving it.

 *  Linking to the article here doesn't allow access but if you do a Google search for "Tokyo Godfathers reviews" and find The New York Times in the results list you can get access.

There's been no snow in my neighbourhood yet but out of town there's been a little.  This is a snowy field in Roslin where I went to visit the chapel.  I believe I'd been before but that was when I was a student over sixty years ago when it was in a fairly distressed condition.  Now, partly thanks to Dan Brown's book, it's lovely.  The carved interior is beautiful and they've built an excellent visitor centre.

Commissioned in the middle of the 15th century by William St. Clair, (William the Worthy),  you'll learn from the official website of the family connection to Dysart.  Those of you who know the area will think immediately of Sinclairtown.  The progenitor of that branch of the family was known as William the Waster.  I cast no aspersions on the good people of Dysart. 

From a later period of Scottish history came a talk at the National Library, one of my favourite spots in Edinburgh, about James VI and I.  This presentation of a new book about him was very interesting and entertaining.  I enjoyed it but didn't lash out on the book.  It's sure to have been snapped up by the library if I ever fancy reading it.

Later that evening I heard the SCO in a programme that featured Schubert's Mass in A♭ which was new to me and which was truly lovely choral singing.  Other singing I've heard in recent weeks came from the RSNO chorus in James MacMillan's Oratorio and from their junior chorus in music from the Nutcracker Suite.  Who knew that the latter had singing in it?  Not me, and in truth the kids sang for only a few minutes and their singing consisted solely of the syllable "ah" in various pitches and durations.  But by heaven it was heavenly and I daresay the presence of a hundred choristers brought in mums, dads, grannies et al to swell the receipts.

At another concert the RSNO welcomed a new principal cello by throwing him in at the deep end to play out front - Shostakovich's cello concerto - one of my many favourite pieces of music.  He was able to relax in the second half of that concert and listen to his bandmates captivate the audience with their performance of Sheherazade. 

I should note that thanks to an RSNO scheme to attract audiences I was able to give a friend two free tickets to a concert of their choice.  Unfortunately their choice of MacMillan's Oratorio failed to be their cup of tea.  

A pity it hadn't been tickets for the SNJO's Ellington concert.  They were exceptionally well turned out in black suits, maybe not quite tuxedos, white shirts and black bow ties in the style of the dance band era.  The music was excellent and the young singer who guested with them was very good.  I'm sure we'll see her again.

The King's panto has a reputation for pulling in the punters and giving them a great evening.  While the King's is undergoing refurbishment the panto is playing at the Festival Theatre and I was invited to a drinks and panto evening there.  It's a glittering production whose lights, sound, pyrotechnics, costumes and general stagecraft are to be marvelled at. The cast go about their business with great gusto, especially the triumvirate of known names, and the chorus add great dancing to the mix.  But it was not altogether my cup of tea so let's just say I'm glad I had a free ticket.

Absolutely my cup of tea was Leith Theatre's production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  The novel is an absorbing story drawn from Muriel Spark's imaginative recreation of her Edinburgh childhood in the 30s. She portrays the interplay of the lives and relationships between teachers and between teachers and pupils against a background of the straitlaced attitudes of the time and the increasing tensions and political ideas that burst into warfare.

The play to my mind does justice to the novel and to its extravagant heroine whose influence over her pupils leads to tragedy and to her downfall.  

This production was very very good.  Was it as good as the production that Fiona and created in 1975?  I'm very probably the only person in the entire world to have seen both productions and my word can't be relied upon so I won't answer my own question.

Despite its ultimate darkness there is plenty of humour in Brodie as there is in The Death of Stalin.  Armando Iannucci's fertile imagination that produced this laugh a minute film that kept me out of my bed till 1a.m last night almost conceals the tragedy of the Stalinist period and indeed pretty much all periods in the USSR/Russia up to and including the present day.  The end credits bring you back to reality.

I also enjoyed on late night TV a showing of The Wicker Man followed by a documentary about it.   Despite it having been a cult movie for 50 years I'd never seen it.  If you haven't, get onto iPlayer now.  It's great.

My long weekend in London started on a slightly sour note in that I missed my train thanks to writing down the wrong departure time in my diary.  So I had to buy a new single ticket on the spot at a price not much less than the return ticket I had bought a month or so before.

But as the Bard said all's well that ends well.  The train that took me south started late and arrived even later qualifying me for total reimbursment.  Isn't that just a fairytale ending.

So in London we (three chums and I) enjoyed food, drink, drama, dance, music and more sometimes together and sometimes separately.  We also enjoyed the company of a number of friends and relations.

In my case I spent a day with my brother and sister-in-law, my niece, her husband and my two great nieces.  They are 10 years old now and I hadn't seen them since they were about four so it was super to see them again.  They are actually part of the reason for my interest in Japan and Japanese because their dad is Japanese. Not much Japanese was spoken at the weekend though. 

That evening David, Sally and I went to Pizza Express to hear some jazz.  You may not know that Pizza Express's founder was a jazz fan and his Dean Street restaurant's basement has been a jazz venue since the 60s.  The group who played that night were led by a saxophonist called Binker Golding.  His playing varied from the soft and gentle tone of his low tempo compositions to the high energy and speed with which he raced through the sax's range.

The following night Claire and I were at Ronnie Scott's with Phil's daughter Molly and her partner Neil to hear a group called George Simmonds and The Squintet.  George, who is a trombonist, didn't make it.  The poor man was taken ill but the rest of the band were brilliant.  This was very different to Binker Golding.  It was New Orleans style standards delivered with amazing skill and energy and I have to say at top volume. Like George, Ross and Siobhan didn't make it but that from disinclination rather than illness.

Earlier in the day we'd all eaten at Barge East, which is an actual barge, moored near where the London Olympics took place in 2012.  Lunch was Sunday Roast with beef, pork, lamb or a slice of all three on offer.  I had the lamb.  A huge portion with the usual trimmings.  No evening meal was called for after that.

The first night we all went to the Almeida to see an Irish play called Portia Coughlan.  It was dark and bleak but I liked it.  This review gives a bit of background to the genesis of the play as well as reviewing the production.  Before the show we ate at Ottolenghi's.  I'd never heard of the man but then I'm from the Fanny Cradock era.  Mr Ottolenghi is a modern cook and food writer though has not always been a cook.  See Wikipedia for his unusual CV.  His food was very good but his prices were as high as his portions were small.

We ate one day at Carluccio's where the style is less elaborate.  It doesn't aspire to be quite as high up the fancy dining tree so its portions are larger and the prices smaller (a bit).  I knew of them as a Glasgow restaurant where I'm sure I've eaten rather than a UK wide chain but it seems their Glasgow restaurant closed five years ago.  Time flies and all that.

Other delights included the Diva exhibition at the V&A who situate the first to bear that description in the 16th century.  But it's a couple of hundred years later that names with which I'm familiar are attached to the exhibits; like Jenny Lind from the world of opera, Sarah Bernhardt in theatre, Marie Lloyd in the music hall.  The exhibition takes us right up to today where I have to confess a number of names were completely unknown to me, though fortunately many were so I didn't feel that I was entirely an old fogey.  It's a fascinating show with a great selection of music delivered to headsets as you go round.      

The Young V&A at Bethnal Green had an exhibition called From Myth to Manga charting all things Japanese in the line of folk tales and fairy stories up to, as the title suggests, today's amazing anime films and manga comics that are popular outside Japan as well as in.  It's not a huge exhibition but I found it very interesting.  The only other time I've been in this area was to a jazz event in 2018 in a church just across the green from the museum and that was to hear a Japanese group of ten baritone saxes.  A slightly strange coincidence.

The one dance show I saw was a jazzed up version of The Nutcracker at a pop-up venue at the South Bank Centre.  I loved it as did The Guardian. 

Having said that there was a deal of dancing in Guys and Dolls at the Bridge theatre.  We walked by the Tower of London and over Tower Bridge to get there in company with Claire's aunt Barbara who'd been at Diva with us and met up with Molly and Neil at the theatre.  It's a terrific space with superb technical facilities that allow them to raise up sections of the floor and fly stuff everywhere.  From all four sides the view is perfect for the 900 people who'd make up a full house though in this show there were more because there were audience members milling around the performance space.  I say milling around but in fact they were very carefully and adroitly marshalled by stage crew as the various scenes were set and struck.

The show was marvellous. First class performances, excellent music, tremendous staging all combining to present the story woven from Damon Runyon's writings and his characters to great effect.  The show burst into life and continued at pace after the final curtain as cast and audience danced joyously together.  There's an article about the creation of the show here.  Although The Guardian's critic gave it four stars she didn't seem to like it as much as I did.

Our AirB&B was in Hackney so we did a fair bit of travel in and out of central London, mostly by bus.  I came away full of admiration for the London bus service.  We like to think we have a good bus service in Edinburgh, and we do, but London's is miles better.

True to form I made it to the Grayson Perry Smash Hits exhibition the day before it closed.  I thought it was fun and I enjoyed the audio commentary by the artist himself.  I particularly liked the pots and could have had any one of them in the house, not so sure about the big tapestries and whatnot. 

All very entertaining but I wasn't sure what to make of the the politico-social commentary in the works.  Everyone I know who saw the exhibition thought it was wonderful and many went multiple times, even Guardian readers who were clearly not influenced by its review.  

My major disappointment though was that there were no fridge magnets on sale in the shop.

The Grads did a show called Chalk that well deserved the four star reviews it got.  A two-hander it presents a mother and daughter in a post apocalyptic world.  The daughter though corporeally intact is inhabited by some being that is gobbling up her mind and directing her to eat her mother.  The mother sits in a circle of chalk that protects her.  So far so daft but their interactions, their squabbling, their feelings for one another drive the show beyond its framing.  It's nicely staged and the performances, including acrobatics on a scaffolding structure are excellent,

Acrobatics of another sort at the Trampoline Gymnastics World Championships absolutely thrilled me one afternoon on the telly.  I saw a bit of trampoline which was fine but the event that I really enjoyed was Tumbling.

I like gymnastics and I admire the gymnasts performing on the mat and doing a few somersaults and such but this Tumbling is somersaults in spades.  The gymnasts propels his/herself along a spongy track doing back flips and aerial twists at enormous speed and finally lands relatively gracefully in a red square on a thick mattress.  It's amazing. I loved it. The British women were great.  They won gold in the team event and silver and bronze in the individual event.  Here's some of it (after the annoying ads).

The other sport I saw some of was the Billy Jean Cup which I think is now the women's equivalent of the Davis Cup.  I enjoyed the matches on the first day when it ended one each to Britain and Sweden.  I didn't see the second day because I was out saxophoning but was pleased that we won.  It's not a totally big deal because the win only means promotion to the first tier for next year but it's progress.

Two good concerts last week and both pretty much full houses with a large proportion of younger people in the audience.  The SCO's concert was of music by Steve Reich, Louis Andriesson and others whose music is in the same vein.  The music was super and engagingly present by Colin Currie the percussionist.  The hall was set out with cabaret tables as it is for jazz gigs.  A DJ played in the bar, before, after and in the interval.  The concert had apparently been heavily promoted in The Skinny and on social media.  I assume all that helped bring the younger set but who knew there was an audience for modern classical music in Edinburgh.

No surprise that many people turned out to hear the RSNO play Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.  Its use in Brief Encounter has assured its lasting appeal to film fans of a certain age but millenials and such?  I hope they enjoyed it and the Dvorak after the interval.  I suppose on reflection it could have been that the opening piece by Anna Clyne, another contemporary composer, drew them in.

Here's the cast of The Curious Case of Osgood Mackenzie at Inverewe Garden where we took the show last weekend for a couple of performances.  This is the garden that Osgood created 150 years ago in what on the face of it is the unkind and bleak terrain of Wester Ross.  With the help of the Gulf Stream, shelter belt planting and years of work (not to mention the abundant cheap labour of the time) he created a little paradise which is now in the custody of the National Trust for Scotland.

While the play was well received in Edinburgh during the Fringe, here in Poolewe the audiences were naturally very interested to see some local history brought to life.  They clearly enjoyed the show and were very complimentary about the performances which strangely enough we lapped up.

The weather on the drive up was not so good but Saturday was a beautiful day and the run back to Edinburgh through some of Scotland's finest scenery was great.  Not so great for Rob who was driving, but for me who had been driven around all weekend like royalty it was super. 

Between shows we were given a bit of a guided tour round part of the garden and round Inverewe House which sits in the middle of it.  The house that Osgood's mother had built burnt down in 1914.  The present house was built by his daughter in the thirties.

Inverewe House

View from the house

Lush growth in the garden

We were staying some distance away and enjoyed excellent food, drink and crac on both evenings, venturing out late one night to see what we could of the aurora borealis, which wasn't much.  But we had excellent views of Skye from the cottage and other fine views en route.

Sunset over Skye

The mountains of Torridon to the south

Gairloch - we were staying 10 miles further along the coast

Blow me if my first post since coming back from Japan doesn't have a Japanese twist to it. I'm usually somewhat dilatory about going to see exhibitions and that proved to be the case for Beyond the Little Black Dress at the museum which I saw yesterday, its penultimate day.

The photo above was snatched from a video that featured in the exhibition of a 2013 collection by Victor & Rolf.  I quote from the label beside the video - 

The Zen Garden collection was composed of 20 all-black austere artworks. Sculptural and voluminous gatherings of a heavy black fabric, a technical silk with the spongy look of neoprene, were manipulated to recreate stone surfaces. Meticulous embroideries comprised of hand-crafted piping resembled stylised grass and moss.
Guided by Viktor&Rolf, each model was arranged in a tableau vivant, collectively forming the stark rock formations of a Japanese Zen garden. It was a rigorous exercise in pattern- cutting, volume, structure, silhouettes, and minimalism, with each garment specifically designed to unfurl around the pose the model assumed.

To my mind that was one of the oddest exhibits

but some might refrain from rushing to the shops to buy this dress made from nettles gathered from King Charles' garden.

Above is one that looks reassuringly normal but what about the one below for the last straw.  Yes if it looks like a straw and sooks like a straw it probably is one.

Joking aside it was a great exhibition and I'm glad I caught it.

So what else have I been up to?  Fiona came up to go with me to a schoolfriend's funeral.  I knew I hadn't seen Ian for a while but when I checked up it turned out to be five years.  I've reached that stage where time vanishes as friends and acquaintances disappear.  Mike Young who was a stalwart of the Grads some years ago has just died as has Douglas Currie who embodied the spirit of the SCDA for decades.  Mike was relativel young but Douglas made it to 94.  I regard that as most encouraging.

Ewan happened to be staying en route back to Houston from attending a Scotland match at the Rugby World Cup.  While he and Fiona were both here we went to the National Theatre of Scotland's production of Dracula - Mina's Reckoning.  I think most of the critics liked it.  This one did and so did I but I could have done with something original from our national company rather than a rehash however clever of a tedious 19th century vampire story.

I've been to a couple of jazz events - the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra at St Brides and Tommy Smith again, this time as a sidesman in Peter Johnstone's quartet.  This featured Joe Locke on vibraphone.  He was brilliant and well worth the ticket price. Not terribly many people shared that view as it was pitifully attended.

The RSNO kicked off their season while I was away but I got to their second concert which was ok but none of the music really held me, even the Sibelious symphony.  

What was wonderful though was Scottish Ballet's double bill Twice Born which Claire and I thoroughly enjoyed.  I'd have missed it had she not given me a heads up since I hadn't got back into checking out the culture mode.  Both pieces in this presentation were absolutely brilliant.  Scotland's newspaper critics admired it but you can't nowadays read their stuff online without subscribing to the paper so here's a review you can read.

I've lost count of the number of Covid jags I've had but I added one this weekend and a flu jag as well so if I could only get rid of my cold and my cough I'd be fighting fit.

My last train trip was a long one back to Tokyo from Kagoshima, passing Mt Fuji on the way.  I got to my hotel about 5pm and left almost immediately to meet Momo for dinner.  We went to a restaurant in some multi-storey block in Ginza.  The restaurant was very busy and we had to wait a bit before getting a table, though it wasn't in fact a table it was two adjacent spaces at a counter looking out over the city.  We sat on a sort of two person bench.

Often in Japanese restaurants you get menus with pictures of the food that's available.  Here they'd gone a step further and provided a tablet with illustrations of all their food and drink and which you used to place your order.  I'm not very sure what I had.  It was similarly presented to many others I've had.  A big bowl of liquid containing noodles and stuff.  I'd asked for seafood stuff and although it was all very tasty apart from prawns I couldn't name what else was in it.  The noodles in this case were thick udon and the liquid was reminiscent of a cream soup.  It was mushroom in colour if not in taste.  Udon are white wheat flour noodles and come in both thick and thin versions.  As I said I had thick ones and I had a side-dish of deep fried shrimp.  For drinks I stuck to beer but Momo had some fancy concoction.

She poor woman was giving an online lesson at 10pm so we left the restaurant around 9 for her to get home and get ready.  It had been fun to see her again even though she's a hard taskmaster when it comes to my struggles with Japanese.

I just went back to the hotel and more or less straight to bed.  I'd had to use the dreaded Otemachi station but in contrast to my previous and bitter experience, using it to move between two different subway lines was very straightforward.

This morning I was up bright and early for the Imperial Palace tour that I'd booked at 5am JST on 1st September.  This time I fell foul of the fact that Tokyo has two underground systems.  I bought a ticket from a machine but when I tried to go through the gate alarm bells sounded and the gate slammed shut in front of me.  There's this so called Fare Adjustment booth next to the gates where the guy informed me that I'd bought a Toei system ticket which I had attempted to use to get through a Tokyo Metro gate.  I had to go and buy a ticket from a different machine.  I put the first one in my purse determined to use it later in the day.

Equipped with the right ticket I got on the wrong train, that's to say the right line but going in the opposite direction.  No problem, jump off at the next station, cross to the opposite platform and go back on my tracks.  I've done it before.

Not quite so straightforward on this occasion.  Instead of both platforms being within the same domain as it were I had to exit, buy a new ticket and re-enter at a different point.  Annoying and time consuming but eventually I got to the palace gates psychologically intact.

Building in palace grounds and explanation

The tour was a bit underwhelming.  I knew it was only the grounds and that we wouldn't get into any buildings (with the exception of a holding pen prior to starting the walk about) but the grounds or at least those parts we were shepherded through were not very attractive.  I visited two gardens later in the day that were more enjoyable to walk around in.

There were a great many visitors and we marched off in four language groups each led by a guide who described what we were seeing and filled in bits of history and so on.  That was all very interesting in fact.  I went round in the French group because there were only a couple of dozen in comparison to the English one's God knows how many so I was able to get close to the guide and get the benefit of her commentary.  There was a large Chinese group as well and their guide had her public address thing turned up to the proverbial 11.  I suppose our group had one as well but it wasn't at all intrusive. In addition I'd downloaded an app that provided a commentary at different spots having worked out from your phone where you were.  I turned that off after a while because all these commentaries were just blocking one another out.

Going in

A bit of the palace

As well as the guides there were various busybodies scurrying around waving light wand like things that traffic policemen and suchlike have.  Their job seemed to be to keep people from straying and make sure you obeyed invisible and pointless rules and clear the way for various dignitaries in large flashy cars.

End of tour

Part of the Imperial Palace grounds is a public park where you can wander at your leisure.  I'd have liked that but unlike most public parks they close the gates two days a week Friday being one of them.  So I didn't do that.  I spent some time pottering about before heading back to my part of town.  I had to go there at some time to get my luggage from the hotel.

I would use a combination of Tokyo Metro and Toei for the journey utilising the Toei ticket I'd conserved from earlier.  I bought a Tokyo Metro ticket and got to within one station of my destination where I would change to a Toei line.  I fed my unused Toei ticket into the gate and flash bang wallop, no joy.  I presented myself to the Fare Adjustment man full of righteous indignation and puzzlement.  He examined my two tickets, asked where I was going, fiddled with his screens and said that'll be 110 yen then.  I attempted to put my case re the unused ticket but 99.9% due to my inability to express such a complicated matter in Japanese and 0.1% to his indifference got nowhere and had to stump up.

When I got to Kiyosumi-shirakawa I headed for a garden that looked the perfect place to recover my sangfroid.  I stopped en route for lunch.  Again I believed I was ordering seafood.  No helpful pictures nor tablets in this little place.  I was putting my faith in Google lens and translate.    

That's a raw egg in the middle, some wasabi near the top of the bowl, a bit of a lemon, little flecks of a green veg/herb and a bed of rice.  Not a lot of seafood there.  The little orange spheres are probably fish roe and the brown bits must be seafoody.  Didn't taste of anything in particular to me, but you know my tastebuds lack sensitivity.  The little bowl on the right by the way is thin udon in a tasty broth and I'd already polished off a bowl of dressed lettuce.

After that I went to the garden where being over 65 I was allowed entry for 70 yen instead of the standard 150.  Here as elsewhere I had to produce my passport to permit verification of my being over 65.  Scout's honour not acceptable and visual inspection of my face and body clearly being inconclusive.

It's a lovely garden.  On a little island were several heron

After a while there I fetched my luggage from the hotel and braved the dual metro sytem once again to get me to the point where I intended to catch the monorail to the airport.  Happily there was another pretty garden there for me to rest my weary legs and watch the reflection of the sun make its way slowly down the face of a skyscraper.  When I judged it was far enough down I went to the airport where I've written this, my last post from Japan, for this trip at least.    

A short coda:  My flight was scheduled for 00:10 subsequently put back to 00:35 but no matter.  When I checked in they told me that they would not be serving a meal during the flight.  Quite sensible given the hour you'd agree.  Instead I was welcome after passing through security to eat in their lounge.  I did so, and drank a very agreeable Austrian Gruner Veltliner as well.  Absolutely the best airline meal I've ever had and in the most comfortable surroundings.

 

There's that Halloween fever I warned you about.

Today then I made it over to the volcano island where I walked about a bit and took a bus around a bit and wondered at the immensity of it all.  There are three cones on the the mountain and they say there are eruptions in the south cone more or less every day.  In all the pictures I've taken there's certainly smoke coming out of it and I feel in some a tinge of orange where the smoke leaves the mountain but that could be my imagination.

What I'd really like to have seen of course is massive chunks of rock being thrown in the air and streams of red hot lava running down the sides,  It was pretty cloudy all day so the photos are not too exciting.  Here's one to illustrate the electricity cable situation I was moaning about.

My walk took me by the 100 metre long set of foot bathing pools that have been set up for the relief of weary walkers or just to show off the presence of volcanically heated water.  

I didn't feel the need to wash my feet but I did check that the water was warm.  There were nice big chunks of rock and views back over to the mainland.

The bus took us to what is the highest point you can get to by road and where there's a viewing spot.  

I spotted this odd looking set up high up on the mountain but there was no knowledgeable person around to ask about it.  I know that the authorities are keeping an eye on things all the time and taking measures to improve the safety of the people who live near volcanoes and I suppose it's something to do with that.  They practice emergency responses all over Japan because of earthquakes and tsunamis and the like so I suppose they have their eruption drills on Sakurajima as well.

After a few hours enjoying a good slosh around I filled up on coffee and headed back to Kagoshima to visit Sengan-en.  No mucking about looking for buses and trams today.  It was straight from the ferry into a taxi.

It's an impressive place.  You can visit both the house and grounds and a couple of nearby industrial sites because the family who lived here for 300 years or so were not only politically active aristocrats but took a major part in the industrialisation of Japan in the late 19th/early20th century. 

Here's the house's inner garden.  Sorry about the intrusive tourist.  I'll get rid of her with Photoshop.  There's another little inner garden with just a couple of rocks in it.

The house is quite swish inside and there's info about all the bigwigs who were visitors in days gone by like Edward VIII, Czar Nicolas and various Japanese notables.  I'm sorry to note that I've chopped off the tiger's head in this picture, kind of ruins it.  But forunately I've got the head in closeup

with the bonus of a good view of samurai body armour.  I've noticed this in other houses I've been in.  I don't know whether that's an addition dictated by modern curatorial ideas or whether your samurai kept his gear handy just in case he needed to leap on a trusty steed and swing his sword about a bit.

One of these perhaps.  A label told me that there was something religiously important about the big one and it got taken to the shrine every day but what it was I don't remember and furthermore I don't know whether it was this model horse (lifesize) or its real counterpart.

Prince Shimadzu Tadayoshi got a grand view of his garden and the mountain as he sat contemplating what improvements he could make to the reverberatory furnace a hundred yards down the drive.

The servants meanwhile were probably dreaming about when they were going to move on from the palaquin age to the steam engine or the horseless carriage.

A couple more pictures to illustrate how beautiful a place it is.

On my way out I passed a gate in a wall with what looked like a watchman's hut beside it and beside that this little statue.  Grasping a club in his hands he could be the God of watchmen and someone has been making offerings to him.  Let's hope the contents haven't reduced his ability to keep baddies at bay.