On a delightfully sunny and warm Friday afternoon the Meadows were as busy as I've ever seen them and the cherry trees were in full bloom. I've recently read a book about Collingwood Ingram, an Englishman who was instrumental in saving cherry varieties from extinction and in promoting the cultivation of cherry trees both in Japan and worldwide. It's a very good read. In an appendix the Meadows are listed as one of the best places in the UK to admire cherry trees in bloom. 

Not to be outdone the Friends of Starbank Park hosted a Cherry Blossom Picnic on Sunday which had all the hallmarks of Japanes hanami celebrations.  I bumped into Hilda who used to play trumpet with Dunedin but who was at Starbank to play with the Edinburgh Brass Band.  Here's a snap of the event and of the brass band.

Continuing in a Japanese vein I went to a U3A talk on Japan in which the speaker focused on the co-existence of traditional and modern features in the country.  I think those in the audience who had not been to Japan would have gained more knowledge and enjoyment from it than I did. 

I enjoyed a Japanese meal with Sarah at Harajuku, an Italian meal with Connor at Vittoria's, a Persian meal with Ross, Claire and Siobhan at Konj.  I also celebrated Ross's birthday at Sotto where I know I had a delicious meal and even more delicious wine but can't for the life of me remember what I had though it must have been Italian in spirit.  Not content with eating out in restaurants I was liberally fed by both Siobhan and Claire in their homes.  A good month for digestive diversions.

Cultural diversions include a Stabat Mater by a Belgian group La Chapelle Sauvage at Easter in the Queen's Hall and again in the Queen's Hall from the SCO a concert of Czech music including a wonderful piece I'd never heard before, Martinu's 2nd Violin concerto.  I absolutely loved it.  My own musical activities were limited to a Sunday afternoon Big Blaw where I had a great deal of trouble getting anything out of my sax in such contrast to the weekend at Stirling University last month.  Maybe time to put the instrument away.

I was at the pictures twice though once was to see an NT Live cast of All My Sons.  It's oe of my favourite plays.  This was what we used to call a very Brechtian production, i.e. no set or almost none. In this case they had a backcloth with a door shaped hole and above the hole a large round aperture which acted as a window into the house.  The forestage held a large tree which we saw collapse in a storm in the opening scene. So it all depended on the performances which were splendid.  I particulary liked Marianne Jean-Baptiste who played the mother clinging on to the fiction that her son will return now the war is over despite his aircraft having been reported missing three years earlier for fear of having to face the part his father played in the deaths of American airmen.   Altogether an excellent production which Esther who was with me also enjoyed.

Two Prosecutors was the film I saw.  Set in Stalin's Russia The Guardian called it petrifying in this 5 star review.  It certainly makes you thank your lucky stars for our albeit imperfect society.

The only live drama I've seen recently was Vanishing Point's What I'm Here For, a collaboration with a Danish theatre company performed in a mixture of Danish and English with surtitles in both languages. From what little I know of the Danes they probably understood the English dialogue without having recourse to the surtitles.  We knew Danes in Nairobi who chatting away happily amongst themselves in Danish would immediately switch to English when we hove into sight. 

I liked the presentation but wasn't all that impressed by the play.  It deals with the pressures on over-stretched staff in a hospital, the mistakes and oversights that can lead to etc.  It doesn't offer any solution nor does it tell us anything we don't already know, except perhaps that Denmark has similar problems to us.    

However my recent experience with the NHS has been very positive and continues to be so.  Having dealt with my bowel cancer they have turned back to checking out my lungs.  I saw a consultant who like my bowel surgeon is an Irishman and he gave me the lowdown on my condition.  Although I have emphesema it's apparently limited and not of much consequence. My main problem is progressive pulmonary fibrosis.  He said that what I would find when I googled it was that I had less than five years to live but stressed that mine was a slightly different flavour.  "What you've got is not good" he said "but it's not that."

Nevertheless they can't cure it, can't repair the damage already done and can't stop it destroying more of my lung tissue.  What they can do is slow down the progression but the side effects of the two alternative treatments he described are not attractive.  I've been left to ponder and in the meantime I'm on a pulmonary rehabilitation course.  That's basically a set of six weekly exercise classes aimed at improving my breathing and getting oxygen into my muscles. I've also got contacts for choirs for the breathless thanks to my meeting Hilda at Starbank park.  We'll see how they can fit in a non-singer like me.

On a cheerier note I picked the horse that came second in the Grand National.  Pity I hadn't gone the length of putting money on it.  I enjoyed Scotland's women's rugby team's victory over Wales and lamented the thrashing they got from England.  I didn't subject myself to more pain by avoiding their Italian defeat.

But Scotland so far has come out tops in snooker's world championship with a couple of superb matches from John Higgins.  How he recovered from being five frames behind Ronnie O'Sullivan to beat him 13-12 was awe-inspiring.

The National Galleries of Scotland talks are popular and the one on Art Deco in Scotland was sold out when I was booking but happily it was also available to stream which I did and which I found very worth watching.  Given by Bruce Peter from Glasgow School of Art he traced art deco's precursors in 19th century decorative arts, discussed how art deco became significant in Scotland between the wars and gave a potted insight into the contents of his book Art Deco Scotland:Design and Architecture in the Jazz Age.

The whole talk was beautifully illustrated by lovely slides including many of ocean liner interiors, mostly Clyde built.  He admits to a fascination with ocean liners which I share.  I saw an excellent exhibition relating to design within ocean liners in Genoa some years ago.

The Japan Foundation annually sends a number of films to a number of places around the country.  This year there were 26 films and 34 places.  I don't know how they decide which places get which films but 8 came to Edinburgh and I saw 6 of them, those in the picture above.  I can't say that I thought any of them were particularly memorable though I didn't actively dislike them.

As a break from the diet of Japanese films I went to see Tasters. This is about a group of women forced to taste Hitler's food before he ate in case it would disagree with him, possibly fatally.  That at least appears to be true but the filmmakers erected a story of sorts about the relationships between the women, a romance between one of them and the top man in the German squad guarding them and the uncovering of a Jewess amonst them. It was ok.

Rather more than ok were a couple of SCO concerts.  At one Jess Gillam played a number of saxophone pieces.  I enjoyed them all, particularly Rant, written for her by John Harle.  She played a concerto written for her by Dani Howard that I enjoyed less because the balance between orchestra and soloist seemed to me to be too much in favour of the orchestra.  Perhaps it was just where I was sitting.  My former sax teacher Rocio was at the concert with one of her daughters.  I had a good catch up chat with her.

That concert had opened with Sound and Fury, a beautiful piece by Anna Clyne. 

The SCO produced another sparkling concert featuring the world premiere of a fabulous choral work by Jay Capercauld, libretto by Niall Campbell, called The Language of Eden. The SCO chorus and soloist Roderick Williams were magnificent.  Both Capercauld and Campbell were there and were given enthusiastic applause.  They looked very pleased as well they might.  

The RSNO in their turn presented us with a world premiere - Elena Langer's new work, The Lives of Birds, for Soprano and Orchestra.  Very different but great stuff.

Another RSNO concert presented even more different stuff.  Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue played by young Scottish pianist and composer Ethan Loch.   So far so normal.  The second half saw some of the RSNO's Youth Chorus on stage clothed conventionally in black but all in short sleeves, their bare arms all hanging vertically like flesh coloured saplings.  In front of them were a motley crew in a variety of costumes; a squirrel, a frog, a tree, a flame and so forth centred on a youth in short trousers and a newsboy cap.  This was the cast for Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges.   The youth we find is a naughty child, scolded by his mother and being a nuisance to the various characters. But later he redeems himself by tending to the squirrel's injuries and the animals help him find his mum.  A rum piece but pleasant enough.

Very different too was Raw Material's take on Shaw's St Joan at the Traverse. I wasn't as taken with it as the Guardian's critic but my companions liked it and would applaud his allocation of four stars.

The final talk in the National Gallery's series about the conservation and restoration of buildings was no less interesting than the others.  Dr Anne Galastro delivered another fine talk focused this time on the reuse of buildings, starting with the transformation of the old Royal Infirmary into the Edinburgh Futures Institute.  She then covered the Reichstag and the peculiar case of the Humboldt Forum.  This latter started life as a royal palace ceturies ago, was severely knocked about during the second world war. It was knocked down by the DDR who built a steel and glass parliamentary and cultural centre in its place.  After reunification that in its turn was knocked down and after years of dithering the Humboldt Forum took its place.  The building has a facade that is a faithful reproduction of the old royal palace but is all decoration free concrete round the back and art friendly open spaces inside.  Wikipedia has a lot to say about it.  

She finished off by rerminding us that since it suffered its second fire the Macintosh School of Art has languished in limbo.  What's to become of it?

The old Infirmary Street Baths didn't feature in that talk but they were transformed some years ago into the Dovecot Studios and have flourished since.  Currently they have an exhibition about Biba, one of the stars of the fashion revolution that was the swinging sixties.  It's a super exhibition.  Here's a picture to whet your appetite

There are a number of talks associated with the exhibition and I went to one yesterday, one of very few men amongst a lively and interested audience of women not all of whom were of an age to remember Biba. It was an excellent talk by someone fully involved in her subject.  I learnt a lot.  

The Glasgow Film Festival red carpet devoid of stars and unfortunately under surveillance by a security guard otherwise I'd have slipped on to it for a selfie.

One of the strands in the festival celebrated the centenary of Marilyn Monroe's birth with a screening of a number of her films.  I met up with Andrew for one of our irregular lunch dates and we went to see The Prince and the Showgirl. It's famous or perhaps notorious for its pairing of her with Laurence Olivier and for the difficulties that she brought to the production.  I was seeing it for the first time and thought it was a super film, a very amusing comedy with excellent performances from the entire cast.  I wouldn't altogether agree with the lady who introduced the film's judgement that Monroe acted Olivier off the set but she was very very good and I'm sure suited the part better than Vivien Leigh who performed with Olivier in the stage version. 

I was disappointed though with the other festival film that I saw, The Wizard of the Kremlin.  Partly that's because I'd misunderstood the publicity I'd seen.  I thought it was a dramatised documentary about Putin (think Mr Bates and the Post Office) but while backgrounded by real events and people it was in fact a wholly fictional account of a wholly fictional right-hand man to Putin. Also it was not very good as looking at the Reception section of the Wikipedia article I've linked will show you.

An amusing sidebar to the festival was that included with the usual request about mobile phone use screened before the film was the information that in the fight against movie piracy cinema staff might observe us through night vision goggles.

Observation is the name of the game for documentary filmmakers.  Some fine examples of the genre were on show at The Outhouse last week thanks to DOCo.  There was a period some ten or fifteen years ago when I performed in a number of student films and occasionally I come across the work of some of the then students who are now fully fledged filmmakers.  One of them is Duncan Cowles and I went to The Outhouse to see his recent short film Neil Armstrong and the Langholmites.  Langholm is the centre of the border area which is the ancestral home of the Armstrongs and Neil visited it a few years after his moon landing in 1969 and was made a feeman of the town.  The film includes some archive footage of his visit but the bulk of this quietly humorous essay consists of interviews with townspeople who were there 50 odd years ago and the town's commemoration of the event.  The film gives us a lovely warm slice of humanity.

There were a number of other fine short documentaries screened that evening and one of the organisers of the event, Lucas Kao, was another man from my student film past.

It's a book;  It's a film;  It's a TV series: as we say when playing charades.  One Day has been all of these and I haven't seen/read any of them but now it's also a musical play which I have seen and which is TERRIFIC as Trump would surely post were he to drop into the Lyceum over the next two or three weeks.

Brilliant staging, super performances, a profoundly moving show.  You couldn't ask for more.  I was at a preview.  It's official opening is tonight.  It can only be better.

I rarely express an opinion on how a piece of music is played because I don't have either the ears or the knowledge but I did hear a performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto at the Usher Hall recently that I found rather bland in comparison to more muscular and vigorous performances I've heard, notably from Nicola Benedetti.  At the Usher Hall also I heard Strauss's Horn Concerto which I haven't heard often enough to have any sort of opinion on.  The wonder of the performance was that the player played the horn with his foot.

I'm on safer ground saying whether I enjoyed a piece or not and the SCO gave me a great deal of pleasure with their performanc of Schnittke's Gogol Suite.  Lot's of lovely smash, bang, wallop in that one.  It's on Spotify though not their performance.

Most of us have come across the Japanese print The Great Wave off Kanagawa at some time.  Scottish Opera with Japanese partners have now created The Great Wave, an opera that deals with the life and work of the artist Hokusai and his daughter.  It was performed at the Festival Theatre and I went with Claire and Phil who are not that long back from Japan and of course I have an interest in the country.  None of us are particularly opera fans but we enjoyed the show and agree with the critics that it was visually striking, ambitious and beautifully produced but a bit short on drama.

The National Gallery of Scotland is running a short series of talks on the renovation and conservation of historice buildings.  The first one dealt with the recovery of Notre Dame cathedral after the tremendous fire a few years ago.  It was very interesting and explored the history of the building and its various additions and changes over the centuries.  The question in such circumstances always arises as to what should be restored or conserved. The interior of the cathedral looks sparkling new but should the grime of ages have been left as it was?  Towards the end of the talk there was a comparison with the approach to Coventry cathedral's restoration and to the restoration of the Frauenkirche in Dresden.  The former retained part of the ruins and added on a brand new modern design while the latter rebuilt the whole church incorporating much of the original fabric.

I spent this past weekend at Stirling university on a saxophone weekend.  Given the state of my lungs, the fact that I haven't done any regular playing for eight months and my recent stay in hospital I was very pleased at how well I coped.  I'm encouraged to do a bit more playing again but not going out on wet and cold nights to play in draughty unheated churches.

The Winter Olympics are in full swing but this picture is of an international match played at Murrayfield just a few days before the Olympics started.  Poland, Slovenia, Ukraine and Great Britain fought it out over three days in front of enthusiastic crowds. I had a ticket for the first day which entitled me to see two matches but I saw only one, Slovenia versus Poland.  That match finished before 4pm leaving a long gap before the evening match.  I spent the gap at home and couldn't find the energy to go out into the rain again when it came to it.  I enjoyed what I did see though and it whetted my appetite for the Olympic ice hockey games.

I've been glued to the TV's excellent all day coverage of every conceivable event including ice hockey.  A number of British athletes who were hyped up before the games haven't managed to deliver while coming creditably close but at today's date GB has had three successes and more may follow. 

Crans Montana where they had that dreadful fire at New Year is where I learnt to ski and Cortina, the Olympic venue, is the last place I skiied, the year before Covid hit us.  I can't say that I recognised any of Crans Montana in the reporting but I did recognise the centre of Cortina and even a couple of the rock formations on the slopes.  The mountain views there and at the other centres were gorgeous.  I grabbed a couple of pictures from my TV screen.

View of Cortina as seen from the BBC Olympic studio

     

Olympic flame in Cortina

The opening ceremony was fun and was very cleverly orchestrated between Milan, Cortina and other event venues.

I had to do a bit of channel hopping to keep an eye on the six nations rugby competition.  I saw France comprehensively demolish Ireland and Scotland battle unsuccessfully in a continuous downpour against Italy only to triumph a week later in the Calcutta Cup. 

Carlos Acosta's ballet company brought their Cuban flavoured Nutcracker to the Festival Theatre. The blend of classical dance and music with Cuban sounds and movements made for an enjoyable evening but as the review I've linked says, the Cuban element was dropped in the second half to the detriment of the production.  

Much of the figure skating on display at the Olympics is essentialy ballet on ice.  The lifts and throws that the skaters achieve evoke even more admiration and wonder than does the athleticism of the stage performers.

The weather on St Valentines's Day broke the pattern of miserable, cold and wet weather that has persisted for some weeks.  Instead we had blue skies and crisp air.  So I went out for an excursion and in the garden of Inveresk Lodge came across a tree with this appropriate formation.

      

Here's my contribution to the Scottish Snowdrop Festival.  They flowered well before Christmas and I'm pretty sure will be dead long before the official end of the snowdrop season. But they are a joy to have on the balcony for a few weeks.

After his skiing trip Ewan went down to Keswick to see his mum.  Connor brought him back up to Edinburgh and we went out to lunch at Howie's in Waterloo Place. Apart from the food being very good there, as evidenced by the fact that it was packed on a Tuesday lunchtime, it was chosen because Claire, who joined us, works just across the road.

The following day Ewan flew back to America after having been my lifesaver/domestic slave for six weeks or so.  I went out in the afternoon to a U3A meeting.  They have a general meeting every month at which in addition to whatever U3A business needs to be attended to there's a talk.  I often find myself thinking that it looks interesting and that I must go but seldom do and this was the first occasion I'd been to the venue they currently use.  Like Howie's it was packed and I was lucky to get a seat.  The talk itself was about a beer duty fraud carried out in Edinburgh in the 1920s and 30s not much more than 100 yards from where the U3A meeting was being held.  It was a super talk well presented and illustrated by a  chap who maintains a website of  events in Edinburgh's long and interesting history.  It's well worth a browse.  

I made my first visit of 2026 to the Filmhouse with Mary to see Rental Family.  It's quite a jolly piece that declares itself to be a comedy-drama about an American actor living in Tokyo who gets employment with a company that supplies actors to play roles in various family occasions, such as groom for a wedding that's not really a wedding but is being held to mask the bride's sexuality and intention to emigrate with her real love.  There was also some sort of dummy funeral which amused me although I didn't understand the point of it.  Our hero then is tasked with pretending to be the father of a girl of around 10 or 11 who doesn't know he's not really her father. This is all tugging at the heartstrings stuff so when the truth comes out and the girl is distraught we are too.  Spoiler alert - there's a happy ending.

New Oleans jazz at the Assembly Roxy was my next outing and I rounded off  the most active week I've had since before going into hospital with a non Burns Supper evening of delicious haggis.

The following week was much quieter.  I went for a walk up town and took a few pictures including this panorama of one of my favourite views.  It was not a bad day but bitterly cold and I took advantage of a pleasant little cafe to warm up my camera wielding hands by wrapping them round a cappuccino.

I went to hear the SCO play Mozart's last three symphonies in the Usher Hall. I'm not a great fan of Mozart.  I like his operas and his choral pieces but I can do without the symphonies.  Not that you can fault the guy for effort to please since he wrote somewhere between 40 and 50, and 30 of those before he was 18.  I suppose I do enjoy hearing some of them but three on one evening was just too much.

Last outing of the week was dinner with friends where I consumed delicious vegetarian middle easternish dishes and went home with a goodie bag of tablet.

  

On the back of disappointment about the availability and cost of Winter Olympics tickets I decided to go to Sheffield for a week in January in the hope of seeing Lewis Gibson and Lilah Frear surpassing their World Ice Dancing Bronze Medal by taking Gold in the European competition.

In the event I decided that while my recovery from bowel cancer surgery would be up to sitting in an ice-rink it was maybe not up to the concomitant midwinter travel and traipsing around.  So I sacrificed my ticket.  I did try to pass it on to a worthy recipient and then post it for sale on the ticketing website but there were no takers.

The whole event was live streamed on Youtube and much of it was available on BBC iPlayer so I watched most of it in the comfort of my own home.  Britain's chances looked good after the first section of the ice dancing event when Gibson and Frear lay second but a small error in the second section cost them a couple of points and relegation to third position. 

Better luck at the Olympics perhaps. 

Christmas and New Year were as you might expect quite quiet.  Ewan laid on an excellent turkey dinner on Christmas Day, even going so far as to include sprouts for my pleasure.  He can't stand them despite my well meaning but failed attempts to force feed them to him in his high chair.

New Year's Eve was a little livelier. Ross and Claire came round and we had snacks and drinks into the early hours followed, once again thanks to Ewan's catering prowess by a traditional New Year's Day steak pie.

Ewan went off to Austria last week to ski and left me to fend for myself.  I had no problems and extended my range outdoors from Tesco and Sainsbury's to a barber on Leith Walk, a stroll in Princes St Gardens and a couple of circular walks locally.

The pace is heating up this week.  See the next post.   

 

This is a work by the admirable Andy Goldsworthy who is a master at making art out of natural materials.  Included in an exhibition celebrating 50 years of achievent it's made of ferns.  There was lots of other lovely stuff as you'll see if you follow the link.

I was looking forward to seeing The Glass Menagerie at The Lyceum but in the event I was disappointed.  Unlike the critics I must add who all loved it.  Most were particularly complimentary about the lighting.  I thought it was a bit dark.  More importantly I didn't get much of an emotional hit from the production.

I didn't get an emotional hit either from Enda Walsh's Arlington at The Traverse.  It came over to us from The Tron and this reviewer loved it.  I sort of enjoyed it and the 25 minute solo dance sequence in the middle was mighty impressive.  Not a drop of sweat appeared on the actor's brow.  But it was weird and if it had meaning it escaped me.

A much more accessible play and a very fine production came from the Grads who put on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  It was altogether excellent - imaginatively staged and well performed by a large cast with a fine central performance from young Iain Goldie.

The fascinating story of John Davidson from Galashiels who has Tourette's syndrome has been made into a film called I Swear.  It's well worth going to see - dramatic, moving and ultimately uplifting.  A documentary was made  about him some years ago and an interesting feature of the film is that clips from the documentary are interposed at the end as the credits roll.

In my less than intense pursuit of Japanese culture I went to see a classic, not to say cult, animation  Princess Mononoke.  My feelings about animation are a bit equivocal.  I find it hard to completely shake off the feeling that animation is for kids.  But as the Wikipedia entry shows there's a lot of technical excellence as well as an important environmental message in this film and I enjoyed it well enough.

I went with no expectations to see Blue Moon to use up my last "free" Cameo ticket.  Now that Filmhouse is back in action I don't feel that I need Cameo membership as well.  It's a super film with a wonderful performance from Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart.  Set in Sardi's on the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma we share Hart's bitterness and jealousy as Oscar Hammerstein replaces him as lyricist to Richard Rodgers.  Wikipedia tells you about it and The Guardian tells you how good it is.

I do tend to forget things and although my diary tells me I went to an RSNO concert featuring Beethoven's Eroica the rest of the programme has escaped my mind.  Fortunately this review fills in the blanks and reminds me of how much I enjoyed the evening especially the first half.

The Zambia Society Trust holds its AGM in London in November.  I've attended in person a couple of times, combining it with a visit to my friend David who was on the committee.  David lives in Lusaka these days but I can still attend online thanks to modern technology.  There's the usual AGM type business but also always something of wider interest.  This year there was a video about developments at a school in the Copperbelt. I tend to think of the Copperbelt in terms of its urban settlements but this school was deep in the bush.  Thanks to many people including ZST members new classrooms have been built and a borehole dug to supply water.  One young woman whose family farms in the area cycled 900 kilometres through the bush to raise funds.  It was an inspiring story.

Siobhan treated a number of us to a very pleasant lunch a few weeks ago, a precursor to the feast promised us by Christmas which this year is being provided to me by Ewan.  He has come all the way from America to look after me while I convalesce following my right hemi colectomy.  That came about as a result of the more or less accidental discovery that I had bowel cancer during an investigation of the reasons that I was experiencing shortness of breath.  Those reasons boil down to decades of smoking.  They won't chop bits of my lungs out though.  I just have to put up with that helped by an inhaler.

I don't intend to post again before New Year so Merry Christmas and all that to all my readers.