Ewan was here recently preparing his flat for renting out and from the debris being thrown away I acquired various foodstuffs including some of this

Despite its best before date of December 2006 I prepared a cup in the hopes of recapturing the taste of bygone days when it was our instant coffee of choice, the choice being this or nothing.

I may well have recaptured the taste but it wasn't very pleasant. Let's be charitable and say it was stale with age.

The same could not be said about Ian Rankin's début play Dark Road. It was brand new after all but I found it pretty stale and old-fashioned.  Maybe the legions of admirers of his detective fiction had a great night.

Most reviews tried charitably to find good in the play.  The FT found a lot of good and gave it four stars and the Daily Record enthused.

Others were more restrained.  Thom Dibdin thought it "intriguing but imperfect". Mark Fisher in The Guardian talks about "implausible corners of the plot" and "clunkier passages of exposition".  The Independent quite likes it but finds a lot of the script stuck in novel mode that doesn't work when spoken.

Finding less to like was the Telegraph's Mark Brown who found the play "a criminally misjudged experiment".  Rivalling Mark Brown in dislike for the play is Joyce Macmillan who concludes in The Scotsman that after this "silly, sensational mess with nothing to say" it is "time to lower the curtain and move on."

Moving on to The Traverse later in the week Couldn't Care Less was a touching little two-hander about a daughter coping with her mother in the early stages of dementia and Translunar Paradise was a superb piece about memory and love.  It dispensed with words and was played by two actors who used masks, movement and mime.  They were supported by an accordionist whose music was integral to the action of the play.