I've jigged around from time to time to salsa music and Claire managed to get me more or less doing some proper steps in this wonderful place, but I'm now launched on an intensive salsa beginners course.

The first tranche of three hours was on Saturday morning in Broughton High School.  It was a brand new building when I was last in it to play badminton circa 1973 and it's been rebuilt since.  So it's doing better than my alma mater of KHS whose "new school" dates from the 50s and looked pretty seedy the last time I passed it.

Like Drummond where I do another adult education class Broughton was a hive of activity and I'm sure presented a much livelier and friendlier atmosphere than prevailed in the schools of my time.

That corner of Edinburgh shelters Fettes College and the playing fields of various schools.  They were all in action and it was jolly hard to find a place to park.  When I go back for the second tranche, for there is more, I'll take the bus.

In the meantime I have a wee CD with a man shouting out instructions to practice with.

I also enjoyed a quite different musical experience over the weekend, two actually, or even two and bit if we count the little radio play about Philip Glass and Steve Reich's two men and a van post Julliard experience.  I don't know just how true that was but it was an interesting insight into their different characters.

The RSNO did one of their Naked Classics concerts in which before hearing a piece time is spend telling you something about the composer and the work, illustrating points by playing extracts and so on.  I actually enjoyed that more than I did listening to the performance of Vaughan Williams' 5th Symphony that followed.

The SCO's concert on the other hand was super.  A brand new piece by Peter Maxwell Davis (who was present) was followed by an exhilarating piano concerto by Bartok.

I've been a Bartok fan ever since as a teenager I lay in bed and heard his weird and wonderful  Music for strings, percussion and celesta coming out of a radio just like this powered by batteries just like these.  I'd no idea what a celesta was then and am not much clearer now but the music doesn't sound nearly so weird and it's still a favourite.

Stravinsky is always associated for me with the jagged, even dissonant tones of The Rite of Spring but his Symphony in C which closed the concert was sweet and tuneful, in fact a bit bland for my taste.

There was a degree of upheaval in our production of Julius Caesar when it became clear that Mr Caesar was not going to be able to learn the lines in time.  So he got the bum's rush; Lepidus had his lines wiped out and became Cicero; Cicero (that was me) became Decius (that's now me); and Decius became Caesar.

Opening night two weeks tomorrow will see us word perfect - no sweat.

And finally here's Connor in the Scottish Amateur Poker Championship in which he came a thoroughly respectable 14th out of 140.