The loud bits of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique would have covered some of the throat clearing, coughing and snifling that beset me a few days ago but I decided at the last minute to give the concertgoing public a break and stayed at home with a hot toddy.

You could have cleared a hundred throats during Glasgow Girls at The Citizens the following day such was the amplified volume of what were already pretty loud numbers.

Half a dozen talented young women acted, sang and danced their way through this story of schoolgirls banding together in support of asylum seekers housed in Glasgow and whose children they were at school with.  Their special target was the so called dawn raids in which families were turfed out of their beds without warning in the early morning and hustled off south to detention and subsequent deportation.  

A serious subject but it made a great show not at all devoid of humour.  The two actors who played all the adult characters in the tale slipped from one personality into its polar opposite and back again within a heartbeat and with terrific skill.

Rain never seems to me to be in short supply by the banks of the Clyde but the Glasgow Girls umbrella twisting dance number relied on the rainy impression given by lighting in stark contrast to the real water cascading down on a similar number in Singin' in the Rain. That's a light and frothy show but had excellent singing and dancing and well....you have to admire all that water business.

Dick Lee and David Vernon on clarinet and accordion respectively were a pretty loud but enjoyable accompaniment to dinner at Vincaffe where a number of Sunday night events are scheduled. I was there with one of my U3A jazzmen and a group of his friends.  It was a foot-tapping evening in which delicious pasta was washed down with a nice Montepulciano.  I nobly foreswore dessert in anticipation of Austrian puddings to come.