"New Country, New Life" was the heading for a session dealing with two books on immigrant experience.  Sunjeev Sahota's novel The Year of the Runaways is about young Indian men in Sheffield.  I've already read a large chunk and am finding the tales of their struggles in India and what so far are not substantially lesser struggles in the UK engrossing.

I haven't yet got Monica Canitieri's novel The Encyclopedia of Good Reasons but the description of how it treats the experience of coming to a new country, in this case Switzerland, from the viewpoint of a five year old girl and her attempts to understand and classify all the long words that the adults around her throw about was intriguing.  I look forward to reading it.

Liz Lochhead appeared in conversation with Ruth Wishart and had lots of interest to say about the Scots language, her own work and Scottish theatre.  The event was marked by the light-hearted banter between the pair of them but we were left in no doubt of how seriously Lochhead takes her work and the cultural scene in Scotland.

She ended by reciting what she called her theatrical credo.  It started and finished with the instruction "Tell the story".  That's my main complaint against En Avant, Marche! in the EIF.  There was no story.

The blurb says "...an amateur brass band in Flanders.  As the ties that hold local communities together begin to loosen, these amateur ensembles offer a civic and collective nucleus, teaching people of all ages and from different walks of life to play together and march in the same direction."

This led me to think that here we would have a warm human tale of how adversity had struck a town, say a factory closure, or of how youth were rejecting their parents' values and of how the fellowship of the band helped the community hold together etc etc.

No such thing.  We were treated, if that is the right word, to a series of clownish vignettes that would have been better placed in a circus or a Victorian music-hall and some sexually explicit badinage that would have been out of place even on a premium phone line.

I have no fault to find with the music produced by the cast and by the Dalkeith and Monktonhall brass band who took part in the show and it was with the band that there was one little nod in the direction implied by the blurb when the main man went round the band asking what the players did for a living.  Their jobs ranged from procurator fiscal to cafe counter assistant illustrating to a degree a community fellowship.

For the professional critics view you can choose between The Guardian's four stars or The Telegraph's two.