The Grads are doing a version of Jean Anouilh's play about Joan of Arc this week.  I didn't audition for it because the intended rehearsal arrangements clashed with other commitments.  In fact those arrangements only persisted for a few weeks so I would actually have been available.  Indeed I turned up at lots of rehearsals to prompt and have been rewarded by a late casting.

Joan hears voices that prompt her to become engaged in the fight against the English and the script allocates those voices to the actress playing Joan, but it was decided late on that it would be better if someone else did the voices and that's me.  So I'm playing St. Michael.  Initially I was to be placed in a position in the balcony invisible to the audience but the acoustics of the ex-church we are performing in are such that I've been moved.  So I'll be visible to a portion of the punters although I will not be wowing them in the "beautiful starched robe with two big pure white wings" reported by Joan.  What a shame.

Just as the English are the villians of the piece in Joan's story so I have always believed that the failure of the Darien scheme was to be laid in large measure at the feet of the English even after making allowance for the climatic and geographic conditions that made establishing a settlement so very difficult.

But reading John McKendrick's Darien: A Journey in Search of Empire showed me a much more nuanced picture.  He has an excellent section on the geopolitical circumstances of the time that explains how the relationships between the European powers drove England to act against or at best to give no assistance to The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies.

The objective of establishing a settlement in Darien was to enable trade between the Atlantic (via the Carribean) and the Pacific.  A few hundred years later the Panama canal was created for just that purpose.  It's creation was politically the work of Theodore Roosevelt who was a descendant of one of the ministers of the kirk who went on the expedition to Darien in the 17th century.

Another interesting book I've read recently is The Word Detective by John Simpson.  It's the story of the years he spend working for the Oxford English Dictionary.  Interspersed in the narrative are short vignettes about particular words that illustrate the business of tracing the history of words and their meanings which is the business of the OED.

Back in February I was at a couple of gigs in the Jazz Bar that involved players from Belgium.  I learnt then that in May in Brussels there is a weekend of jazz throughout the city in venues indoors and out.  That sounded a good way to spend a weekend and I've just been.  I coupled it with a visit to the French Tennis Open at Roland Garros, one of the things I've always fancied doing.

I had thought I would be able to see Patrick in Brussels (my sailing friend) and Sylviane in Paris (my French theatre friend). But he was at sea and she was away hiking.  So I'm going back in late August to see them both.

Anyway the jazz weekend was excellent.  There were a number of great combos performing in a bandstand in the park, several groups on temporary stages in city squares and a grand variety in bars and restaurants.  There was even a very good quartet performing on the Friday night in the hotel I was staying in.

I squeezed in a visit to the Musical Instrument Museum that I hadn't managed to get to on my very short visit to Brussels in 2015 and I went to an exhibition about Audrey Hepburn who was born in Brussels as this plaque attests.

Someone who was buried there 450 years ago is Peter Breugel and there are various celebratory exhibitions that I didn't manage to get to. Beyond Bruegel looks as though it might even be worth a second trip before it closes in January combined undoubtedly with Back to Bruegel which opens in October and advertises visual reality technology that will allow the visitor to "experience the 16th century in the flesh through face to face contact with original objects from.......".

In Paris I had tickets for two days of tennis.  The first day I was in the main show court, Philippe Chatrier.  Although I was at the outermost extremes of the court I had an excellent view and saw matches involving Caroline Wozniaki, Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic ans Serena Williams.  All top dogs.  These were first round matches so unlikley to be very competitive but in fact the first match saw Wozniaki being beaten and Serena Williams was down a set before she managed to get into action.

The second day I was in the brand new Simonne Mathieu court which is an architectural gem sitting in a public garden and encompassing plant houses in its structure.  It holds 5,000 spectators against Chatrier's 15,000 and I was in the third front row.  That's really close to the action.  I saw three and a bit matches before leaving for the day.  These involved lesser players but not that much lesser.  Fabio Fognini for example, a top ten player when in form and Victoria Azarenka a former world number 1.

It was great.