Apart from the Jazz Festival my diary was pretty empty for July so I optimistically pencilled in "play lots of golf".  I only managed one round.

But I did have a little seaside holiday. 

Some friends were over from Spain and used my flat.  To give them some privacy and save me from sleeping on the floor I spent a few nights in a flat in Portobello whose owner was on holiday.

I took part again in the Napier Jazz Summer School.  As is the usual drill we were split up into groups and given a couple of tunes to work on for our end of the week gig.  A particular challenge for me this year was that I had to memorise the tunes and the forms we'd developed for them.  Luckily that wasn't too hard and thanks to John Rae who steered the group I played in, our contribution to the gig was pretty good.

The festival concerts that I went to were a mixed bag.  I very much enjoyed Tommy Smith and Fergus McCreadie's contribution and Graham Costello's STRATA Expanded as well as the exploration by Konrad Wiszniewski and Euan Srevenson of the relationships between jazz and classical music.  One gig I went to was brilliant provided you kept your eyes shut.  Otherwise the constant fiddling about with laptops and control boxes on the floor was very distracting.  None of the rest were particularly memorable except perhaps Like a Cat Tied to a Stick billed as Radiohead reimagined.  This has earned me respect from some of my younger friends who don't realise that Radiohead means nothing to me.  It was the intriguing title that attracted me.

Small Island was beamed from the National Theatre to various places including Edinburgh.  It was an absolutely wonderful production of an adaptation of Andrea Levy's moving novel about the experiences of the West Indians who came to the UK after the second war.

Also wonderful in lots of ways was The Lehman Trilogy, another National Theatre production though it was broadcast from the Piccadilly Theatre.  The Guardian gave the show five stars.  I'd have given one fewer for the one defect that the Guardian review points out.  The collapse of the bank in 2008, what happened and why, was past before you realised it was there.

On a rather smaller budget than either of those shows was Battery Theatre's Mary, It began with a Lass... which I saw in the gardem behind the Storytelling Centre.   They ran competently through the events we are all reasonably familiar with about Mary Queem of Scots.  The small cast ably supported by a couple of singers switched roles adroitly to inhabit the principal characters of Mary's story and turned to advantage the different levels and nooks and crannies of the garden.

I ate out a few times, including with my school chums in Glasgow.  We went to the exhibition of Linda McCartney's photographs at Kelvingrove.  There were some fascinating glimpses into the family life that she and Paul enjoyed and a number of good portraits of The Beatles and other musicians. Other photographers may have teased out more from their subjects than she did but the work is worth making a trip to Glasgow for.

My Fringe starts tomorrow.