The fine weather in late May found me going through ice cubes but this picture reveals the fact that the weather has not been so kind for many years.  It's the last cube making bag from a box that I bought in France during the years I spent my summers there.  So it's at least nine years old.  June so far has not put any pressure on my ice cube making equipment.

Like June I have not been bustin out all over but have continued to be largely stuck at home, profiting where possible from the kindness of strangers in the form of theatrical freebies on-line. Of those I have enjoyed some and not others.

The Seawall was one of that much feared genre the oneman show but it was a poignant little tale of happiness and tragedy expertly delivered which moved and entertained.

Oneman in this context includes onewoman.  I'd say oneperson if it were not for the fact that I haven't managed to accustom myself yet to the feel of that formulation.  At least it's grammatical unlike "more better" and the like which strike a discordant note ever more frequently.  As for punctuation I spotted a grocer's apostrophe in a Scotsman headline to add to their various grammatical and spelling errors. Are they simply typos unnoticed by the subs or do the perpetrators think they are correct? 

OK. Put me in pedants' corner labelled grumpy old man.

Getting back to onemen.  The National Theatre of Scotland's Scenes for Survival have been, are and continue to be a delight.  These sparkling original pieces only a few minutes in length exhibit the plethora of writing and acting talent that we are lucky enough to enjoy.  Don't miss them and why not fork out a few bob in donation while you are at it.

Back in the big world I've seen from the National Theatre: This House, which I enjoyed no more nor less than when I saw it streamed to cinemas, i.e. not much, The Madness of George III, which I hadn't seen before and Small Island which I had.

Small Island is a joyous and moving play about the experiences of Jamaicans coming to the mother country (as they delusionally think of it) after the second war.  In the context of  Black Lives Matter it demonstrates at once both the distance we have come and the distance still to go.  The production itself is stupendous.  I can't think of many productions that have so effectively deployed a huge cast in a seamless sequence of scenes married to the imaginative design and use of essentially simple settings backed up by skilful lighting, sound and video. As for acting; incomparable.

The Madness of George III appealed to me somewhat less.  I wouldn't want to detract in any way from the fine performances of all the cast but I didn't find myself moved to anything like the same degree as I was in Small Island.     

The RSC's production of Macbeth with Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack was not terribly well received when it hit the stage.  It's saving grace in critical opinion was that it wasn't as bad as the National's with Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff that came out about the same time.  Well I hadn't seen either nor read the reviews so approached the RSC one on BBC4 in a state of nature.

I rather enjoyed it.  Played pretty much as a horror story it had lots of touches that I loved.  The little girl witches with their dolls were satisfyingly creepy.  Blood was everywhere.  The onstage porter keeping score was doubly creepy.  Macduff's wife and pretty little chickens were dragged off to a spine-chilling screamy death behind a curtain.  Banquo's ghost did the business in the flesh as did the parade of kings to come.  The countdown clock above the stage leading from Macbeth's rise to his fall that resets itself when Malcolm takes over was an interesting touch.  All in all it was full of fresh ideas.

One that jarred with me though was the final fight.  Macbeth is given the lines "Lay on Macduff and damned be him that first cries 'Hold, enough!.'" and then they set to.  In this production the line ended with "Hold".  The fight gets going and Macbeth is beating the proverbial out of Macduff.  Then he stops, holds out his sword point downwards and says "Enough", at which Macduff cuts his throat. Odd.

I had tickets for the touring production of A Monster Calls but it was cancelled thanks to Covid-19 so I was pleased to find it was being streamed and a wonderful show it was.  Super staging, excellent acting and a touching treatment of a young boy's ambivalent feelings about his mother's imminent death.  He doesn't want her to die but he wants the stress and horror of waiting for the inevitable to be over.

My DVD of The Way We Live Now turned up in a set together with He Knew He Was Right and The Barchester Chronicles. I thoroughly enjoyed The Way...though I still hanker to see the 1969 black and white version again.  I didn't know He Knew... .  It's a great story about irrational jealously.  Is there a rational version?  Satisfyingly the jealous husband fades away and dies from his inability to master his emotion.  Loved by his wife to the end would you believe. 

Barchester awaits my finding a gap in the constant stream of entertainment that surrounds me.

My eye was caught by a French TV series on All4 called Philharmonia.  It turned out to be a silly and believability stretching story about murder and mayhem surrounding the arrival of a new conductor. I enjoyed the setting in the gorgeous Philharmonie de Paris concert hall that I visited last year and I learnt that the equivalent of "break a leg" for musical groups is "toi, toi, toi", so almost worth watching.  

Philharmonie Inside

Philharmonie Outside

A much better French TV series from the same source was The Other Mother. A child psychologist goes to the police because he is concerned that a boy of four is not the child he is said to be. After initially rejecting his suspicions the lady cop commander finds herself drawn into the mystery and into the psychologist's life. It's a good story that keeps you wanting to know more. It's set in Le Havre as well which is a change from the usual Paris centred cop stories.  Recommended.

I've zoomed a fair bit for sax, Italian, Japanese, wine tasting, social chit chat and even the Dicksonfield Owners and Residents Association meeting.

Jazz at Lincoln Centre runs an annual school big band competition called Essentially Ellington.  Hundreds of schools throughout the states take part. This year was their 25th anniversary and they celebrated in part by inviting a number of non USA bands to join the final stage.  Among them was the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra.  Covid meant they had to hold the final online so the finalists and I guess the foreign invitees missed out on a trip to New York. I listened to a fair bit and marvelled at the quality of those teenage musicians.

I've managed a couple of reasonable outings, one down to Stockbridge and Inverleith Park where you get lovely views of the city,

and one to Duddingston where I fancied I would get some shots of the Kirk and loch which in my imagination I'm sure I've had in the past but the best I could get was this shot and that was from miles away.

But I liked this grafitti that I passed in the Innocent Railway tunnel on my way back to town.