I was out the other day and came down the Mound where the Christmas tree is rather forlornly waiting for its lights.  A good metaphor for life under Covid.

Not that my life has been particularly lightless with so much going on online.  The Venetian Twins, abandoned at a late stage of rehearsals in March is now back in rehearsal on Zoom with a target production date of March 2021 and Shrapnel, in production via Zoom and Youtube as I write, has occupied me for the last few weeks.   

I was fairly sure that no other amateur group was producing anything online for the public but then I came across The Bachae.  However since this is a production by final year acting students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to my mind it qualifies as amateur only in the strictly "not getting paid" sense.  Ancient Greek theatre can bore the pants off you but I thought this was a first rate production and it held my attention.

It was well acted, beautifully costumed and subtly lit. It looked lovely throughout with the single exception of a rather tacky looking plastic sheet stretched between two towers for one scene.  A gauze suspended from the flies would have looked so much better.

What didn't hold my attention terribly well was Chichester's production of Crave by Sarah Kane.  The critics raved about it and I bow to their opinion, humbly admitting that the sight of a poor actor beating their head on a moving walkway and moaning with despair didn't move me.  Hopefully in the dark of an actual theatre in the midst of an audience gripped by tension I'd have felt diffferently.

I've just watched Lament for Sheku Bayoh from The Lyceum.  We might think of Sheku as Scotland's George Floyd.  He died while being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy some five years ago.  What exactly happened and why is still clouded in a fog of contradictory assertions.  The Lament doesn't give an answer but repeatedly and powerfully asks the question and broadens the landscape to probe racialism in Scotland.

What stikes me about this case as it has in other circumstances is the length of time wasted in enquiries behind closed doors, reviews carried out by interested or partial parties before a full public enquiry which it was obvious from day 1 was needed is launched.  The good news is that that has happened.  The bad is that it is expected to take several years over the job.

The Portrait Gallery is one of my favourite spots so I hastened to visit when it reopened.  They've set up a Covid safe route around most but not all of the gallery and I enjoyed seeing again so many historical characters, wondering every time how life was for them and in their day.  One lovely portrait is of Allan Ramsay's second wife and this brief Youtube video fills in some interesting background to their relationship.

I'm an occasional attendee at gallery events and talks but despite much such material being made available online I'm failing to keep up.  I saw an interesting talk from Washington about their gallery but there are many more that I've missed.

I had a flu jab recently which I'm hoping was a dry run for a Covid inoculation, but be that as it may it took place near Easter Rd stadium which is a stones throw away from Lochend Park which I had never visited, so I went. Like Pilrig park earlier this year it was well worth the effort.

Another thing that was well worth the effort, not that much effort was involved, was to attend the Zambia Society Trust AGM.  I've been a few times in person and combined the trip with a visit to friends in Brighton or my brother in London.  My Brighton chum is now living in Lusaka so I wouldn't have seen him even if a trip to London had been possible.  The online meeting was very well organised and I did see a couple of chums in the gallery view but we didn't communicate.  There was a good canter through the various projects that the Trust supports.  In the grand scheme of things they may be small beer but they do an enormous amount of good.

In additon there was a fascinating presentation about work being done (not by the Trust) to extend the tourist potential of Livingstone.  Every tourist who goes to Zambia visits Victoria Falls but the town of Livingstone which is only a few miles away doesn't benefit a great deal.  Yet it is of significant historical interest and this project aims to build on that by restoring historic buildings, developing a tourist trail, deepening relations with organisations such as the David Livingstone centre in Blantyre and so on. The work that has been done so far at the museum is impressive.

The last time I went to the AGM the London Jazz Festival was on and I went to several events with David and Sally.  This year it was online.  I loved Bill Laurence playing piano at Ronnie Scott's, the saxophone of Samuel Eagles and the band Still Waters.  I wasn't quite so keen on Liber Musica but not to the same extent as the person whose comments on the live chat were deleted as they posted them.  On exasperated fan eventually said "why don't you just listen to something else rather than slag off these musicians".  Very sensible advice.

There was some homegrown jazz to enjoy as well.  Playtime gave us an excellent Mingus tribute from Pathhead village hall and a group of talented young musicians present a concert celebrating Art Blakey at the conservatoire.

The amazing resource that is the BBC iplayer gave me my treat of the month, a Japanese film called Our Little Sister.  Tender, moving, joyous, a real cinematic jewel.  It is set in a seaside town of under 200,000 people not very far from Tokyo which made me think that if and when I manage to do a language course in Japan it would be much better to do it in a place like that rather than in a major city.