After one of my Fringe shows I walked home via the Canongate and was entranced by the renovation of the physic garden and the Abbey Strand buildings.  The garden was opened to the public in November last and although I've passed that way since I hadn't noticed and I think the buildings have only recently lost a carapace of scaffolding, but for me recently often turns out to mean within the last year or three.

I had a festival packed weekend with a leisurely start at 11.30 on Saturday at the Book Festival.  They've moved from Charlotte Square to the Art College.  The Covid diminished festival fits into the space but I think it would be a bit of a squeeze if they were ever to welcome the crowds of the past.  However I believe the intention is to continue with the hybrid model that combines a limited number of events in which writers and audience are physically together onsite with many events that allow a worldwide audience and a worldwide body of writers to get together online.  

Thomas Pringle was a writer from the Borders who led a party of settlers to South Africa in 1820.  He was not much cop as a farmer and went off to Capetown where he was involved in running a school and running newspapers.  He fell foul of the colonial government and returned to London where he became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society.  Known, at least from a white colonial standpoint, as the father of South African poetry; literary awards are made there in his name to this day.  But he's not well known in Scotland.

Indeed he was unknown to Stuart Kelly, a Borderer himself and a literary critic who lives a stone's throw from Pringle's birthplace.  He was at the festival to discuss with Zoe Wicomb her novel Still Life.  At school in South Africa she had to learn a number of his poems by heart.  Intrigued by the man, his championship of native rights, the paradoxies of his life she has written a novel that weaves together real and fictitious characters in a time-shifting story that she insists cannot be characterised as a historical novel and which Scottish publishers turned down as being too difficult for the reader. 

I hope it's not too difficult for me because I bought a copy.

I suppose we could call the version of The Importance of Being Earnest that I went on to see an inclusive production.  Thanks to the conceit of replacements being needed for actors who hadn't turned up it included members of the audience. There was even an audition for the part of Miss Prism, the winner being selected by audience acclaim.

If these were plants they were very skilful actors indeed but I fear they were genuine punters.  I don't want to be negative about this production.  I'm sure it wasn't that easy to do. The audience actors clearly enjoyed their frolics on stage.  The audience were in gleeful fits.  A good time was being had by all.  I loathed it and left well before the end.

Now I didn't loathe the next one but The Laird Strikes Back struck me as much less entertaining than it might have been.  We meet Gussie McCraig, the sort of Scottish toff who went to Eton, hunts shoots and fishes, drinks to excess, condescends now and then to the odd Scots expression but strangles the vowels and holds opinions to the right of right.

He's practising a speech or presentation, swilling whisky and consulting notes as he does so.  He does that so well that I wondered if indeed he didn't know the lines.  But he inhabits the character brilliantly.  There's a videoed sequence of him on a Zoom call, sozzled and as we see at one point semi-clad.  Super acting but I couldn't for the life of me work out who the call was with or what its point was.

We see him later in Number 10 blethering on about what he said to Dom and how he sorted out Carrie while waiting to be fired for some misdemeanour.

Being fired leads to elevation to the Lords and a spot opening COP26 against a backdrop that unaccountably proclaims the conference to be being held in association with Italy.  Something to do with the Mafia?

Satire I think needs a much better defined target and a razor sharp delivery. But the actor was great.

Saturday night at Tynecastle.  I think only the second time I've been in the stadium.  This time at least it was to do with football.  In case you're wondering the last time was to watch rugby league with my late chum Dick Bowering.  The play Sweet F.A. is about the flourishing of women's football before, during and for a few years after the First World War before it was consigned to oblivion for decades.

A talented cast of about a dozen women act and sing their way through the story of the creation of a works team, their victories, their defeats and their struggles with the SFA.  Their individual backgrounds with husbands, brothers and lovers off to war and the close relationship two of the women develop are skilfully woven in.

The show is joyous, funny and moving.  Maybe a bit long when the cold wind of a Scottish summer evening blows through the park.

I began Sunday with Richard Holloway, everyone's favourite former bishop, talking to Joan Bakewell, one of my favourite former frequent faces on TV.  She's getting on a bit (88) and has downsized from a large Victorian house where she'd lived for fifty years to a ground floor studio flat and has wrtten a book about it, The Tick of Two Clocks. 

The discussion moved from this particular experience to the more general problems of old age both for individuals and for society, to the question of assisted dying. What's the difference Joan asked, between upping the dose of morphine in the name of palliative care and the same manoeuvre to take the pain away forever.  What indeed?

Black is the Colour of my Voice was the choice of our Thursday online theatre watching group a month or two back.  I missed it but probably would have enjoyed it.  I most certainly enjoyed it live.  I count Nina Simone amongst my favourite jazz singers and Apphia Campbell's voice has similar strengths but the focus of the show is not on Simone's jazz repertoire or that aspect of her life but on her beginnings and on her growth through the civil rights movement. Campbell shows herself to be an accomplished actress as much as singer.

The show ran for a bit longer than billed and I had to sprint up from the bowels of the EICC and walk vigorously to the Filmhouse bus stop where after only two minutes wait an 11 whisked me off and deposited me at the door of St Andrew's and St George's West with seconds to spare before the Guitar Recital I had come to hear started.

I was greeted by name.  You recognised me, I said.  The lady on the door didn't seem to realise this was meant to be a joke and informed me in serious tones that I happened to be the only single (ie unaccompanied) attendee on the list.

The recital was lovely.  A complete contrast to the show I'd just come from.  Quiet, contemplative classical pieces.  I didn't have a programme so I've no idea what the guitarist played.  He didn't announce any of the pieces.  Indeed he didn't so much as say hello or goodbye.  He just melted on and melted off.

Then to the Castle Terrace muti-storey carpark rechristened MultiStory for the nonce.  Rituel was a dance-like piece in which four young men, assisted at times by a guitar player or by a soundtrack, played out the sort of male bonding games that characterise the growth from childhood to adulthood.  It was excellent and the release of a helium filled balloon into the sky at the end was a beautiful moment though no doubt environmentally questionable.

Back to the Book Festival for a discussion between Alan Little and Nick Bryant about the latter's When America Stopped Being Great.  Bryant has reported from America  since 1984 and regards the roots of Trump's ascendancy as dating back decades to Vietnam and earlier.  This was an interesting conversation and on the day that Kabul fell to the Taliban the book's title could not have been more appropriate.

In the week of the Plymouth shootings Screen 9 also resonated with the present.  It's an account, in the words of survivors, of the mass murder of twelve individuals and the injuring of many more at the midnight premiere of a Batman film in Aurora, Colorado in 2012. 

You're offered popcorn as you enter what could well be a cinema.  The four actors appear on stage below a screen on which a blurred image is being projected.  They recount how they spent the day of the screening; how they were looking forward to it; how they'd decided to go; how they prepared.

Lights go down.  The actors take up positions amongst us in the audience.  They tell us what happened.  The teargas canister.  The shots.  The blood.  Their friends, relatives dying beside them.

Back on stage the aftermath; the grief; the questions; the guilt; the ongoing fear.

This is a fine piece of theatre that to a British audience, even with Plymouth a live issue, causes us continuing puzzlement at the role of guns in American culture.