I have something of a predilection for trees in their winter glory.  I daresay had Burns turned his mind to it he could have written a rare poem in praise of them which I'd have been delighted to quote in this blog post that's being published on his birthday. In recompense my picture tips its hat to another poet worthy of a supper in his name.

January has sped past without very much happening in the little pool that I inhabit.  Ewan went home early on.  The band got back into action, joined last night by Esther who got me into thinking about the saxophone in Barbansais about fifteen years ago.  She and husband Andy have just returned to Edinburgh after some ten years in Munich.  We lunched together in Henderson's the veggie restaurant run I understand by descendants of the Henderson who opened one of Edinburgh's earliest veggie places in the New Town years ago. I had an aubergine dish that was ok but didn't measure up to the stuffed aubegine I made myself at lunchtime today. 

I had another meal out at L'Escargot Bleu where my tasty rabbit was washed down with conviviality.  I haven't had a home cooked rabbit to compare it with yet.

I was cited for jury service but as in the only other time this has happened to me I didn't have to serve.  I'm of an age where I have the right to be excused but I didn't exercise that right; not entirely from a sense of civic duty but mostly in the hope it would be interesting. 

There is a celebration of the work of Francois Truffaut on currently and I've enjoyed a handful of films from it so far.  I went to the cinema to see Les 400 Coups which despite its fame I don't believe I'd seen before.  It's a good film but quite a hard watch dealing as it does with the harsh childhood of its protagonist, Antoine Doinel, who is modeled on Truffaut himself.  

Thanks to my BFI subscription I've been able to watch the four subsequent films that follow  Antoine through adolescence, marriage and divorce.  Truffaut made the first film in 1959 and the last in the series in 1979.  In all of them Doinel was played by the same actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud.  Apart from Les 400 Coups they are all comedies and very funny.

There are another half dozen films unrelated to Doinel being shown in cinemas and I intend to see them all and indeed have already seen two, L'Argent de Poche and La Nuit Americaine.  I'd seen the latter before but remembered nothing about it other than the title and its meaning which I will leave you to discover for yourselves.  It's a light-hearted look at film making.  Jean-Pierre Léaud appears in it and plays a character very like Doinel.