Cherry blossom is making its brief annual appearance in Princes Street and elsewhere in the city.  The fact that the weather is windy, cold and grey rather takes the edge off it but that's global warming for you.

I hope that when Claire's play on that subject, Rock, gets to the Ross Bandstand, a stone's throw from where this picture was taken the weather will have improved.  To get into the mood we've held several rehearsals outdoors, not in all weathers but on occasion distinctly chilly.

In my last post I mentioned Peter Johnstone as one of our excellent jazz pianists and I had the pleasure of hearing him play with Helena Kay's trio this week.  Helena was young Scottish jazz musician of the year in 2015.  I've seen her play with the Tommy Smith Youth Orchestra and with the SNJO but this is the first time I've seen her play as leader and I'd never heard her speak before.  It goes without saying that she's a superb sax player but In addition her compositions which I hadn't heard before are beautiful; graceful and melodic, eschewing the frenetic runs up and down the instrument favoured by many players.

She's a slightly built shy looking young woman who seems almost too small to hold never mind play the tenor.  But she's not shy at all.  She spoke confidently and a delightfully cheerful and happy personality came out to charm the audience.

Another young saxophonist with a strong and confident personality is Jess Gillam who I heard playing with the Scottish National Youth Orchestras Symphony Orchestra.  She'd been due to play with the SCO in a concert that was Covid cancelled so I was pleased that she'd made it to Edinburgh.  The whole concert was excellent.  They played Respighi's Fountains of Rome and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony while Jess played a super piece by John Harle called Briggflatts after a poem by Basil Bunting.  It was written for her and she premiered it in 2019.  The last movement of the concerto is available on Spotify here. It goes like the clappers.

There's been something of a Shostakovich-fest recently.  In March Sheku Kanneh-Mason played his Cello Concerto with the RSNO, then a couple of weeks later came the Tenth Symphony with the NYOS Symphony Orchestra and just last week the RSNO gave us extracts from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the Second Piano Concerto and the Fifth Symphony.  The latter is a strong contender for the disc I'd rescue from the waves were I on that desert island.

I believe that I first heard it in the Usher Hall under the baton of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky when I had a standing ticket at a daytime concert in the 60s.  Shostakovich himself was here in 1962 for the Festival and his music featured throughout the three weeks but such researches as I've made don't mention the Fifth.  Be that as it may there's a very interesting article about his visit here.

Leith Walk is chock a block with eating places and I keep promising myself an onslaught on them but it's a slow process because there so many nice places to eat in Edinburgh.  Some friends from my days in Zambia were here around Easter and I had a delicious dinner with them at Fishers on The Shore.  On Easter Sunday itself the sun came out and I had an open air lunch at the Pier Brasserie in Newhaven.  Proving how small a town Edinburgh is a fellow cast member from The Venetian Twins walking her dog stopped for a chat as I ate.  

But I have checked out one place in Leith Walk recently.  That's Knight's Kitchen which has a bit of an African flavour in the decor and on the menu with the odd word of Swahili here and there.  Lunch was fine but a major disappointment was that the Tusker lager listed on their menu wasn't available.  When I lived in Nairobi I often had a Tusker at the Agip petrol station with a chum on the way home after work on a Saturday morning and it was generally available at the meetings of the East African Computer Society held in the offices of Kenya Breweries.  I don't think it's passed my lips since I left Kenya.  No great loss really since I don't much care for beer these days.  Just nostalgia.

Perhaps it was nostalgia that caused me to buy a copy of The Ghosts of Happy Valley when I was browsing in Blackwells. I enjoyed the book which is to some degree a postscript to White Mischief but fortuitously it cleared up a linguistic query that has been with me for decades.  Living in Kenya I picked up bits and pieces of Swahili and I can still use the language to find where the toilet is or to buy a bottle of milk or express what have you been up to in the long time it is since we last met, but I only recall one word of Kikuyu.  That was "atirere", or so I thought.  Pronounced with a stretched penultimate "eeeeeeh" it punctuated the conversations between Kikuyu speakers in the office eager to get their point of view across. Thanks to this book I now know it is "utirere" and that it means "listen". 

Another book I bought on that occasion and have just finished was the much lauded Booker winner Shuggie Bain.  Leaving aside any judgement as to its literary worth it paints an absolutely horrific picture of growing up with an alcoholic mother in a community where narrow mindedness, religious prejudice, homophobia and downright nastiness rules the day. 

For horrific tales you'd have to go far to beat the story told at The Lyceum in The Meaning of Zong.   From the slaving ship Zong in the 18th century 132 slaves were thrown overboard to drown, allegedly out of "necessity" to save the ship and the remaining people on board from "the perils of the sea".  Those words are central to the subsequent litigation between the slavers and their insurers because apparently the loss of cargo jettisoned in those circumstances would have been covered by insurance.  The case didn't turn on the fact that those Africans were murdered.  Because in the eyes of the law they were cargo.  The argument was about "necessity".

The play is brilliantly staged and well performed but is not entirely successful.  Most reviews suggest that the play tries to do too much and that some of the more poetical passages tend towards over wordiness.  I agree but it's a very fine contribution to the reassessment of Britain's involvement in slavery.  We like to remember the abolitionists but gloss over what we did that needed to be abolished.

Thanks to my BFI subscription I saw a couple of great films.  First the Argentinian film Relatos Salvajes, translated as Wild Tales  which was nominated a few years ago for the Oscar's best foreign language film award.  There's a good review of it here so I'll save myself the effort of writing one and just recommend that you see it.  Then the Iranian film A Separation which I remember not managing to see in the cinema some years ago.  It's a fascinating insight into domestic life in Iran.  From the same reviewer as above here's an assessment. 

When we invaded Iraq in 2003 I was living in Spain and the news that broke at the same time about whistleblowing at GCHQ passed me by or I quickly forgot it and I don't recall the prosecution of Katherine Gun, the whistleblower, who went to court in February 2004 probably because by then I was living in Italy.  It's an astonishing tale of the machinations of the UK and USA to obtain support for the invasion, the Kafkaesque workings of the official secrets act and the duplicity of the UK government who dropped charges against her rather than be forced into revealing details of their legal advice about starting the war.  A revelation that would have clearly shown a supine U-turn under American pressure.  All this and more is laid out in a great film, Official Secrets, in which one of my favourite actresses, Keira Knightley, plays Katherine Gun.  The Guardian reviews it well.