I spent a little while at the Foodies festival today.  Laura MacDonald, the saxophonist, gave some tickets away at her gig in the Jazz festival.  In her other life she's been a Masterchef finalist and was booked to do some demos at the Foodies.  Unfortunately she wasn't there today.

I wandered round, watched the kids being face painted and doing cooking, munched on free samples, listened to music, imbibed free samples and generally relaxed in the sun.  Found the food outlet with the smallest queue (Slumdog from just up the road) where I bought a tasty plateful for lunch.

I didn't count them but there were probably two booze stalls to every food one.  I sampled a rather tasty whisky liqueur at one but at over thirty quid a bottle refrained from making a purchase.

At twice as much as I paid in Italy just a few weeks ago I likewise refrained from making a purchase at this aperitivo bar where spritzes of all sorts were on offer.

In Glasgow this week I had quite a decent lunch with Andrew at a place called Gloriosa.  We went on to see the John Byrne exhibition at Kelvingrove.  It made a very distinct contrast to the Vettriano in Kirkcaldy.  The art works were much more varied, though it has to be said Byrne does rather favour the self-portrait, but of course his work as playwright and stage designer and involvement in screen adaptations of his writing puts him into a different catagory.  The exhibition runs till mid September and is worth a visit.

The EIF's free opening event, MACRO, took place under this large canopy at Murrayfield stadium.  It consisted mostly of the extraordinary acrobatic building and disintegration of structures made from human beings by the Australian physical theatre company Gravity & Other Myths.  Under each of the spotlights in this picture is a tower of three people.  I shall have a second chance to enjoy their work at the Playhouse this week.

So far I've seen three Fringe productions:

Exodus - an amusing, indeed farcical tale of a Home Secretary aspiring to be PM, her SPAD, an asylum seeker who takes on the task of pretending to be her mother and a journalist who wants to interview her.  Dealing with the plucking of an infant from the sea at Dover by a politician who wants to put an anti-migrant thermonuclear barrier round the UK provides the situation from which the humour flows.

The Last Return - a comedy built from the behaviour of people queueing for a sold-out theatre performance in the hope of a ticket being returned.  It's very funny, very well performed and staged and very daft.  I loved it.

Bloke and his American Bantu -  a show constructed from the correspondence between the Afro-American writer and activist Langston Hughes and the South African journalist, writer and actor Bloke Modisane.  Hughes, albeit remotely from his home in Harlem, seems to have been a big support both materially and emotionally to Modisane who had left South Africa and was scratching a living in London.  I had the impression perhaps wrongly that when Modisane had some success he didn't fully repay that support.

I wasn't terribly excited by it, certainly not as much as the South African reviewer who saw the show before it left for Edinburgh.  But I was interested enough to order a copy of Modisane's book recounting how life was for a black man in the South Africa of the 50s.  The book was of course banned in his home country.