This cheeky little girl features in a photographic exhibition I went to in Glasgow the other day.  I had an Italian lunch and a glass or two with Andrew, after which we went out to Kelvingrove.  The exhibition is of photographs illustrating Glasgow life from the late 50s to the 90s.  They were taken by an amateur photographer called Eric Watt and were well worth the visit.  My next visit to Kelvingrove will undoubtedly be to the V&A's Mary Quant exhibition which opened there yesterday and runs until October.

It's not the first exhibition I've been to since I returned to the land of litter and grafitti and other depressing things.  That was Dr. Who at the museum in Chambers Street.  I'm not a fan but I did watch it years ago, presumably with the kids.  For me the Doctor is Jon Pertwee which is odd since for much of his tenure I was in Nairobi.  Anyway I enjoyed the exhibition.

I very much enjoyed Scottish Ballet's A Streetcar Called Desire despite being a bit confused about which Tennessee Williams play it was drawn from.  I wasn't confused by the Coronation which was a fascinating sequel to the late Queen's funeral but not nearly so charged with feeling.  It was interesting enough but despite a nod here and there to other Christian denominations and to other religions it was fiercely even defiantly CofE to a degree that I found somewhat offensive and I'm an atheist.  My other thought was one of sympathy with the vast majority of the attendees in the abbey who cannot have seen much thanks to the geography of the building.

I'm a fan of large scale choral works so going to the SCO's performance of Brahms' A German Requiem made for a satisfying Friday evening.  Not so satisfying was my exposure to The Vintage Explosion at the Queen's Hall.  I'd chosen this to take advantage of a free ticket offered to me in return for miniscule services rendered to the venue.  Not being used to gigs of this kind I turned up for the advertised kick-off of 7.30 only to be treated to half an hour from a support band followed by half an hour of nothing before the main band deigned to appear.  They were very good but also very loud.  It was fun to hear some old rock and roll from the distant past but I'd had enough of it before the end of the first set so I went home.

By what I assume to have been an inadvertent coincidence the G7 nations gathered in Hiroshima in the same week in which the Grads performed Copenhagen by Michael Frayn which centres on the development of nuclear weapons and the moral responsibilities of the scientists involved. In 1941 Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist working on their nuclear reactor programme visited his former mentor Neils Bohr in occupied Denmark.  Bohr was one of the fathers of nuclear physics who after fleeing Denmark worked on the project that ultimately destroyed Hiroshima.  The question is why did he visit.  Was it to warn Bohr of Germany's aims for him to pass it on?  Was it to try to find out from Bohr what the Allies were doing in the field of atomic research?  Was it to seek advice on how best to subvert the German atomic effort without being suspected?  Was it to let Bohr know that in Germany's embassy in Copenhagen there were sympathetic officials?

Those various possibilities are explored through the recollections of the now dead protagonists, Bohr, Heisenberg and Bohr's wife Margrethe.  Many of the scientific and technical points are complex but Frayn's text does much to make them understandable.  It seems that Margrethe played a significant role in turning Bohr's ideas into "plain language" during his career.

I thought the production worked well with competent performances that brought the characters to life and staging that helped move the action along.  It held my interest throughout.  The local critic gave it four stars. Cassandra that I am I'd rather Frayn had omitted the final happy ending coda and sent the audience home feeling miserable.

Litter and grafitti may have made me a tad miserable since coming home but my window-boxes are doing their bit in lifting my spirits with beautiful irises and azaleas in flower.