This fearsome creature in its tropical looking setting is in fact in Logan Gardens near Stranraer.  I made a little expedition there one weekend when they were open for the Scottish Snowdrop Festival.  There were snowdrops but I didn't find them terribly splendid.  However I enjoyed the visit to the garden which I last visited in 1967.  It's one of those gardens that benefits from the influence of the Gulf Stream though judging by some photographs of it covered in snow that's no guarantee of year round balmy weather.

I was lucky with the weather for my visit.  It was a lovely afternoon although the rest of my brief stay in Stanraer was not so blessed in contrast to my visit to that other Gulf Stream influenced garden, Inverewe, in November when it was lovely all weekend.  We met recently to discuss when we could take Osgood up to Wester Ross again and fixed on a date in June only to find later that it doesn't suit the venues that want to host the play.  Project postponed sine die.

There was a very interesting talk at the French Institute about the time Zola spend in England.  Because of his involvement in the Dreyfus affair he was sentenced to a prison term but fled to England where he spent about a year in various hotels and houses around Norwood.  The French lady who gave the talk had lived in that area and had followed Zola's steps taking photos of places he had photographed (it was his hobby), recreating them to the extent of having people pose in them where there were people in the originals.  She managed to get a blue plaque put up at one of the locations.  We also learnt something of Zola's tangled personal life in the talk.  There's a Guardian review of a book about Zola's flight and the Dreyfus affair that will tell you more.

The following week I went to another talk at the French Institute, this time about Mary Queen of Scots and this time accompanied by Siobhan who is a fan.  She I think stayed awake throughout the talk whereas I dozed off.  Thankfully, for it was very dense and very dull and intoned without light or shade.  

Fortunately the evening was redeemed by a poetry event at the National Library where the wonderful Len Pennie entertained with readings from her first published collection, Poyums.  We then repaired to the Bow Bar fur a wee swallie.

The SCDA held its One-act Festival this weekend.  I went along on Saturday to support the Grads' entry and it turned out to be a worthy winner.  Taiwan by Martin Foreman (who is himself a member of the Grads) was quite a bleak tale set in some sort of dystopian future.  A young woman turns up at a lonely house occupied she believes by a solitary oldish woman with a story about her car breaking down.  This is not true. We learn that the young woman wants to move in with her husband and children to escape the growing problems of the city.  Things turn violent, her husband arrives, the older woman's husband who the young couple didn't know about also appears.  The play advances to a grim conclusion.

Good writing very well staged and performed.

As was Two Sisters at the Lyceum.  Quite an engaging tale about forty year old sisters taking a break at a holiday park where they spent their sixteenth summer.  One sister, the serious and settled one, is there to focus on writing.  The other is looking for temporary shelter from the impact of her affair(s). The caretaker at the site is the same young Swede, now older of course, whom she had fallen for and dreamt of sharing a hippie lifestyle with back in the day.  Will romance blossom again?  Will the serious sister be diverted from her righteous path?

A twist is added by the presence of a group of teenagers who take part in the action but also read out at points memories of being sixteen provided by members of the audience before the curtain went up.

Last year the Dunedin Wind Band played at Sci-con, the event where punters dress up as characters from various science fiction works as varied as Harry Potter and Starwars and are entertained by talks and the presence of their heros and buy all sorts of merchandise and just wander arround admiring one another.  We played again this year and the gig went really well.  I wonder if we will be invited to play at a different but similar event, Comic-Con, being held in October at Ingliston.  Do they perhaps include Beano and Dandy lovers amongst their clientele?

There's a Japanese film festival on around the UK over the next several weeks.  Six films are being shown in Edinburgh and I've been to the first.  Winny was not a winner for me however.  I wasn't much interested in the subject matter despite recognising the question that it exemplified and which recurs throughout history.  Does the inventor bear any responsibility for the uses to which his invention is put?  

I have a lot of time for Japanese public toilets.  I appreciate their abundance and their cleanliness and often their architecture, so a film about a Japanese toilet cleaner sounded just up my street.  Perfect Days is not part of the festival and is directed by the redoutable Wim Wenders which one might consider a warning in itself.  Nevertheless I went to see it. Did I enjoy it?  Sort of.  I can see all the virtues that this Guardian review lays out and to a degree I share the protagonist's joy in tranquillity and simplicity.  But on the whole, especially when I go to the flicks I like a bit of action and drama.

Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony Opus 110a played by the SCO provided lots of action and drama at the Queen's Hall in its brutal and furious passages.  Even when it's quiet it's bleak. I was sure I hadn't heard it before but some parts seemed familiar.  I found out later that it was actually an arrangement for larger forces of a string quartet that I have heard several times.  On the same programme was a modern work by Magnus Lindberg that included some amazing violin playing by Pekka Kuusisto.  He always brings something wonderful with him when he comes to Edinburgh.

Unlike this reviewer I thought the encore to the Saint Saens Piano Concerto at the RSNO's Valentine's Day's concert was very well chosen and it was delightful how Trpčeski stepped back from being virtuoso soloist to almost self-effacing accompanist.