I chose a book from Amazon UK the other day and when I went to check out you can imagine my surprise on finding that there were already three books in my basket. Three very good novels by Naguib Mafouz that I would unhesitatingly recommend but which I had not selected. According to the system they had been added on April 9th 2009.

Now unusually I know exactly where I was then and can swear unimaginably dreadful oaths that I did not use a computer that day rendering one of their explanations void. I contacted them you see and got a bland email in return suggesting two possibilities.

One that I had been on the site and failed to close down allowing someone to sneak in and order the books, or two that a family member or friend was aware of my password and had used it. Neither of these explanations is at all credible and in any case surely if someone were that keen to get those books they'd have completed the transaction.

It also seems a far-fetched idea that someone would try to steal a few books in this way. If they did break into an account it would be much more likely that they were after a big ticket item or were trying to get hold of a credit card number with which to steal better things, like cash.

Now nothing was in fact purchased and Amazon point out that credit card numbers are not actually held on the site so I can see that accessing my account for that purpose wouldn't get you very far.

My more prosaic answer, which I offered to Amazon but which they ignored, was an IT processing malfunction. I've seen a few even more bizarre in my time.

But what about the paranormal? I was after all on The Amazon on the 9th of April.

Sunday dawned overcast and cool so I decided that it was not a day for lakeside fun and played golf. My game was poor to middling as usual with just enough good shots to make me think that it’s not yet time to retire defeated. I was particularly pleased to finish the tricky 18^th with an excellent greenside bunker escape and a deadeye dick putt. The pro happened to be watching and my exploit was greeted with a round of applause, but Kevin somehow manages to get a strong hint of sarcasm into his applause.

Before heading off to the golf course I checked my email and found a missive from Skype telling me that to prevent them from gobbling up my credit I must make use of their services pronto. I’m not sure why I ever established this credit because I never use it except to prevent it from being forfeited. Usually I send myself a one word SMS which is hardly much better than just letting them have the money.

But this time I spent 0.0552 pence on an SMS to a friend whose web silence had been troubling me. I need to send another 16,000 or so such texts to use up my credit so it’s a bit unfortunate that she’s broken that silence already.

Despite the fact that it takes me no longer to get to Guéret from here than it does to get to Filmhouse from Dicksonfield, lethargy and wine with dinner frequently combine to prevent me from enjoying such nocturnal delights as it offers.

I was tempted to go down on Saturday to experience some electro-pyjama music, a genre that the summer festival brochure tells me is between disco-funky and rock Play-mobil. Given that the electro-pyjama was the warm-up to a concert by Big Sophie you can gauge the extent of my temptation.

Last night however I kept the wine under lock and key and went to a great concert of Duke Ellington and Count Basie standards by this big band.

I thought they were brilliant. I kept my eyes on the alto sax players but I couldn’t uncover their secret. It was very well presented although one peculiarity was that the numbers were introduced (with a lot of interesting information) not by the conductor but by one of the trombonists. He's the left-most one in the picture and instead of just leaning forward to his own mike he clambered past his fellow trombonists each time to get to the lectern that you can see downstage on the right. Approximately 100% of the names of tunes, players and composers that he had to pronounce were of course American and his English pronunciation was often amusing and sometimes incomprehensible. The one I liked best was when he said Sara Vogan for Sarah Vaughan as though she were a German relative of Terry's.

In the picture below you can see the band being congratulated at the end by the Mayor of Guéret. He’s not the man with the pony-tail.

You can catch their singer Anne Ratsimba on Myspace. She’s worth listening to and watching her sing is no hardship either.

Further delights in this festival are a musical bar crawl tomorrow, neatly dignified as a barathon, from early evening to the wee sma hours with a lunchtime prologue, and a day of open air fun around the lake on Sunday.

I’m tempted even to lay Sunday’s golf aside but maybe it will rain.

Over the last fifty years or so my appreciation of cricket has moved slowly from disdain to delight and nowadays I am if not an avid then at least an enthusiastic albeit occasional listener to Radio 4’s ball by ball coverage. That treat is available to me even here in the depths of rural France thanks to long wave. I had listened to some of the test match commentary during Australia’s first innings and yesterday on returning from the golf course I was glued to my set as England wrestled a draw from the jaws of defeat. It was extraordinary how that draw carried all the impact of a glorious victory.

It was a lot more captivating than the play that closed the Chatelus festival later in the evening. I wouldn’t say it was bad. The three teenagers who performed The Socks by Pierre-Yves Millot put a lot of effort into it and produced some very good moments. At one point when we had been introduced only to the first two characters one of them used an imaginary fishing line to pull the third character out of the front row and on to the stage. It was very much a coup de theatre and played with convincing physicality by the lad on the imaginary hook. But by and large the cast were not in the play but on the stage – look at me, I’m acting! That’s the director’s fault since left to their own devices teenagers (and others) if not shy and retiring will almost inevitably perform thus. Also like many absurdist pieces the play had a problem trying to find a resolution to the situation it had set up making the evening (blessedly short) unsatisfying.

On Saturday there was a book fair. It was not made up of a set of second-hand book stalls (though there was one) but featured local authors and little publishing houses flogging their wares plus a paper-making demonstration by a guy who has recreated ancient wooden presses and employs antediluvian methods to produce echt-medieval paper sheets. Twee? Who? Lui?

I decided not to invest €16 in a re-telling of the 40 murders that have taken place in the Creuse since the year dot or €12 in a tale of growing up in a village that the author assured me would not be found on the map but was surprise, surprise not unlike one she knew well as a child. Instead I gave €1 to a good cause and got two tatty paperbacks in return. Mean? Who? Me?

Châtelus Malvaleix is not a very big place but this week it has mustered all its forces to mount an arts festival. There’s an exhibition of painting and sculpture, a couple of plays, some musical events, a book fair, an artisan market and bizarrely to my mind a country walk.

I’ve seen the first of the two plays and despite the warm appreciation of the public I was not too impressed. It was about people wandering around an art gallery commenting on the works on display – quite appropriate for the occasion - but for a cast of nine to impersonate convincingly several dozen gallery visitors and staff is not easy however many changes of costume they affect. It had its moments though and if it hadn’t been twenty minutes late in starting I might have regarded their efforts more charitably.

I know only one other work by Jean-Michel Ribes and it too involves people wandering around a gallery commenting on the exhibits. It’s definitely not the same play so he must surely be working out some hang-up from a misspent youth.

The jazz concert yesterday was more enjoyable. A piano and trumpet duo who played mostly standards pre-dating Miles Davis. The trumpeter sang as well but his voice was a bit thin and under-powered for my taste although he gave a very nice version of Besame Mucho. At the end we were asked to give a special round of applause for the Creuse’s one and only piano tuner without whom even those lacking perfect pitch might have been plagued by the odd bum note.

Below is a collage of some of the art works. I would not pay €100 or so for the mysterious fluffy things nor €750 for the pretty enough picture of horses but what do I know about art?


On the other hand I was very happy to pay €3 for a tray of sixteen peaches this afternoon despite knowing nothing about fruit growing.

The weather in Aubazine was splendid, the setting delightful, the accommodation and food good, the golf fun. But too many golfers are so obsessive about the bloody game that you could spit, or at least let your eyes glaze over and think about something else.

I looked up a relative who lives thereby and relaxed on his settee with a couple of beers in front of a transmission of Andy Murray's quarter-final match since Peter like most British residents has access to BBC TV. I think that may be bordering on the technically illegal because of all those complicated territorial rights issues and large payments for sporting events that bedevil the airwaves but it's so widespread that it's almost as though a right of way were being established.

Peter is not what you would call a close relative. He's my sister-in-law's sister's husband's brother. Now some languages probably have a snappier word for that just as Arabic for instance doesn't need to say my uncle on my mother's side and my uncle on my father's side since they've got separate words عمّ and خآل.

As far as I know I don't have any American relatives for whom even less snappy expressions would have to be used but in case I do, and for any unrelated American readers here's wishing you A Happy Fourth Of July.

There are only a few days left for you to get ready to head off to Kinross to follow Robert The Bruce’s heart into battle under the auspices of a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

I am myself preparing to head for Aubazine next week to play golf under the auspices of what I like to think is a slightly less weird organisation, The Senior Golfers of the Four Leagues. But I suppose that like beauty weirdness is all in the eye of the beholder. Some might think for example that there was a touch of weirdness about doing a little quiet research into the custom of kissing hands, which is what I was doing when I came across the SCA.

Some people came to look at the house the other day. They spent all of ten minutes looking round, asked me no questions and not many more of the estate agent's man who was with them. So I don't think they were bowled over.

Perhaps a modern property like this friend's house in La Châtre where I had dinner last night would be more to their taste. I last saw it when it was a shell and it's fascinating to see the finished article. It's quite a contrast to the standard issue new-build bungalows that spring up around here, not to mention old stone shacks like ours or what is soon to be Ewan's Georgian flat.

Over a few rainy days last week I found myself reading Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.

When I read the description on page 9 of penny loaves being distributed by the bereaved to the village on the day of a funeral I said wisely to my anthropologically knowledgeable self that yes I had come across this custom somewhere before. Then reading on page 16 of how George Pontifex had recast in modern idiom the advertising blurb for a religious book I wondered quite how that had the ring of familiarity. On reaching page 35 where Mr Allaby advises his five unmarried daughters that they should play at cards to decide which one of them should throw her cap at Theobald I had a strong suspicion that I must have read the book before.

For the life of me although I greeted each scene with warm familiarity as it appeared, I could not foretell what was going to happen, apart from having a vague presentiment that a prayer meeting would play a role. The prayer meeting duly took place on page 180 so there was no longer any room for doubt. I had read the book before.

This set me wondering what might be the minimum number of books that in the present state of my memory would provide me with an endlessly fresh reading experience if I were to read them repeatedly one after another. And further, at what point in time will my memory function be so reduced that one book will do?

There are tens of thousands of English speakers living in France so it’s not surprising that several publications exist to serve their needs. I picked up “Creuse News” the other day, never having seen it before.

It contained the usual mix of stories extolling the French way of life, stories complaining about the French way of life, articles on how to do x or y when living in France and lots of ads.

Most of the ads were unsurprising – builders, electricians, teachers of French, restaurants, installers of British TV, social events etc. But some did catch my eye: the Corner Shop providing all our favourite products (not yet run by an ethnic minority I noted); the English mobile hairdresser and nail technician; the traditional Scottish piper available for all special occasions; and to cap it all there was Bill aka Monsieur Fromage who takes coals to Newcastle in the form of British cheese to French markets.

“Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays où il existe 258 variétés de fromage?” said General de Gaulle. He must now be turning in his grave at the thought of the British making the country even more difficult to govern. Yet more so at the thought of Churchill having the last laugh.

A blog I dip into from time to time is Language Log. It's maintained by and is largely for professional linguists, so it's often above my head but this post about rubbish, seagulls and Edinburgh New Town with its plethora of comments is a gem to be enjoyed by one and all.

The good ship Caramel on which I sailed the ocean blue and the river brown has her own website which features, inter alia, descriptions of her voyages. I have been press-ganged into writing up the leg of the 2008-2010 voyage that I travelled. Having sweated over a hot computer these last few days to produce an account it is now finished hurray!

It will be loaded onto the site for all the world to read but since there are a couple of earlier legs of the voyage that have not yet been uploaded this may not happen very soon.

So to satisfy the public demand that I tell myself undoubtedly exists I have put a copy here.

Faithful readers of this blog will find some familiar material because I have naturally enough recycled some of the stuff I posted en route. But there is more than that and a few of the several hundred photos I took that I hope you will find interesting.

Boucané(e) on a French menu means smoked. I've wondered idly for years about the origin of this term (what's wrong with fumé after all?). Now thanks to the Rallye des Isles du Soleil I know the answer.

In their June newsletter which I was translating yesterday there was a little item about an outfit called Les Fréres de la Côte. So I did some research into it. It's a version of Just William's gang for grown-ups (sic) which celebrates and reproduces the culture (somewhat romanticized) of the original brothers who were a bunch of pirates hiding out around the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was founded in Chile in the 50s on the birthday of the world's most illustrious prat and has spread around the world.

In this description I discovered that the chaps who weren't busy stealing treasure and making sailors walk the plank were called buccaneers, which I always thought was a synonym for pirate but seems not to have been so originally. In this guise they grew cabbages and hunted wild animals. They smoked the meat from these animals and turned an honest piece of eight by exporting it.

Now the French for buccaneer is boucanier so that's obviously something to do with boucané(e) but which came first? Well it turns out that they were called boucaniers because they used a native grilling device called in the local lingo a boucan in smoking their meat. Hence boucané(e) = smoked.

I suppose I could have found this out years ago by turning to an etymological dictionary or two but then I would not have extended my pitifully limited knowledge of pirates.

I may extend it further by reading Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates but then again I may not.


This is the Brotherhood of the Coast's flag. The resemblance to the Jolly Roger is not coincidental.

Well I didn't recover my title on Sunday but I had a good day in the sunshine and met up with a number of golfing friends and won a bottle of wine the following day at the Dryades competition, alas without improving my handicap but it's early days.
This morning the cows are back in the field next door. How long will they take to chomp through the knee high grass? Probably not as long as Claire would have taken to clear the cut grass by the gable end had she stayed on.

75% of the long grass by the gable end has been cut down by the roads department's Spring verge tidying up so that's another reduction in my work load.

The grass-cutters came yesterday and shaved the grass in what I fear must be the final one of the cuts that we contracted for at the end of last summer. From now on it's down to me. What a shame, the professional cut is so much smarter.

Claire visited for a few days this week en route home from a wedding in Figeac. Relaxation was her priority so we vegged out instead of doing the sights. After seeing her off at the station yesterday I went to the Dryades for my first full round. I whacked a couple of balls into the middle of nowhere and messed up big time on a couple of holes but on the whole it didn't go too badly. We'll see how this weekend's two competitions pan out. Will I recapture the Champion of Indre (Men - third series) title that I fluked a few years ago?

Anyway I am fully prepared, having obtained this morning from a local doctor the silly Certificate of Non Counter Indication to the Playing of Golf that the French public health system insists that one has before one can take part in a competition. He obviously thought it was pretty silly too since he didn't bother with any sort of examination but took my word for it that I was in good enough nick. He didn't even charge me for stamping the bit of paper which I thought was pretty decent of him.

I wasn't charged last night either thank God when I blew into a bag for the Gendarmerie. That's the first time in my life that I've been breathalysed but now I know that one 25cc lager shandy is a safe measure. I'm glad it wasn't the previous night when 25cc or more of white wine went down my throat at John's barbecue.

Maybe I should invest in a satnav. Despite knowing the way I managed to take a couple of wrong turnings thus lengthening the already tedious two day drive from Edinburgh to Barbansais.

But what a joy to arrive to already cut grass. It was expensive but we thought it worthwhile to keep the place looking neat and tidy while it was for sale. Avoiding all that backbreaking work that I've had to do every Spring was just a happy by-product. If it's still for sale at the end of the Summer I'll be tempted to argue for spending the money again.

Mind you I haven't got off entirely. For some reason they decided that the stretch of grass between the gable end and the road wasn't part of the deal so I've got about 100 square metres to sort out.

That plus the ceiling that has collapsed over the cellar has slightly taken the smile off my face.

I got back from Trinidad a week ago today and realise that I have failed to blog anything at all. Put that down to being preoccupied with getting ready to go to France for the summer, which I do tomorrow.

This time I am accompanied by a saxophone. I hope to entertain the cows and gain some elementary proficiency but I'm not putting any money on either eventuality.

I also plan over the summer to sort out the hundreds of photos I took on my trip. I need to find sufficient self discipline to discard lots but here is one I shall definitely keep taken on the boat returning from the turtle releasing expedition.

Now I saw some postcards in Port of Spain at lunchtime - BUT - they were faded, bent and dusty. What's more they were crap pictures. So it looks like no "wish you were here" correspondence dropping through your letterboxes any time soon.

Caramel came out of the water on Wednesday. That was a fascinating process. I took lots of pictures but they are still in my camera unfortunately so you can't see how it was done.

We sailed into a narrow channel and a vast machine trundled over us, slings were slung below the boat, a diver plunged in to make sure the slings were not fouling any essential under water bits and the boat was raised into the air. (We were no longer aboard.)

Then the travel-lift, for such is the machine's name, rolled forward on its massive wheels and held the boat steady above the ground. A man with a jet hose scooshed water all over the hull for ever and a day. Then a cowboy nonchalantly but with precision drove a huge flatbed truck under the boat. Supporting hydraulic ramps were raised, the slings were removed and Caramel was trucked off to her temporary resting place for two more days of cleaning, dismantling and storing. I think it's a bit of a job closing up Barbansais at the end of the summer but that's nothing compared to this. We ended up propped up on various supports with a long ladder to get in and out since we were still living aboard. That has been a wee challenge for my knee and I'm pleased to report it survived.

Of course I've been spared much of the work since it has required yachtie skills. Added to that Daniel and I had a day off on Tuesday and motored about a bit so I'm not complaining, just marvelling.

I bumped into a Leith registered yacht in the boatyard today and had a chat with the owner. He's been sailing round the world for several years, single-handled for the last while because his wife got fed up and jumped ship in Singapore and headed back to Auld Reekie.

Patrick and Daniel flew off to Brussels this morning and I'm now in Port of Spain till Tuesday hoping to find something interesting to do.

This is Caramel moored in front of the marina hotel and pool. It's not far to go for a cool beer and a swim.

Correction to the previous post - that wasn't a drain. We're not going around polluting the high seas. It was an inlet. Water is sucked in for flushing purposes but fresh water for drinking and washing is taken aboard when necessary. We have a 1000 litre tank for that.

Sinks and toilets empty into a waste tank. Obviously that can fill up and I'm not sure what happens then but when I am you'll be the first to know.

Sorry that more later turned out to be a lot later but I expected to be back on line later the same day or at least before leaving Guyane but that didn't work out.

We were moored about ten miles away from Cayenne and I was never in the town again which was a shame. However I had a number of fascinating excursions.

I stood on the spot from which satellites are launched. The union jack flutters in front of the main buildings so I suppose we are still paying our dues to the European Space Agency but it was conspicuous by its absence from the Ariane rocket that sticks the satellites up there and makes the money. Another example of basket case Britain abandoning anything that involves high tech engineering in favour of hair dressing and financial services. Look where that has got us.

A wonderful day out was to the Isles de Salut. This is your genuine Devil's Island where Dreyfus was incarcerated and where Papillon, according to his own account, escaped from. Not quite true apparently but what the hell the regime was just as bad where he was. The French could have taught the Germans and the Russians a thing or two about how to run a prison camp. The truly astonishing thing is that this camp was only finally closed down after the second world war.

I'm now in a marina in Trinidad about 30 miles from Port of Spain. It's everything that your Caribbean dreams might suggest. For the moment though pleasure is taking second place to preparing the boat for its eight months out of the water.

Tip of the day.....if you don't like housework don't ever buy a boat. It's ten times as bad. And that's without all the little repair jobs that need DIY skills and crop up quite frequently. How would you like to put your subaqua gear on and dive below to clear a blocked drain?

No? Neither would I but I've seen it done and held a rope to prevent the deblocker from being swept away.

Apologies to anyone waiting for a postcard from the Amazon.

I bought stamps in Rio in anticipation but the merchants in neither Santarem nor Afua have invested in postcards. Given the number of tourists they get this is a sensible decision.

Now Cayenne, where I am today, is awash with postcards but this being Saturday afternoon the postoffice is shut and the French even in their distant possessions have not freed themselves from the idea that selling stamps anywhere other than a postoffice is something almost immoral.

That apart Cayenne is an interesting port of call. It's got a few grand colonial buildings and lots of decrepit ones. It's very strange to be in the middle of the tropics driving along roads marked exactly as they are in France and supervised with the same intensity by the Gendarmerie.

More later

Just spent the afternoon releasing baby tortoises into the Amazon. It was all part of a project to conserve and protect Amazonian wildlife, or more specifically various species of tortoise.

We steamed off on one of the large river boats full of a cheery mass of wildlife enthusiasts, or maybe just enthusiasts with nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon. We sailed for about an hour, during which there was a draw for tortoise preservation tee shirts, (I got one but so I think did 90% of the passengers - some of them, unlike me, even got an appropriate size) until we came to a large island where we had to be ferried ashore by small boats.

There were a number of vats full of baby tortoises and an area of beach fenced off and lined with small crates. Several posters were on display explaining the tortoise's problems and how they were being sorted out thanks to the public authorities of the region. One had an English translation of the "rotdogs sold here" variety. There was a loudspeaker system set up and an awning under which stood representatives of the various bodies involved in this project. There were speeches from each of them, about six in all I'd say. And then various votes of thanks. You didn't need to be able to understand much Portugese to know what was going on.

I expect the speeches were boring because before they were finished some enthusiasts got hold of a few tortoises, put them on the sand, pointed them towards the river and wished them luck. Eventually there was a more substantial release when the crates were filled from the vats and hundreds of tortoises were given their freedom. Some of them didn't quite understand and went the wrong way but amazingly the vast majority made straight for the river. How on earth did they know which way to go? Maybe they are geared to go downhill.

When it was over we all clambered back into little boats, got aboard the mother ship and enjoyed a snack and a cold drink on the way home. All this courtesy of the various sponsoring bodies.

We're now in Afua near the mouth of the river after four days chugging down from Santarem. I was a bit surprised that we did it under power but there are apparently good nautical reasons. On the whole the river was pretty calm although we did have a spell of heavy weather yesterday with waves crashing over the deck in real Titanic style. I was doing the washing up at the time - not too easy when you can't stand still.

Mostly the sailing was relaxing to the point of nodding off. Plenty of time to observe the river traffic and spot occasional dwellings on the river bank while marvelling at the immensity of it all.

The night stops were when it got up close and dirty as we explored little streams and creeks in the rubber dingy. I saw lots of lovely vegetation and quite a few birds but with the exception of water buffalo in their waterlogged paddocks no animals. Disappointing on one level not to see anacondas slithering by or crocodiles sliding down the bank and into the water but it meant that I felt a fraction safer when I jumped off the back of the boat for a wash.

Afua is an absolute jewel. The town is built above the water or rather mudflats. The narrow streets are edged by shops and houses all supported on wooden piles often with little bridges to get to the front door. There is not a powered vehicle to be seen or heard. What is not transported on the river from one pier to another goes by bicycle van. The streets and quite grand town square are constantly occupied by streams of cyclists. There are cycle taxis, four-wheeled family cycles, lads speeding along with a girlfriend on the pillion holding a parasol and even a cycle butcher.

The peace that you might imagine a consequence of no cars is somewhat tempered by loud music from bars and by the good news of Jesus being yelled out through loudspeakers mounted on - you've guessed it - a bicycle.

We're here for four days then it's out to sea, this time with the sails up. Next port of call is in France. Cayenne is not too handy for Paris but it is in France since Guyane is a DOM.

This is probably my last chance to have internet access for a couple of weeks. We set sail tomorrow morning and although we are 1000 kilometres up-river we officially leave Brazil here. There is nowhere else between Santarem and the sea where exit formalities can be carried out. One chap is somewhat concerned. He arrived yesterday to join one of the boats and fears he may never be able to enter Brazil again because officially he won't have left, no office being open on Good Friday to do the business.

In fact I am not yet on the Amazon. Santarem stands on the Tapajos where it meets the Amazon. It's a bit more impressive that the confluence of the two Creuses. The town itself strikes one at first as a typical third world dorp, all potholed streets and smelly gutters. But it's a bustling lively place. The waterfront is jammed with boats carrying cargo and people hither and thither. Passenger traffic seems to be mostly at night and as you walk along you see people settling into their hammocks on board these high two or three decked vessels ready for a trip to some even more remote settlement.

We saw the fish market yesterday morning where you can buy varieties of fish ranging from dinky little Piranhas about six inches long to vast Grouper like creatures five or six feet in length. The mystery is where do they come from because you see only the occasional fisherman on the river in a tiny pirogue or a dozen lads casting their rods along the promenade.

The yacht club where we are moored is a vast complex that has seen better days and those were long ago. But it's remarkable how they cleaned it up and filled the huge pool with sparkling water for the arrival of the Rallye des iles du soleil. Also it has to be said for the better off denizens of Santarem who don't muck about in boats much but like to have fun. I think that's the Brazilian keynote - having fun.

We had a certain amount of restrained fun in town last night pottering about the waterfront in that caressing warm darkness that is a delight of the tropics. There were lots of people about, walking, chattering, eating ice creams and sucking coconut milk through straws - delicious. There were kids playing basketball, kayak races on the river, mendicants with goods for sale - all in all a very jolly atmosphere. I'd say it was mediterranean life in spades.

We eventually settled on a restaurant terrace to enjoy the local hooch, the well known caiparinha, eat some food and relax. The food is excellent but served in mammoth portions. Three of us had in fact lunched off the doggie bag from the previous night's dinner and still had to throw some away. So I chose a steak sandwich and helped out with the finishing off of a huge pizza that someone else couln't manage. For most of the time we had musical entertainment from a keyboard and guitar duo who played and sang excellent latin jazz, bossa nova and so forth. Lots of what I took to be their own music but they didn't neglect to throw in the occasional standard. I expect that throughout the country and indeed the world their Girl from Ipanema was one of thousands played last night.

There's a great variety of people to watch and wonder about and one peculiarity I've noticed is that in the same street you find near slums and beautiful villas. Is this a sign of social cohesion or just of rich and poor rubbing along till the next revolution or military takeover?

At 3 in the morning Manaus airport is fully open for business; bookshop, souvenir shop, bar and obviously this internet service. I suppose there must be some good technical reason for night flying but it's not much fun for the passenger. I've another hour and a bit to wait for my connecting flight to Santarem and I'm dead tired.

Tuesday in Rio could have been a feverish tourist hell but I tried not to fit too much in. I spent quite a while relaxing by Copacabana beach. That looks exactly as it does in tourist brochures and lots of jogging and volley ball was helping the cariocas keep healthy.

In the centre of town where I was later some street theatre was going on to persuade the unhealthy that they should improve themselves - no mention of beach volleyball though. Just as well there was street theatre because the said to be magnificent Theatro Municipal which I had gone to see was under wraps for refurbishment.

But I did see the magnificent Sugar Loaf and the truly stunning views from its top.

Now that Cloud Nine is over I know what I got wrong with it.

When I read the play I was not very impressed by act 2. Indeed before starting rehearsals I had looked at various ways of expanding act 1 and doing without act 2. So I was somewhat surprised at how my appreciation of act 2 grew during rehearsal and at how well it played. I was immensely pleased with the result.

Act 1 on the other hand had seemed to me hilarious, holding promise of endless pleasure in rehearsal and on stage. In the event the hilarity became subdued somewhere in the process and we ended up with what I felt was a rather bland and stodgy result.

I thought it was a lack of pace and energy that was the problem but now realise, thanks to a brief adjudication and to feedback from friends, that we had drawn the characters too timidly. A broader more exaggerated portrayal was needed. I guess my desire to avoid making a pantomime of Act 1 was the primary cause of the blandness that took the shine off the production.

Hopefully I'll know better next time.

Anyway, off to Amazonia in the morning. I don't know how easy it will be to keep posting from there but I'll give it a shot.

Ate logo for now.

Readers of this blog would hardly suspect that since before Christmas I have been working on a production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. I've kept quiet about it because had I posted you'd mostly have read a cheerless tirade about the difficulties and disappointments of the project, the unreliability and incompetence of others (my competence and reliability being above reproach of course) and the total inadequacy of our rehearsal facilities.

But last night we held our first rehearsal in the theatre. What fun it was. What a buzz to have a set, lights and sound and an enthusiastic cast getting to grips with the play in a proper space. That was our technical rehearsal so there was tweaking here and there, halts for fiddling with lights, re-runs of tricky bits and rushing past sections where nothing much other than acting takes place.

Tonight the dress rehearsal in which we aim to simulate performance conditions and then tomorrow we open.

Wouldn't it be lovely to have more theatre time or a really good rehearsal space. Don't sigh for Kitwe......carpe diem.

Someone asked me the other day what had happened to Pierre Levicky of Pierre Victoire fame. I didn't know but thanks to today's Evening News I learnt that he is running a restaurant called Chez Pierre in Eyre Place. In fact I think it was something I already knew but had forgotten.

I hope whoever asked me reads this because I can't remember who it was. And I must check out the restaurant before I forget about its existence again.

I was sitting in a bus at the bottom of Dundas Street this afternoon when a man got on carrying a book and a Cloud Nine flyer. How exciting and unexpected was that.

Slumdog Millionaire was billed somewhere as "feel good film of the year" but now that I have at last seen it I couldn't disagree more strongly.

I'm sure I'm not giving away any secrets when I tell you that there is a happy ending. But that happy ending is for two individuals out of a cast of millions. The film as a whole presents an unremittingly bleak picture of poverty, squalor, inter-communal hatred, corruption, spite and cruelty. I'm not surprised that the Indian press were unhappy at the way in which their country was portrayed.

It's a good story and is well told but for me it's the "feel absolutely nauseated that anyone lives like that film of the year". Let's hope some of the millions made from it go back to alleviate their lives.

I saw a production of Shaw's The Millionairess last night by Edinburgh amateur company The Makars. I went primarily to distribute leaflets advertising my own show but the production was worth the journey.

I have a couple of vague memories of Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren in the film version, mostly to do with the song lyrics "boom diddee boom diddee boom, goodness gracious me". Now I've seen the play and refreshed my memory of the film thanks to the internet I feel that I am almost an authority.

The play like all Shaw's works is very wordy and the cast did terribly well to keep the text alive and entertaining throughout. The sets were fairly minimalist but captured the essence of the different locations and the transformation from the decrepit Pig and Whistle into the up-market Cardinal's Hat was cleverly and economically achieved. The costumes to my eye gave us the flavour of the 30s and The Millionairess in particular was beautifully dressed for the final scene.

The director made excellent use of the entire stage and gave us lots of variety and interest in how she placed the characters although much of the movement seemed to break the convention that a character has to have a good reason to move.

It was a lively and entertaining production so if you are at a loose end this evening pop along to Adam House for 7.30 and enjoy yourself. If last night is anything to go by the under 60s will be especially welcome, not least because they pay full price.

If you've nothing cheerful and interesting to say keep your mouth shut.

That's the reason I haven't been posting recently. But before I get out of the habit completely and my readership turns elsewhere for entertainment and stimulation I thought I had better at the very least display some signs of life.

Around ten days ago I did something nasty to my leg. The joints were swollen and painful. The muscles were in a permanent state of cramp. I woke up every few hours in pain during the night and couldn't find a comfortable resting position. I needed a stick to get about.

After a few days it didn't get better so I tried to see a doctor. I had to wait four days. That did nothing for either my condition or my temper. However I'm now on drugs, I've been x-rayed and my doctor believes he can sort me out in time for me to be an able-bodied seaman by April 6th.

But I don't feel a great deal more cheerful and resent having to haul myself out to conduct Cloud Nine rehearsals three nights a week. So I may keep my mouth shut for another ten days.

The widget that I put in the sidebar recently is providing me with a very varied selection of music. It's a bit tedious going through the process - not quite the one click and it's yours that you would hope for - but the end result is that I'm building up an eclectic little jazz collection featuring people I've never heard of. I dare say much of the rest of the world hasn't heard of them either and that giving away tracks is part of their marketing strategy. So far I've resisted the bait and have not bought.

I'm not always so strong-willed unfortunately. I went to KB last week, for what seems to me to have been the first time in more than 40 years, to a free lunchtime concert. Naturally the band were flogging a CD but I turned away despite having adored the music.

When I got home I looked on the web out of curiosity to see how much of a saving I had foregone by not buying the CD directly from the band. Only a couple of quid but I found that I could download all the tracks for only pennies more than 60% of the gig price. A CD to stick the downloads on runs at 20 or 30p so you'd be a fool to overlook such a opportunity to save money.

Listen to Haftor Medboe's New: Happy yourself and save.

I submitted my raffle conduct complaint but had to eat a slice or two of humble pie when I ventured into the coffee bar on Saturday night and saw that the prizes were all on display throughout the evening with full attribution to their donors. So they were getting publicity in spades.

But I stuck to the rest of my complaint and whether it had any impact or not I felt that the conduct of the reading out of the pre-drawn numbers on the Saturday was much livelier that it had been on Friday.

I still didn't win a prize though.

The fact that green 210 and not green 211 was a prize-winning ticket in the SCDA One-act Festival raffle last night has nothing to do with my displeasure at the way the draw was conducted.

If it was conducted at all. For instead of witnessing screwed up counterfoils being drawn by an innocent hand from a receptacle incapable of harbouring concealed compartments someone came on stage, informed us that the draw had already been carried out, that prizes could be collected from the coffee bar and read out a list of winning numbers.

I scoured the 249 pages of the Gambling Act 2005 this morning looking for rules on the conduct of draws but the closest I got was the duty of gambling licencees to adhere to codes of practice issued by the Gambling Commission for, inter alia, "ensuring that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way". Now the SCDA is not such a licensee and it seems escapes the need for any degree of openness under Part 14 of the Act that deals with "non-commercial gambling" and because its prizes amount to very little.

Should they mis-appropriate any of the raffle money however it's better done in Scotland since the punishment is six months in jail rather than 51 weeks for the same offence in England.

But leaving legal matters aside, for a drama organisation anything with less theatrical oomph and less entertainment value could hardly have been imagined. And if I had been a local business donating a prize I should not have been happy at the complete lack of publicity I got in return.

In fact I was very much in that position because the Grads donated two tickets to their next production which I am directing. The object of that donation being in large part publicise our show.

A stiff letter of complaint is required.

Thanks to a serendipitous switching on of Radio Scotland in the car this afternoon I became acquainted with this site.

If you've ever been curious about social kissing in France here's where to learn more. The map tells you how many pecks to give depending on where you are.

The "Statistiques détaillées" show the variation around the majority response in each department. The "Revue de Presse" contains an amusing video from Arte that adds a social class dimension to regional variation and in keeping with its Franco-German status sympathises with visitors from across the Rhine. Theres's also a link to a Guardian article that explores the ongoing development of British oscular habits.

You can even register your own customs. I was sorry to see that the Creusois were bottom of the league for number of respondents so as a part-time resident I registered my experience and was pleased to find myself in the solid block of department 23's 50% who maintain that two kisses make a greeting.

I came across a heavily armoured bunch of policeman and their paddy wagon underneath the North Bridge yesterday afternoon. They appeared to be assembling a pair of portable metal detectors. I simply couldn't imagine why.

By the time I left the Fruitmarket gallery dozens of teenypoppers were pouring out of the station in bumfreezers, frisking across the road, waltzing through the metal detectors and forming a disorderly queue outside a pair of large doors.

According to a constable I interrogated this is standard procedure and a necessary precaution for discoes aimed at the early teenage market. That struck me as terribly sad and also an extraordinary contrast to the laid back, open door, no check system employed at the school that I visit once a week and which surely some of those kids attend.

Listening to a phone-in show the other morning that tiresomely rehearsed well-worn arguments about Scots, its past and future the ether was brightened by a neologism rivalling bidie-in for humour and inventiveness. A modern Scots coining for sleeping bag - snorey poke.

Scots words can be heard aplenty in the co-op but it seems that a wider linguistic community shops in the branch at the bottom of the Walk. I was so surprised to see Sunday's El Pais there this morning that I bought a copy. They had one other foreign paper but I felt no need for a copy of the Irish Times.

But I did buy an Evening News, attracted by their headline about the Caltongate development which I will share with Alan who likes to know what's going on there. I found a couple of rather disturbing stories, one about a knifing 200 yards to the north of me and another about a murder attempt half a mile to the south but was reassured by this crime initiative from the Scottish Government.

On the day following the puff pastry find I checked the lift on my way out. No pastry. Following my “get fit for the Amazon” routine I walked down to street level. There balanced on the door-handle of flat 4 was a packet of reduced price puff pastry. On the carpet just inside the street door was another and on the step outside was a third.

Where are the other seven I wondered. I knew there were seven because I had noticed the price on the handle balanced packet was 45p and the receipt in the lift had been for £4.50.

I didn’t have long to wait before finding another outside the car-park level door when I returned. I thought at first that I was looking at the calling card of a particularly anaemic dog but realised that a packet had burst open. Another packet lay on the stair between floors.

Can this be territorial marking? Slightly less disgusting than peeing around the boundary or scraping musk glands along the carpet but definitely more animal than human.

Intriguingly flat 4 still boasts a packet on its handle tonight. Is the occupant away or is the flat empty or could this be the lift lunatic’s lair? I am scared to knock in case I am whisked inside, slaughtered, cut to pieces, stuffed into a Tesco bag and dumped. Where – where else but in the lift.

I haven't posted about the lift lunatic for a bit but he has not gone away and his latest offering reinforces my view that he is not a simple litter lout but someone with a problem.

Arriving home last night around 22:30 I opened the lift and there was a Tesco bag containing a number of packs that I took at first glance to be packs of pipe tobacco. In fact they were packs of puff pastry bearing reduced price stickers. A Tesco receipt for £4.50 for half a dozen packs lay on top of them dated 31/1/9.

If you were in your right mind would you buy half a dozen packets of puff pastry from the bargain shelf on Saturday and then dump them in a lift on Monday? I suppose the answer may be that he was out of his head when he bought the stuff and dumped it when he came to his senses.

Keeping my fingers crossed didn't do Andy Murray much good then.

I woke around 5 a.m. when Murray's game had just started but couldn't drag myself out of bed to watch it. Over the course of the match I caught the score now and then when I momentarily surfaced and at one point had the impression that he was heading for victory in the fifth set but when I finally got up it was all over. Too bad. Roll on Roland Garros.

I've just signed up for what must be the cheapest language course in the world. It works out at £1.25 per hour over the session. Just what the economist ordered in these trying times. The other resoundingly plus points are that it's during the day, my evenings being taken up by rehearsals, entertainment and social activities, and it's only ten minutes walk from my flat. I tried a couple of different levels this week and have settled for one that should give a good brush up to my Spanish.

The class is held in a secondary school and that in itself is quite fun. It's an old building, in very good order inside, full of little stairways and long corridors and mysteriously marked doors. I was following a labyrinthine route trying to find my way out and as I went up a stair a gaggle of kids rushed down towards me and as they passed I heard a boy cry "Captain Hook".

Goodness me I thought and turned to bask in the glory of having been recognised by a fan but the crowd swept on leaving me forlornly crying "Yes I was he, did you like the show?"

The heat of the moment having subsided rationality crept in. At most the lad was 17. My Captain Hook would have had to be very powerful indeed to have seared itself into a 4 year old's head and the memory to have popped out in a brief encounter 13 years later. I'd like to believe it but I'm not entirely daft.

I've been watching a lot of television this week.

I stayed up on Sunday night to see Ronnie O'Sullivan carry off a closely contested Wembley Masters snooker final playing some magnificent shots with a brand new cue. A new cue - so what you may say. I knew that players valued their cues but didn't realise that most of them use the same cue throughout their careers. So much of the commentary was astonishment at what he was doing with a cue he had picked up for the first time only days before the competition.

Not like tennis players who can get through half a dozen racquets in one match. That's been the other TV treat, the Australian Open. Scotland's other player Elena Baltacha (born in Kiev, lives in England but claimed by us for good reasons - check it out) kept me up till 2.30 this morning. Winning the first set with the best drop shot I've seen so far in the tournament wasn't enough and despite frequently being two or more points ahead in a game she couldn't do quite enough to topple Amelie Mauresmo.

I got out of bed about 9.30 expecting to see Andy Murray limbering up but Carla Suarez Navarro and Venus Williams were still slugging it out. Navarro was busy taking the second set against expectations having been well beaten in the first. When she was 2 games to 5 down in the third I went off to make a cup of tea in anticipation of Murray's imminent arrival on court. But she went on to take 5 games in a row and send Venus Williams home in economy class.

So then there was Murray. He didn't bounce out and sweep his opponent away in the first set as Nadal and Federer tend to do. He plodded his way through a straight sets victory over a player almost 50 places below him in the rankings. But he won. Fingers crossed for the next round.

Another rabies jag - another bus story, or rather storey since the most frequent bus in town is now a double decker. The tops have been chopped off others to provide this capacity, including the one I was waiting for amidst the confusion caused by the resumption of tram works on Leith Walk.

There are more cones and diversions than ever, leaving uninformed travellers and those who cannot read waiting anxiously at stops that are out of use or at which their bus will not call until the present flurry of hole digging is over.

LRT have slipped a fare increase into this maelstrom. They have clearly been listening to those economists who warn us that the current deflationary trend is a slippery slope to stagnation. As I understand it the theory holds that when prices are going down people don't buy things because they are waiting for them to get cheaper. So thing makers go out of business.

The converse of the theory surely implies that LRT will expand inexorably as people rush onto the buses to get their journey in before prices rise again. That must be why they've added a deck to the 22. Triple-deckers next?

This is a somewhat ironic picture. Plotting a route to the Western General for a rabies jab (I'm taking no chances with this Amazonian trip) I discovered that I can access real-time bus information on-line for any bus-stop in the city. So what you are looking at is the actual display you would see on the bustracker outside if it weren't for the fact that its head is still missing. (Plus some features you don't need when you are at the stop).

If you have the right sort of mobile phone you can access these displays wherever you are. So stranded in Newington late at night you can answer the question "Is it worth getting a 3 to Princes Street on the off-chance that I'll catch a 22 or should I just wait for a 7?". What a facility for the modern traveller.

I can see a game to rival Mornington Crescent being developed and played with this data.

I came away from the hospital with a box of malaria bills as well. They are for trying out. I had a long session being instructed on what anti-malarials are now available, which are recommended for what places and what their side effects are until my head rang.

Product X is taken weekly and is counter-indicated for various categories of person since they may experience depression, mood changes and god knows all what.

Product Y is taken daily and may increase the skin's sensitivity to light

Product Z is taken daily and is counter-indicated for anyone on a budget since the tablets cost an arm and a leg.

I'm trying out product Y so if you see me sitting on my verandah in my swimming trunks you'll know it's all in the name of medical research.

Leaving my local Tesco the other day I was accosted by a lady who wanted to interrogate me about my shopping experience. One of my friends tells me that he makes it a point of honour to lie wildly to market researchers and focus groupers whenever he gets the chance but I didn't have the brass neck for that.

However I seized upon the opportunity to complain about the lack of unsalted butter. Perhaps head office will pay attention since the local management didn't.

Or more probably they won't.

I noticed another weird pricing move in Tesco recently. They increased the price of a particular brand of muesli by 30 or 40 pence and a couple of days later brought it back to the previous level.

Presumably customers shunned it. I certainly did, but I bought it when the price fell back. Was that me falling prey to a cunning bit of shopping psychology?

Every so often I get up to date with what one of the groups I was involved with in Paris is doing. I've just had a look at their site. It's changed its address since I last looked and has added a rolling picture gallery feature that I must find out how to do. It would be great for the Grads.

It's a super little trick and none the worse for having my picture in it. See if you can spot me .

The puff for the Che Guevara bio-pic I saw today says "Soderbergh has recreated his life not in epic terms, but as a long, hard slog" - very true - a long hard slog for the filmgoer. From its totally hagiographic story-line I suspect that it may also be the first step on the long, hard slog to sainthood. I can't wait to give Che Part Two a bodyswerve.

This being twelfth night I have conscientiously taken down my Christmas cards. In previous years I have tended to keep them. Ancient cards still surface from time to time when I'm searching for something in the roof. This year though they have gone straight to the recycling bin.

I suppose I should honour the twelfth night tradition, or is it superstition, by deleting the e-cards I got as well. I'd better take no chances with lady luck and get rid of the website cards I created too.

If you are heading south for the New Year to escape our sub zero temperatures why not take a young gannet with you.

That's the appeal I heard this morning from the North Berwick Seabird Centre. Apparently a chick was deserted when the 150,000 or so gannets that breed on the Bass Rock left for warmer climes in October.

He was rescued from the rock a few weeks ago as you can see in the video but according to this report he now needs a lift at least as far as Gibraltar to have a chance of growing up so if there's room in your executive jet give the Centre a ring.

I thought my electronic Christmas card was pretty neat but swelled with pride on learning from my webhost on Christmas Eve that my bandwidth allowance for the month had been exceeded and the site would be off-line until 1st January.

Goodness me! The original recipients must have been so impressed that they had to share the pleasure with all their contacts, who in turn......until bingo - hits of google like proportions forced my site off the road.

An apologetic email arrived on Boxing Day. Turns out to have been a flaw in the bandwidth usage checking program. It's easily done. I once caused lots of grief by coding > instead of >= or maybe the other way around. In any event the supply of certain plastic oddments to Woolworths was thrown into disarray, but I don't believe that to have contributed materially to their demise.

Edinburgh readers will recognise this as a bus tracker. They have been sprouting up beside our bus stops over the last couple of years and tell you how long it will be until the next bus arrives.

They are a lot more useful than a printed timetable displayed in an awkward corner of an unlit bus shelter. But bus trackers have not reached all parts of the city.

I was out at the Western General the other day getting a yellow fever jag and arrived at the stop for my return journey. No tracker, so I peered at the timetable. According to that I had arrived one minute before the single solitary bus that passes that stop was due.

After eight minutes shivering in the wind and rain, the shelter was against vertical weather only - my bald head would have been protected from sunstroke , I gave up and set off on foot. You've guessed the rest; I had not gone 50 yards when the 42 swept past.

Now that was annoying but less so than the recurrence of lift lunatic activity. Here is yesterday's
find. What is to be done?

And much less annoying than having a mouse run up your leg inside your jeans as you sit peacefully at the table. But it won't do it again. I just hope that's a warning to any of its little friends who may be lurking around. Photographs of the corpse are available on request.

Christmas cards are starting to arrive. I really want to abandon physical cards entirely in favour of wholly electronic greetings but I may have to send one or two. I shan't be able to send one to whoever forgot to sign their card so I hope they also read my blog and get pleasure from these, which I offer to all my readers with best wishes for the festive season and its aftermath.

Iain Heggie's "A Wholly Healthy Glasgow" was a Fringe (or maybe even EIF) hit that I saw and thoroughly enjoyed sometime in the 80s. I hadn't seen anything else of his since - a fact I regret especially since his biog tells me that he has adapted Marivaux, a big fav of mine - until last night.

"The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer" is also a Glasgow based piece but very different. It's a fairly gentle, even whimsical story set in the 18th century whose running gag is its protagonist's astonishment at a medium's forecasts of what's to be in the Glasgow of the future - horseless carriages, a receptacle box containing a five inch high town crier in every drawing-room (the same town crier what's more), water closets even for the poor, and so forth. It was a script that raised laughter in other ways as well.

A friend I met in the bar decried the fact that much of the humour sprang from local references and maintained that even if the references had been to his home town of Dundee he would have held the same opinion. I suppose it may seem a slightly cheap way of getting an audience on side, although one might question to what extent an Edinburgh audience would be sympathetic to weegie allusions or vice versa but I for one enjoyed that aspect, as well as the humour that he drew from more universal themes - father/daughter, modern/old-fashioned, wealthy old man/poor young suitor, tricky businessman/naive investor.

Now this was a one man show ably and impressively performed but what impressed me even more was the fact that in addition to actor and director the programme credits no less than fourteen people as having a hand in the production and another eleven individuals or institutions are thanked for their help.

Would that that ratio might be replicated for my show.

Tattie Shaws is an excellent vegetable shop up the road that I try to patronise rather than weakly add pre-packed veggies to my Tesco basket.

In there this morning for a head of garlic. Isn't it an annoying habit of supermarkets to sell them in packs of three - what non-Transylvanian one person household can get through three heads before they go rotten? I spotted this delicacy and thought I'd better try it. Tattie, or is it Shaw?, assured me that I'd love it and he was right. It's a stotter.

Made I assume by the guy whose flavoured porridge stall you see around from time to time. It may look like solidified porridge but it's not. It's made from the oats and he does a range of flavours. They contain butter but I'm pleased to report that it's unsalted, another improvement on Tesco.

I did a little bit of catching up with Little Dorrit via the BBC's wonderful Iplayer before watching this week's episode last night. So many sites that offer video streaming would do well to find out how the BBC do it.

Anyway that aside I am so much enjoying LD. Of course to start with the material is first class. Dickens' imagination and character drawing are superb. He can give us caricatures of villains as evil as evil can be and of goody goodies too sweet to be true, but more rounded portraits too. I'm particularly intrigued by Fanny Dorrit at the moment as she shows a sensitivity and vulnerability at odds with what we gleaned of her character earlier.

That in part is tribute to her acting. Not only the girl who plays Fanny but every single player is magnificent. The adaptation (not that I've read the book so my appreciation is of the TV drama that Davies has created), the direction, the camera work, the costumes - the whole shebang is a triumph.

I'd love to see Walter Scott's novels get the same treatment.

I was tempted out to the golf course by yesterday's bright sunshine and flashed my old codger's card in the expectation of 18 holes for next to nothing. Alas I should have been like Cinderella and kept my eye on the clock. At midnight on Fridays my magic card turns to dust and for 48 hours I have to pay the full whack.

I went for it just the same because it was a lovely day and after 9 holes had scored 46 which, had it not been for one duff shot would have been 44. So I went into the back 9 full of confidence that I had an excellent chance of reaching and perhaps breaching my hitherto barrier of 92.

Now Craigentinny is not a long course nor a particularly tricky course but it had enough up its sleeve yesterday to thwart me, indeed to annihilate me, a lost ball on the 17th just turning the knife in the wound.

Cinders got her Prince in the end. Will I eventually score?

As well as having all those handy buses (minus the 13) I'm surrounded by shops and practically have to walk through Tesco to get anywhere.

Last week Scot Mid revamped their store that lies some 300 paces further from my door and passing it last night on my way back from earning an easy 30 quid giving my input to an ad focus group I popped in.

It's just another supermarket of course so hardly exciting, but they have rejigged the layout and seem to have conjured up enough space to display a greater range of foods than before, including an uncountable number of butter substitutes and what's more to the point three brands of unsalted butter.

I've recently had words with Tesco over their piles of salted butter and nary an unsalted pack but they have failed to heed me. Scot Mid used to be as bad but now that they have turned over a new leaf I may abandon Tesco in their favour.

Can I remember the old Co-op number to get the divi as well?

I'm very fond of boasting about how well bussed I am in this part of town so you can imagine my distress when I went out to catch a 13 the other day on discovering that it no longer runs past my door.

Now it's not a bus I use often, being one of those that run at long intervals and never on a Sunday, but meandering as it does through the New Town I had it marked as perhaps being of future use when Ewan eventually finds his nest. And it's a blow to art lovers from Lochend to Leith Walk since they now have no direct connection to the Gallery of Modern Art.

On this occasion that's where I was headed - to see the Charles Avery exhibition. If you like Giles cartoons you'll enjoy Avery's drawings. Many of them feature a bent old creature who reminded me strongly of the Giles Granny figure, even though this one sports a triangular coolie style hat. Fans of Tolkien and that sort of made-up universe will enjoy the fantasy texts accompanying the work. And according to the chap who introduced the exhibition (who did not dwell on, nor even mention, the Giles connection) this is art world beating stuff so rush to see it.

My distress at the semi demise of the 13 was nothing as to my distress on finding a beanie hat on the floor of the lift when I came home. Connor had assured me that there had been no lift lunatic incidents during my absence. Has he struck again or is this simply the case of a lift user warmed by coming in from the cold removing his hat and failing to stuff it into his pocket?

A more sinister explanation occurs to me. If lift lunatic incidents have only broken out afresh since I got back could it be some modern Jeckyll and Hyde phenomenon? Does this inoffensive pensioner turn into the lift lunatic at certain conjunctures of the planets, or perhaps when he's had one too many?

I saw a brilliant show at the Traverse last night. Described as a dark comedy it was certainly funny and the audience, many of whom it turned out were friends or relatives of the performers, thoroughly enjoyed the humour. In contrast it seems to the previous night's audience, who it was decided in the post-show discussion must all have been Edinbuggers.

I suspect that equally oppressive and destructive family environments exist here but that the eastern response to seeing it displayed is to feel uncomfortable rather than to laugh. This comedy you see concerns a west of Scotland Catholic family headed by a drunken, posturing bully of a father whose sins are visited on his children. Founded on his own experience it took Paul Higgins five years to write and you have to hope that it was a thoroughly cathartic process for no-one would want to carry baggage like that around with them in later life.

In response to a question he said that while he could watch the play relatively dispassionately and indeed laugh at the humour, none of his immediate family had seen it and that he thought they would find it hard.

The father is a brilliantly drawn character, a drunken bully as I said but with a cutting and sardonic wit and deep down a loathing of what he has become. Gary Lewis brings him vigorously to life in a superb performance. It was evident from what he said after the show that his portrayal was grounded in a very sensitive understanding.

"Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us" runs at the Traverse till Saturday and I'll be surprised if it doesn't get another outing very soon.

I don't imagine that Noel Coward would have been any happier with the film version of Easy Virtue than we were though many other members of the audience laughed a lot. Unfortunately the director hadn't put any effort into the coruscating bitterness with which Coward counterpoints his bons mots.

My own virtue came under strain on Sunday night when I found myself realising just after leaving Tesco that I was carrying 12 bottles of wine but had been charged for only 6. I had to go back and own up. At two quid a bottle for a quite delicious Australian plonk on extra special offer they were a bargain that didn't merit being sullied by theft. Even though the theft would have been unintentional. Had it been a branch that I don't use daily maybe I'd have been tempted.

Even without the excitement of the wine it was a notable weekend. Ewan was around sussing out the New Town's possibilities for his projected relocation to Scotland later in the year and Fiona was here preparing the way for attacking the fringe with her prizewinning production of The Island.

An additional excitement hit my inbox this morning. A sailing friend offered me a berth on his yacht for a leg of the Rallye des isles du soleil. I'll join Caramel at Santarem on the Amazon in April, sail downriver to the mouth at Afua and then on to Cayenne and Trinidad. I said yes before I had a chance to confuse myself with the pros and cons.

Yes the internet could come to my rescue. Exactly the diary I want is available directly from Collins' site. However I found a diary of the size I want for 79 pence so if I can just discipline myself to carry a pencil around with me I can do the business and save a fiver.

Apart from searching for diaries I've been processing photos of my holiday in India in 1984. I've put the whole lot, turkeys included, on Picasa and a choice few accompanied by such travel diary notes as I made before running out of steam onto my personal website.

An old friend has kindly sent me scans of an NKAS programme to fill a gap in my corpus. This is a show Ewan was in. I thought it was one in which Connor also took part, playing in the orchestra, but it isn't. However Alan (the friend) has a programme for that show too and has promised to scan it for me. That would fill the final NKAS gap but it took 18 months for the first one to reach me so I'm not holding my breath.

I'm just back from Portugal where the sky really was as blue as appears in this photo of the castle in Lisbon. It was that way for the whole week.

Our rented flat was very well positioned for getting around the city, being near a metro station. It's disadvantages were its eccentric room layout, its collapsing bed, its limited supply of food preparation tools (one blunt bread-knife) and by the time we left its broken teapot. Oh, and one of the keys.

We saw the principal sights, ate the principal dishes, drank the principal beverages and escaped the attentions of the principal felons, said to be pickpockets.

So it's back to the frustrations of ordinary life. What has happened to the supply of small, cheap diaries with a pencil in the spine? Have Collins and Letts, those giants of Scottish diary production, decided that small is ugly and that pencils in the spine are potential deadly weapons?

A visit to six shops uncovered nothing. Will the internet come to my rescue?

I found myself impersonating a youth the other night.

As I queued up to buy a ticket for an RSNO concert a chap offered to sell me one that was spare because his chum was not going to be able to make it. I assumed that he was selling it at half price in an attempt to minimize his losses. Later I discovered that I had in fact purchased at full price an "under 26" concession ticket.

The fact that I passed the ushers' scrutiny I find most encouraging.

I caught the Grads production of Twelfth Night on Friday and was glad to have done so. It was pretty good although it won't efface from my memory the version in the style of a 40s musical that I saw the students of the American University in Cairo do some years ago. I absolutely adored that one. At the other extreme the most stupid version I can remember seeing was an Italian one in which amongst other nonsensicals the director found an incestuous relationship between Viola and Sebastian.

Gordon didn't go down such a silly path but was quite inventive, if not with the characters then at least as far as the presentation was concerned. I suspect that for some effects he peeped over the shoulders of giants as it were. But where would any of us be without giants. I've certainly found them helpful more than once.

For those of you who missed it click here.

If Shakespearean comedy is not your bag but you like a good laugh check out Burn After Reading. It's a hoot and in contrast to the intellectual who reviewed it for Newsnight I found the plot perfectly easy to follow.

I think even Hugo Chaves would enjoy the Venezuelan joke.

I renewed my acquaintance this evening with Belhaven Best. What a delight after five months slaking my thirst after golf with Kronenburg 1664 and similar bilgewater. There is a chap in the Creuse, an Englishman, who brews what I'm told is a decent drop although I have never got around to tasting it. I shall check it out and if satisfied insist as a condition of renewing my membership that Les Dryades stocks it.

Nursing the first pint of Belhaven I made the acquaintance of Bobo Stenson and his trio, or at least of his music. He plays piano in that jazz marriage made in heaven of piano, double bass and drums. What's more he plays my favourite kind of jazz. I expect it has a name although I don't know what it is. It's the antithesis of trad although it doesn't lack rhythm or melody. Maybe it's the absence of stomping that makes the difference. The sound is crystal clear and clean. I expect you have to say it's modern despite one of their numbers being by Purcell.

Despite loving modern jazz I'm a sucker for costume dramas about the wonderful days of yore when honest yeomen doffed their caps, and butlers and pantrymaids ministered to the needs of the gentry. So visually I adored Brideshead Revisited with its beautiful twenties/thirties costumes and sets and stunning glimpses of gracious living in town and country. But I wasn't so engaged by the presentation of the characters and the story. I'd recently read the book so I was aware of the fact that a few liberties were being taken to condense the whole thing into movie length. No big deal perhaps for a straightforward narrative but Waugh's tale is quite dense and time is needed to allow us to accompany Charles in his journey of discovery through friendship, love, life and religion.

I'll just have to get hold of the highly praised 1981 TV version which I've never seen and which covered the same ground about five times as slowly.

The tooth I had trouble with during the summer was pulled out with much effort last Monday. I was impressed that it came out at all because there had seemed to me so little left to get a grip on. Even more impressed in that my dentist is a little slip of a lady.

The absence of sticking out tooth caused her to spend a lot of time screwing down into the depths of my jaw with the dental equivalent of a bradawl to give access for her pliers. The remains came out a little bit at a time after much twisting and rocking and tugging for each section. As a bonus she took out a little fragment of a previously extracted tooth that an earlier dentist had overlooked but that my tongue has constantly sought for several years.

Thanks to the miracle of anaesthesia I felt more or less nothing but she told me to take painkillers even before the numbness had worn off so I thought I was in for it. In fact it wasn't too bad but it gave me an excuse to sit around for a couple of days in my pyjamas nursing my jaw and occasionally rinsing out the bleeding gap with a salt solution.

During which time I got hooked on the snooker tournament and barely left the telly all week. I did manage to drag myself away on Saturday night to hear Carlos Arrendondo sing the songs of Victor Jara and Violetta Parra as part of Edinburgh's Hispanic Festival, grandly named but only a handful of events over a weekend. Carlos ran a very enjoyable Latin American culture course that I did years ago. He's intensely passionate about Latin America music in general and his Chilean roots in particular and did justice to the songs although I really prefer listening to him singing his own material.

I don't prefer it so much, even as a bit of a Chilephile myself, that I was willing to miss the snooker final on Sunday night in favour of hearing him again though. It's always exciting to see someone who's well behind in a sporting contest get back into contention and Ryan Day fought from 7 - 2 down to nearly drawing level in the 16th frame but John Higgins won it and took the next frame to clinch the match. Great for him to win in front of his home crowd but being more often a plucky loser myself I felt for the Welshman.

Now that's over I've no excuse. Must get on with something.

It looks like that thanks to Gordon I'll soon own 60% of my own money in RBS. That's cool.

Tuesday was a lovely day so I put on my golfing shorts and met some friends for lunch in the open air at one of our favourite trucker stops. In the afternoon on the golf course the temperature topped 25 degrees which is not bad for October.
No-one is lunching on the terrace in this picture taken the following much dreicher day as I drove north and homewards . The weather brightened up shortly afterwards and I enjoyed delightful autumn colours and mild conditions until after eight hours of otherwise tedious driving I got to Dunkirk.

I crossed early yesterday morning by Norfolk Line, who incidentally I see are taking over the Rosyth - Zeebrugge service in the Spring. Good for them. The drive from Dover to Edinburgh was a bit less bedevilled by traffic jams and road repairs than it has been in the past but it still took more than nine hours and I was glad to collapse with a cup of tea before unloading the car.

Waiting for one of Connor's excellent home made Chinese dishes I relaxed with a G&T having been made aware of alcohol by a couple of giant billboards as I came along Seafield. Alcohol awareness week actually ends tomorrow but I think I can be relied upon to keep the faith thereafter.

These French country people have their sayings, one of which is: "it's at the end of the fair that you count the cowpats."

So this being the end of the fair as far as my competitive golf is concerned for the year here's a wee picture of the state of the cowpats.
Thanks to the French Golf Federation's records I can go back on my scores to day one, but this graph starts at the high point of my career, three years ago, when my handicap hit 22.4.

(For the benefit of non-golfers let me explain that the objective is to minimize rather than maximize the number of cowpats so a rising line on a graph is unwelcome.)

Of course I am bound to do much better next year, which thought reminds me of another local saying: "don't count the eggs while they are still up the chicken's ...". Well let's just say "before they are laid."

The old man across the road was 90 last week. Although he's as bent as a bow and uses a stick he's constantly active. He goes up and down from dawn to dusk between his house and his garden, where he digs and plants and labours quite against his doctor's orders. He also takes an hour-long walk out of the village every morning. And as a major plus he's still got all his marbles.

We gave him a card and a bottle of champagne and I expressed the hope that we would see him celebrate his 100th birthday in due course. He hummed and hawed and shuffled uncomfortably just as my aunt used to do. She would declare that she didn't want to be 100 but when pressed couldn't or wouldn't set a time limit.

Let me put in down in black and white; I do want to be 100 and I want to be it as soon as possible while I'm still able to read the Queen's telegram.

Why should a damaged bottom tooth cause an agonising pain in the cheekbone?

I don't know.

Is there a more agonising pain in existence?

I don't want to know.

This interesting looking building, whose contents are also interesting, is the museum at the Gallo-Roman site of Argentomagus. The site itself is somewhat underwhelming compared to the likes of Pompei or Ostia. With respect to visible remains it's more like the Antonine Wall but with a bit of imagination you can see the Legion of the Ninth disappearing into the mists of the Creuse valley.

It was one of the spots covered during Alan's visit when I tried to go where I had not been before. Having cracked the business of checking museum hours before setting out we also visited Argenton's Museum of Shirtmaking and Masculine Elegance where as you can well imagine we felt thoroughly at home.

Gueret's museum was the final stop on Alan's culture packed visit. Despite its proximity it was the first time I had been inside. It's a museum very much in the old style and the natural history section in particular with its displays of stuffed animals in "typical" poses reminded me strongly of Kirkcaldy museum in the fifties.

From their plaster models of reptiles and amphibia I learnt that the creatures that had concerned me in the grass earlier in the year were not venemous vipers but harmless slowworms. The trick to identification is apparently to observe their eyebrows. If present then it's a slowworm. If absent it's a snake. Or is it the other way around?

Nature took revenge on me for that mistake a couple of days ago when a wasp stung me on the thumb as I bent down to pick up the toaster. My thumb is red, swollen and uncomfortable and to make things worse I still haven't worked out what the wasp could have been looking for in the toaster.