That's the fun bit of gardening over. I've razed my umpteen square metres of jungle grass to the ground with the trusty débroussailleuse.

To recover I'm off to a golf course near the Loire leaving the cut grass to dry out. Then starts the back-breaking job of raking it up.

If I thought I could get away with it I'd set a match to the lot.

Even at this year’s miserable exchange rate it is hard to make a case against the fixed price lunches available in this part of the country being an unbeatable bargain.

There are two establishments conveniently located near the golf club, one to the north and the other to the south. We struck northwards yesterday after the front nine and enjoyed: a starter of terrine, cold meats and salad; turkey escalope in mushroom sauce with fried potatoes; cheese ad libitum; a delicious pastry and as much wine from our carafe as it felt wise to drink - all for 11 euros.

It goes without saying that bread was also provided. French travellers come back from Italy stunned at being charged for the bread that accompanies their meals. Wasn’t it absence of bread that lit the revolutionary tinders in 1789?

Here’s a piece of information that may prove invaluable to you. It would certainly have been invaluable to me on Thursday night.

There is no junction 28 on the A16 motorway between Calais and Dunkirk.

Do not be fooled by the published Michelin map nor by the up to date (sic) internet one. Do not believe the instructions issued by Louvre hotels on how to get to their establishment at Armbouts-Cappel.

Trust me. Don’t drive up and down looking for 28 even if it is your lucky number. Use junction 57.

Our Labour Party representatives at Holyrood and Westminster have moved out of Brunswick Street, lurched to the right and settled on the main drag.

They've taken over what was the fireworks shop.

The window cries out for a few sparklers at the very least rather than the damp squib of a display that they have come up with.

Gordon has been listening. Well that’s what he promised to do isn’t it. He has been listening, and maybe reading my blog. He has explained, more in sorrow than in anger, that he was right all along.

I have got it all wrong. It seems that I have as usual been looking at events through the prism of self-interest.

When he told that nice Mr Blair that the euro was Bad for Britain, it wasn’t that the euro was bad as such. No, no; badness would come from having it in our pockets in place of the pound. His old friend Mr Wilson, he reminded me, had had wise words to say about the pound in your pocket being just as good a pound, if not even better, after devaluation as it had been before.

The euro, provided it's in the foreigners' pocket, is just dandy.

You see Eurojohnny is now getting so many more pounds for his money that he is shoving our competitors out of the way in order to snap up our cheap goods and services. Our businesses are bursting a gut to fulfil his orders. Our workers are enjoying lots of overtime pay. The Poles can’t get as many zlotys as they used to so they are leaving, freeing up employment opportunities for our keen-to-work unemployed. Our overseas call centres are being relocated back home to take advantage of the sinking pound. Mr and Mrs Eurojohnny and all their hundreds of little eurocents are flying in in droves to spend money in our world famous and historic tourist traps.

Everyone is making enough money to outweigh that 20% rate loss by a country mile.

Remember too that Eurojohnny has overtaken Uncle Sam as our main trading partner so the fact that his dying dollar won’t buy much from us isn’t as important as it once was. In fact it gives us the opportunity to snap up his cheap goods and services and fly over to spend our money in his quite world famous but not so historically ancient tourist traps.

So for every Briton who is not a non-working part-time resident of Euroland, and even I have to admit that that’s a lot of people, everything is fine according to Gordon's analysis.

Going off to Euroland shortly to escape the burning suns of Britain?

Be prepared for a nasty setback. You will have to spend 20% more than you did this time last year to get the same number of euros.

Now who was it who persuaded that nice Mr Blair that the euro was a nasty continental plot that would be very bad for Britain and that we must stick to our lovely strong pound and our lovely interest rates and our lovely house prices and our lovely economic giant friends across the Atlantic?

One more thing that disenchanted voters may want to cast up against Gordon Brown? Unless they are taking their holidays in Florida I suppose.

Here's my photo of the the tram works again with the 1904 version directly below for comparison. They fairly laid waste the street then but I suppose there wasn't much in the way of traffic to be accommodated.

Leaving aside the tower block I'm struck by how many of the earlier buildings remain to frame the shot.

The 1904 photo is reproduced with the permission of Edinburgh Public Libraries. The rest of the Leith series and many others are available at www.capitalcollections.org.uk

I thought I was finished with The Life of Brian but I discovered that when viewed with Internet Explorer 7 thumbnails were not expanding when left clicked. I traced the problem to some peculiarity of the host so I've moved it all again.

That function is OK on the new host but I'll have to run through the site to see if there is anything it objects to. I wonder how this one handles "porn".

Here's a photo I took in Leith Walk the other day to mirror a photograph taken from the same spot of tramlines being laid in 1904.

The old photo is here on www.capitalcollections.org.uk and is copyright. I've been a good little boy and asked for permission to copy it into this blog for comparison but that has not been forthcoming yet.

The modern photo is of preparations rather than the laying of the lines but when that gets going in 2010 or whenever I'll be out there snapping.

It's a great day for The Life of Brian. I've reached the millennium. There are a few inconsistencies with the presentation that I'd like to iron out but I shall resist the temptation to tinker and leave it alone till the autumn.

The summer focus has to be on golf.

I didn't panic but I filled my tank all the same so that I can get at least halfway to Dover, where there should still be supplies, if Scotland suffers a month long petrol shortage.

Wasn't it Alastair Darling who admitted that Northern Rock depositors were acting rationally when they rushed to withdraw their savings despite assurances from on high that all would be hunky-dory?

Going
Going
Gone

Sunset September 1998 somewhere in Syria

I've finished moving my website to its new home and have confirmed that my URLs now point to the new space.

I will get on with adding content as soon as I've got rid of the little translation job I'm doing for Patrick. He and his chums want to attract more English speaking sailors to a rally they organise so intend to create an English version of this website. I'm doing the words.

Will The Life of Brian get to the millennium before the Iles du Soleil sailors get to Afuã ?

I had some trouble with porn yesterday.

I was moving bits of my website to its new host. I found one page that simply wouldn't display after the move. I checked and re-checked that the appropriate files were there and that no links were misspelt etc etc. Eventually it dawned on me that it was probably the host's page filtering routine that had found something it didn't like. And indeed it proved to be the word "porn".

My old host didn't mind "porn" but wouldn't let you say "hotmail", although it tolerated "hot male".

What's porn doing on my website anyway? See for yourself here.

I've been reading a book recently about the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz as to which of them was the inventor of calculus. I shan't spoil the undoubted pleasure you would get from "The Calculus Wars" by Jason Bardi by so much as hinting at the answer but will share with you some of the incidental knowledge I gained.

While having fun in Paris Leibnitz reluctantly accepted an appointment as counsellor to the Duke of Hanover because he needed the money, and although he dragged his heels for a couple of years he eventually turned up in Hanover in 1676 and spent 40 years raking it in, working polymathically and enthusiastically on behalf of his boss and twice as hard in pursuit of his own intellectual interests.

One of the jobs he took on soon after his appointment was to write the history of his boss's family. His estimate was a couple of years work but in fact it was still incomplete when he died in 1716.

I often feel that my much slighter "Life of Brian" website is going the same way. I've now filled up all the free webspace I had and have been looking around for more. I've found what surely will be enough for me but of course I'm having to transfer all the data. That's not entirely straightforward even now that after a couple of days I've resolved various technical issues. But I have to change every single page in one way or another so it is not the work of an instant.

I'm taking the opportunity to get rid of the frame structure thus removing barriers to search engines, and to create links straight to every show and every year on the site directly from the first page.

Until I've copied it all to the new space The Life of Brian will be where it always has been but if you'd like a sneak preview click here . Be warned that some links are dead ends.

This is the view from the house I shared with other members of the 4.48 Psychosis company in Kelso at the weekend. It's also where our hopes of taking the show on to Inverness ended up.

But there is life after death. Most of the company are already embarked on another show and I'm reading plays in anticipation of 2009.

For a full debrief on the SCDA theatrical high jinks at Kelso see Plaything.

An irritating beeping noise early in the morning is bad enough but on the morning that the clocks have gone forward it's an hour worse.

That Sunday at 05.00 GMT my smoke alarm started to beep, but not to protect me from death by burning. There was no cloud of smoke. There was not so much as a wisp in evidence.

Once the brain had cranked into gear I decided that the backup battery (it's a mains connected gadget) was exhausted. I got up on a chair and struggled with the cover while generating a major crick in the neck. It was only an hour or so later once Connor had been roused that I remembered I had a step-ladder, well two actually.

No way could I see how to get it open to get at the battery and stop the infernal beep.

We discussed breaking it apart with a sledgehammer. I'll wait until I can inspect some like it to try to work out how to open it up. It doesn't seem to have the same mechanism as the ones I installed in Mountcastle. Fortunately I was out a lot that day.

On Monday I unsuccessfully looked for a similar alarm but mercy me it didn't beep until just before the electrical shops closed at 5pm. It beeped all night.

Tuesday morning it got too much for me and I started to dismantle the beast and at an early stage snipped some wires to give blissful silence. Once in pieces it was clear how it fitted together.

The next challenge was to find exactly the same model so that the base plate still attached to the mains didn't need to be removed. A combination of internet search and telephone enquiry led me to one in Abbeyhill and in a jiffy all was fixed.

I haven't blogged for a while because I've been learning Pirate. Why not have a go yourself.

It seems that I was so disconcerted on Wednesday that I failed to register Act 1 Scene 2. Reading the play in the bus I see that there (in scene 2 that is not in the bus) Viola gets filled in on the goings on in Illyria including the Orsino/Olivia situation. So the audience is not denied that vital information after all. Now I'm asking myself what scene 1 is there for. Cut it Gordon, cut it.

Nor are the former patrons of Ndebele denied their biltong. I learn from a notice in the window of their vacant premises that Findlays of Portobello have added biltong and boerworst to their 101 things a butcher can do with dead animals.

Ben has gone off to the Himalayas for a wee walk and is keeping a travel log. I added a link to my list a couple of weeks ago but forgot to point that out. It's worth a click, especially for the pictures.

A week without a post disappoints at least one of my regular readers so just for her here are the highlights of my last seven days.

On Saturday I attended a concert in St Mary's Cathedral (the pisky one) in celebration of Ronald Stevenson's 80th birthday. The composer was there but not too many chums had turned out, or was I just fooled by the vastness of the space. Anyway he'd surely have been pleased by Murray McLachlan's playing of his Passacaglia on DSCH.

This is a pretty astonishing piece - solo piano without a pause for one hour and twenty minutes that grips the listener throughout. Apart from needing the stamina required to play for that length of time various other demands are made of the pianist. Perhaps the most entertaining for the spectator is when the page-turner, seated on the pianist's left gets up, knocks the music stand down flat and runs round to his right while the pianist, continuing to play with his right hand leans into the body of the piano and thumps the strings vigorously in various rhythms with his left hand for a page or two.

Sunday saw our second rehearsal for the reprise of 4.48 Psychosis and the eagerly awaited first episode of Mad Men. As so often happens the hype belied the quality of the product, for me at any rate. Since I'm not often faced with a surfeit of entertainment at 10pm on a Sunday evening I may watch it again. On the other hand The Westminster Hour can be a thrilling bundle of fun. No hype for 4.48. In Kelso crowds will roll up for that on the basis of a solid track record.

On Monday I bolted down Connor's delicious paneer pot au feu and rushed off to a residents' association meeting due to take place in a local cafe as a result of our previous meeting arrangements having been judged of a lesser priority than toon cooncil business. But alack and alas some cock-up with keys kept the cafe closed and we repaired to the chairman's kitchen for a rapid romp through parking schemes, lift malfunctions, vandalism, repainting funds, defective locks - the usual exciting ephemera.

Scott's great skill as a chairman is always to draw the meeting to a close bang on 7.30 which left me enough time to get to the Queen's Hall by half way through the first movement of Beethoven's string trio opus something or other. I managed to slip in while the crowd cleared its collective throat between movements one and two. The trio was elegant and was elegantly played but I was happier in the second half. A piano was added to beef up the strings for a rattling good chunk of Dvorak. I pass over Kurtag's little miniatures that never seem to go anywhere.

More music on Tuesday - at lunchtime I went to one of the university's extremely good value concerts - is there better value than free? An engaging short piece by Janacek was followed by a stomping rendition of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The orchestrated versions are all very well but the original for piano alone doesn't need any help at all. It's one of my desert island discs.

My language sensibilities were intrigued by the fact that it was billed as Pictures IN rather than Pictures AT which is how I've always known it so I googled them both. AT wins hands down for the Mussorgsky piece but there is an IN, to wit Pictures in an exhibition by Death Cab for Cutie which is a very different kettle of fish. Listen to it and groan. There is also an AT by Emerson Lake and Palmer that is a rock version of Mussorksky's music with lyrics added. It's horrid.

I popped into the City Art Centre afterwards and admired Ansell Adams photographs, many of which I've been exposed to through the medium of calendars winging their way to me from the USA during Connor's sojourn there. There is an exhibition of political cartoons on as well that had me laughing out loud. My very particular favourite that might even be worth the £295 asking price features East Fife football strip burkas. I shan't spoil your fun by explaining why. Just go and see it.

Another very different kettle of fish cropped up that evening when I went with a number of Grads to Edinburgh Music Theatre's production of A Chorus Line. For some in the audience this was a chance to re-experience a well loved show/film but it was my first time. I shan't rush to re-experience. As a story it failed to interest, engage, move or excite me on any level and the music was musak.

The company however did a great job. They did the best they could to make it look interesting - hard with all that standing around in a long line in front of black drapes - and I failed to see the logic in sometimes having the practice "mirrors" visible and sometimes not but they got a good variety of groupings and interesting lighting effects. There was a lot of red but I don't really think I was grumpy about it. (see Play Thing).

The characterisations were all well judged. The acting was confident and sincere. None of the accents faltered even slightly. The costumes were excellent (notwithstanding the gents' baggy trousers in the finale which some people didn't like but which I didn't notice because I was concentrating on the girls). I loved the dancing, especially the finale and not being a pitch perfectionist the singing passed my muster without a stain on its character.

Choose a more interesting show next time please.

On Wednesday the Grads held their monthly meeting with the carrot of a reading of Twelfth Night (the autumn production to be) to encourage people to put up with the boring business stuff. Claire shares with Scott the desire to shoot through the agenda and despite a barely controlled bout of corpsing brought on by notification of an SCDA opportunity for younger people had it done and dusted just after eight.

Those with previous engagements bade farewell and we started the read. Fifteen lines into Act 1 Scene 1 Gordon interrupted to say we'll cut there and go on to scene 2. I confess to having been disconcerted. Was that just for this reading or does he intend to play it that way? If he does then the audience will not be told that Orsino is in love with Olivia and that she has rejected his overtures, a central element of the plot. Ah well!

After the reading I went home to sup on Connor's second culinary concoction of the week which had not matured (those pesky spuds) in time for me to eat before going out.

I had decided a while ago to go to the Citizen's production of Waiting for Godot and on Thursday set off to see the matinee performance. This was scheduled to be a cheap day out since I can travel to Glasgow by bus for nothing and the Citz charge only £6 for their matinees.

The bus I intended to catch pulled out dead on time, if not early, when I was about 50 yards short of its stance. No hassle, another will be along in 15 minutes. But that one was 15 minutes late so I arrived in Glasgow with so little time to spare that I decided I'd have to get a taxi - cost £5.20. I got to the theatre with ten minutes to spare to learn that the matinee had been cancelled. Should I just go away? Seems a shame having got here so I bought a ticket for the evening performance. That's £9 even for a wee concessionary like me so I'm now 135% over budget and naturally if I'm here all day I'll have to have some lunch.

I had in fact a very pleasant lunch (now 386% over budget) and did a bit of tourism. For the first time in my life I went into the cathedral. It's an absolutely splendid building and at least it is still there unlike many of the historic relics featured in a little tourist trail leaflet that I followed. I gazed in awe at the former sites of past wonders. What destructive planning ideologue allowed Britain's first music-hall to be torn down without even a brass plaque to mark the spot let alone a decent photograph and a recording of Harry Lauder singing "Stop yer ticklin jock"?

Back to the Gorbals for a coffee (413% over budget) and a great show. Gerry Mulgrew played one of the tramps and the play was even funnier than I remembered. I guess Glasgow accents and personalities are just that bit funnier than we are over here in the east.

So that's six of the last seven days. Today I finished reading "Utopia & other places" by Richard Eyre. It's an enjoyable read with good stories of his time at The Lyceum and at the Nottingham Playhouse. The book contains many thoughtful and useful aperçus for the actor and director.

And of course I wrote this post.