A chalet from Billy Butlin's first holiday camp opened in Skegness in 1936 and its 2015 equivalent at Whinfell Forest.


I've just spent a few days there.  Apart from a day visit to Butlin's Ayr camp in the 50s I'd never been to a holiday camp before and was greatly impressed by this one. It has a beautiful setting that with its groups of wooden houses set in the forest reminded me strongly of Colorado.

It struck me as a super place for family holidays.  There are lots of outdoor activities to suit both adults and children and luckily, given our climate, just as many indoor ones.

When you've had enough of self catering, grazing and sluicing are well provided for in the various restaurants and bars.  I'm told the swimming pool (or sub-tropical paradise as it prefers to be known) is wonderful.  I didn't try it and since my friends had to leave the pool and stand around shivering while a fire alarm was investigated I don't feel I missed out.  I did enjoy table tennis and ten pin bowling and snooker and pool and archery and "the segway experience".

PS It's not cheap.

 

A thoroughly enjoyable toe-tapping evening in the Queen's Hall last night at the farewell concert of Fat Sam's jump jive and swing band.  Although they've been active on the Edinburgh scene throughout the  thirty years of their existence it's probably twenty years since I last heard them play, something I'm now beginning to regret.  But they wouldn't be the first band to have more than one farewell concert so I'll keep my ear to the ground.

Pictures from The Burn

On my way home from a saxophone weekend at The Burn near Edzell I went to a couple of Fife Jazz Festival gigs in St Andrews.

I was intrigued by the idea of a saxophone and tuba duo and was blown away by the resulting music from Marius Neset and Daniel Herskedal.  A lot of noise can and did come out of those instruments, but interestingly one of the refrains of the weekend had been the importance of dynamic contrast and this pair gave a master class on the subject.  From thunder to barely audible in a heartbeat. As for technique, the sounds they got, their speed and dexterity; all were marvellous and underpinned a fascinating sound world.

A really nice Italian meal later I was in the totally different sound world of Dixieland.  Although Dixieland and other varieties of traditional jazz no longer hold my interest to the extent they once did you can't help but enjoy its infectious rhythms and bright colours.  These guys were good, particularly the harmonica player.  I had a chromatic harmonica at one time as a kid but could never produce anything other than an overall mush.  How anyone can direct air through particular sets of those little holes I'll never understand. 

By the interval I'd enjoyed about much as I was likely to and was thinking of those "lang scots miles, the mosses, watters, slaps and stiles" and decided to forego the second half in favour of  getting home for bedtime.  And I'm so glad I did.

The A92 was closed off east of Kirkcaldy so I drove through the top of the town (not without an accidental and unwished for diversion through a housing estate) to find that it was still closed west of Kirkcaldy.  That meant going into the town and onto the Dunfermline road to get to the bridge.  Well blow me but the bridge was closed so I had an extra 50 miles to drive via Kincardine.  Had I stayed to the end of the concert it would have been half past midnight till I got home.

There was a bit of a silver lining though.  That diversion took me past the beautiful Kelpies glowing red and silver in the dark.  Tam O'Shanter would have loved them.

It was suggested to me this morning that choosing to walk up the stairs nine times out of ten instead of using the lift might not be quite enough preparation for my skiing holiday next month.

With that and inspired by the fitness displayed on court in Melbourne I decided on a vigorous walk to Modern Two this afternoon to see the Two Roberts exhibition.  Well, after a post prandial relaxation session I had to get the bus most of the way for fear of being too late to get round the show.  It would have been well worth walking all the way though, super stuff.

Happily I found on leaving the gallery that the Water of Leith pathway which had been partially closed for months because of a landslip was fully open again so I got my vigorous walk after all.

I stopped halfway for a coffee in Stockbridge and was served by a young woman I recognised as having been a fellow attendee at a salsa class some time ago.  I didn't let the fact that she didn't remember me get me down. I saw it instead as an endorsement of the character actor's ability to melt into the crowd when playing himself.

At Canonmills I passed a couple of pubs that used to be spit and sawdust establishments but are now smart, comfortably furnished, attractive bars where you can eat or just have a coffee rather than down a pint leaning against peeling wallpaper.  It's a wonderful social revolution, and no smoke to boot.

An exciting closely fought tussle that didn't last.  Murray faded away in the third set and was obliterated in the fourth.  It must be excruciating for the loser to stand listening to the various platitudinous speeches at the end and then have to make his own but Murray stood up to that test manfully.

At least the match finished in good time for me to prepare lunch.

A good week of tennis viewing culminating in Murray's victory over Dimitrov in an absolutely gripping match this morning.

As well as the two streams corresponding to its TV channels  Eurosport broadcasts additional streams and it has been possible on occasion (it's a bit hit and miss I don't know why) to watch a match on one of them without either commercial breaks or commentary.  That's such a bonus since much of the time the commentators contribute very little to enjoyment of the game.  I generally don't need to be told that a good shot has been played and remarks such as "..he grabs the ball with his racquet and returns it full of meaning..." simply annoy me.  I am indebted though to one commentator for sharing with me the knowledge that Sharapova never wears sweat bands and seldom calls for a towel between points.

Again more or less by accident I caught Zambia's second group match.  They played Tunisia and were all over them, mounting attack after attack, swarming around their goal, banging away but only managed to get a ball in the net after 60 minutes.  Tunisia got an excellent equaliser ten minutes later.  That seemed to put fire in their bellies and in the dying minutes they scored a winner.  Such a shame. 

Perhaps the new president will take a day off to nip up to Equatorial Guinea to encourage them, or maybe Guy Scott will since he looks likely to have time on his hands.

I enjoyed The Merry Widow very much.  Unlike the Daily Telegraph I found lots of wit and sparkle in it; the book and lyrics in particular, by Jeremy Sands, were a treat to the ear.  The sumptuous set and costumes were lovely, the can-can dancers spirited and the principals incarnated their characters well although I will agree with the Telegraph to the extent that I found some of the delivery of the text a wee bit clumsy.  I also understood the business with the fan very easily which I didn't the last time I saw the show.  Mind you that was done in Hungarian so I didn't stand much of a chance.

The Australian Open Tennis grand slam is upon us and I have purchased a month's subscription to Eurosport to watch it since neither BBC nor ITV have much coverage to offer.  It's a streaming service so I can watch on a PC or even a telephone but the device of choice will be my smart TV.

It's remarkably cheap (provided I don't rack up some excess broadband usage charge and I remember not to let it be automatically renewed).  As a bonus I got it in time to watch Zambia's first match in the African Cup of Nations.  They scored a great goal just outside of 60 seconds after the kick-off and spent the rest of the game gamely trying to get another but gave the ball away rather too often to their opponents, the Democratic Republic of Congo.  They were the better team overall but only managed to get through the Zambian defence once so the match ended in a draw.

The time difference between here and Melbourne is such that the daytime matches start at about midnight our time.  I shan't see many of them.  I did try to stay up last night to watch Murray's first match but tiredness got the better of me.  The evening matches on the other hand start at breakfast time, to be honest a bit before my usual breakfast time but I may make an effort to get up earlier for the next two weeks.  

Throughout 2014 I was sure that I was going to fit in a visit to Belgium to enjoy some of the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Adolphe Sax, whose invention I've been learning to play for the last several years.  Dinant where he was born looks worth a visit even when it's not bedecked with saxes but I didn't make it there nor to Brussels where he was brought up, studied music and became an instrument maker in his father's business and which has been hosting a large Sax exhibition.

The French have a great claim on Adolphe since it was to Paris, a much more important musical centre than Brussels, that he moved in 1842; where he set up a workshop and over the following years developed the saxophone to a form recognisable to us today.

So it's not surprising that as part of the inaugural activities at their new concert hall, which opened on Wednesday, they are devoting Saturday afternoon to the saxophone.  I was tempted and if Easyjet had had a Saturday morning flight I might have succumbed to temptation, but I'm going to the Met instead, not actually to New York but to it's satcast manifestation in the Cameo where I'm standing in for a sick friend and accompanying his wife to The Merry Widow.

Although the sax was initially taken up by military bands and used by a number of classical composers, it has flourished in the world of jazz and nowhere more so than in the USA.  Now thanks to my favourite jazz programme I know that the Met (museum not opera) is running a sax exhibition till the end of April.  I've never been to New York and would quite like to visit so maybe......    

"You don't do the lottery surely" said the man on the train as we stood side by side in the corridor.

This was in response to my doubly unlucky dose of travel trouble.  I had gone down to London on Saturday when, thanks to engineering tardiness at Kings Cross, my train spent an hour standing in Stevenage and then a second hour tantalisingly close to Finsbury Park station, then crawled in and released us.

Finsbury Park is a handy ten minute bus ride from David's flat but when I designated Kings Cross as the station at which I would activate my Oyster top-up that was in expectation of the train fulfilling its normal destiny.  So I accepted a free tube ride and added another half hour or so to my late running journey.

Returning to Kings Cross yesterday to come home I found that the 13.00 to Edinburgh was not going past Newcastle thanks to an electrical problem on the line further north.  No problem, a speedy connection with a local train to Berwick and onwards in a fleet of what were no doubt luxury coaches had been arranged said the station staff.  The fact that the train guard still thought we were going all the way to Edinburgh was a communication failure soon put right.  And anyway said she optimistically it may be fixed by the time we get to Newcastle.

It wasn't.

But only 40 minutes to wait so I had a coffee and a biscuit in the warmest corner I could find in Costa's little cafe.  For Newcastle is a drafty station.

As time grew closer to 16.30 and there was no sign of the Berwick train, confidently still declaring itself to be On Time on the departure board, some degree of doubt crept into my mind.  At this point a shortly due Aberdeen train was mentioned and rumoured to be going across country to Carlisle and then on to Edinburgh.  Could our train not have done that I thought.

At about 16.40 still claiming to be On Time the Berwick train trundled in but kept its doors shut for ten minutes or.  Before they opened passengers for points north were entreated not to board it but to wait for the Aberdeen train.  Half a dozen people got on leaving several hundred on the platform.

At about 16.59 there was much whistling, waving of arms and striding up and down by station staff but the by now admitting to not being on time 16.30 to Berwick didn't move.  Every so often over the next half hour they tried again but the train sat still like a reluctant sheepdog.  To cheer us up at some point it was announced that the Aberdeen train was outside the station waiting for a platform.  Unfortunately it seemed that the stationary Berwick train was occupying the required platform.  It was then redundantly announced that the Berwick train had a technical problem.

I judged at 17.30 that I could risk going to the gents and in the few minutes I was away the Berwick train disappeared but the Aberdeen one didn't arrive.  After a while it did but as everyone tried to pile onto a clearly already packed train we were tempted with the announcement that another Edinburgh train was due in less than half an hour.

Fearing that it might be a long half hour I got aboard as did pretty well everybody and a bit before 18.00 we were underway and it appeared that the electrical problem had been sorted for there was no further talk of Carlisle.

Half an hour or so into the journey a passenger was asked over the train intercom to return to the foodbar as the buffet car is now known.  The girl concerned heard her name but didn't catch the message.  Hard enough for anyone but doubly hard for an American as she was.

"I've just come from there."  "You must have left something."

She had of course, a passport I think.  Now this train was so crowded that she chose to wait till we got to Berwick then jump off the train and run down the platform to the foodbar rather than fight her way through the standing passengers.

The driver hurtled the train along and we got to Edinburgh about 19.20.  I got through the scrum of disembarking and embarking voyagers and up the steps happy with the thought of slipping across Princes Street and onto a 22.  The street was empty of buses and full of torchlight processors so I had to set off down Leith Walk on foot.  As I got closer to home I decided that a Tailend fish supper would just hit the spot.

The food would clearly have been fresh given the crowd waiting for it to appear from the fryer but I had had enough waiting for one day so raided my deep freeze instead.

The silver lining is that I can probably claim a free return trip to London under East Coast's delay compensation scheme.  But do I want to risk it?  Maybe I should try the lottery instead.

A nail-biting finish to the snooker last night for Ronnie O'Sullivan supporters as Judd Trump fought  back with determination and skill from 9-4 down to 9 all to force a deciding frame.  But even with a broken ankle O'Sullivan is a hard man to beat and a perfectly played snooker behind the green put paid to Trump's challenge.  It was a great match.

Something put paid to my bus pass a week or two ago.  It lasted about two years I think and would have been due for replacement sometime next year.  My new one must be made of sterner stuff.  The machine on the bus tells me that it expires on 9/11/41. It's good to know that the City of Edinburgh expects me to last that long.

The reading material in most barber's shops around here tends to be The Sun or The Daily Record so I was pleasantly surprised when I went to get rid of my Festen grandfather beard to find The Herald, The i and the new pro independence paper, The National, to browse while I waited.

That excitement aside it has been a musical week.  First up was Judith Bingham's choral work The Christmas Truce.  Famously German and Allied troops briefly laid aside their weapons in favour of football and fraternisation at Christmas 1914 and this work deals with that.  The singers made all sorts of whooshing and whistling noises to represent the mayhem of bombardments and during the truce section the male singers split into "Germans" and "Tommies" and sang respectively Oh Tannenbaum and Still the Night, did a bit of male bonding hugging and then went back to war.  I'm told by someone I know in the choir that it's a really good sing and I have to say I thought it was a really good listen.

Following that was the SCO and Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.   I first heard it in the Festival Hall in London in 1967 and it's been one of my desert island discs ever since.  Later in the week the RSNO performed Shostakovitch's Second Piano Concerto.  That's another favourite but of a totally different character, energetic and jaunty while the Beethoven is poetic and lyrical.

Earlier in the week I dashed from a DORA quarterly meeting to the final Dunedin Wind Band rehearsal before our participation in the Scottish Concert Band Festival.  That happened today in Livingston where over the weekend about 30 bands from the central belt ranging from primary 7 kids through youth bands to our category of community bands are doing their thing under the watchful ears of an adjudicating team of two who award certificates of greater or lesser excellence.

We took part for the first time last year although I wasn't able to be there and were awarded a silver certificate.  This year with my participation we won gold.  Just a coincidence no doubt.  It's not as impressive as it sounds because gold plus and platinum are obtainable so it's a bronze in Olympic terms.  However it does qualify us to play in the National Finals in Perth Concert Hall in March. I can't be there unfortunately because I'll be away ski-ing but I expect they'll struggle through.

Next up is our Christmas concert 

 Despite Festen being over and done with I didn't get away from theatre altogether. I auditioned for the Grads next production, Titus Andronicus.

Four stars for Festen http://alledinburghtheatre.com/festen/

I spent some time this morning grappling with the most recalcitrant, user unfriendly ticket selling website I've seen in my puff.

Eventually after several restarts ab initio and by giving in to the system's insistence that my date of birth was 25/11/2001 I got a ticket for each of the three days of the Davis Cup tie between GB and the USA that's to be played in Glasgow in March.

I played golf yesterday for the first time in months.  Absence has not made the game grow stronger.  On the other hand I didn't seem to play much worse and I only lost two balls.

It's difficult to measure how you are doing when you are hacking round by yourself, playing two or more balls on a hole if there are no players pressing behind.  You need the discipline of competition and a scorecard.  I expect that discipline would have made me feel more disappointed.

Tomorrow we move into the theatre for next week's production of Festen.  Part of the effort to publicise the show is to create little video trailers that are tweeted and distributed via Facebook.  These in this case consist of the characters talking about the birthday party they are about to attend and which is the context in which the play takes place.  They are being released one a day and mine hit social media this morning.  For the unsocial media savvy here it is.

A conservatoire according to Collins dictionary is "an institution or school for instruction in music", so when the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama changed its name to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland you could have been forgiven for thinking that they had decided to get shot of their role as a drama school.  Not so. Theatre training continues and produces excellent results.

I popped over to Glasgow recently to see two productions by the final year acting students. They were both excellent.  One was The Hypochondriak, a version of Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire. His comedies always seem to work well in Scots and this was no exception.  The other was an absolutely first class production of The Country Wife.  The Herald gave it five stars and it deserved every one.  

Another great play and fine production that I saw last week was Bondagers.  It's an exploration of the lives of a group of 19th century female agricultural labourers that premièred at The Traverse a little over 20 years ago.  I was stunned by that production so the Lyceum's was inevitably a little bit of a let-down but only a little bit.  The harshness and fragility of the life people led in rural Scotland at that time has thankfully gone but the characters drawn surely still exist in different guises throughout modern society.

My neighbour in the Usher Hall on Friday opined that "she fair draws them in" referring to the fullness of the house, the fullness of the Caird Hall the previous evening and doubtless the fullness to come of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, brought about by the presence of Nicola Benedetti.  For it was she we had come to hear play Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.  I'm sure there are other violinists who play it well but we all believe that our local hero is the best.

A few people seated in the organ gallery could be seen shuffling out during the piece, their loyalty to Nicola (if indeed that's what brought them) not sufficient to stand up against Shostakovich's brutally beautiful phrases wrenched from the extremes of the instrument.  I love it.

As the news of Acker Bilk's death came through I was practising his great hit Stranger on the Shore which had been dished out as homework by the clarinet evening class tutor.  I do hope that my mangling of the tune neither hastened his death nor caused any turning in the grave.  

My DVD player seemed finally to have become immune to my coaxing strategies and refused to open its drawer whatever I did so I bought a new one.  Trying it out for the first time I took the opportunity to view two discs that have remained in their shrink wrapping for some considerable time.

I'm not sure how I acquired either of them.  I think Masters of European Football IV must have been a freebie that I've been too weak willed to throw away.  It purports to be a set of profiles of a dozen famous footballers but it's really just a selection of their shots at goal.  By the time I'd watched six players my boredom threshold had been well and truly breached so the remainder will remain  a mystery.

Jeane Manson is an American singer who made it big in France.  So big that she had to sell her house and horses in Normandy and retreat to a but and ben in Spain to pay off a tax bill.  I don't think that put her too near the poverty line though.  Anyway at some time she cut a DVD singing Christmas songs with a Red Army choir and I have it.  How did I get it?  Well at Barbansais there wasn't a lot to do in the evenings. The supermarkets and FNAC often had deals on DVDs, five for a tenner and so on.  I think I must have picked up this DVD as a make-weight in some such deal.  It's not to my taste though.  I only managed to get through it by fast forwarding.

But I still haven't managed to throw either of them out.

This is a sight familiar to all visitors to Glasgow but it's not the only way in which traffic cones can be diverted from their designed use by the citizens of that fine city.

At the Argyle Street end of Buchanan Street the other day I saw a member of a busking group playing a cone rather in the manner of a didgeridoo.  At intervals he pounded the pavement with its base thus exploiting its percussive possibilities as well.  How long before the weegeehorn takes its rightful place in the concert hall at the other end of the street?

I was in Glasgow for my periodic school chum lunch after which we went to the exhibition on Mackintosh's architectural career running until January at the Hunterian.  A lot of it was fairly familiar because there are really only a handful of designs of his that turned into actual buildings.  More's the pity when you compare his three imaginative designs for a small gate lodge that were rejected in favour of a dumpy cube, no doubt practical but yawningly boring.

The new cultural and education seasons are now well underway and I have been putting my bum on the seats of various theatres, concert halls and classrooms.

The Lyceum has a very sparkling looking set of worthwhile plays this year with a brand new show for openers.  Kill Johnny Glendenning garnered a fistful of four star reviews and the audience at the performance I attended clearly loved it.  I thought it was dire.  It always pains me to see such talent, hard work, skill and money devoted to trivia.  But with those reviews it will hopefully have brought many punters in and filled the theatre's treasure chest and with any luck those happy punters will come back to see the better stuff that's on offer.

Mahler and Shostakovich are amongst my favourite composers and have featured in the concerts I've been to so far.  I'm not particularly familiar with Bruckner and thoroughly enjoyed his massive 7th Symphony.  Apart from a short burst of cymbal clashing and frenetic triangle bashing in the third movement there is almost no percussion but with seventeen brass players on hand he gets a great deal of noise out.  Perhaps the piece I've enjoyed most though and which was completely unknown to me was Christoper Rouse's Flute Concerto.  It's absolutely lovely.  There are several performances on Youtube.  Try this one.

It almost makes me want to have a go at learning to play the flute but I've already launched on a Clarinet for Beginners evening class.  I so often see saxophonists double on clarinet that I'd thought I might have a go.  So far (two lessons in) it's not been too tricky and my fingers still go to the right places on the sax so no adverse impact yet.

One of my sax endeavours has just collapsed.  The guy who was running the U3A jazz improvisation group has packed it in and I don't think anyone else in the group is capable of replacing him.  I'm not too disappointed.  I got into it more or less by accident and my improvisational skills and knowledge were manifestly inadequate for the repertoire.  The improvisation work I do with my teacher is more in tune with my abilities and with the passage of time, touch wood, I'll be more up to the job of playing in a group.

But now I've got my Wednesday afternoons back and am already looking forward to devoting some of them to going to the cinema, something I've neglected for a while.  Mind you I'm not neglecting it this weekend.  I saw A Most Wanted Man yesterday, an excellent spy movie and then sat up late to re- watch Shine with its brilliant central performance by Geoffrey Rush.  David Helfgott, the subject of the film was troubled by mental illness and La Herida which I saw earlier in the evening screened within the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival also dealt very interestingly and movingly with the topic.

Moving too was the plight that many of Edinburgh's 20,000 odd Spanish residents find themselves in as depicted in the documentary En Tierra Extraña, another of the festival films.  Unable to find work at home many thousands of young Spaniards have gone abroad, many of them to Edinburgh where despite having enough degrees to throw a stick at they knuckle down to working as cleaners, dishwashers or whatever.  And they are not all young.  The people featured included a 52 year old woman with hardly a word of English who left hearth and home to look for better things.  I recognised one face on the screen as a man who drives the airport bus.  I don't suppose having a PhD (or whatever qualification he has) hinders him but it might be seen as a waste.  It's certainly a waste of the treasure spent by the Spanish state on education. I haven't found anything in English about it on the web but if your Spanish is up to it here's an article.

On the dance floor I have not been but a touring production of Top Hat was and so was Scottish Ballet.  I enjoyed both shows very much.  Richard Burton's deep rich voice reciting poems by Dylan Thomas in Scottish Ballet's Ten Poems ran the risk of overshadowing what was happening on stage but the choreographer and dancers rose to the challenge  of interpreting the poems as we listened.  This was paired with The Crucible.  Now I've been in Miller's play and know it quite well so I understood what was going on but there was no way in which a stranger to the story could have followed all its narrative thread, partly because it wasn't all there of course.  What could you do in 40 minutes.  But it was compelling and beautiful dancing so who's complaining.  Not me and not really The Guardian.

Top Hat was an entirely different kettle of fish and the entire story such as it is fitted comfortably into the evening.  I loved it and some may accuse me of double standards because if Kill John Glendenning is trivia then surely Top Hat is too.  True it is as they say not Shakespeare; but even taking away the music, the well-known songs, the well-worn old jokes, the wonderful dancing, and the sheer glitter of it all there is a kernel of human feeling and reality that the Lyceum's play simply lacks.