My pigeon is growing.  The adults leave it alone most of the time now.  I suppose they are off looking for worms to stuff down its gullet.

Amazon it seems to me used always to send stuff to me by Royal Mail but this week they used something called Amazon Logistics.  I think that's just an umbrella term they use to conceal the actual carrier.  Anyway the one who came to me must have applied the logic in the name to his task and decided that although the two little packages he had would have passed easily through the letterbox they were not letters.  So he put a card through my letterbox (stretching the definition a bit) and left my packages with a neighbour.  My neighbours are not usually in at 1pm but this chap works shifts and was at home.   I was also at home in fact so either I'm getting deafer with time or he knocked very quietly.

I complained to Amazon about the stupidity of the affair and got an email that gave every sign of having been written by a human being who had read my missive.  Either that or they've got hold of some very clever email analysis software, perhaps from GCHQ.

The Lyceum finished their season with a sparkling production of a play by Goldoni and having just been the Teatro Goldoni (not to the show that was on, it sounded dire) and the Goldoni Museum (hardly worth the 5 euros entry) I felt I couldn't miss it and I'm glad I didn't.

In The Venetian Twins the eponymous duo arrive independently and unknown to one another in Verona, one fleeing from justice and the other to marry a lady he has never met.  The other characters, who aren't aware either that there are twins around continually find themselves in situations in which they believe they are dealing with one twin when it is in fact the other.  Much confusion and entertainment results.  

The adaptation into very Scottish English abounds with humour of the seaside postcard variety,  but also has some keenly satirical fun with early feminism and male pomposity.  There's slapstick and the engagement of the audience in pantomime fashion (less the community singing I'm glad to say).  It all adds up to a splendid entertainment.

The SCO and chorus gave a totally different but equally splendid entertainment in the presentation of Haydn's Creation.  I hadn't realised before that this is a relatively lighthearted work, far away in spirit from the serious religiosity of the cantatas of Bach for example.  It was sung in English and sung very clearly by both chorus and soloists so there was no barrier to understanding and the soloists made the most of the elements of humour in the piece.  I'd heard it once before as music behind a ballet in Rio but I don't recall a feeling of lightheartedness in the dance or the music.  I expect that was a failing of sensitivity on my part.  If it's not spelt out in bold caps I'll miss it.      

The Traverse had a very good play on last week. By a Quebecois writer Right Now is the story of a young couple who appear to have lost a child and whose lives are taken over by a rather odd family living next door. Despite dealing with loss it was very amusing, terribly well performed and at the end left us wondering what was real and what was imaginary.

Two extremely bloodthirsty families are at odds in Titus Andronicus which the Grads have just presented.  I suppose the play could be considered as a 16th century precursor of Hammer horror movies and treated on that level it's quite fun but I think Shakespeare was wise to abandon the genre and move on to much more interesting stuff.

It was done in the round in what's a new venue for us, Assembly Roxy.  It's a great space and the staging in the desert was excellent. ( It took two hours for a substantial team of which I was a puny member to move that sand out on Saturday night.)  In general I enjoyed the show, all the cast were convincing and some performances such as SJ's Lavinia who is beaten, raped, has her hands cut off and her tongue torn out were truly excellent.  But what a lot of tosh.  

The Roxy set up for Titus (photo by Gordon Hughes) and how it looked less than 24 hours afterwards during a recital by Sue Mckenzie and Ingrid Sawers. Saxophone and piano make a great combination.

Minimalist music is not everyone's cup of tea but I'm a fan so went hotfoot to The Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow this weekend to enjoy a plethora of fascinating pieces from Steve Reich's monumental Music for 18 Musicians that runs non stop for an hour and demands super competent players to the same composer's Clapping Music, a five minute piece for two but which was performed by a group of school children on this occasion.

I didn't make it on Friday to hear Philip Glass's big concert nor did I grace the midnight to three art college gig and I gave the three hour Sunday morning session for kids a body swerve but I still managed to hear about ten hours of music plus a very entertaining session with Reich in conversation with Colin Currie.

It was not the first time I'd set foot in the concert hall building but it was the first time I'd attended an event there.  The auditorium is splendid and there were plenty of other good spaces for the free concerts that took place in the afternoons and for Saturday night when the RSNO were also in action in the building.

It was the first time I'd heard any of this music live with the possible exception of Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds which I think Michael Nyman's band played on a visit to Edinburgh a long time ago.  It confirmed my conviction that recorded music is a poor second best to live performance.

Hard to pick a favourite from around twenty-five disparate pieces but maybe Horses of Instruction by Steve Martland did it for me.  But I'd happily hear them all again.

During a break on Saturday I popped round to see the Theatre Royal's new front door and foyer.  It's very smart and there's a lovely staircase spiralling its way heavenwards that I couldn't resist snapping.

There are a number of displays in the foyer including a wonderful video that compresses the two day set up of an opera into two minutes and fifty five seconds by running at breakneck speed.  Here are a few stills from it.

There are dozens of international days for this or that recognised by the United Nations.  They are listed here.

One of them is International Jazz Day which falls today.  It's been going for four years and is being celebrated with concerts throughout the world, including at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow.  But the epicentre this year is in Paris where there are multiple events taking place. France holds a very special place in the history of jazz, having welcomed many black American jazzmen who were discriminated against in their own country and given them a space in which to work freely.

The main gig is being held in the Unesco building and is being streamed live over the internet.  I am watching it as I write.  Herbie Hancock has just announced that next year's gig will be hosted by Barack Obama in the White House.  It would be nice to be there but I rather think I'll have to be content with the internet.

A glimpse or two of the amazing city of Venice where I've recently spent a week.  It's narrow winding streets many of which don't seem to lead anywhere are daunting at first and it's easy to lose your way, even for the ultra modern traveller equipped with GPS, but before long you can move around the town like a native.

Unless you can walk on water you're also very likely to use the vaporetti, the wonderful water-buses that go up and down the Grand Canal and serve the various islands that make up the city.  They're expensive but fun.  You even get to the airport by boat. 

Venice's most famous boat is of course the gondola and dozens serve the tourists at a not inconsiderable profit to their owners.  In theory there are also special gondolas that act as ferries from one side of the Grand Canal to the other (useful given that there are few bridges along its 4km length) but I never saw any in action.

There's stacks of art in galleries and churches but the city itself was enough of an open air art gallery for me on this trip so I only went indoors for food, drink and music.  Vivaldi's Four Season's is everywhere.  Much though I like it you can get too much of a good thing so I avoided it.  I had hoped that there would be an opera on at the famous La Fenice.  There wasn't but I went just the same, mainly to see the inside of the building, and the concert of renaissance madrigals that I attended was very appropriate for the architectural style.  It's famous for having burnt down and about a dozen firemen were on duty throughout the evening, something I've never seen anywhere before.  There were also lots of usher type people and a souvenir shop in operation but not a coffee or an ice-cream, let alone a drink to be had.

I went to some other reasonably enjoyable musical events though I found the electronic clarinet gig hard to warm to.  At least it was free. 

The bottom right photo above is where I was staying.  Fans of the novels of Dona Leon will be excited to learn that it's in the very palazzo in which il commissario Brunetti has his flat albeit on a different floor.  My friends (who have written guides to Venice focusing on locations associated with the Brunetti books) were very excited but I took it in my stride.

I'm no pigeon fancier but I felt bad this morning when I chased a pigeon off my balcony only to discover that she had made a nest in the corner and produced a couple of eggs.

 Was my action destined to kill two chicks before they were even born?  Maybe not, mum is back on the job.

When I arrived in Obertauern for a skiing holiday this year I was relieved to find that I had just missed a week of celebrations of the town's fifteen minutes of fame - the visit of the Beatles in 1965 to shoot some snow scenes for the film Help!

As well as holding a week of jollity they have erected this permanent memorial and other installations that I take to be temporary but you never know to what lengths fans in combination with tourist offices will go.  Wogblog tells the full exciting story of the fab four's visit.

The weather was not the unrelieved blue sky and sunshine of my last visit so I took one day off to visit Saltzburg which celebrates its connection with another musician of renown.  Arguably Mozart has been memorialised in a less dignified manner than the Beatles by the invention of Mozart Balls and the opening of shops devoted to their sale.

You know you are someplace swanky when the lemon to squeeze on your pork comes in a little yellow muslin bag tied up with a ribbon.

For the people who know these things today's eclipse had been in their diaries for centuries but I only heard about it last night.  So as the day dawned bright and cloudless I was unequipped to take advantage of the fine eclipse viewing conditions.

I risked my sight to cast a few brief screwed up glances heavenward with little success.  I found my ski goggles provided no protection.  I looked at the sun through a bottle of red wine seeing only a Rorschach ink blot that revealed nothing.  I tried the sun's reflection in my dirty window panes but that was too bright.  I poked my camera towards the sky thinking that I could at least get a photo but all I got was an ill defined but very bright blob.

I got very excited when the circle of light cast through the pinhole device that I created had a dark bite taken out of it till I realised this was not the moon but one of those undescended chards made famous in an American vote count some years ago.

So I gave up and watched it on the telly.

However, after it was past its peak and the moon's retreat was underway the sky clouded over and every so often for ten minutes or so as the cloud cover varied there was just the right degree of veiling for me to see the crescent shadow on the sun without going blind.  A result.

The A Play, A Pie and A Pint season started this week and Siobhan and I went to the first offering at lunchtime.  After the half dozen concerts I've been to this month it was nice to be led back into drama by the mellifluous Welsh voices of the three woman cast of Leviathan.  Especially given the lovely text that Matthew Trevannion, the author, had given them.

Set in a council house garden on a fine sunny day we met Mavis, who described herself at one point as having been a functioning alcoholic, her daughter Karen who slumps in an armchair eyes closed most of the time, stirring every so often to deliver coherent but disturbing monologues and Hannah, Karen's daughter, who has narrowed down the potential father of her unborn child to a list of three.

There is a fourth character whom we never see.  This is a murderous moggie who is busy wiping out the birds that visit the garden.  I'm sure that's very important and that Mavis taking an injured but still breathing bird into the house towards the end of the play with the stated intention of nursing it back to health is crucial to our understanding of the work.

But I didn't understand anything by it.  On the other hand there's a great deal of humour and I loved the cut and thrust of the dialogue between Mavis and Hannah.  They argue over Hannah's way of life.  They argue over semantics - gypos versus travellers.  "Travellers!" says Hannah "I went to school with most of them."  They argue over Karen.  Hannah screaming that the woman needs her mental health sorted out while Mavis maintains she only needs to rest.

What's it all in aid of?  Who knows but it's very well done and mightily entertaining.  

GB's victory huddle after Andy Murray saw off John Isner in straight sets to seal the tie.  Mind you he made it difficult for himself.  He was a bit shaky early in the match and at points throughout but managed to pull rabbits out of hats when he had to.  I guess he was feeling the pressure of both the expectation and the necessity of a win.  Isner in turn clearly was desperate to redeem himself from his failure on Friday and tried too hard at times.

Fortunately Murray's less than flawless first serves were matched by Isner's surprising difficulty in coping with Murray's second serves. 

GB now play France in July and given the wealth of French tennis talent that will be a tough one.

James Ward came on court at The Emirates Arena in Glasgow yesterday after Andy Murray had comfortably beaten Douglas Young in a couple of hours in the Davis Cup tie between GB and USA.

James ranks a full 90 places below John Isner, who is a one-time top ten player so I for one didn't expect to be late home but how wrong I was.  It was a gargantuan battle from the start.  The players were never more than a point or two apart in the entire five hours of play.

Ward stayed with Isner through the first set to force a tie-break that he narrowly lost and again lost the second set by a slender margin.  He got a second wind in the third set and came out a winner at 6-3.  The fourth set ended in a second tie-break but this time Ward won it with points to spare.

Then came the marathon fifth.  Thankfully it didn't quite reach the extremes of Isner's match against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon a couple of years ago otherwise I'd still be there but it ran on until Isner finally fell to Ward 13-15.

The crowd was delighted and not a little astonished.  The pleasure of the victory mitigated to some degree my trudge through the rain all the way to Queen St station where I caught the ten o'clock home.

I got home a few hours earlier today having witnessed another excellent five set match in which the world's best doubles players, the Bryan brothers were mightily discomfited and very nearly dislodged from their perch by Jamie Murray and Dominic Inglot who took them to 9-7 in the final set. 

GB need to win only one match out of two tomorrow to progress to the quarter finals and I'll be there rooting for them.

Waiting for play to start

The Toss

Serried Snappers

Cheese figures too in The Caucasian Chalk Circle when Azdak, sheltering the fleeing Grand Duke (though he doesn't know it) gives him a lump of cheese and advises him to "look at it mournfully - because it's already disappearing - like all good things".  But at least he gets to eat it.

Azdak is one of the parts I've most enjoyed playing and seeing the Lyceum's fine production in the company of other veterans of The Grads 2006 production brought back pleasant memories.  My memory wasn't perfect because I only remembered that I'd also played another role when I saw the character on stage and I signally failed to remember another one even when he appeared and had to be reminded of it afterwards.

There was lots of lively music in CCC and for an entirely different but equally spirited genre I was back in the same theatre the following evening for a wonderful concert organised by Jazz Scotland  featuring Ravi Coltrane, son of the great John, and his quartet. They were preceded by New Focus, a Scottish quartet led by Konrad Wiszniewski and Euan Stevenson. 

Jazz is a very broad church with many styles.  Ragtime, dixieland, swing, hard bop, acid jazz, fusion and free are amongst the plethora of sub-genre names that rear their heads in writing on the subject.  I don't rightly know what to call what I heard from those players but it was very much today's jazz from both groups.  Perhaps with a sweeter more contemplative accent from the Scots compared to a grungier more urgent tone from the Americans but that's a broad characterisation denied by examples from either side. The best thing is to listen to it and not bother about the taxonomy.

Joe Temperley and Brian Kellock will undoubtedly provide equally wonderful music tomorrow but it will be more firmly linked to the former's long and distinguished career with the great bands of the 60s and his sojourn in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.   

"Later we'll go next door where we can sample some cheeses and see how a number of different wines combine with them."

Those were approximately the words of the chap leading the wine tasting at the French Institute which we had been led to believe would last from 6 to 8.  So as the slides slid past and his mellifluous tones led us through the geology, the climate and the agronomy of the Loire valley in heart stoppingly beautiful French our estimate of when that cheese and wine nirvana would arrive which at 6 had been comfortably positioned around 7 moved uncomfortably closer to 8.

Having genteelly sipped our way through one glass of a Muscadet and one of a Menetou-Salon over nearly two hours were we destined to a rapid swallow of the promised five remaining wines and a pig-like gorging of bread and cheese in the last quarter?

Well no quarter was given for the release to hit the next door feast came at ten past eight.  No good for those with an 8.30 dinner reservation in a restaurant on the other side of the city.  Caveat vinoamator next time.

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.