Vanishing Point's other show in the EIF was much more to my taste.  In Interiors the audience are observers, some might say voyeurs or even peeping toms although in truth nothing sufficiently salacious happens to justify those terms.

We are in undefined northern latitudes outside a house watching as a group of people gather for Peter's customary midwinter party celebrating the start of the steady lengthening of days that will lead to Spring and Summer.  His grandaughter is there. A young man she is interested in arrives.  A lady of Peter's age comes in with a cake dusting the snow off her boots, then a couple, unmarried but close and finally John a newcomer to the district completes the party.

There is no dialogue but some intermittent commentary, first from an unseen source but part of the way through the speaker appears on stage and watches with us as the party pursues the course that all such gatherings do. Food is served.  Drink is drunk.  Little conversational groups combine and dissolve, There is dancing.  There is happiness.  There is disappointment.  Eventually everyone leaves.

It's a warm, affectionate and poignant portrait of everyday human beings living everyday lives and is just lovely.

Just lovely too, and I dare to suggest warm and affectionate has been the audience response to the first two performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The audiences have been gratifyingly large and advance sales indicate that will continue for the rest of the week.  There were reviewers in on opening night but their thoughts do not seem yet to have seen the light of day.  When they do I'll share them here.

I went to my first Fringe show of the year earlier today.  It was completely by chance that someone gave me a free ticket.  The company were papering the house for their first performance.  But I really struck lucky.  It was a great show.  Half a dozen actors, all graduates of the Lecoq school in Paris (famous for mime) played out a number of more or less intelligble scenarios with wooden blocks, figurines, smoke effects, cotton wool clouds, fish heads, balloons, light, sound and music but very few words.  It all culminated in what I took to be an apocalyptic destruction of the world carried out under the watching eye of a man with a tree growing out of his ear.  It was performed with great skill and athleticism and lived up to that holy grail of the Fringe - weird but wonderful.

Get your tickets here.

When you read the reviews in The Scotsman and The Guardian of The Destroyed Room you can see why the International Festival invited Vanishing Point to present the work again in the Festival.  But did they rely solely on the reviews or did they see the show?

If I had read the reviews I would have been even more disappointed than I was. I struggle to see that any illumination or enlightenment was offered to us about the issues argued over in what seemed to me to be an episode of a middle class Big Brother.  You may say that theatre's job is to pose questions rather than give answers but that demands that the play formulates a question which I don't think this did with any clarity.

Rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream are coming on apace despite the problems of absentees, drop-outs and sackings that seem to attach themselves to large cast productions.  But it will be grand.

I've been time-sharing that with the Jazz Festival and the accompanying Jazz Summer School.  The thirty odd participants were split into five bands and our week's work culminated in a great little gig in the Jazz Bar this afternoon.  The band I was in played a couple of classics by Miles Davis and Duke Ellington but the theme of the week was reworking the masters so our versions presented several novel twists including a chorus of Swanee River.  Not for the faint-hearted listener.

Last weekend I saw several concerts and the head out winner was an band called Rumba de Bodas.  They presented a rocket fuelled hour and a half of great music.  Catch them on Youtube or better still live.

Second, in a very different vein was a group led by a New York based Scottish saxophonist who has produced an album of jazzed up Ivor Cutler numbers.  I swore that I wouldn't buy any CDs at the festival this year but I thought his Glasgow Dreamer project was such an interesting and worthwhile project that I shelled out for one at that gig.  I'm glad I did because I think the music comes over better on the CD than it did in the City Art Centre.  The instrumental balance is much better, thanks no doubt to mixing skills and equipment more readily found in Brooklyn than Edinburgh.

I'll pack in a few more gigs this weekend finishing off around midnight on Sunday with some of my favourite local players.

Here is one of the idiosyncrasies of the golf course on Barra.  Every green is protected by an electric fence to keep the cows at bay.  Its other notable feature is the absence of fairways. It's all rough.  The views are lovely though and it's an invigorating hillside walk.

I arrived in Stornoway on a Saturday night so the first full day of my Hebridean holiday was the Sunday.  It rained non-stop.  Even in glorious weather a Sunday in the land of the Wee Frees is quiet but in the rain it's comatose.  I spent the day driving around Lewis trying to spot an islander but they all stayed resolutely indoors and only the tourists were observable asking themselves why they hadn't started their holiday on a Monday.

I exaggerate only a little.  I got to see the standing stones at Callanish if not the inside of the visitor centre and the Doune Braes hotel not far away was open for lunch.

Mind you a young man recently returned to Lewis after a decade's absence did suggest to me that if one had to live on an island dominated by religion it was best to make it a Catholic one since then on a Sunday you could at least play golf.  Which of course I did when I got to Barra.

I played the other four courses on the islands as well. Having just seen the film Tommy's Honour it was clear that I couldn't miss playing at Askernish, a course originally laid out by Old Tom Morris in 1891 and brought back to life ten years or so ago.  It's a brilliant course but played havoc with my feet.  They're still beplastered.

The islands are famous for their beaches and here's one of them on Benbecula.  There's a lovely blue sky in the picture but the wind was blowing raw and cold so there was no danger of me putting my trunks on.

 Apart from golf I did the tourist thing and admired the landscape and visited various spots of interest.  There's an excellent museum on South Uist and not far away the remains of the village of Howbeg which I was interested to see because of a book I read recently called The French MacDonald.  Alexandre MacDonald was the son of a man who left Howbeg for France in 1746 with Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Alexandre rose to be a Marshal of France and was made a Duke by Napoleon on the battlefield of Wagram.  He came to the Hebrides in 1825 to visit the land of his fathers, met various relatives and is said to have taken a handful of Hebridean earth back to France with him which accompanied him to the grave.

These teuchters specialise in romantic tales.  You can see Flora MacDonald's birthplace or at least a cairn where her hovel is said to have been and you can have a dram in Am Politician on Eriskay named after the boat full of booze that foundered there and gave rise to the novel Whisky Galore.

There's a lot of lovely landscape to see and idyllic spots to retire to if you're into peace and quiet.

I didn't hear very much Gaelic spoken over the week.  There were a couple of old codgers chatting by the pier in Tarbert but I think that was it.  However, Gaelic is very much present on bilingual roadsigns and as a linguiphile I suppose I should welcome that.  But I have some reservations about the fact that the Gaelic and English texts are not given equal prominence.  Unlike on bilingual signs on the mainland where the text size is the same for both languages, on the islands English is allocated a significantly smaller one.  Here's an example:

It seems a bit daft to me unless the islanders have poorer eyesight than we tourists.  In the case of the brown signs aimed specifically at tourists it seems not just daft but unwelcoming.

My one regret is that I didn't find time to visit Kisimul castle, the ancient seat of the MacNeils of Barra.  I sailed past it as I left Barra bound for Oban.

It's quite a long trip but lots to see en route, especially as you sail down the Sound of Mull, although not many joined me on deck.

Lo and behold I came across Mike Mainieri's music again within days of hearing him play when looking for a new tune to work on from my current ABRSM jazz book.  A sign from on high?  Probably not but I'm now getting to grips with his Sara's Touch.

What with a saxophone weekend in the Lakes and a trip to the Hebrides I'm not going to see much of this year's film festival.  I did get to the so called opening gala, though the crowd of smartly bekilted and fashionably befrocked teeming down the steps of the Festival Theatre as a more modestly dressed crowd queued to get in rather suggested that I was going to a post gala screening.

Anyway Tommy's Honour is a very good film, well worth your seeing when it comes out on release.  The Tommy in question is the son of Old Tom Morris, both of them figures of renown in the development of golf in the 19th century and respectively youngest and oldest ever winners of the Open Championship.

The film tells a great story.  There is of course sporting triumph and defeat.  There is generational tension.  There is a love story. There is the class struggle between the gentry of the golf world and men like the Morrises.  And there is tragedy.  All of it filmed in Fife and East Lothian in six weeks during which, according to the director there was only one day of rain.

Another super family story was the highly fictional (I imagine) and highly entertaining Belle Famille. A businessman returns to France en route for a meeting in London after fifteen years in China.  He has a Chinese lady in tow to present to his mother and discovers there is a tussle over the former family home in the provinces.  The fiancee is also a colleague so he packs her off to London to keep the meeting warm for him while he investigates the old home situation.

His childhood chum is involved as is the local mayor and his late father's mistress.  He has a run in with the mistress's daughter (not sired by his own dad fortunately, otherwise social norms and possibly laws would clearly be in danger of being broken before the last reel has run).  Helped by a gloriously funny character who had a crush on him at school he finds out what dark deeds have been done in the past.

There's a scene at a concert worthy of a Brian Rix farce in which evryone runs in and out in pursuit of some aspect of the plot.  Our hero is always on the point of going to London but a turn of the plot always prevents him.  At one point he is run off the road by his childhood chum who has been in a relationship with the mistress's daughter but gets dumped and suspects it's all our hero's fault. Which of course it is. After numerous twists and turns it all ends happily for everyone as you would expect.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the screenwriter and director, known to us for his magnificent Cyrano starring Gerard Depardieu, was there for a Q&A but I didn't hang around for much of that.

Before that I saw an interesting documentary about Chile.  Chicago Boys described the influence of the moneterist school of economics centred on the University of Chicago on those Chileans who studied there.  In particular it focused on the period leading up to the overthrow of the Allende government and the subsequent dictatorship. Undoubted economic progress was made thanks to the plans and model developed by the Chicago Boys during the Pinochet period but at some cost.  One of them who served as Finance Minister made the barely believable statement that he was unaware of the human rights violations that occurred at the time.     

There was a more light-hearted air to the set of animations competing for the McLaren Award for new British animation that I saw earlier, though a couple of them had a darkish tinge.  I was particularly pleased to see Isabella the film I'd made an abortive attempt to see at the Glasgow Short Film Festival a few months ago.  Mind you I didn't give it my number 1 vote.  That went to a delightfully funny and thoroughly traditional animation about a cat's visit to the vet.  Unfortunately the competitors were split over two screenings and I couldn't get to the second so I only saw half the field.

The SNJO concert at the Queen's Hall on Friday was rather sparsely attended which was a great shame.  Tommy Smith had once again brought a guest player of world class to play with his talented band.  Maybe Mike Mainieri is not a household name to Edinburgh jazz fans (I for one had never heard of him though judging by the list of those he's played with I've probably got a few CDs on which he features) or maybe they don't like his instrument, the vibraphone.  Whatever the reason they missed a really good gig.  I hope the citizens of Glasgow and Aberdeen turned out in greater numbers.

Liz Lochhead has created very popular and successful Scots versions of a number of Moliere's plays and now she's written a play about the man himself.  She's made a very good job of it.  While it's very funny as befits its subject there are moments of sadness and loss that add a poignant seasoning.

I'm a Moliere fan so was predisposed to enjoy the show, which is the last in the Lyceum's season, but even I found the early scenes a wee bit lacking in fizz.  Fortunately things warm up and Thon Man Moliere soon starts firing on all four cylinders.  Jimmy Chisolm is superb as Moliere, especially in his rant about the King's suppression of Tartuffe and is ably supported by a cast that know their business and a technical team that know theirs.

The birdlife around here is predominantly made up of pigeons, seagulls and magpies so it was delightful to find two beautiful goldfinches perched on my balcony.  They didn't hang around long enough for me to get a picture so I've pinched one from a twitcher site and photoshopped it onto my balcony. 

Here it is, as large as life.  Well larger actually.

The RSNO did a Cole Porter concert a couple of weeks ago.  They pinned it on the coincidence of the orchestra having been founded in the same year that he was born. But no excuse was needed at all to revisit the extraordinary wealth of wonderful songs that he produced.  Amongst hosts of others the words and music for My Heart Belongs to Daddy, Begin the Beguine, Night and Day and for the musicals Kiss Me Kate and High Society all fell from his talented pen and the talented Kim Criswell delivered them with aplomb.

Richard Strauss (not to be confused with Johann the waltz king) may have written any number of songs but it was his Four Last Songs that featured as one item on the RSNO's final concert of the subscription season.  This was the first time I had heard them live and I thought they were beautiful and so much better than on any recording I've ever heard.  The main work was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  The only trouble with this is that you can't really enjoy the first three movements because all you want to hear is the fourth in which the Ode to Joy is blasted out my a large choir.  It was good when it came and the opening piece of the programme whose name I've forgotten by a young woman whose name I have also forgotten and which was inspired by some flats being blown up recently in Glasgow was another blast.

Men in the trenches of the First World War lived with daily blasts of gunfire and bombs and many fell victim to shellshock as a result. This was the case for one of the three young soldiers whose experiences were dramatised in the National Theatre of Scotland's 306:Dawn.

306 is the number of men who were executed for cowardice during the war and dawn was when sentence was carried out.  Dawn was also when the first performance of the play took place in a barn a few miles outside Perth.  I went to a performance at a more usual time but I don't think the play can have lost much in atmosphere thanks to the exceptional performances, the fine music and an inspired presentation.

Here's a model of what was inside the barn.  The NTS has always favoured unconventional stages and this is no exception.

The seating areas are the dark clumps.  The action took place on the raised grey areas, in the passageways between them and on walkways behind the palisades of giant wooden rifles that surround the whole.

It's a very moving experience watching the men being overcome by the horror and stress of exposure to the brutality of warfare allied to the army's rigid and compassionless regime.  As the review in The Scotsman put it " At the end of the play, many in the audience will weep. There’s also a place, though, for a deep and implacable anger at the cruel, life-denying cult of death and killing that held this all-male culture in its grip. This is an indelibly powerful work of music theatre that will have that impact wherever it is performed, for many years to come."

I'm going to quote Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman again, this time about another WWI play that I saw at the Citizens and which puzzled me.  Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme she says "has never been a comfortable play for those who like things simple, in terms of culture, sexuality, or Irish politics".

I couldn't make up my mind whether the play was an exercise in bigging up Irish protestantism, which I found uncomfortable, or in likening the folly of prejudice to the folly of war.  I'm indebted to Mark Brown in The Telegraph for some enlightenment when in introducing his review of the production he says "Just as the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 was a historic juncture in the shaping of Irish Republican politics, so the Battle of the Somme was  formative in the evolution of its rival tradition, Ulster Loyalism."

As a theatre production it was excellent and I recommend reading both those reviews, Scotsman and Telegraph, as well as a little bit about Frank McGuinness its author for a better appreciation.

Maybe I should have done that before going to see it but I prefer to make up my own mind about things even when a bit of background might sometimes help.  I was in fact a bit worried when I went to see Scottish Ballet's Swan Lake because I had inadvertently read an uncomplimentary review of it in The Spectator a week or two beforehand.

Fortunately I enjoyed it for the most part although as Roger remarked the swans' costumes were somewhat unflattering, reminding him strongly of M&S underwear.  (You have to walk through a lot of that to get to the mens' department.)

That apart it all looked beautiful.  Actionwise Act 1 was a bit bland but when Act 2 got going,  and the black swan appeared with her henchmen it heated up.

Photo by Andy Ross

Some reviews didn't like it because it stripped out a lot of the traditional story.  My relative unfamiliarity with the ballet protected me from that concern and Thom Dibdin who clearly knows his ballet swept those concerns aside in his review.  And what is there not to like in Tchaikovsky's wonderful music. 

I moved on from the Greeks to the Romans by starting to read Robert Harris's second novel about Cicero and in parallel with it Mary Beard's Roman history SPQR.  Her first chapter covers the same ground as the first half of the novel, the Catiline conspiracy, and it's fascinating to see how the real events have been woven into the imagined.  Both books are absorbing and happily cost me rather less than the original hardbacks.

Before either of those civilisations flourished, way back in the pagan days, to judge by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring people made some very strange noises and I was intrigued to see the RSNO deploy a washboard to make some of them.  I don't know if that was their idea or if Stravinsky actually scored it that way but it gave me a little fellow feeling with the great orchestra for I once played the washboard myself.

I think once is the operative word for I can recall playing only one gig.  It was in the YWCA in Kircaldy back in the mists of time.  Of course it might be that the skiffle band went on to greater things without me, my playing having produced sounds too much like Rite of Spring for their taste.

Stravinsky appeals to my taste but so do lots of other things and I had a splendid evening at a concert dedicated to Cole Porter who wrote so many wonderful songs with great melodies and wickedly clever lyrics.  The polar opposite but equally pleasurable was the Arild Andersen Trio gig.  Andersen is a Norwegian double bass player and his trio includes our own Tommy Smith on tenor saxophone.  So the music was jazz but that's a broad church and there are lots of jazz fans who can't stand their particular sub-genre.  There's a website that lists 28 different types of jazz plus another dozen musical styles that it regards as jazz related and I searched around it to try to put a name to the trio's style.  Post Bop and Post Fusion Contemporary seem to be the most appropriate but what's in a name. The best thing is to listen so here's a tune that I think is a good example.

There was a lot of listening in The Grads production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  It's a great play and this was an excellent production.  It got one of the most enthusiastic reviews I've read in a long time so rather than witter on let me direct you to IT.  The run's finished.  Too bad you missed it but check out our website for what's on in the Fringe.

I took my visitors to hear the SNJO doing Dave Brubeck, to an evening of folk music, albeit newly written, and to see an excellent play at the Traverse.  Once I'd bought the tickets I realised that I had seen it before.  But it well merited a second viewing and this was I think an even better production of Right Now than the previous one.

It's 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 whose early friendliness turns into an intense and unsettling intimacy.  It's shot through with humour but a darker, disquieting flavour never dissipates and at the end a changing of places leaves you wondering what was real and what was imaginary.

As soon as they left I was off to Keswick again, not for kitchen duties this time but to see Fiona's first class production of The Hired Man.  From the novel by Melvyn Bragg with music by Howard Goodall it traces the fortunes of John Tallentine, a farm labourer and miner, and his family from the 1890s to the 1920s against a background of social and economic change in the countryside and the shock of the first world war.  The company brought it off very well and it made for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.  I also had the pleasure of catching up with some old friends who'd come up from the south to see the show.

Back in Edinburgh the next day I had a quick tootle on the clarinet in preparation for my evening class.  I enjoy the class but I'm not making much progress primarily if not entirely because I seldom make time to practice.  I'm fairly disciplined about the saxophone but having spent time with that it's hard to summon up energy and enthusiasm for the clarinet.

The kids in the TSYJO probably practice hard but undoubtedly start from a base of considerably more talent and natural musicality than I have.  They gave a great concert on Sunday afternoon with sparkling playing, not least a duet between Tommy Smith on tenor and a twelve year old Jessica on trumpet.

I've had a go once or twice at reading The Iliad but have never got very far.  Homer does go on a bit and my spirit has always drooped after twenty pages or so.  I'm sorry to say that I had much the same reaction to Chris Hannan's version at The Lyceum.  That's a shame because it's a very fine work, beautifully staged and with nice humorous Gods in attendance.  Critics other than myself have given it lots of stars but really that Achilles is such a constantly bad-tempered little hero that you just want to pick him up and give him a good skelp on the heel, rather than spend two and a half hours waiting for him to see the error of his ways.

The show also suffered for me by comparison with Zinnie Harris's This Restless House that I'd seen a few days earlier at The Citizens. Based on The Oresteia it's even more of a nasty saga than The Iliad and starts not long after that finishes when Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War.

The first of the three plays is stupendous.  It's wild, it's gory, it's fast and furious.  It's tragic and comic and loud and absolutely bursting with excitement.  The second comes close but is not such an assault on the senses and the third was a little puzzling.  It moves away from the world of myth and magic into modern psychiatry.  It may well be a sensible take on the curses of the ancient world to invoke psychosis and paranoia but Mark Brown in The Herald puts it well for me when he says the third play's setting "creates a discombobulating breach in both the tone and the structure of the drama."

But the whole is really wonderful.

There's nothing like the imminent arrival of visitors to bring out the sleeping domestic god within so I have spent the bulk of today with duster, mop and hoover, even to the extent of moving furniture to get at hidden nastiness and realign the Moroccan rug.

Above and beyond the call of duty I cleared out the pamphlet store that is the lower level of my coffee table casting into the recycling without a second thought gems that are not yet twelve months old.  I haven't gone so far as to dispose of the 2011 Fringe programme nestling in a drawer in the spare bedroom but one has one's limits.

The trouble with this blog business is that it's so easy to get behind unless you have enormous self discipline.  The more you do the easier it is to get behind.  Here we are very nearly at the end of April and my reactions to nine plays, two films, two concerts and a science festival evening remain unrecorded.  That's not to mention TV, radio, books and the dreaded internet.  Well so be it.

I've also fallen behind with my coffee drinking.  I went into the freezer after lunch to fetch a new bag of coffee to find that the only one I had was a "special limited edition Christmas Blend".  To be enjoyed it said with mince pies and Christmas jumpers.  Neither were available but there had been several short showers of snow like stuff on the drive up from the Lakes this morning so perhaps the coffee wasn't being drunk in an entirely unseasonable setting.
  

After three days on the trot of getting up at 7am to help in the B&B you'd think I'd have been glad to get to bed early when I got home but I couldn't tear myself away from the telly before midnight.

That's when the wonderful rerun of the 1966 election results programme which had occupied the BBC Parliament channel since 8 in the morning ended.  I saw only the last four or five hours; those  that were originally broadcast on the afternoon of the day following the election.

It was a feast for the memory.  All the journalists and presenters who were household names at the time were there.  The studio was under the control of Cliff Michelmore.  Bob McKenzie and David Butler presented the numbers and analysed the swings.  Iain Trethowan gave political commentary.  Robin Day interrogated Grimond and Heath (Wilson kept himself aloof which rather surprised me).  Smooth James Mossman gathered comments from a bar in the square mile. Fyfe Robertson stumbled along the production line at Fords in Dagenham drawing out nuggets of opinion from the workers. Trios from various interest groups were marshalled by Kenneth Allsop to give their take on the result.  He also handled George Woodcock from the TUC who delivered vigorous opinions.  We heard from the likes of Esmond Wright for the Scottish results, Michael Barratt in the Midlands and so on.

They took us out to various live counts, to Downing Street (no security gates and the press milling around onto the very steps of the house) to see Wilson arrive back at number 10 with his majority increased from less than a handful to nearly a hundred, to Heath's losing press conference.  He was in great form, relaxed, cheerful, humorous, positive.  Having got used to his sourpuss image after being supplanted by Thatcher it was a delight to see this earlier incarnation.

Leaving aside the fact that I was watching a squarish black and white video recording sitting slightly unsteadily in the middle of my wide screen it was interesting to see how far from our present flashy computer graphics we were fifty years ago.

Individual results appeared on caption cards reminiscent of silent film dialogue frames but less professionally created.  Apart from a couple of block graphs the principal information presentation form was rather like an oldfashioned cricket scoreboard.  The most high tech item was the swingometer, lovingly tended by Bob McKenzie and whose development in later years was even more lovingly supervised by Peter Snow.

The most striking difference, noted by my inner feminist, was the absence of women.  None of the presenters, pundits or interviewees were women.  Not a total absence though, illustrated in a slightly surreal sequence in which two presenters held a discussion. Between them sat a woman who stared fixedly ahead hands resting motionless on the desk while remarks passed over her head like tennis balls over a net.  One of many female gofors I suppose.

Did that strike me as odd or unfair at the time I wonder?  I don't suppose so.  We did after all have some women fronting serious TV programmes, such as Mary Marquis and Joan Bakewell.  The vanguard of the many who have followed.

The Sunday Times this week selected Stockbridge as the best place to live in Scotland.  I can only think that their man must have been at the exceptionally fine concert that the Dunedin Wind Band and others presented in Stockbridge Parish Church on Friday evening.

For the dozens of Facebook friends and others who failed to respond to my invitation to attend, indeed not a single one turned up, here's what you missed.

And afterwards there was my homemade gingerbread.  I shan't give you the chance again however hard you beg.

The tunnel taking Edinburgh trains out of Queen Street station closed to traffic yesterday for five months and my fruitless journey to Glasgow which had taken an hour via Motherwell was further exacerbated by the hour and twenty minutes ride home by way of the innumerable stopping points on the Airdrie line.

Fruitless through my own fault.  I'd been to the Glasgow Short Film Festival on Thursday where a film I had some involvement with was showing; Dear Peter , which I learn today won the audience award.  I had gone back to see a film made by an Edinburgh College of Art graduate I'd met while doing a film there.  Unfortunately I didn't check the programme first and found when I got there that the film had been shown in the afternoon.  To sharpen my disappointment Isabella won the Scottish Short Film award.

Before going to the festival I'd been to the Fairfield's shipyard museum on one of my periodic jaunts with Andrew.  It's in their renovated offices which are largely given over to providing space for local businesses but quite an extensive set of rooms document the history of the yard from its beginnings to the present day.  It's well worth a trip to Govan. 

We were fortified for the excursion by lunch at the Bavaria Brauhaus.  New to me and possibly quite recently established, as the name suggests it's all German beer and grub (wine is available too).  My lunch looked so nice I had to snap it

It was called Spanferkel on the menu.  That's really suckling pig and this was humble pork belly but it was absolutely delicious and highly recommended should you find yourself in Bothwell Street at lunchtime.  The beer on the other hand was nothing to write home about.  But I speak as someone for whom lager is an unacquired taste.

The view of Edinburgh's skyline from in front of Inverleith House has always been one of my favourites and Monday morning's mist lent it an extra je ne sais quoi.  The mist was soon replaced by glorious blue skies and warm Spring sunshine that was no doubt further encouragement to the rhododendrons and other plants in the Botanics whose buds can scarcely contain their impatient flowers.

After my stroll around the gardens I spent a little while watching the controlled mayhem taking place in Inverleith park under a banner reading EPSSA, which I hazard to guess stands for Edinburgh Primary Schools Sports Association.  Countless kids were milling about being marshalled by loudhailing adults into appropriate groups to run around the park.  I don't know if prizes were being awarded but I hope if they were there were a few to spare for the teachers whose task looked to me a lot harder than that of the runners.

I suppose it's a hard task to turn a popular novel and even more popular film into a stage play.  Get Carter at the Citizens was such a play.  I knew nothing about either the book or the film so was judging the work purely on what I saw and heard.  The staging was super; a vast mountain of bricks behind a foreground space that served as laying out parlour, casino, bar and numerous other spaces with the adroit addition or removal of key bits and pieces.  A drum kit sat down left and was played from time to time by the main protagonist's dead brother.

The first half worked well for me.  Little shafts of light were shed on the plot, characters were drawn, tension built up and I went out at the interval full of expectation for an interesting second act.  Unfortunately it all got a bit convoluted and silly. Multiple deaths occurred, revelations tumbled over one another and it all seemed a waste of an afternoon. 

Many years ago in my last year at university I was down in London for an interview and had to stay overnight.  Looking for something to do in the evening I wandered over to the Festival Hall and heard Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto for the first time.  It's been one of my desert island discs ever since and I was delighted to have another chance to hear it played live at the Queen's Hall last week.  There was some nice stuff by Mozart and by CPE Bach on the programme as well but the piano concerto was the tops.

My nephew Max's funeral, like many, was an odd mixture of sadness and conviviality.  I didn't know him at all well and learnt much of interest from those who spoke.  He shared many of his opinions with his dad but was a bit more active in trying to implement them.  His dying had the merit if one can call it that of being pretty much organised by Max himself.  He’d written a lot about dying during the course of his illness and was active with others in developing ideas about controlling and planning end of life  You can read some of his stuff here http://peoplethinkingaction.blogspot.co.uk/.

Death by hanging is the lot of dozens of people caught up in the witchcraft paranoia of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.  Although based on 17th century events that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts he wrote it in response to the communist paranoia stoked up by Senator McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee in the 50s.  I like the play very much partly because I found the part of Revd Hale a very satisfying role to play but also because of the work's richness of character and dialogue, its emotional charge and its forensic examination of intolerance.  The Lyceum's current production appealed to me very much.  The central matter that sparks off the whole dreadful tale is Abigail's rejection by John Proctor.  Her continuing desire for him, her jealousy and her anger lead her to concoct a tale of witchcraft on the basis of some youthful high jinks in the woods.  She's normally thought of as a wholly bad egg.  This is the first production I've seen that made me feel some sympathy for her.  It's also a splendid example of truly ensemble acting with around twenty actors taking part.

A rather smaller ensemble of two plus a little extra at the end took the stage in Blackbird at the Citizens.  This is a play about child abuse that was very well received in the EIF ten years ago.  I was spending a sunny summer in France at the time so had not seen it.  This revival delighted The Telegraph but struck me as no more than a thoroughly competent production of a perfectly well crafted play.  My companions were less generously opinioned.

In the great theatre that is sport Andy Murray did another sterling job at the weekend defeating almost single handedly (Jamie joined him in the doubles) the Japanese team in the first round of this year's Davis Cup competition.  His Sunday afternoon match was draining to watch so what it must have been to play in goodness knows.  He looked absolutely knackered as he dragged victory out of the fifth set.

Brooklyn is a novel that I bought after hearing its author Colm Toibin speak at last year's Book Festival.  I enjoyed this tale of a young girl's emigration from Ireland to New York circa 1950, her homesickness, her adaptation to American life, her romantic involvement, the tragedy that strikes her family and her subsequent return to Ireland.  Her return is intended to be temporary but things develop that threaten that intention.

I shan't spoil your enjoyment by disclosing what happens but suggest you run along to a cinema and see the beautiful film they have made of it.  Take some Kleenex.

What a musical weekend I have had.  As forecast Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto in the hands of  Boris Giltburg was exhilarating.  It's a high octane number so you'd expect him to choose a relaxed little ballad as an encore but not a bit of it.  He raced through another physically demanding piece albeit a lot shorter.

Even the orchestra most unusually played an encore.  I don't know what it was but it was a reasonably substantial latin sounding piece.  Not surprising given the conductor was Mexican.  It was very jolly with lots of odd percussion including at one point the conductor giving his head a knock.

The evening had started with another jolly piece called Naughty Limericks by a Russian I'd never heard of and after the Rachmaninov we were treated to a symphony by my favourite Russian composer, Shostakovich.  Lovely stuff.

 I should  have been at an SCO concert on Saturday but forty winks induced by an afternoon tea party although they ended in time for me to make a mad dash to the Queen's Hall doused my enthusiasm so I didn't go.  I mustn't drink so much tea in the afternoons in future.

On Sunday I was making music as well as listening to it at the Scottish Saxophone Academy's  saxophone day in the Roxy. Philippe Geiss who, inter alia, was the main man organising the sax congress I went to in Strasbourg was there to run a couple of master classes and we all played in various combinations in the concert that closed the day.

Not having had enough I went on to hear my chums the Jazz Romantics in an evening of swing in a bar I hadn't been in for over fifteen years.  It used to be a favourite post rehearsal refreshment stop called Maxies with pretensions to being a wine bar.  Now it's a mini brewery real ale place with twenty pumps on the bar counter.  Well maybe only a dozen I didn't actually count.  Fortunately they still sell wine and the ambience is still delightful.  And the music was good and there were dancers to watch as well - a jolly good round off to the weekend.

#Likes was performed on Saturday but didn't live up to its name as far as the adjudicator was concerned.  I thought too that the applause was polite rather than enthusiastic so the audience may have shared his opinion.  Disappointment reigned supreme until dissolved in alcohol.

Endgame at the Citz on the other hand was greeted with lots of applause.  It exhibited what might be thought of as contradictions.  It was both entertaining and incomprehensible.  I sought understanding in the reviews but found none.

Incomprehensibility was the order of the day though.  I was going on from Glasgow to a jazz event in Kirkcaldy before returning to Edinburgh but rail ticket pricing meant that I would save £10 by going back to Edinburgh before setting out for Kirkcaldy.  So I did.

The jazz was good.  Vocalist and fiddler Seonaid Aitken fronts a group called Rose Room who were joined by saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski and the Capella String Quartet and played a mixture of great tunes from Django Reinhardt's Paris and from the Great American Songbook.

Amongst great Russian piano concertos one of the best known, thanks to its prominence on the soundtrack of Brief Encounter, is Rachmaninov's 2nd which was given a rousing airing in the Usher Hall by Boris Giltburg with the RSNO.  He's back with them this week to bash through Rachmaninov's 3rd which I'm sure will be equally exciting.

In between those two giant concertos the RSNO played the pretty gigantic Symphony No. 1 by Vaughan Williams, known as A Sea Symphony.  There must have been over 100 musicians on stage and I counted a choir of around 130.  Together with baritone and soprano soloists those forces created wonderful music.  I can't say that it particularly brought the sea to my mind but I thoroughly enjoyed the noise and it somewhat dwarfed Debussy's La Mer which was presented in the same programme.

Back in the land of incomprehensibility, until you applied a little thought to it was the sub-prime mortgage and banking fiasco which was ably and entertainingly explained and illuminated through the lives of a number of participants in the movie The Big Short.  The film or the book it came from should be part of the school curriculum to help kids get wise to the big bad world of money.    

I've been busy rehearsing the one-act play that Claire has written for the SCDA competition.  It's called #Likes and is about current preoccupations with fame and celebrity.  The protagonists are two teenage girls who are simultaneously best friends and Youtube rivals.  I play their headmaster.  It's a Catholic school so I get to invoke the Holy Virgin from time to time.

In the professional theatre I saw a very enjoyable production of The Weir at The Lyceum.  It's a very gentle, poignant and profound picture of unexceptional lives in rural Ireland.  It was one of those productions in which everything seemed perfect.  There was an excellent set with a clever back wall that changed from see through to solid.  The characters were beautifully drawn and whenever I gave it a thought I was impressed by how skillfully and unobtrusively the director had deployed her cast about the stage to best effect.

The Dunedin Wind Band had a playaway day but because it took place on the day following a Burns Supper held in my flat I played safe and didn't put my name down.  It was the wise choice.  A late night and a belly full of haggis and drink would not have been a sound basis for a day of music making.

But this last weekend I've blown a lot of wind through my saxophone.  I was up in Edzell for the second year running for a couple of days playing and socialising.  Here's the group of happy campers.  I'm barely visible near the top of the stairs.