In the aftermath of celebrating yesterday the 30th edition of  International Dance Day the fact that today is the very first International Jazz Day has understandably slipped under most people's radar. 

Not a trumpet has sounded in Edinburgh but festivities have taken place from Algeria to Uruguay and Glasgow has beaten the drum for the UK.  Not a lot to look forward to now until the 70th International Man of the World Day in December.     

There's a very good little programme on Radio 4 called More or Less that lifts the veil from statements and reports of a statistical or mathematical nature normally emanating from government or the like to expose their shaky foundations.

I've done my own veil lifting of today's statement by Royal Mail in defence of the increase in postage rates asserting that UK rates remain half those pertaining in France or Germany.  I know nothing about German rates but I was very sure that this was nonsense with respect to France.

A straightforward comparison of the cost of first and second class stamps in the UK and in France shows that French stamps are cheaper, but Royal mail's assertion is not entirely nonsense. If for example you send a letter weighing 100gms by second class mail in France it will indeed cost you twice as much as it would in the UK.

But in looking at a dozen cases between 20gms and 1000gms that's the only case I found that supports their assertion.  In six cases the UK was cheaper and in six cases France was cheaper so the honours are even.

Vive la différence! Or should that be vive le match nul.

There's been some enthralling snooker on this week and despite three fairly long days filming I've managed to catch quite a lot of it.

It was wonderful to see Stephen Hendry back in form after several disappointing years.  I hope he manages to keep it up.  Another player who's slicing through the opposition is Ronnie O'Sullivan.

I'd love to see the pair of them in the final.  The last time I saw them play one another was the infamous concession, viewable on youtube. 

Habemus Papam!  In comparison to the real ones I shall be quite a young pope when I tread the boards in the Grads production of Marlowe's Faustus in August.  I'm also playing a chap called Wagner but he is not the composer which is a shame because I fancy waving my arms about musically instead of just making the sign of the cross.

It's hard to know how many times I've walked past this building but I seem to have been blind to its beauty until today.  I was on my way along the Water of Leith with a bagfull of goodies from Stockbridge market to the art gallery where I had a light lunch in the sunshine and then strolled around the current sculpture exhibition.  My favourite was the masked men on all fours.

Sated with both food and art I decided to Munch at a later date.

If you went off up North to shoot the final film of your four year course at the art college only to find that your cast and location provider had changed their mind you'd be forgiven for returning to Edinburgh in a gloomy state of mind.

This unlucky lad however had the good fortune to be put in touch with me and through me with Susan and through her with the entire amdram community of the East of Scotland and now has a new cast who are able to do the shoot in time for him to have ten days to put a film together to meet the submission deadline.

One lucky srtike led to another.  He's found a perfect location in  a street I once lived in.

Over the course of the winter I've been playing golf on Sunday afternoons and so have not been able to take advantage of the free to members Cameo double bills.  I'll be playing even more golf over the summer but not generally on Sundays and was looking forward to those double bills. 

It was a bit of a body blow then to discover that the double bills will be no more as of the end of April.  We are promised occasional advance screenings of films about to be released but that's hardly adequate compensation.

I expect to be a Tuesday regular on the golf course which will preclude my taking advantage of the Cameo's silver screen deal of coffee and movie for very little money.

I may have to transfer my loyalty to Filmhouse.

There was a very clever re-working of The Marriage of Figaro at the Lyceum last week.  The lecherous Almaviva was transformed into a randy Edinburgh banker and Figaro a young hedge fund entrepreneur on the make.  Beaumarchais' play stood up well to the treatment and provided lots of farcical highlights including the appearance of an accountant dressed in a penguin suit.  It was beautifully staged and I loved the transformation from bank boardroom to Princes Street Gardens.  

As usual I was too mean to buy a programme and the theatre was too mean to provide a cast list so I can't congratulate by name the actor who played Figaro on how well he did in singing various arias from the opera to cover scene changes.

Neither can I congratulate the lady behind me who not only had failed to silence her phone but answered a call and then spent ten minutes grappling with the phone, I assume in an attempt to switch it off, during which time it emitted a series of irritating beeps.

That's matinee audiences for you.

No such shenanigins either on stage or off at the Traverse where the new artistic director's work was on show for the first time.   For Once is a set of three interwoven monologues that could have been presented Becket style with three chairs and three spotlights as Orla O'Loughlin admitted was her first reaction to the script.  Instead she has placed them in a realistic domestic setting with a practical sink and an iron that emits steam as the mother gets through a pile of shirts in the course of the play.

But until the last moment when they come together the actors while physically existing and moving in the same space don't so much as acknowledge one another's presence.  You know from the start that something awful has happened but it's a while till it's revealed and the tension that is built up in that process is held throughout despite a number of moments of humour.

I liked the performances very much and the treatment but I'm not sure that I go all the way with what I am led to believe is the play's argument that bad things happen because teenagers have nothing to do.

No pain.

An unexpected visit from friends from the west led to two absorbing hours in the protrait gallery following the jacobite cause, a mini pub crawl through Sandy Bells and The Abbotsford (where we fell in with a fellow langtonian) and a delicious meal chez The Dogs.

Who said Friday 13th was unlucky?

This little beauty caused a degree of excitement when it was pulled from my jawbone an hour ago.  Excitement to the extent that my dentist sent it next door for her colleague to admire.  It is you see the four leaf clover of the dental world.  It's a double rooted canine.

What's more it's in mint condition.  There's no decay.  It isn't broken.  It bites perfectly.

But it had to go.  You see it's a drifter.  For several years it's been making it's way out of my jawbone towards my upper teeth and those upper teeth are about to be lowered in the reversal of some treatment that I was conned into having many years ago.  The canine was sitting too high for that to be done without a collision so bye bye little dogie.

Now it's a question of waiting till the anaesthetic wears off and the pain begins. 

I gritted my teeth on Tuesday morning and set off in light sleet through rush hour traffic to play in the first seniors competition of the season.  The light sleet gradually got heavier and turned into driving snow as I crossed town.  The Pentlands could be seen dimly in the distance to be covered in a blanket of wet snow and arriving at Lothianburn I was relieved to see a course closed sign.

It turned out that I hadn't followed the proper procedure concerning entering for the competition so I wouldn't have been missed anyway.  However now I know what I'm supposed to do and I'll be there come hell or high water for the postponed encounter next Tuesday and as a bonus I don't need to get there at dawn because I've drawn a tee time of 10:18.

I was innocently trying to update www.dicksonfield.co.uk to bring to the notice of the world in general and the residents of Dicksonfield in particular that the chairman of our residents association will be one of the carriers of the olympic flame as it makes its way around the UK when I found that access to my hosting account had been suspended.

I fired off a support ticket asking why and in answer was asked to explain the nature and purpose of my websites and especially to explain what one particular page was all about.  Would it not have been easier I thought for the defenders of freedom to have read what was on the page rather than assume that the words "Heil Caesar" (brought to their attention no doubt by a crawling bot) were a manifestation of  neo-fascist goings on that had to be quashed by closing down The Life of Brian and freezing my account.

If the government get their way over cyberspace surveillance I'll probably be fighting extradition next.

At last the show is on the road.  Yesterday we found ourselves in the once familiar surroundings of Adam House where the Grads used to do all their shows.  The place is in remarkably good nick considering how little tlc it ever got in the past and how little we can assume it has received since we stopped being regulars.

The dressing-room tannoy was reliably non functional but who cares when the house is practically full and the show is going great guns.  The feeling on stage was good in the little bits I'm in and sounded spot on from the wings elsewhere.  The audience laughed a lot at the funny bits (of which there were more than I had noticed), maintained a respectful silence when it was sad and serious and applauded enthusiastically at the end.  What more can you ask for?

And oh, the director was deliriously happy.

The car-park of a block of flats just around the corner yesterday.

I'll never feel so bad about litter at Dicksonfield again.

I'm a somewhat reluctant member and a less than occasional user of Facebook but someone in India wants to peek at my wall and use my facilities.

Thanks to the vigilant powers in cyberspace I have been warned about this activity and have updated my password to provide a staunch defence of the very unexciting material that appears in my account  Perhaps I should also delete my profile picture in case an intruder exercises his or her make-up skills to impersonate me.

Rabbit Punch made it - first prize in its category.  So now I've appeared in two prizewinning films.  That's assuming my brief appearance in this one didn't end up on the cutting room floor.  Surely not.

The documentary about Jocky Wilson also won first prize in its but Jocky himself just missed the news by dying, poor chap.

Yesterday was the last of the winter mixed social golf competitions that I have been playing in.  What a lovely day it was weatherwise.  The haar of the previous day had dispersd and we enjoyed a gloriously sunny and warm afternoon.

The end of the season was celebrated by playing a Texas scramble instead of a Fourball and afterwards we had a meal in the clubhouse, various prizes were presented and silly games played.

I didn't feature in the golfing prizes but my team triumphed in the silly games.  One guy was astonishing in his ability to catch a soft ball on his head while wearing a velcro studded cap.  I didn't excel at anything although at least none of my magnetic darts fell on the floor.  However the team performance won me a little box of chocs.  

The real golf season starts shortly and I'm looking forward to that.

While in the art college yesterday I learnt that a film in which I make a fleeting appearance is on the shortlist for a BAFTA Scotland New Talent award.  Rabbit Punch is one of three in the short fiction category.  It's no thanks to me of course but I'll be rooting for it and keeping an eye open for the results when they are announced later this month.  If it wins maybe it will get a screening and I'll have a chance to see it.

Looking through the other nominees my attention was caught by Kirkcaldy Man in one of the documentary categories.  It's already won a prize in a German documentary film festival.  It's about Jocky Wilson the darts player who went from rags to riches and back to rags again.  It was screened in Glasgow last month but alas I did not know.  The Guardian's man saw it somewhere and has this to say. If BAFTA like it perhaps we'll all get a peek.

I was in the art college working on a student film called Matinee Idol which is a little story about a handsome silent movie star whose voice is a rough and impenetrable Aberdonian.  His first foray into the talkies is losing the movie moguls, of whom I am one, lots of money.

It's being produced using what's called chroma key compositing meaning that everything is shot against a plain colour background (normally green or blue) and afterwards the desired background replaces the green through digital magic.  Thus you don't need to go all the way to Australia to be filmed gazing in awe at Ayer's Rock if you can get hold of some footage of it.

The little twist compared to filming in real locations is that since all the backgrounds are in the same physical position you have to move your set and your actors around to get shots from different points of view instead of moving your camera quite as much.  Tricky getting lined up against something that isn't there.      

Good company, good food and drink and exceptionally good weather all contributed to an excellent weekend in the Lake District.

So it was a trifle dispiriting to get home and find that the invasive smokers who I thought I had got rid of some time ago had been in the stair again, polluted the place and littered it with smoking debris.  This time their twisted little minds had added a touch of vandalism.  I can see them giggling away as they burnt a smiley face into the carpet with their fag-ends.

The knowledge that smoking kills gives me a little comfort.  If only it killed more quickly.

It's been on since October but I've only just managed to get around to seeing it.

The Cadell exhibition at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art ,the biggest and best for 70 years, is simply lovely.  I've long admired pictures such as The Orange Blind and Portrait of a Lady in Black that are in our public collections.  They are both here but the exhibition draws on a number of private collections for the majority of the pictures on display and those naturally I had never seen.

There are gorgeous still lifes; one of white geraniums particularly appealed to me.  There are beautiful interiors that together with elegant women one thinks of as his trademark.  I could have happily ripped two or three of those off the wall and taken them home with me; Interior Croft House, Interior Strathur and the terrific portrait of the wife of one of his patrons whose name I've forgotten.

Add to that a whole roomful of vibrant landscapes of Iona and a few fruits of his visits to France and Venice and you have the makings of a satisfying afternoon in the gallery where you can finish off by indulging in a nice cup of coffee as you rest your feet.

Don't neglect the little display of letters and photographs charting his life that is shown in the ground floor library.  From his explanation during his teenage sojourn in Paris as a student accompanied by his mother and sister that they didn't stay long in the Jardin des Plantes because of the smell of the poor people to his sad comments on financial distress towards the end of his life they are fascinating.

But hurry; it closes on the 18th.