Showing the way

Like synchronised swimming, rhythmic gymnastics strikes me as utterly daft but you have to recognise and admire the skill of the people doing it and the huge effort it must take to achieve proficiency.

The bits I saw of it in the wonderful SSE Hydro on the first day of the Commonwealth Games could be described as hell of a hard hula hooping and cleverly complicated keepie uppie.  Even at the height of the hula hoop craze of the 50s I couldn't manage more than a few simple rotations round my midriff so I did appreciate what these girls were doing (it's a girls only event) but I still think it's daft. 

Scottish number one in action

Glasgow was enjoying tropical weather that day and I lunched in the open air by the banks of the Clyde before heading for the squash at Scotstoun. This was terrific and caused me to regret that I ever stopped playing.  I suppose I wouldn't last five minutes if I started again but they say racketball is a game kinder to the more mature.  Looking at that video I'm not so sure.

Doubles in the glass

I've often wondered how on earth you could ever play doubles at squash and now I know.  The first rather obvious point is that you need a bigger court.  At Scotstoun three singles courts became two doubles courts by sliding the walls of the middle court towards one another and the glass box show court expanded sideways.  The players keep mostly to one side of the court and the game seems even faster and furiouser than singles.

When I played the scoring system used required a player to win serve before he could score a point but that is now an alternative to the standard system in which a point is scored on change of serve as well as during service.  That should reduce the length of matches and most of those I saw on my two visits took less than 30 minutes but one very exciting singles (won by Scotland) went on for an hour and a half.  That match plus a ladies doubles between Malaysia and New Zealand were more than enough value for the ticket money.

Scotland beating Malaysia

Another energetic racquets game that I used to enjoy playing is badminton.  The Commonwealth Games badminton is being played in the Emirates Arena, again a splendid venue.  It's just across the road from Celtic Park.

I was a bit disconcerted when I went in.  Four courts were simultaneously in action.  Four umpires were shouting out scores.  The public address was urging us to applaud teams as they left on completion of their matches and welcome new teams coming in.  The answer seemed to be to concentrate on one court and allow your attention to wander now and then.  Fortunately Scottish players were in action which gave me a focus and although they were outclassed in a couple of cases the mixed doubles match was a closely fought and exciting game in which we beat Malaysia.

Unbelievably he saved this

In addition to all of those I went to men's hockey and saw Australia drub Wales and India beat Scotland by a similar score although it was a much more closely contested game.

Guess the sport

The sport I originally set out to see was Artistic Gymnastics.  I only got a ticket in the second sale when unrequired reserved seats were released and although all the seats in the Hydro have a great view some are greater than others and for this event mine was one of those.

Just a blur

Up off the floor

Like the badminton an awful lot was going on at the same time.  Vaulting, parallel bars, high bar, beam and floor exercises. I used to be proud of my cartwheel and my handstand but how anyone can do a back somersault and land on a 4 inch wide beam defies explanation.  This was a great morning's entertainment for everyone except the poor English vaulter who despite all the soft landing mats did something nasty to himself and was carried out with his leg in a splint.

No doubt about which team this youngster is supporting

I got to another gig featuring young musicians.  These, from a school down south, were even younger than the Porty lot and there were many more of them.  With two enthusiastic teachers, one conducting and the other bashing the piano they romped through a set of big band numbers with commendable skill and presence.  I've only vague memories of musical activities at KHS but I'm sure we had nothing like this.

Billed as Woody Allen's piano player Conal Fowkes played and sang a range of numbers from the twenties by different American composers and players, some well known and some obscure.  It was a delightfully relaxing morning concert in the Tron Kirk that deserved a bigger audience.  Woody got a mention only once when for his final number Conal played a piece from the soundtrack of  Magic in the Moonlight, Allen's latest film.

I've just had a look at Conal's bio and see that the Jazz Festival organisers' Woody name dropping does him a disservice.  I also see that he was born in Zambia.  If I'd known that I'd have spoken to him at the gig.

Another delightful piano player, also at the Tron, was Paolo Alderighi who played a similar set but perhaps ranged over a longer timescale.  He finished off by playing a piece for four hands with his wife, Stephanie Trick.  It was a high speed, high octane performance and as he said beforehand, the improvisational nature of jazz adds an extra degree of danger to theundertaking.

Despite the rain the Grassmarket thronged with music lovers yesterday.  I don't know why these guys had to play in the open when others had the benefit of covered stages.  They are not the Salvation Army by the way.

There was more open air revelry today but I got hooked on the golf and shamefully stayed indoors and missed the Carnival Parade, the bands in Princes Street and a sun-drenched Grassmarket.

I felt a bit short-changed at the first Jazz Festival show I went to.  I was drawn to it by a wish to hear Abdullah Ibrahim, the grand old man of South African jazz.  I enjoyed his set but it only lasted 30 minutes.  The rest of the evening was not to my taste and although jazz is a pretty wide and elastic term none of it qualified in my view.  The second half was also too noisy and although I moved to the back of the theatre and stuck my fingers in my ears I decided to leave after 15 minutes or so. 

The Portobello High School musicians were much more to my taste at one tenth of the price.  They appeared in various combinations as a jazz combo, a blues band and the two girls sang individually and together with piano accompaniment.  They were very good and a lot of people had turned out to hear them at 10.30 on Saturday morning.

They were followed by a great fun Italian outfit called Bandakadabra.  They were keener on  audience participation than suits me but luckily I was far enough away to get off with clapping and swaying on the spot rather than being drawn into more extreme antics.

Another gig was a game of two halves in which a group led by Martin Kershaw played beautifully more than making up for the challenging free jazz style of  the Roby Glod Trio.  They were allegedly both playing music by or inspired by the same man (Lennie Tristano) but you could have fooled me.

After decades of blotting the landscape this unlovely building is on its way out thus improving the view from our flats.  Too much to hope that the adjacent high rise block will go the same way?

Opening my curtains on the last morning of the jazz course this was the scene.  A pretty red balloon floating over the Perthshire countryside at 7am.  Why and where was it going?  Maybe making its way to T In The Park where if this lovely weather persists the punters should have a great time.

We had a great time with our own little sub-division of the musical universe.  There was a brilliant concert given by the tutors last night and then we all performed in our various groups this afternoon to tumultuous applause from one another and from friends and family.  Maybe about a half of the players were youngsters so mums and dads picking them up were a large part of the audience, but I spotted George Duncan, described by The Herald as "jazz advocate, dapper emcee and board member with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra".  Looking for up and coming talent perhaps.

My own talent is more on the down and going side.  The week highlighted my many deficiencies as a saxophonist but my enthusiasm is undiminished.

Upun my word if I weren't rehearsing tomorrow night I'd be heading west.

My recording device isn't clever enough to cope with a channel change so I didn't manage to see much of Murray's third round match but it seems to have been another confident and well controlled victory so the omens are set fair for next week.

I'll be sampling the delights of a Catholic girls boarding school on finals day so if Murray makes it I'll be reliant on recording but we can be pretty sure the entire match will be broadcast on one channel.  The girls have been sent home on holiday so will be spared the noisy efforts of the aspiring musicians attending Richard Michael's Summer Jazz School and vice versa.    

One well known Catholic girl (that's my assumption given her origins) made a surprise appearance with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in a packed Usher Hall last night.  Nicola Benedetti came on to play one number with the band (part of Wynton Marsalis's Blood on the Fields).  That meant that in the absence of Joe Temperley from the line-up we still had a Scottish element.  I was disappointed that Temperley wasn't there but at 84 a twenty gig tour even though it included his native Scotland is maybe a bit daunting and for all I know he's not too well.

Big band music is not really top of my pops so although I enjoyed the concert I liked best the encore when Marsalis came back on with the rhythm section and played absolutely divinely for ten or fifteen minutes putting his trumpet through all possible shades from squawk to lullaby. And isn't the Queen's Hall a much better fit for that style of music?  Yes, though it clearly couldn't have satisfied the demand for places.  

Adam House lends itself to many activities and currently houses a wonderful exhibition, The Poster Art of Modern China.  The material comes from the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Center.  You can see it all on their site but it's much more impressive in the flesh as it were.

Here's Mao the culmination of the Marxist Leninist ideal.  We can see his forebears Stalin, Lenin and Marx.  It looks as though Marx is there twice but I think one of them must be Engels.  Their ideas were the same but their noses are slightly different.

 I love this one of the infamous Gang of Four being done to death by a terribly young set of communist heroes.

This one, which celebrates the founding of communist China is fascinating.  It was first printed in 1952 and revised several times as political tides ebbed and flowed.  Gao Gang who was to the left of the bearded chap at the extreme right of the front row disappeared in this post 1956 version and during the Cultural Revolution Dong Biwn's face replaced Liu Shoaqui's (dark suit third from the left).  Then after the Cultural Revolution Gao and Liu were reinstated (both were dead by that time).  All this before Photoshop had been invented.

It would be a bit hyperbolic to call the tram route in from the airport scenic but it's very pleasant and the journey struck me as a good way for a visitor to arrive in the city.  It's not the fastest mode of transport, especially going round corners when you might call its progress stately if you were being kind but it's comfortable and there's plenty room for luggage.  What a pity the rails don't stretch that last 0.6 miles (says Google) to McDonald Road.

I suppose that yesterday's weather helped.  Edinburgh looked at her best in the warm sunshine.  I always think it's a bit of a bummer when coming back from holiday to find good weather.  Why did I spend all that money to go to the Mediterranean when I could have sunbathed happily at home?

Unfair I know and of course I wouldn't have seen this

Mount Etna was having a little eruption when we were in the area.  Indeed the airport at Catania was closed for a bit because of ash the day before we were due to fly out.  Thanks to the roof of a parked car I was able to keep the shutter open for a while without the fuzzing that would have resulted if I'd been holding the camera.  The picture was taken in Acireale which is about 25 miles away.

Some years ago I was playing golf somewhere with the Seniors des Quatres Ligues during the French Open Tennis tournament.  The TV in the clubhouse was showing the tennis and one of my fellow golfers was standing at the bar gesturing at the TV and sounding off about mon fils this and mon fils the other.

I was quite impressed at the thought that I was in the company of the father of a tennis ace.  It was some time, maybe even a few days, till I discovered he had not been saying mon fils but Monfils.

He's Murray's opponent today and I hope that the rain in Paris lets up sufficiently for the match to take place.  I've suffered from rain myself recently.  I went to play golf a couple of weeks ago not only for the first time this season, not only for the first time this calendar year but for the first time since Lothianburn went bust last Autumn.

I got as far as the 7th when I had to leave the course because of lightning.  The storm had clearly set in for a while so that was that.  This week the rain started when I reached the second tee, no lightning thank goodness.  It rained with increasing intensity till about the 9th then eased to a drizzle, taking up the attack again the 16th and holding its own until I came off.

I hope Murray and Monfils have better luck this afternoon or rather this evening since it doesn't look as though they'll get started before 6.30 French time.  That probably means we won't see all of the match today.

I should have been at the theatre tonight but I was unwilling to hit the record button and leave watching the conclusion of Murray's match until I'd come home.  In the event I wouldn't have seen the end because the match was suspended at seven all in the fifth set.  Murray should really have finished it off in the fourth but he served two double faults in a row and his game collapsed.

It was a great match though with almost as many ups and downs as that fascinating 19th century French cause célebre, the Dreyfus affair.  Robert Harris's fictionalised account, An Officer and a Spy, which I bought at the recent Historical Fiction Festival is a cracking read that has kept me up late a couple of nights.

Apart from giving us an insight into the prevailing anti-Semitism of the time and the strain put on the French  army's self-respect by its defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 the story of the unravelling of the case is quite gripping.  I suppose it added to my enjoyment that while I lived in Paris I was in a show that featured Dreyfus's degradation and that I've seen with my own eyes Devil's Island where he was incarcerated.

Here it is, seen from Isle Royale the main island in the little group it belongs to off the coast of French  Guiana.

This may look like a souvenir of my holiday in Austria last month but it is in fact a snap from the recent Keswick Mountain Festival where amongst other treats there was a Tyrolean evening.  We were serenaded by these young chaps while munching our way through goulash soup, wienersnitzel and various Austrian puds.

While beer of the country was available there was a complete absence of Austrian wines.  A very acceptable French Muscadet stepped into the breach and proved an excellent lubricant for communal yodelling. 

My first day on a golf course since Lothianburn went bust last autumn.  It was a lovely afternoon - at first.  Then the sky started to darken and as I came off the seventh green the thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed, the rain pelted down and I left the course in a hurry.

Much to my surprise I got there and even more surprisingly I was able to buy a ticket for the very session that I failed to get when I first applied.

My only gripe now is that having been charged £4.50 postage for the first lot of 5 tickets (which haven't been sent out yet) I'm being charged another £4.50 postage for this 1 ticket.

I left my computer in the queue when I went out.  When I got back there was no sign that it had got to the front and then been bumped for doing nothing or that it had fallen asleep and made no progress.

So I started again.  After two and a half hours of telling me that I had less than half an hour to wait the reducing time bar was tantalizingly close to disappearing when I had to go out again.

Once more on my return there is no sign of anything having happened.  I'm making one more attempt and goodness me but the system says I'll be there in less than half an hour.

The last remaining tranche of Commonwealth Games tickets went on sale at 10 this morning. I was there in the hope of getting a ticket for the gymnastics event that was the one out of six events that I failed to get a ticket for first time round.

I logged on before 10 and as expected went into a queue. The reported wait slowly went down from over an hour to between 30 and 60 minutes, then to between 0 and 30, ha! ha!

Over thirty minutes later at approximately 12.20 my internet connection, which since I upgraded to BT Infinity has been 99.9% flawless went down.

Panic stations followed by ineffective fiddling followed by it's self-righting followed by my getting back onto the ticket site placed me as you have no doubt guessed further back in the queue.  I have to go out before the forecast puts me at the front and I suspect it's an optimistic forecast and there's no guarantee of a ticket being available if and when I do get there so I am not holding my breath in anticipation of success.

You wouldn't think a weather forecast could keep you gripped and entertained for over two hours on a Saturday night but Pressure does just that, as is so well explained by Claire here.  Only the snooker final comes near it.

I took up playing jazz saxophone about 50 years too late to profit from this research finding.

When I came out of The Forbidden Experiment I dallied over some Ivor Cutler CDs and agreed with the Traverse chap manning the stall that The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler was well worth seeing.  "What about the show I'd just seen?" he asked.  "Unbearable" was my reply.  Mark Fisher in the Guardian was more sympathetic but certainly puts his finger on one of the main reasons why I found it so unsatisfactory when he  says  "...but its real problem is that it's not fully integrated into a coherent whole."  I'm not sure that it's even integrated into an incoherent whole.

 I can't say I was ever particularly an Ivor Cutler fan but I did find that his deadpan humour generally made me smile, and then shake my head at its absurdity.  My favourite piece is "Who tore your trousers James?" but I can't find a freely available recording of that so try this one as a taster.  

It's been a heavy concert going few days, four on the trot.  There was Nicola Benedetti looking great in a swanky black and gold number while elegantly and sinuously playing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5.  Then a very retiring little chap in what looked like a Romanian hand me down suit thundering his way through the dramatic and romantic Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1.  He followed it up with a short contrasting encore that had more rests than notes in it.  On Sunday Donald Runnicles looking every inch the musical maestro with his long white hair (pity about the growing bald patch) steered his band through the peaks and troughs of Mahler's 9th Symphony.  How can so many violinists play at the same time and yet there be such quietness?

All very enjoyable but the best was undoubtedly the SNJO.  They played Tommy Smith's arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue which he had tweeked a bit, reducing the tenor sax's contribution in favour of featuring a wonderful Japanese pianist called Makoto Ozone.  I was sitting about three feet from the grand piano experiencing shock and awe at how his hands danced around.

There was even more shock and awe at Ozone's arrangement of Mozart's 9th Piano Concerto.  Some of what the band played was clearly kosher Mozart albeit with different colours (how he'd have loved a sax section), some was clearly pure invention.  But much of the piece was I assume a subtle blend.

In standard jazz band style there were solos from various players.  I particularly enjoyed a gentle and lyrical soprano sax solo.  There was an extraordinarily vigorous drum solo that seemed as though it could only end in the death of the drummer but which was gracefully brought to a conclusion by gentle encouragement from the piano.

It was altogether a brilliant evening.

Only one concert to look forward to this week unless I decide to squeeze in a piping evening but three plays in compensation.