The idea was fillet steak, with a discount voucher at the Green Door, and take Stu and Steph to the Opera. The reality was somewhat different. Parking at festival time in Edinburgh is made a trifle more difficult as they remove large streets of parking for parades and security, at one point we were driving up a narrow street with a guy pretending to be Frankenstein walking down towards us – we finally parked at one end of Edinburgh and made our way through a packed Grassmarket and up Victoria street to the Green Door clutching our voucher for a free bottle of wine and 10% off the delicious steaks. It was now an Italian restaurant with no free tables (and that was before we waved a discount voucher at them). So it was back down Victoria Street trying all restaurants until we reached the one that actually had a free table and a friendly waiter in a kilt – Maison Bleu and delicious the food was and nice the decor and wet was the wine and expensive the bill but you can’t put a price on happiness.
It was unusual that the opera was at the Usher Hall, but hey we had seen naked Swedish women performing Tosca in the Leith council chambers one year. It was even more unusual when it turned out to be a concert performance so no acting, no grand and imaginative scenery and the conductor had just had a daughter so didn’t turn up, leaving an enthuasiastic and energetic woman conductor to take charge of the colourful choir. Stravinsky’s ballet suite Orpheus sent Stu to sleep but the icecream arriving woke him up – even that wasn’t real in that the delicious Musselburgh dish revealed a variety of E numbers and no cream. After the interval the heat was hotting up and the Usher Hall had replaced its CO2 rich air conditioner with cardboard fans. Stuart was seriously requiring elbows and knees to wake up now as the singers wailed their way through Oedipus Rex with no special effects of eyes gouged out. Still at least I enjoyed the music from the grand circle and especially the fact that the others didn’t although at least I didn’t take them to a Portsmouth Sinfonia concert (where each player uses an instrument they have never played).
Kim was a judge at the Shell STEP awards, which she always enjoys and at least this year they supplied her with the briefing notes a few days beforehand rather than at the actual awards.
Barbara, celebrating losing her serial cheating disabled lover, let me back to her party, where previously I had demonstrated fertitlity rites with a couple of women under the full moon and in front of the Coldstream clergyman. I enjoyed the waddling ducks in her pond, the pears and figs from her trees and in particular the nude photograph (not of Barbara nor the ducks). Everyone brought their own fare which typically resulted in a wonderous combination of delights – especially in this case with the desserts. We left before the full moon this time, and without the waddling ducks, to give a standing ovation to the Pink Floyd tribute band Shine On and the particularly delicious diamonds backing girls who were doing a passable emulation of the girl at the start of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected but this time not in silhouette form.
The sheep provided some entertainment by one getting her horns stuck in the fence and bleating musically until Stuart and I trooped over to see why she was bleating. She had managed to get her head through to munch the grass (is always greener) through the fence but forgot about the horns and couldn’t get back. It took a minute or two to calm her down and work out the topological solution and she was off with Kim singing ‘Horn Free’ from the fence.
