Edinburgh. One Day at the Festivals.

Edinburgh Festival Reviews

Every year I try to have a quick run around as much as I can in a day at the Edinburgh festivals. Every year I underestimate how long it will take me to get from venue to venue when the pavements are all choc-a-bloc with people dragging wheelie suitcases or trying to hand out flyers. So as usual I tried to squeeze in too much.

Here are some quick reviews of the shows that I managed to catch, in case you are planning to take in a couple.

Thoughtful

Issues of refugees are being discussed in several shows at the Fringe this year. The Sleeper (by Henry C. Krempels in a pokey space in the top floor of the Jury's Inn Hotel) starts with the testimony of real Syrian refugees. An Englishwoman on an overnight train across Europe returns from the bathroom to find "a pair of eyes" in her couchette. Reporting it to a world-weary staff member on the train he asks her to decide if she wants him to deal with it. They replay the confrontation, to see what choices we can all make in such a situation. The person who seems powerless to determine her fate is Amena, whose voice we struggle to listen to in all this (well played by Aya Daghem with a startled air of confusion). A quick wake up call to your brain in its 10.30am slot in the fringe programme. (Their shows have a later 11.40am time for the remainder of the run).

Angry 

It is difficult doing a stand-up show at noon, when your more sobre audience requires a bit more work to loosen them up, but Eleanor Morton at The Stand gives it a good go. In a show titled Angry Young Woman, she is angry about most things. Particular ire is aimed at the everyday sexism in our world which, funnily enough, female comedians (or comediennes if you prefer) are exposed to on and off stage. It would be good to see more of her, but as TV panel shows already meet their one woman per show quota, you probably won't.

Also apparently very angry is Lucy Porter, with her show Choose Your Battles at the Pleasance Courtyard. However it is the middle-class rage of losing the keys for the Volvo that is the subject of her show. Where Eleanor Morton was earlier talking about faking it by going about on public transport with a yoga mat prominently displayed under her arm, Lucy Porter was talking about her yoga classes. All a bit cosy.

Classy

The one name that jumped out at me when I saw the programme for this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, was James Kelman's. With a new collection of short stories released this month (That Was A Shiver available now - go buy it at your local bookshops). He was on top form, and I was delighted that instead of reading from his new book he decided to talk to us about his thoughts on literature in general and the position of artists in Scotland today. TV's Brian Taylor was a good host, reflecting on his university studies of Descartes as they talked. Kelman talked about his own learning, starting from the Realism of Zola and moving on to Camus, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and so it goes on. A curious mind exploring his world, and finding his voice in trying to express the subjective experience of his characters. Nobody else in Scottish (or British) literature comes close to this existential ventriloquism. Good painters start by first observing people and the world around them, and Kelman is a master of his art because of his ability to observe, and to listen, to people.

I bought a ticket for The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk as it is based on paintings I like by Marc Chagall, who often pictures himself and his wife floating over the town. Thinking of Chagall's paintings gives me terrible flashbacks, as my then 2 year old daughter all but managed to crash straight through a 10 foot painting of his when we visited the Musée National Marc Chagall. Thankfully no damage was done to either her or the painting. The play, by Kneehigh theatre company, is a two-header with Marc Antolin as Chagall and Audrey Brisson as his wife Bella, accompanied by two musicians. The fantastic choreography and Marc Antolin's floppy-haired physical similarity to Chagall does make the paintings appear before your eyes. Clever stagecraft throughout manages to carry a love story and a turbulent historical period, without distracting from the storytelling. A lovely way to spend an hour and a half.

Over the Town 1918 by Marc Chagall

Topical

Written by Sabrina Mahfouz (whose essay was one of the stand out's in the excellent book The Good Immigrant) and Hollie McNish, the play Offside benefits from the poetry that both writers excel at, with a rhythm and beat to the script that matches the muscular physicality of the story. On stage Daphne Kouma, Tanya-Loretta Dee and Jessica Butcher tell the real stories of Emma Clarke, a black footballer who played for Scotland in the 1890s and of Lily Parr from the 1920s. Flicking back and forwards to the current day the play tackles issues of prejudice, sexism, mental health, intrusive journalism, body image matters and more, but manages to stay on track by having a story that you want to follow weaving through all of this. The melodrama that real football can generate sometimes translates badly to film or theatre, but my problem  was that Emma Clarke's life sounds so interesting that I wanted to hear more about her, playing in Glasgow in the 1890s, than the imagined England players of the modern phase of the play. If it's true drama that you area after, the Scottish Women's Premier League is about to kick off again after a short hiatus for the Euros there. Glasgow City FC's next home game is against Hamilton Accies on Sunday 3rd September.

Goalkeeper Emma Clarke, in the back row here of Mrs Graham's XI in 1895

Oddity

Described as an "experimental opera" and written by Roddy Bottum, keyboardist with Faith No More, I found Sasquatch: The Opera a lot of fun. As a rock-opera the live music from Bottum himself on keyboards, accompanied by electronic beats, timpani drums and brass was very impressive, and far more dramatic than the story playing out in front of the musicians. I did not ever expect to see an opera where a drug-addled hill-billy family con tourists with their fake Sasquatch, before the chained up daughter of the family flees into the woods and falls in love with the real beast, who it turns out is a real pussycat with a falsetto voice. The surprising chorus working the forest meth lab in the second half of the story help hunt down the beast and...well you can go and see it if you want to find out what happens. Bass-baritone singer Joe Chappel should have his own show on at the fringe whilst he is here, as he has a great voice. It's a strange hotchpotch of ideas and maybe needs stronger direction and better acting to knock the story into shape, but if you want entertained you should see it now in case it gets the rough edges knocked off of it.

Stuffy

Part of the official Edinburgh International Festival, Had We Never, Robert Burns: Chains and Slavery, was a late night concert performed in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The museum currently has two fascinating exhibits that offer a dialogue between Robert Burns's idealised character as demonstrated by the white marble statue of him in the main hall here, and the truer, more flawed character, who was on the verge of heading to Jamaica to work on the plantations before his poetry took off. Douglas Gordon has copied the white marble statue, in black marble, and as a literal iconoclast, has thrown its broken parts onto the hall floor at the feet of Burns. Graham Fagen has a video installation of reggae singer Ghetto Priest singing a new version of Burns's The Slave's Lament  by composer Sally Beamish.

Reflecting on these works an evening of Burns's poems and songs was promised, with new works by Jackie Kay and a live performance by Ghetto Priest and musicians from the Scottish Ensemble. It was a terribly Edinburgh affair, stilted and old fashioned. Instead of trying to see Burns differently much of it was based around old fashioned, churchy performances of Burns's works from bass singer Brian Bannatyne-Scott and counter-tenor David James. Away from the Caribbean angle, the international works were a bit dry. I like Avro Part's version of My heart is in the Highland's but like much of his work it feels very religious and churchy. I know the Shostakovich Burns stuff in Russian as I heard many earnest renditions of them at the Scotland-USSR Friendship Society, but again that took me to the late 1970s/ early 1980s. Jackie Kay brought fresher moments with her playful poems on Douglas Gordon's sculpture and on Burns, such as Resume The Plough, where she spoke of Burns getting "Awa frae polite society/ And Edinburgh literary soirees". I bet she was thinking the same thing. I have never been to a Jackie Kay reading which wasn't filled with laughter and applause and I have never, ever heard such a fussy rendition of A Man's A Man, in which I seemed to be the only person wanting to join in. All in all it was a very strange programme.

I was maybe getting a bit tired by midnight when it finished, but I was now ready to go back to Glasgow, where audiences are a bit more bawdy.

Edinburgh Festival 2016 - Edinburgh International Book Festival

Edinburgh International Book Festival 2016

Edinburgh Book Festival now runs for two weeks each August in Charlotte Square, and get 220,000 visitors in that time. Their bookshop is always worth a visit as it tends to be a bit different from the usual set up, and if you aren't coming to the ticketed events, the Square still makes a good place to eat your picnic on a sunny day during the festival. I saw three events during the festival this year (for £39 in total, before you buy the books). Here are some quick reviews of a couple of book festival events that I went to.

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Alice Oswald ***

I enjoyed Alice Oswald's previous book, Memorial, an unusual invocation of Homer's Iliad. It starts with a list of the 200 soldiers who die during the Iliad, then recounts their fates, from Protesilaus to Hector. She read from her new collection Falling Awake, which features poems reflecting her education as a classicist to her observations on the minutiae of nature from her work as a gardener. For Alice Oswald poetry is a serious business and her reading was earnest and full of portent. The rhythms of her poems were clear in the rhythms of her reading, and death was an ever present part of life. She then revealed that she does have a lighter side, which her editor kept out of the latest book, reading Living Under the Digestive System. I hope that this brighter aspect of her poetry gets room to breathe in the future

James Kelman  *****

A full house awaited James Kelman, including Liz Lochead, Tam Dean Burn and other well kent faces, as he read from his exceptional new novel Dirt Road. He gave us a passage from early in the book, that told of 16 year old Murdo and his dad settling into a cheap motel for the night on their travels to meet American relatives, a break from their travails in Scotland. They are both recently bereaved and alone, after the death of Murdo's mother and sister. As Murdo heads out to the local shop to seek breakfast for them both he comes across Queen Mozee-ay, her music and the music of the south that will drive him and the story onwards. Like Alice Oswald it was good to hear the rhythm of Kelman's reading, the rhythm of the music that Murdo has a drive to make. There are clear echoes of Kelman himself in Murdo, the artist as a young man. I hadn't realised that as a 17 year old Kelman traveled with his family to America as they planned to emigrate there. Immigration/emigration and the mixed up origins of America and American music, from the Gaels to Mexicans feature as a background to the personal journey Murdo and his dad make in the book.

I have seen Kelman talk many times before and every time he gently shares his knowledge with the audience, on subjects as diverse as the Clearances, Russian literature, the co-operative movement, the Newport Folk Festival or the history of the Gaelic language. Whether you notice it or not you will always come away from one of his books or his talks having learnt an awful lot of stuff, mostly about people.

He also revealed a lot about his writing technique here, and talked about scenes he had written then cut out of the final book - a "director's cut" of a James Kelman book would clearly be a fascinating read. I hadn't noticed the name of the elderly Creole singer, Queen Monzee-ay, hints at her Menzies hinterland and in the book various tiers of Scottish immigration to America are apparent. When asked about his ending for this book he said that "the best type of ending takes me by surprise", then when he looks back at it there is not any alternative ending. It just fits.

Wi' the Haill Voice *****

As well as being renowned for his own works as a poet, Edwin Morgan was also a translator of the works of Mayakovsky, Racine and Pablo Neruda among others. Soviet poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky is a controversial and complicated figure. He lived through the Russian Revolution and worked as a playwright, poet, artist, propagandist and was a prominent Futurist. He committed suicide in 1930 aged 36. His poem "Talking With The Taxman About Poetry" gave its title of Billy Bragg's third album. I have read some of his works before, but like many poems in translation, you are never sure how much of the original sense and feeling you are getting reading it in English. The book I have has the Russian version on the page opposite the translation, and it was clear that there were rhythms and shapes, repeating sounds that you could see in the Russian, that weren't happening on the other side of the page that I could read. Edwin Morgan felt the power of the poems evaded him, translating them into English, so for his translation he brought them into the Scots language.

Try these couple of lines as an example and I think you can see that this was a good decision. In English the lines are rendered as...

Pineapple, pheasant's breast, 

stuff till you vomit, for that is your last feast

or as Edwin Morgan has it in his Scots translation...

Stick in, douce folk.-Pineaipple, feesant's breist: 

stuff till ye boke, for thon is your last feast.

Already you can hear the sounds and anger missing from the first version, and to me this feels more like an angry Russian revolutionary's voice. To celebrate the re-printing of Morgan's poems we had Tam Dean Burn and the improvisational musicians of Ferlie Leed (double bass, harp, electric guitar and keyboards) taking us through a selection or poems from the book. With an energy and enthusiasm they brought the words off of the page to be looked at in a new way. If this had been a standard poetry reading, somebody standing up and reading from the page, this would have had niche appeal to these fluent in Scots. I had read through the poems in the days before attending this, using the glossary in the book to get the sense of the poem then reading through the sounds and feelings on the page. As Edwin Morgan is no longer with us to read his own words, this performance was a great way to give them a novel force. Tam Dean Burn definitely read them wi' his haill voice, and with all of his body. I am very sure Edwin Morgan would have whole-heartedly approved.

Tam Dean Burn gie'ing it laldy

Edwin Morgan's beautiful book, now re-issued by Carcanet is well worth getting. I managed to find another piece of Edwin Morgan's poetry on show at the Edinburgh Festival. I made my first visit to the Scottish Poetry Library, just off the Royal Mile. They have a small exhibition of concrete poetry, including some of Edwin Morgan's concrete poems, alongside those of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Vaclav Havel. There's a nice wee shop and, of course, their lending library for all your poetry needs.

Scottish Poetry Library, just off the Royal Mile

Horse - The Diamond Speaks. Celtic Connections Jan 2015

Horse - The Diamond Speaks - Live gig review. Jan 29th 20154

Looking for my passport recently I came across some old ticket stubs for concerts I'd been to in the 1980s and 1990s. Amongst them was a ticket for a very memorable concert in Level 8 at Strathclyde Student Union, where I was taken to see Horse by a friend who was right into her stuff. It is a concert that really stuck in my mind. Hearing her fantastically strong, rich voice live led me to follow her output in the intervening 24 years.

Horse McDonald, to give her her full moniker, is a singer-songwriter originally from Fife whose distinctive, deep, soulful voice appears to be undiminished by the passing of time. She was performing at Celtic Connections this year in a concert called "The Diamond Speaks". After coming across the works of neglected women poets she has decided to put music to their oft forgotten words. Before coming to that however, she gave us a blast through some Horse highlights, performing songs such as Breathe Me, Careful and Home alongside her classy five-piece band.

The second half started and ended with poems by Mary Queen of Scots. The first of which pictures the gift of a diamond Mary gives to Queen Elizabeth, speaking on her behalf. Her musical interpretations avoided using tropes of traditional music to interpret this 450 year old poem, and at times the music was quite modern and experimental as the night went on. 

I'm sorry to say that beyond Mary Queen of Scots I hadn't heard of any of the women whose works were performed and I guess that is one point of the exercise. We also had works from Anne Hunter, an 18th century songwriter who wrote the words to some of Haydn's English Folk songs, Mary McKellar from Fort William who wrote in English and Gaelic, the Jacobite Lady Nairne Caroline Oliphant and Ellen Johnston, a working class Victorian poet from Hamilton. The twentieth century was represented by Marion Angus from Arbroath and Olive Fraser from Aberdeen. The programme notes and the introductions by the singer gave us a thumbnail sketch of these women and maybe a chance for other works of theirs to surface.

I like poetry, I like Horse, so I was always going to enjoy this show and I hope that it ends up resulting in an album sometime soon. She has a great voice and always something interesting to say. 

Glasgow Commonwealth Games 2014 - Sport and Culture Festival

Normally I write things here to try to flag up events people maybe don't know about which are going on in Glasgow. Music, plays or venues I would recommend people try out. However adding my tuppence worth on the Commonwealth Games, this is maybe a bit superfluous. There cannot be a person in Britain unaware of the Commonwealth Games with the blanket coverage on the BBC and there cannot be a person in Glasgow who hasn't spent two weeks trying to work out how to avoid the road closures and fenced off areas to get from A to B. So I shall limit myself to a quick review of how the Commonwealth Games was for me.

My own Glaswegian nature is usually be be slightly cynical about a lot of things, particularly enforced jollity. However I was determined to make the most of the Commonwealth Games visit to Glasgow. Alongside the sports we were also promised a series of cultural events, under the Festival 2014 umbrella. The mounting anticipation to the event was heightened in the days leading up to it by the sight of long neglected road markings on many of Glasgow's streets being given a fresh lick of paint, a flurry of pothole repairs, grass cutting and fence painting. If there is one good "legacy" of the Games, it is surely to make it clear to Glasgow City Council that a wee bit more effort from them in the future in maintaining such basic city infrastructure wouldn't go amiss.

Then the barriers around the venues and athletes' village went up and the level of disruption that would occur became obvious, particularly for those living in the east end of the city. However, despite the best efforts of the media to uncover dissenting voices, most people were getting caught up in the excitement of it all and looking forward to Glasgow being the centre of attention for 11 days. I diverted my usual jogging routes to have a wee nosey at the Games venues as they were  made ready (here) and finally the Games arrived in town. Anyway here is a quick review of how I found the Commonwealth Games.

Commonwealth Games - Cultural Festival

In an effort to highlight Glasgow's obesity problem Tunnock's tea
cakes and Irn Bru featured prominently in the opening ceremony

The opening ceremony at Celtic Park kicked it all off. Despite fully intending to leave my cynical side elsewhere, the excruciating first quarter of an hour of this tested my resolve. It wasn't clear from the TV coverage what was going on, or that the cheesy cliché-ridden start was meant to be tongue in cheek. To be honest, with the unintelligible Scottish version of John Barrowman singing his heart out, it was hard to be clear if he knew what was going on either. It settled down after that and once the wee Scottie dogs had led everyone out, we have forgiven them the opening farago. I was a bit disappointed that whilst we got talking heads in the studio on our TV screens, the people in the stadium were being warmed up by the likes of Glasgow ska-band Esperanza.

Before even the opening ceremony started I had already seen Aidan Moffat's Commonwealth Games funded musical tour of Scotland earlier in the year ("Where You're Meant To Be"). Also, running for about 6 months under the auspices of the "East End Social" banner, Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground launched an ambitious series of events. "Part music programme, part community engagement project" it brought music and musicians to areas and venues normally overlooked in the eastern side of Glasgow. They brought Edinburgh's poetry led Neu Reekie evening to the Platform in Easterhouse, where I heard readings from Jackie Kay, a presentation from top video artist Rachel Maclean and music from Broken Records and The Pastels.

Throughout the Commonwealth Games the cultural programme provided a varied list of events, based largely on Glasgow Green where music from as diverse a list as Sydney Devine, Lloyd Cole and the Amphetameanies was on show.  The Glasgow Green site was usually free entry although once you visited the bars you realised where the profits were being made.

Ford car showroom on Glasgow Green

The security checks at the gates were slow and off-puttingly po-faced. There were enough distractions for children and the usual variety of food outlets but the huge PR stands for Virgin Media, Emirates, SSE and Ford were a bit unsubtle. Less corporate were the entertainments laid on at The Quay by the BBC. We went down there a few times as there were free tickets available for numerous BBC TV and radio recordings, a bar and fun fair and the chance for kids to try out various sports. A Govan boxing club taster session has my daughter wanting to join them now. The Royal Navy minesweeper HMS Bangor was also moored here, but it struck me as being a bit out of kilter that we got to take smiling photos of my seven year old getting to fire a big heavy, real .338 rifle on board. What larks!

HMS Bangor moored on the Clyde

Whilst at the BBC we stumbled from Mel Geidroyc interviewing Helen Skelton for the radio, into the audience for a Simple Minds sound check which was a bit weird. It was busy at times down here, but never mobbed which seems odd. Like a lot of the events I think that the dire warnings about road closures and no parking anywhere was ultimately a bit off-putting for some people. One event which was well attended down here was the flotilla organised to bring a couple of hundred boats up the Clyde, which was an impressive sight and seemed to highlight the glaring lack of boating activity normally taking place on a once crowded river. At the flotilla thing the boat which I enjoyed clambering about on most was a new CalMac car ferry, where they were letting you wander about the bridge playing with all their shiny new gadgets.

Commonwealth Flotilla on the Clyde

It was great to see the newly refurbished Kelvingrove bandstand in use again. As a child we were often here or at the bandstand in Queens Park for political rallies. I had also spent many an afternoon down here at the Radio Clyde sponsored heavy metal days for some reason and as a student I think The River Detectives or Horse would've been the last acts I'd have seen here before it was closed down. Horse was back again one evening and I managed to catch some of the excellent Remember Remember one night (go buy their great new album "Forgetting the Present" if you haven't already). In the earlier evening one day I came down to catch a film "A View From Here" about refugees and Glaswegians living in Glasgow multistorey flats. I've been trying to see this for a while as I spent my teenage years in the Lincoln flats in Knightswood that feature in it. My block is in the process of being demolished and the arts projects involving tenants, which featured in the film, to commemorate their lives in the flats seemed a more appropriate way to mark their demolition than the abandoned (and crass) plan to blow up the Red Road flats for our entertainment in the opening ceremony. My only gripe down here would be that as we were all being encouraged to walk, cycle and use public transport it might have been an idea to lay on some bicycle racks for the dozens of us that took this advice.

Remember Remember at the Kelvingrove bandstand

My favourite events in the cultural programme however were down in the Briggait. Here author Louise Welsh and architect Jude Barber ran the Empire Cafe. With tobacco, sugar, spices, coffee and tea coming from the colonies of the Empire to Britain, the cafe was therefore the appropriate setting for poetry, performances, debates, workshops and walks exploring Glasgow's links with the North Atlantic slave trade. I have taken myself on a wee tour of Glasgow's Merchant City before to try to learn about this part of the history of the city which we are not taught about. We still don't talk about it. The current exhibition in Kelvingrove "How Glasgow Flourished" whilst at least acknowledging slavery, again seems to underplay the role that the work of slaves played in making Glasgow merchants rich. One evening the debate (in which the representative from Glasgow Museums didn't exactly shine) was over whether Glasgow should have a permanent museum commemorating our role in the slave trade. Another debate I went to (pertinent to the current referendum) was on whether Scots should see ourselves as colonised or colonisers. The consensus on both days was that a plaque, an apology or an inert museum feature was pointless unless it was also engaging, encouraged debate and dialogue and that people were educated and learnt lessons from the past. As the Sunday Herald reported yesterday these calls appear to be being heard. The mix of poetry, music and debate was fantastic and congratulations to all involved for their efforts. I particularly enjoyed being at these things in the Briggait building as my great, great granny had a fish stall in here for many years when it was the fishmarket.

Ben Nevis bar

Apart from these formal happenings some of the more informal things I stumbled upon were memorable too, whether the merrily drunken Scottish woman in The Brass Monkey pub singing about the bronze medal she'd won or the African musicians and kora player who had joined the usual folk musicians in the Ben Nevis pub we stopped in on the way to the Hydro one night.

The other non-sporting thing I'd like to commend to you was "Clyde the Thistle". The official mascot of the games appears to have shifted tens of thousands of soft toys and the trail around Glasgow of 25 photogenic Clyde statues seems to have been strangely popular. These statues looked cheery and slightly scared at the same time, I'm not sure if that was intentional. As a lifelong Partick Thistle fan I am pleased that so many people have taken this lowly weed to their hearts despite (from a football fan's perspective) the anachronistic naming of a Thistle with the title of our one time footballing rivals. As a close relative of mine spent a good amount of time over recent months as one of the Clyde mascots, even receiving training at the Conservatoire of Scotland to "express without sound how Clyde would show that he was excited?", etc. I'm pleased that he was a success. Children took to him more that they did to the unsettling Mandeville and Wenlock mascots from the Olympics, so well done 12 year old Beth Gilmour from Cumbernauld (current home to Clyde FC) for designing him. My personal favourite was seeing Clyde in the red and yellow of Partick Thistle at Buchanan Street bus station.

Clyde the Commonwealth Games mascot

Partick Thistle mascot "Harry Wragg" back in the day
(photo stolen from @greigforbes)

Commonwealth Games - Sport Festival

When they initially went on sale, getting tickets for the Commonwealth Games was a bit of a hassle. Like many people I applied for a variety of things on their fussy website but got nothing initially. Then in the second phase of ticket sales I applied for a wider variety of things and ended up getting almost everything this time. As we have three children one disappointment for me was that for most things you could only apply for four tickets, meaning that we couldn't all go as a family to anything we were interested in. Also price reductions for children were not available in all sports, and if they were then only on the cheaper seats. This stank of squeezing as much money as possible out of ticket sales. Then as the games drew nearer we find that suddenly hundreds more tickets were available, presumably returns from the sponsors and other nations. Much as my children, as keen swimmers, had wanted to go to Tollcross Pool, by now I'd spent so much already on tickets that I wasn't going to try again for the third time for swimming tickets. The rush for these new tickets led to the website crashing and was poorly managed. From the outset the ticketing created bad feeling, however Glasgow was swept up in the excitement of the Games arriving in town and the impression on TV was that venues for all the sports were crowded and noisy. 

The sport wasn't all top notch stuff. Lawn bowls may be popular in Glasgow (Glasgow lawn bowls blogpost) but it doesn't create many superstars. At some events such as the marathon and cycling the loudest cheers were often for the athletes in danger of being lapped. So what did my scatter-gun approach to ticket buying mean we ended up seeing? 

Athletics

Hampden Park as an athletics arena

We all know that Hampden Park is a poor stadium for watching football in. When it was redeveloped a few years ago by the SFA they managed to create one of the world's most bland and atmosphere-free football arenas. The Commonwealth Games planned to save money on creating a new athletics arena by converting Hampden for the Games. It works so well for athletics that there are now calls to just leave it as it is now and find a new home for Queens Park FC and the SFA. This won't happen, but the athletics we saw here were great. As several rows of seats were removed to accommodate a running track I didn't realise that our "Row L" seats meant we would be in the third row and right in amongst it all. The integration of para-sports into the athletics programme is surely the model that other events should follow as we seamlessly went from watching the para-sport discus to the women's 1500m heats and so on. The atmosphere was great, helped by blazing sunshine. Lessons seemed to have been learned from the delays on the opening day of the athletics, when the security checks led to ludicrous queues outside Hampden. We got to and from the stadium without delay with free public transport and shuttle buses laid on. My children got right into it, could follow what was going on and cheered and clapped away with the best of them.

Discus bronze medalist from Nigeria

Free to watch and taken in by many on the streets of Glasgow were the excellent marathon races. 

Marathon goes past Geoarge Sq. (Photo @ItsDelbert)

As my dad used to run marathons I have spent many a cold Sunday morning on street corners applauding at races, so it was funny to watch an elite race where a clutch of runners go past you and are not followed by a few thousand plodders needing some encouragement. I watched it at George Square and then promptly came home and filled out my application for the Great Scottish Run on October 5th, which runs a similar route. That's got to be a good thing.

 Badminton

The cumbersome Scottish badminton uniforms probably stopped them winning more medals

 My son goes regularly to a badminton club, and somehow knows who Scotland's best badminton players are so he was keen to see some badminton at the Games. These were held in the Emirates  Arena opposite from Celtic Park. We've watched badminton and cycling competitions here before so knew our way around. We watched the final of the badminton team event, which was between England and Malaysia and the silly English newspaper articles about English athletes being advised on what to do if they were boo-ed was again shown to be scare-mongering nonsense as both teams were given vocal support. The usual sport that I spend my Saturdays watching is football, and its players are often criticised for their gamesmanship, but the moaning to the referee and gamesmanship both teams displayed here when feigning service was far more irritating and petty than anything you'll see at Firhill. The squash players we saw later in the week were just as bad which I found interesting as I don't usually watch these sports.

Badminton medal ceremony

 In the end Malaysia won and some minor royal I'd forgotten existed came out to disperse the medals. The wee bagpipe tune that they start these ceremonies with gets right into your head and I've been humming it tunelessly for days now. Again transport was no problem, as we were directed straight down onto a train at Dalmarnock station that took us straight home to Patrick. Again the free public transport with your games ticket has got to be copied again as a great way of cutting down cars on the road and making people aware of what public transport they could get when it is made cheap and easy.

Weightlifting

Weightlifting final at the Armadillo

 I went with my dad and my kids to a weightlifting final in the Armadillo (or Clyde Auditorium as it was once called) and we had a ball. It is a sport that has always been mired in controversy and accusations of steroid abuse and during the games one Nigerian medalist failed a drug test. However as a spectacle it is very entertaining and exciting, basically building up to the last man who manages a lift, wins. What you miss watching it on TV is all the daft music and commentary in the arena, with the Birdie Song and Batman theme tune featuring amongst others. The gold medal went to a proud man from Kiribati who celebrated with a wee dance before we learned what the national anthem and flag of this nation in the Pacific Ocean were. The weightlifting is definitely a good night out.

Squash

Squash doubles show court, Scotstoun

 If I'm being honest I'd have to say that we found the squash less entertaining than the weightlifting. We'd bought tickets for this as my wife and I have an annual game of squash against each other (I think I'm winning 15-0 in the series) and as it was being held in Scotstoun we could just walk along to it. This has been a controversial venue as squash tries to build its profile. No permanent show court will be left in the city to host future competitions after this court is taken apart and the astroturf football pitch it sits on restored. We had tickets for the squash doubles and the games themselves were chaotic and hard to follow. The glass court is quite groovy but it is a fast game and with so much jockeying for position, long points which you had sat through end up as a "let" for reasons that are never clear without the benefit of TV replays. After numerous jokes about the TV programme The Cube, my children decided it would be more exciting if the court was gradually filled with water and animal hazards as the game progressed. I can't say that I was won around to the notion of including squash in the Olympics.

Boxing

The Hydro where the boxing finals were held, with the Armadillo behind it

My personal sporting highlight was a Saturday night that my wife and I spent at the boxing finals in the Hydro. With one woman's final and five men's finals on it was a packed night of boxing. The Hydro makes a great venue, with there not being a bad view in the house for something like this. No matter how far away you were from the ring the action was easy to follow without recourse to the large overhead screens. I've watched amateur boxing before either in a tent at the Miners' Gala Day in Edinburgh or at the Fairfield Working Mens Club in Govan. Under the new scoring rules and without the fighters wearing headguards the difference between amateur and professional boxing is now more blurred. The crowd were never partisan (although as it was the heavier divisions there weren't any Scottish boxers fighting) and the only boo-ing of the night was directed at the judges when the crowd disagreed with their decision to award the light-heavyweight bout to the New Zealander David Nyika over Kennedy St Pierre of Mauritius. England's Scott Fitzgerald put on the best boxing display of the night and will surely either be a contender for medals in Rio in two years, or on the professional circuit by then. Scott Fitzgerald - remember the name. After six medal ceremonies the bagpiped tune for these was going round and around my head for days.

Have a listen to it hear if you missed it during the 261 medal ceremonies over the past 11 days.

Boxing at the Hydro, Glasgow

Cycling

I didn't get any tickets to the velodrome, but like many people headed out onto the streets to cheer on the road races on the last Sunday of the games, hoping that David Millar could end his career with a medal in Scotland. It was soon apparent that he couldn't and like many people once the rain started teaming down I retreated to a bar to watch the finale on television. Lizzie Armitstead and Geraint Thomas were worthy winners and whilst the helicopters were able to dodge the downpours, Glasgow did look very handsome and green. 

Now all we need is some real cycle lanes in Glasgow, not the pretend ones we have on several streets at present.

So, in summary...

Good points

• Glasgow was buzzing throughout the Games. People threw themselves enthusiastically into it, determined as ever to show the world that we see ourselves as friendly, welcoming and hospitable. We love our city and want you to come and love it too
• The crowds at the events were big and were enthusiastic and it proved that we can organise these things successfully on our own - this may be the only point seized upon by anyone in the ongoing independence debate which seemed to have been put on hold for the past 2 weeks
• Efforts were made to have a worthwhile cultural programme running alongside the sport, particularly successful in the Empire Cafe and East End Social strands
• Public transport could replace cars. Spectators were repeatedly warned not to bring cars and followed the advice to the extent that someone I know who lives in Kings Park near Hampden loved the games as her streets were so quiet. There were glitches and plenty of shuttle buses seemed to run about empty as their routes were not well publicised. However this needs regular, reliable public transport to work, such as late night trains on the subway, cheap or simple fares. Once the games finish we won't have these again.
• You can cycle in Glasgow. More people now cycle than ever before but with barely any protected cycle lanes in Glasgow you do feel it is an accident waiting to happen. Although many cycle paths were shut by games security fences I got about easily on my bike, enjoying going along the roads the cars weren't allowed on. Simple things like more bicycle racks would help build this up and normalise it. (Note to media people - nobody but Gordon Matheson himself calls the city bikes "Gordon's Gears" - okay?)
• Glasgow looked great on telly. Well, it did, didn't it? The council need to notice surely that a bit more spent on basic maintenance is necessary to keep it looking the way it should, but I fear we'll drift back to pot holes, long grass in the parks and unpainted fences in Victoria Park
• On a purely personal note I caught up with some old friends who moved to Jersey years ago, that came back to Glasgow to see this. That was good fun

Bad points

Hmmmm...tasty

• I don't like to moan but...was that catering the best we could come up with? I soon became very familiar with the same uninspiring array of food wagons. In the Armadillo I took my seat then wasn't allowed out to them for some reason I can't quite work out, to get some dinner as I'd rushed from work. That left me with a choice of hot dogs or hot dogs inside the venue. Still I suppose I didn't really need another portion of battered haggis balls and chips. (Poor wee haggis).
• More effort could have been made to include local people in the games. Whether on Glasgow Green, Easterhouse at the Platform, the BBC activities at the Quay or the sports themselves it was always the same middle class crowds. If the locals aren't actively brought in to these things they are excluded by the prices as much as anything else. There may have been plenty of free entertainment on Glasgow Green and at the BBC, but if bodysearches stop you bringing food and drink in with you, you exclude anyone who cannot afford £4.90 for a pint of lager and £7 for a burger. Surely free games tickets could have been set aside for more local sports clubs in Glasgow rather than corporate sponsors?
• The Clydesiders were hailed/ patronised as a great Games success, but I really feel this was people doing essential work of the games without being paid. A friend worked as a volunteer driver, doing 10 hour shifts, sometimes through the night. That is just exploitation.
• The BBC coverage was thorough but struck a strange tone referring repeatedly to athletes from other parts of the UK winning medals in their "home games". I really felt this was Glasgow's Games and Scotland's Games and that they were muscling in. The same with the largely English commentators and presenters on TV. Were there no sports journalists at BBC Scotland that could have been given the gig?
• And finally, Gordon Matheson. What an embarrassing buffoon that man is!

I feared before had we'd get a bit of a showing up, but in the end Glasgow looked great, the crowds were great and we all had a great time. The Commonwealth itself is an outdated anachronism but the odd mix of sports and athletes taking part meant the Games had the pleasant feel of an event somewhere halfway between an Olympics and a school sports day. I mean that as a good thing.

Betting On The Muse by Charles Bukowski

Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you've read any Bukowski before you'll know the story of his life, lived out in all his writings, from drunken, gambling, addled, street fighter in and out of jail, in and out of bed with various women to drunken, addled, middle age where the eventual success of his writing bought him a less hand-to-mouth existence, but essentially his passions remained the same. This 400 page book of poetry and short stories was published post-humously but doesn't at all feel like is the leftovers being churned out to earn a buck. The poems, in free verse with a good ear for vocabulary and line length are loosely chronologically arranged ending on his musings on imminent death. I loved a couple grumbling about losing poems he'd almost completed on his computer "it's like reeling in/ a fish/ and then it/ escapes the hook/ just as you reach/ for it." You can picture him there with a beer beside him banging away at his Mac at 3am and cursing at it. Many of the poems are seemingly quickly written and I think should be read in the same manner as he was a prolific writer, as if you are in a conversation alongside him on a bar stool. Often you'll finish it and forget it, but a line or an image here and there will come back to you.

The short stories I liked, snapshots of the underbelly of his Los Angeles largely and tales from its racetracks and bars, and the stories and poems being jumbled up together works well. If you've read his novels the same semi-autobiographical character is here throughout. If you enjoy spending a bit of time in his company fine, if you don't, then don't bother with this.

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