Another Busy weekend

 We took son no 2 back to Glasgow on Friday which fitted in well as we had a Scottish Opera event in Glasgow on Saturday which had a ridiculously early start. OK it was 9.00 am and I appreciate most people get to work by 9.00 but we're retired, it was a Saturday and my body reacts badly to early mornings. On that front I have some bad news for it....*

The event itself was a Study Day for the first half of the new season, so looking at Boheme in the morning and the double bill of a Ravel and a Walton in the afternoon. The speaker in the morning was someone called Michael Downes who is a very well respected whatever, not that I'd heard of him before, but you know, that means nothing. I didn't think he could tell us much about Boheme that we didn't already know but he was interesting actually, especially on the musical structure about which we had previously known less than nought, so there you go. There was a buffet lunch, which was rather more acceptable than the woman sitting opposite us thought, although nothing to write home about. The afternoon session took the form of a Q and A, where someone from the fund raising team asked a lot of prepared questions of the lovely Lea (Shaw) who takes the main role in the Ravel ( L'heure espagnol) and is covering the main part in the Walton - The Bear. Some of the questions had already been answered by the time the questioner got to them, and she didn't have the nous to just not ask them. I dunno, I wasn't feeling all that bright during the first morning session so I'm possibly jaundiced. I didn't feel I got a lot out of it for the money and I wouldn't rush back. 

That said it was held in the Scottish Opera HQ in Elmbank Street and we saw rather more of it than we have before. It's beautiful, lots of lovely architectural details, including many stained glass windows of which this was the best example that we saw.

And this was Michael Downes OBE taking to a member of the audience afterwards

photograph removed at the behest of Scottish Opera

Yesterday we went to The Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. I had never been there before so I was unaware of the fact that they are in fact original Georgian Assembly Rooms - very Georgette Heyer/Jane Austen. I'm sure they must have been restored/ refurbished several times since they were first built in the 1780s. Obviously I had to look that date up, I didn't have it floating around in my head.  Anyway here are a couple of pictures of (updated) Georgian splendour.

And here's the reason we were there;  to hear this woman

who was doing a show to promote this book 

quite successfully, as I bought it! despite having it on Audible already

The show was very good; Haynes is a great communicator and very, very funny,as anyone who has listened to her series on Radio 4 will know. And, as the icing on the cake, we spotted a TV presenter, of whom the OH is a big fan, a few rows in front of us, so that made his evening. I exchanged a few words with her and she was every bit as lovely as she seems on the television. 

We were very late back because we had gone by train but the show was so good it was definitely worth the money and the late night! 

Tomorrow we are off to Florence (hooray!) *flying quite early,  so that's comparatively bad news, and  the blog will of course go quiet for a wee while. By the time we come back I suspect my phone  will be groaning under the weight of all the photographs I have  taken,  so there should be lots of interesting stuff to post once I've recovered from what I suspect may be  serious sensory overload.