Through a glass darkly – 132

Thank God for Christian friends. That God calls us not in isolation, but into relationship with other members of his family. In recent days we have been pleased to see David Smith, onetime Principal of Northumbria Bible College, and the lead tutor on my MTh course at ICC. Glasgow, some 15 years ago; we had lunch with Mike and Wendy, our longtime friends from St Thomas’s, Glasgow Road, where I was once a [middle-aged] curate, and then took in a Fringe show; we had lunch with Andy and Kate and Joan, all up from [Christ Church] Duns; and I am about to meet up with James and Julia from St Peters, Chantilly.

On the Fringe

We are three weeks into the Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe. I’m not quite enough of a native in this city to complain about all the visitors. But bus journeys take significantly longer, and patient bus drivers cope with people crossing the road against the lights while glued to their phones.

The Fringe programme this year is almost 15mm thick and runs to some 384 pages. I am a very cautious, very conservative Fringe goer. Ever since we went to a late night comedian doing things with empty beer bottles a few years ago. Ever since the play, set somewhere in the Western Isles, when five minutes in the leading lady stripped off and lay on the table. But there have always been good things. I used to enjoy Miles Kington [of Parlez Vous Franglais] performing with Instant Sunshine. We once saw Rhoda Scott at the Queen’s Hall. [Years before seeing her, I think, at the Vienne Jazz Festival.] And I still have a CD of Dilly Keane doing one of her outrageous shows. 

This year we started in July with The Classic Jazz orchestra, an eight piece band playing a repertoire ranging from Jelly Roll  Morton to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The band included well-known Edinburgh musicians Colin Steele on trumpet and Dick Lee on clarinet and alto sax. One Sunday afternoon we took in Voices of Lions. This was a fifty-strong a cappella group, all boys, from Hampton Grammar School, with a wide range of songs; spirituals, pop classics, show tunes, and ballads. They were good. As was Hebridean Fire at Surgeons Hall. Elsa Jean McTaggart, a fiddler and multi-instrumentalist, and her husband took us on a musical journey through the highlands and islands, accompanied by some stunning photos of the Hebrides. The show also provided me with my joke of the year. But it works better in the Gaelic !

I couldn’t get tickets for The Look of Dusty, an award-winning tribute act by Ella McCready, which was already a sell-out. So we went instead to Oliver Harris doing his Roy Orbison tribute act in the Frankenstein Pub beer cellar. Harris has the voice and range to do justice to a string of classic hits – Only the Lonely, In Dreams, Oh Pretty Woman. Which went down a bomb with the fans. [But I couldn’t help remembering seeing the great man himself, standing motionless in his big dark glasses, belting all these songs out in a show at The Apollo in Oxford at the end of the 1960s. Inexplicable as it seems now, the Walker Brothers were topping the bill and Orbison closed the first half.]

We also saw In The Mood – A Tribute to Glenn Miller by Jon Ritchie and the Swing Sensation. They all played in GI uniforms for the first half and then changed into tuxedos. It was a big, brassy band, supported by a male vocalist and three female singers, the Swell Belles. The music was good, but the show was a bit spoiled by the inability of the presenter to use the microphone properly. 

And we have been three times to shows at Valvona and Crolla. Which is a well-known, hugely stocked, rightly popular [and expensive] Italian delicatessen at the top of Leith Walk, celebrating its 90th anniversary this year.  The shop also doubles up as a restaurant and Fringe venue. And Philip Contini, grandson of the founder, is a singer and regular Fringe performer. We saw two shows there that both featured Dick Lee. The first was Swingtime, with Dick Lee on clarinet and Brian Kellock on piano playing the music of Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson. And the second was Swingology, with  Dick Lee and vocalist Ali Affleck and the Swingaholics recreating a Parisian cafe of the 1940s, featuring the music of Django Reinhardt and Edith Piaf and Sidney Bechet. Sadly I can’t remember the tunes for more than five minutes. Both the shows were excellent. 

When Joanna loved me

Almost finally, we saw The Stuff of Legends, with The Spatz Trio paying tribute to the music of Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole. Tony Bennett had largely passed me by. In the day, back in the 1960s, I didn’t get much beyond Roy Orbison and Ray Charles, and a bit later Frank Sinatra. The Spatz Trio were great; great songs and great performance. Until they sang the following 1964 Tony Bennett song, written by Jack Segal and Robert Wells. Which brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes.

“Today is just another day, tomorrow is a guess

But yesterday, oh what I’d give for yesterday

To relive one yesterday, and its happiness

When Joanna loved me

Every town was Paris

Every day was Sunday

Every month was May

When Joanna loved me

Every sound was music

Music made of laughter

Laughter that was bright and gay.

But when Joanna left me

May became December

But, even in December, I remember

Her touch, her smile, and for a little while

She loves me

And once again its Paris

Paris on a Sunday

And the month is May.”

I’ve just bookmarked one of the several versions on You Tube.

And these are the only photos that I can find of Joanna in Paris, the city where she was born.

August 2024