Edinburgh Time
8 November

For years now, I've said to myself that I should like to visit Edinburgh outside of Festival time.

So, when Rod and Dale contacted me earlier in the year and said that they would be in Edinburgh in November, staying in a flat and would Ross and I like to join them, I jumped at the chance.

Having known Rod in the virtual world for a little while, I first met the two of them in Edinburgh in 1994 at the Festival. Since then, I've been to see them in Seattle in 1996 and 1999 and hosted them in London in 1999, first Dale and his sister Clarice and then Rod.

Ross and I trained up and arrived in time for him to enjoy his afternoon nap whilst I set off on a shopping expedition to Morrison's with Rod and Dale to stock up on provisions and take in Blockbuster for DVD entertainment. On the walk, I reminded Rod of something that he had said to me back in 1999 when he first met Ross. He counselled me to be very careful because "That young man trusts you".

As is often the case, Rod had completely forgotten the incident but it meant a lot to me at the time and it is advice that I have tried my best to hold to.

Dale rustled up food, to whit a pre-prepared beef bourgignon with a tasty spinach salad on the side, before he and Rod set off for the Usher Hall and a concert which included Sarah Chang fiddling the Dvorak concerto and Shostakovich's fifth symphony. We had passed on this, rightly assuming that travel would take it out of us.

I had already had a music fix for the week anyway. I got a late invitation to join Roland at the Phil on Thursday night for a concert including Haydn's 70th symphony, his sinfonia concertante for oboe, bassoon, violin and cello and Mozart's 40th symphony. The Haydn was great, full of fun, wit and elegance. The soloists in the sinfonia concertante were all Phil principles and they and the band played their hearts out. The conductor, Christian Arming, a young, blond kapelmeister, took things at an appropriate lick. He was less successful with the Mozart. I like my Mozart to be fleet but the heartache comes out of the elegance. This performance just felt to be too hard-driven with the consequence that anguish turned into angst.

In the event, I think that Ross and I were better served by staying in. Neither of our hosts was taken by Sarah Chang (tone too thin and small) although the Shostakovich was good. Instead, we wallowed in good old fashioned entertainment.

Shrek 2 was brilliant - too good for children. We giggled throughout. The whole thing is shot through with jokey film references, manic games at the expense of fairy tale conventions and delightfully off the wall characterisations. Voices included Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Julie Andrews, John Cleese, Antonio Banderas, Rupert Everett and Jennifer Saunders (though I spent the entire movie thinking that it was Emma Thompson). Four stars without question.

The following day started in lazy mode. It was well after eleven o' clock before we had breakfasted and abluted and were ready to face the day. It struck me that this is one of the great virtues of not staying in a hotel. Breakfast does not come at a set hour and you can laze in your room without expecting a maid to arrive to do the cleaning at any moment.

Anyhow, Rod and Dale headed off to a craft fair and we mosied down Princes Street to the National Gallery of Scotland for an exhibition entitled Titian and his Contemporaries which was a hang over from Festival time. Although we spent a pleasant ninety minutes with the paintings, the show's title was a complete misnomer. It really consisted of a lot of works by secondary artists like Paris Bordon (who? I hear you say - well exactly) from Scottish collections plus the two or three Titians in the Gallery's collection with a couple of other pieces brought in from outside. I didn't come away with very much sense of uplift.

We lunched at Pizza Express and then returned to the flat for the afternoon. Ross napped whilst the rest of us chatted and read. I finished off Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment which was highly enjoyable and full of his usual low comedy and high moral purpose.

However, the joke that all the soldiers turned out to be women was somewhat undermined if you knew the origins of the book's title from the treatise by John Knox called The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women.

Still, it was a good read and worth three stars.

Once again, I liked the fact that we were not in a hotel. I wouldn't have felt comfortable lounging around in a hotel bedroom. Evening time, we ate out at a French restaurant which was a particular favourite of Rod and Dale's. The food was very good and the waiters were scrummy - definitely a case of "Come on in, the waiter's lovely".

We rounded the day off by watching Connie and Carla a fairly insubstantial movie about two nightclub singers who escape from the attentions of criminals by hiding out in downtown LA as a drag act. It was a cross between The Ritz and Priscilla. The actors tried their best but it really was hokum. No-one would ever have believed that the two women were men dressed as women. A very average two stars, I'm afraid.

Sunday, Ross and I went off to the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art to see an exhibition of works by the American artist, Ed Ruscha. Ross was particularly keen to see this as one of his lecturers at College had compared his work to this man's. In the event, neither of us was particularly keen. Although there was a lot of the urban alienation of an Edward Hopper, there was little of the poetry. It felt very cool, precise, well-crafted but ultimately not very exciting.

Things picked up a lot when we moved on to the permanent collection - Picassos, Bonnards, Utrillos and more. This definitely merits a longer look on another occasion. We had a very good lunch in the downstairs café before meandering back to the flat. One the lawns in front of the Gallery were a line of seagulls stamping on the green sward. I've seen birds to this before. They are imitating rainfall in the hope of luring worms to the surface. In this case though, it looked as though the gulls were performing an avian version of Riverdance.

Rod and Dale were off visiting friends so we took advantage of their absence with a little whoopee.

The evening brought more good food from Dale - an excellent spag bol using sausage meat rather than mince which was a nice touch. Rod and I stepped out to return the DVDs and chatted about life, the universe and everything. We returned to find Ross and Dale discussing older men.

Ross went to bed and the rest of us settled in to watch Mean Girls, a comedy about settling in at a new school and the sorts of rites of passage that must be undertaken. It was OK but there was not enough hot male tottie for my liking. best moment was when Rajiv Surendra, the captain of the school's maths team, ripped his top off revealing a very pert chest. Strictly two star fayre.

And then it was all done and home again. A quick weekend but a lovely, relaxed one. I've not done justice to the camaraderie, the laughter, the conversation. I'd love to visit Rod and Dale with Ross sometime. I'd love to go back to Edinburgh with him and do the Festival as well. It's always good to have something more to do.