At the Festival

I had read and enjoyed Jackie Kay's memoir about growing up as an adopted child of colour in 1960s and 1970s Glasgow and her search for her birth parents, so it seemed a good choice to see it adapted for the stage. However, it was probably always going to be the case that the book was better than the play and in this adaptation much of the dialogue was taken directly from the book with little added. I think it lost out in that the book is told with the mature Jackie's hindsight which sees the funny side of things that might have been painful at the time, and there was no narrator in the play to give that perspective.

I saw this with three friends from my nurse training days - it's our 40th anniversary this year, amazingly enough! I'm the only one still in Edinburgh but I gave up nursing a long time ago. The other three are scattered around Scotland, and they are all retired, although younger than me. We've been meeting up more regularly recently than for a long time. I guess the retired ones have more energy to arrange such things!