Saturday 5^th June 2010

I’ve been absent. I’ve been remiss. Glyndebourniana was on Wednesday. It’s opera at a country house, if you’re in US or foreign. Or rather tres snob, usually self-brought picnic and frock opportunity with shortest possible opera endured in the intervals. Very, very high.  Tickets £185 each, but Aunt Lavinia paid, me to do the picnic and drive her the sixty miles to Sussex.

So Tuesday was Pre-Glyndebourniana-picnic-and-boarding tension.

I feared retribution, having ditched poor Robert Nevil’s birthday for this elevation. Would my official car blow up on the way? Would the ice-box fail and the picnic fester?

We gained Glyndebourne demesne in one piece at least. Aunt Lavinia was in an excellent frock from Annabel’s of Oxford, still going strong from the 80s. But oh the other audience! Perhaps this was my punishment. Val, as you know owing to a fondness not always steady on his feet, would have had his guillotine out. Huff-puff well-heeled middle-aged men, with lady-wives, glaring at my suit by Nicolo Ceschi Berrini – not a dinner jacket, you see, which is what you’re supposed to wear. ‘It was reduced,’ I wanted to scream, ‘reduced by 40 per cent to £770. So bog off!’

This is the Poor Little Rich Gay way – we loathe and aspire at once.

The frockage of many ladies was alarming. E.g. hugging dress of prawn-cocktail-pink lav paper on a big-boned woman with bulky knee-high boots for the glorious summer evening. Classic June.

Aunt Lavinia looked in the programme and saw sponsorship by Sainsbury’s mentioned. ‘You see, there’s Sainsbury’s,’ she boomed with her centuries-old voice built to span at least three fields and a wood. ‘Now what have Tesco’s ever done for anybody?’

Tesco’s was certainly excluded from my picnic. I brought proper china and silver, but no candle-sticks. You remember last year Aunt Lavinia withered wretched Robin Smallmeal, my arch enemy, who was situated nearby with candlesticks. Common, she said. No sign of him this year, thank goodness, although I did dread. We had smoked trout with salsa verde, cold sirloin, potato salad with thyme, rocket, tomatoes, passion fruit meringue cakes from Ottolenghi (yes! Ottolenghi!).

When we were packing up in the dark afterwards, I wondered if a napkin that had drifted into the  ha-ha was mine. I decided no but Aunt Lavinia said, ‘It’s a perfect good napkin. I should have it if I were you.’ So I clambered down into the field in Nicolo Ceschi Berrini and almost couldn’t get back up again.

How many Greatnesses have had to be hauled out of the ha-ha at Glyndebourniana over the years?

But we did love the opera. That’s the thing – at Glyndebourniana you are rarely let down. It was Billy Budd. Very strange, just a little too long, but it won’t be so superbly done for a very long time.

The Impact of Humans at Glyndebourne