Wednesday 3rd August 2016

Last Wednesday to Salzburg for Harry Rollo’s event. I was expecting a chamber feel with a few of our greatest English performers weaving and arching superbly. On the aircraft were Reggie Cresswell, the Ghanian ceramicist, and Kernow Hellizon, whose launches always feature Sir Mickland Jagger. Reggie said that when they switch on the aircon in the cabin great gales of germs are released. I encountered Kernow by the lavs. He was travelling separately in a family setting. So nice to have somebody to talk to who understands what it is to be of a certain kind of family. He was most sympathetic about the terrible mineral situation before homing in on the doctor’s box stowed in the hostess area. ‘There’ll be morphine in there,’ he said. ‘Shall we try and get hold of it?’ I said.

We gained our hotel while Kernow transported his family straight to the Sacher. Our hotel had no air con but I rather liked the heavy German doorways and cupboards. Staff were off their heads. In the garden, I stepped on a border full of nothing but bindweed (I was on the verge of suggesting Round Up) in order to get closer to where Rufus Pitman, like some strange trapped figure in a German fairy story, was trying to speak to me out of a window. He said that Raj Zoraster was holding him by force in their room. At once staff were upon me, eyes popping, and clapping their hands, ‘No, no, thiz is a garr-den.’ No concern whatever for Rufus’s desperate plight.

Later we fell into the hands of some crazy school-boys pretending to be waiters in the dinner restaurant but actually pursuing some long-standing feud. Reggie didn’t believe the dumpling wasn’t meat-based and left it so they all but threw it at him.

Harry’s great perf was the next day, Thursday, which was a day devoted to waves of Greatnesses arriving by air from London – their luggage unfortunately not accompanying them to a degree not laid down by statistics for our guidance. At 4pm I attended at the railway station, where Anthony Mottram arrived by train from Prague. There was much to talk about, as we re-positioned in an international way from our Bulgarian experiences of only a few days before. The big news is that Anthony Mottram’s mother, 95, trying in vain to persuade her off-spring to give a concert in the communal drawing room of her sheltered Court accom, finally came up with the unturn-downable notion that it would be a pre-funeral concert. Her funeral, that is. Like a pre-dessert. So it’s going ahead for September.

Anthony Mottram was appalled by his room at the hotel which was a heavy German monastic cell.

Finally, finally, after snacks, we were geared for the perf

Salzburg: Clouds Gather before Harry Rollo’s Great Perf

Salzburg: Reggie Cresswell Liked the Gravel Finish in this Square: Fountain also Almost as Good as Firry

Salzburg: The Russian Quarter

The Door to Anthony Mottram’s Room in the Hotel: Horrors Within