Monday 21st February 2022

As I said, one exposure to Theodora was booked because one must do something. Then Royston King came up with a second Theodora opportunity. So it looked as if February was to be not just one agony of Theodora (6.30 start. 4 hours) but two. I was sure of utter, ghastly drear. I will admit I did practice it a bit on the Spotify beforehand, so when it began, on the Opening Night, I was perched on a moving chair in the Balcony, it seemed quite bouncy and nice. You can’t complain about the story – easy to follow and it’s been updated from Early Christian Antioch to a hotel kitchen of today, with Eastern European staff in bibs and comfortable footwear. So the cast had plenty to do as there’s always a lot to do in a kitchen – fetching from the fridge, pouring out etc – while the singing was going on which it did quite a lot. I certainly wasn’t bogged down. I could tell one tune from another. The setting was a familiar one, of ugly exploitation and oppression. Then a young man in a suit sang in a lady voice an incredibly whirling aria and there was a huge reception. I thought Joyce Didi was to be the main thing, but there was someone else. Joyce was busy pouring coffees. Eventually it was her turn. She whirled and twirled. There was another huge reception for her extraordinary acrobatics. It was beginning to whack along. I couldn’t quite tell one number from another, but tunes of charm and pathos were springing up from the orch.

By the interval I wasn’t just thinking of the sandwiches. In the second act, Theodora herself is cruelly abducted into prostitution by the horrible Russian man and the high-singing young man, who is her lover although they’re the most fearsome Christians, comes to rescue her. He ends up wearing her dress while she escapes in his clothes. He could have escaped too, of course, but it’s best not to ask. It wouldn’t have been sufficiently in the line of sacrifice and martyrdom, I suppose. In the dress, the young man does some preliminary pole-dancing.

‘Who is he?’ I asked, in the interval. ‘This counter-tenor.’ His underwear was black, for they swapped clothes in full view, not behind a screen. Our part of the Balcony was abuzz. Jakub Józef Orlinski, I unearthed from the programme. ‘Have you seen his breakdancing on YouTube?’ a woman sitting nearby asked. ‘Not that I’m that keen,’ she added. Well, after that the final act was really quite thrilling. More miracles from Joyce Didi, including a gospel moment of improvisation, and for the ending, it had been decided they wouldn’t die but instead kill the horrible Russian man who was going to kill them. They disposed of quite a few others while they were about it, using the knives from the kitchen.  This was done in slow motion while they sang their magic mu and Jakub Józef released other worldly high notes. It was fabulous. In the general sweep of the theatre, this decorous, orderly mu was riveted anew in this modern sex-trafficking, migrant worker environment, not known to Handel.

I did look up Jakub Józef’s breakdancing on YouTube – as soon as I got home. Breakdancing is where you become a spinning top, upside down, among other things. It’s just like counter-tenor singing, at least as carried out by J J. In residence, Theodora I had on the entire time. One glorious number after another revealed themselves, but not like The Messiah – they’re hard to reproduce in one’s own voice. You can progress through the first few bars, but then where?

I began to dread that Theodora at the Garden would be felled by you-know-what. Unbearable thought. But it wasn’t – Robert Nevil and I were poised on gilt chairs in the Balcony as once again the orch launched forth. There’s always a danger of let-down if you try to reproduce a thrill. But no! It was thrilling, although the audience a little slow to begin with. There were different high-lights this time – parts not registered before. The ultimate in masculinity, it turns out, is a tall athletic man, known for breakdancing, singing falsetto in a dress. What could be more manly? The final duet, ‘Streams of Pleasure Ever Flowing’, sung while they’re busy knifing the enemy, is the soprano, Theodora herself, and the Counter-Tenor – simply staggering. Jakub Józef has none of the usual Counter-Tenor resemblance to Lady Bracknell. The voice is pure but extraordinarily strong, in the high notes daringly opening up completely and circling in the roof of the Opera House like some strange disembodied creature.

Who would have thought it? So Theodora not utter ghastly drear. I would cross the Earth for it, wherever it was being given, even Panama.

Thursday 17th February 2022

Val’s been coughing for weeks. Not up to a visit, until suddenly a bit better and I was underway for Moscova, Hastings. But, in the meantime, between departure and arrival thereto, Val had gone downhill again, but not so far as not to be up to a rigorous critique of the Queen’s frock for the Christmas broadcast. Val axed straight to the heart of it. Couture is not comfort. Fitted is not comfortable. Wearing couture is strenuous as we know from previous days with ladies fainting, their feet killing them, unable to breathe, desperate for their boudoirs to be unwound from their frockage. So she’s ordered comfort, she doesn’t want to be squeezed in any more and Angela’s going to have to think of a new approach.

We’d thought of trying for Fish and Chips at Bexhill. The Multis had explained a complicated mechanism whereby you order from one shop but eat at the outdoor provision of another, the actual chippie’s interior being unspeakable. But that was off, owing to Val’s decline. I ferried him round to the Co-op and he sent me in with a list. One item I couldn’t read or rather I thought, It can’t say ‘knickers’. So I had to go out to the Official Car and Val said it did say Knickers. ‘But they don’t have them in the Co-op,’ I said. ‘I know,’ said Val.

Later I vac-ed Val’s premises and dusted. He lost his scrunchie but found it in his knickers. He said Buckingham Palace had smelled of a public swimming pool when we’d visited it. He had to be pitched off the sofa so I could vac it. An amazing array of essential items he keeps near him – an unpicker, a tape measure, a half-finished Norwayan Alpine tapestry and her wools, the Historical Atlas of Europe (Val always says, ‘If you want to grasp History, look at a map’) as well as some house plant food and a biography of Constance Spry.

Monday 14th February 2022

The Gay Mother’s thinking of reviving the Chicken Brick. She read about it in the Tablet. You can find a Chicken Brick on eBay. On the other hand, she said, ‘I’d never be a chef. It’s so nerve-racking.’

I inquired about climate change, which is a big subject these days. ‘I don’t think the world will come to an end,’ the Gay Mother explained. ‘It’s more that the Earth will no longer be habitable for humans.’ ‘So who will live here instead?’ I ask. ‘Some other sort of animal,’ she said, apparently quite satisfied that the planet would not go to waste therefore.

So many religious publications in the drawing room. After luncheon, by the fire in the drawing room, the Gay Mother is pouring over the latest issue of the Church Times. ‘Terrible goings-on in Llandaff,’ she says. ‘My goodness.’ The Bishop’s accused of bullying the Dean. We know the Bishop who used to be Dean of Salisbury and was present at my godmother’s funeral in the Cathedral where I addressed the Cathedral.

The Gay Mother still can’t stand Mary Beard – so silly. David Attenborough also blacklisted. ‘Can’t they find anyone else? He’s had his turn.’ But of Beatrix Potter she will hear no ill.

The Drawing Room – Shrewn with Religious Publications

The Sun Shone in the Drawing Room and on the Publications of the Churches

Saturday 12th February 2022

Messages kept coming from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, begging me to go to Theodora by Handel. I thought: it will be utter, ghastly drear, like that other one with the prep school boys on bicycles where there’s only one good number (Lascia ch’io pianga). Only worse, because it’s a tale of Christian martyrs. Theodora isn’t even the Empress Theodora. But you’ve got to go to something. Who’d have thought an opera visit would be so dangerous – which is how it should be, perhaps. So I booked and booked Robert Nevil to accompany. Then Royston King comes in  – also with Theodora – and I can’t resist, just to be in the House and with Royston King, of course. So now my February is Theodora twice over. It lasts for 4 hours. 6.30 start. Maybe even 6.

To top all the Theodora suffering, Robert Nevil’s getting flaky about Theodora – his attendance at it, I mean.

Maybe it would have been better never to have started on this Theodora journey. What will become of me?

Tuesday 8th February 2022

Nigella’s no-knead black bread requires black onion seeds. As the Gay Mother said, ‘Onion seeds are black.’ So what is a black onion seed? In my cupboard there were none – which was bemusing because I was possessed of a sure and certain faith of them being there. The Maharajah and Robert Nevil must have used up the supply with all their Hindu cooking last Spring. So off I go – shopping for black onion seeds. ‘Where are the black onion seeds?’ I blare in the greengrocer’s. The youth even comes out from behind his screen. Nothing. Something called Nigella seeds are small and black but not black onion seeds. They had those. Besides, surely Nigella wouldn’t call for seeds with her own name in her no-knead black bread? Anyway, she hadn’t. She’d put Black Onion Seeds quite definitely.  So I blast into several more shops. Yes, to Nigella, no to Black Onion. It begins to look as if the whole afternoon will be consumed. In the fourth shop the young woman in attendance offers to undertake ‘research’. She Googleth – and Lo! Nigella seeds and Black Onion Seeds are the same thing – la meme chose. It ought to have been a perfect moment of resolution. But Nigella as well as being Nigella, daughter of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a flower, not an onion. If Black Onion Seeds are Onions, how can they be Nigella? But they are. To me, it felt like a brick wall. What’s more, I had some of them in the cupboard all along. The Maharajah must have replaced the previous ones.

I need never have left home.

Monday 23rd January 2022

Small dinners are often the solution in January when the Queen in still at Sandringham and grand affaires are not yet launched.

Harry Rollo and Mercury Mr Kitten dined. ‘Just you, me and Alfred,’ as Alfred’s wife used to breathlessly promise at cocktail parties. Harry revealed the situation in Belgium where amateur performers are to be curtailed. ‘Make them professional,’ I told them.  ‘Give them a chocolate bar. That will stop them getting Covid-19.’ From my handbag I produced mask-exemption badges for them both. Harry had been on the brink of refusing Belgium altogether because of the masks but fortunately Belgium was rearranged to suit.

Harry described his father’s 80th birthday on 30th December. Everybody on the Right Wing said, ‘You try and keep me away.’ Everybody on the Left Wing stayed at home, even the former War Correspondent of the Left Wing Newspaper, who had faced many Wars. Harry’s mother managed 20 or 30 to lunch all by herself. Beef Wellington was her feature: ferociously difficult. Few have attempted it even after years of training. It was superb.

Mercury Mr Kitten said you don’t want to hear pop singers breathing. Adele, who is a very famous pop singer, is a smoker and absolutely gasps while singing, he said. Harry did an imitation of it. Simply awful but it has not stood in her way.

We listened to Dame Janet Baker on the Spotify, singing from Elijiah: ‘Oh Rest in the Lord/Wait patiently for him’. Her breathing was admired but her grandeur less so. ‘It’s awfully grand,’ Harry said. Nowadays singing is less grand. I remember Renato Scotto coming on as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth at the Garden (c 1977) and taking ten minutes of applause before she even sang a note. Tremendous bowing and humility. At last she got going as Lady M and was rather clapped out and screechy being fin de career. Dame Janet was never like that. Indeed they wouldn’t have her at the Garden because she sang the Messiah in places like Huddersfield on a regular basis. All the same, it was the era of the colossally important voice.

After the dinner, Mercury Mr Kitten and Harry Rollo left on a World Tour.

Saturday 15th January 2022

As usual, the year always takes a while to get going. I’ve even experienced a few moments of boredom between tea and drinks.

Robert Nevil actually suggested an engagement which turned out to be incomprehensible.  This was the week before last. At a gallery in Fitzrovia, Just William either was or was not selling his art collection. The works were displayed and priced but the general idea was that they were not for sale. There were two Patrick Proctors for £3500 each. Tiny ones of Cecil Beaton on holiday. Robert Nevil took a dim view of them being of Cecil Beaton. Various people drifted in whom Robert Nevil seemed to know well enough to engage in complaining about the London Library. Departure was announced, I was cracking open with boredom out in the street but still departure did not take place because complaining about the London Library was not over.

When at last I could advance, it was straight to the tube station. No tea in a café.  Robert Nevil not especially interested in the Christmas visitors who’d gone on to die. Aunt Vosge was not actually a Christmas visitor but from accounts of her extreme state given down the telephone by Cousin Wilson she might as well have been. She was quietly gathered just after New Year as was old Commander Trahair Trelawn, whose accounts of naval equipment, semi-secret exercises and emergency planning  I’ve been listening to every Boxing Day for the last 50 years at least. This gone Boxing Day turned out to be his last, although not unexpected. He was able to self-propel to the lunch table with his walker and his attack on Queen Mary as mainly German was formidable.

Friday has been a bad day for meeting infected people and so it proved again when Royston suggested the Courtauld Gallery with Sir Kingston Fisher who is the Chief Accountant to the City of London Corporation. Sir Kingston enraged Royston by being constantly out of the gallery on the phone to John Lewis about a possible fraudulent transaction. But within the Gallery Sir Kingston on the phone to John Lewis could be heard perfectly well from without. Royston was fuming and threatening to cancel Sir K entirely who had previously been 1 1/2 hours late for lunch with Lord Crumble, an outrage with which Royston confronted Sir K whenever he came back into the gallery which wasn’t very often. I couldn’t grasp whether upon the John Lewis business depended the entire fortunes of the City of London Corporation or just Sir K’s private affairs. Perhaps it was both. Later we gained the café. The wrong sort of coffee was obtained for Sir K who presented a substantial thesis on how coffee was never served with milk already in it. But actually the server had brought the wrong coffee and another person elsewhere in the cafe was blasting in a parallel universe at the notion of coffee being black which was the coffee meant for Sir K. When at last the right coffee was before him Sir K left the room. Eventually he said he had to get to his bank before it closed. Royston said it was to prevent a melt-down of Sterling.

During the art part of the visit, I was so weak in the lower galleries I had to lean on the radiators. Marvellous works and a whole room of Rubens. When we got upstairs into the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Room it was as if Spring had come just like that. My invalid state fell away at once. That Monet of the vase of flowers is ecstatic. It’s just a picture of a vase of flowers in one way of looking at it. How bold it would have been at the time to attempt such a subject. Never is it more than its subject but the subject is so utterly itself and so ravishing and swirling with its own energy of flowers. Then there’s the Foliès Bergere by Manet. Manet is special to me, Adrian Edge, because he was so privately wealthy sometimes he didn’t bother to finish a picture when he couldn’t be bothered. All the same, the Foliès Bergere is one of the great paintings of all Art, along with Les Baigneurs by Seurat.

By Wednesday of this week, Sir K was found to be coughing. So it was lucky he was so much out of the room last Friday.

Monet: Vase of Flowers

Manet: the Foliès Bergere. She stares blankly. Her reflection in the mirror is in the wrong place and seems to be an older, more matronly person who is talking to somebody in an intimate way. But the central figure is not talking to anybody. There’s such grandeur and blankness in this picture

Van Gogh: Very nice but a Sunday Artist, hence Popular. This fence going across the Picture is so Obvious

Monday 10th January 2022

‘I wouldn’t have wanted a full, normal life,’ said Ivy Compton Burnett. Before Christmas I had normal life as now known. Rufus Pitman and Raj Zoroaster dared to give a party. Really it was a buffet luncheon – so suitable for the older guest – with a palatial array of made-dishes. The work! All done without staff. Everybody was there. Sensational was the revival of Bruno France Bruno, emerging intact from a prolonged disappearance still equipped with priceless tickets for the opera. Then there was Bruce McBain, not often seen at parties, and Lord Arrowby, to an airy loveliness beat by the cares of State, or rather his new domain where he is absolute. ‘Stop saying “Woke”‘, Lord A snapped at one of the maharajahs, whose nails were done in turquoise. All the maharajah wanted to know was the degree of Woke in the Lord’s new demesne and the Lord said it wasn’t very much.

After that I had a delightful confab with the Maharajah, breaking off from academic matters, about perfumes and got a perfume tip: ‘Leather’ by Malin + Goetz. I bought it the next day.

The Vicar was there and asked me about the Harrison Birtwistle opera at which he said we’d met by chance. I felt I was lifting off and departing this life – absolutely no recollection whatsoever. But just in time it came back to me.  This opera was 3 hours of which one could make no sense whatsoever. Such an absence of sense while still having an opera was a staggering achievement, the experience of a lifetime.

I look The Nutcracker in Ed Jasper, the bedlinen expert’s, annual party. It was enchanting, an escape to a fairy world – The Nutcracker. Afterwards over sandwiches and champagne at Ed and Roland’s new mansion, Ed said, ‘People don’t realise how easily they could make their lives better – with enhanced pillowcases, for instance, or air conditioning.’ He invited me to his villa in Cephalonia for 2023. 2022 is fully booked with other friends. I admired the hall flooring in the yet-to-be-renovated mansion. ‘I hate it. It’s going,’ Ed said.

I hope I’ll be spared for Cephalonia.

Royston gave a luncheon on Friday 17th December in the new Spanish restaurant in the Royal Academy. It was thrillingly full. ‘Posh people don’t catch things,’ Royston said. But it turned out to be a super-spreading event. Royston and his whippy accountant friend both went down early the following week, while I was with the Gay Mother. But I escaped. Or appeared to. Lucky escape. Afterwards we peered at Late Constable in the Royal Academy. Royston insisted on ten minutes before each painting but it was rewarding. I saw Constable anew. How dramatic and mysterious, although plainly England’s green and pleasant scene. Slashes of paint on the canvases unapologetically paint as well as the lashing rain. The figures – ghostly somehow, not quite there, rather like the people in Monet. Odd perspective – disconcerting. The view of London from Hampstead Heath has a mound in the foreground which, judging by the tiny-ness of the nearby figure must be as high as Everest, but still impresses as a modest mound.

Royston insisted on the Summer Exhibition as well which nearly killed me and then we took seething Fortnum and Mason. I was too shattered to go on the whippy one’s club for dinner. Perhaps that’s what spared me.

My final engagement of the pre-Christmas period was Hastings to visit Val at Moscova. We completed the shopping of  his Christmas needs. Some miniature Christmas puddings. Then he mentioned Jackie Stallone’s honing of the art of rumpology. She was the mother of Sylvester Stallone. Rumpology is a method of divination from examining the arse of a person. We entered Alastair Willis’s Tudor House which was dressed for Christmas. But he, very grandly, wasn’t there. Val sat in a chair by the Tudor fire nattering with the former secretary of Fergus Strachan who had been left as chatelaine while I roamed the house, paying particularly attention to the Sid Ed Memorial Tudor Tin bath, which when he sat in it overflowed terrifically and poured through the Tudor House from top to bottom.

25th December 2021

‘I wouldn’t have wanted a full, normal life,’ said Ivy Compton Burnett. But, as it happens, the drive-in to Christmas has been fully normal, this year, for me, Adrian Edge.

One Carol Service

One ballet

Two parties

One dinner

One lunch at the Royal Academy followed by Late Constable

Just the racking strain of how the Government might veer and the added interest of throat swabs and quaking for the results.

My car went forth loaded with Christmas junk. Fruit cake, mince pie… how one longs for the lightest of soufflés. The depth of winter, the Holy Family so reduced and alone, completely unrecognised in terms of what they would afterwards become. They would have had viral onslaughts then, since December is always the time for a surge. Now that they’ve been itemised, and Q-coded and heralded, they will be a feature of Christmas for ever more.

So now the time has come, first of all to shrink Christmas, then finally to vanish it altogether. No more tinsel, no more excess packaging, no more gush about ‘Loved Ones’, no more Christmas loneliness for the lonely (they can just carry on being lonely as they are on every other day of the year), no more ‘Call the Midwife Christmas Special’, no more Christmas stress and bird agony, no more grind of cards and guilt..

The maximum for Christmas should be a tiny brown memorial to the Stable, the rough brown weave of the Holy Family, the brown of the stable itself and the cows within, cowering in winter and suffering, alone, longing for better weather and jolly summer regattas.

Friday 10th December 2021

The Lincoln Cathedral Messiah was three weeks ago now. What a cathedral! Royston and I nearly blew it down arguing about the Gothic. He said the decoration was highly systematic, based on numbers of religious significance reflecting the Trinity. But I don’t like to think of them doing it in that mechanical way. I feel that they were freer, driven by aesthetic imperatives. I suppose I could read a book about it, but I never will now. All my ideas are stuck in university days, when I managed to read a few paragraphs about how Ruskin thought of the Gothic as a community effort with everybody chipping in with what they were good at and the result a miraculous hotchpotch, the complete opposite of Classical. Royston said things have probably moved on now, since Ruskin. Well, maybe they have but nobody’s told me, Adrian Edge.

I’m not going back to university days, reading all those awful books.

Lincoln Cathedral defies Ruskin’s definition though, having very obviously a single design. That’s what’s so astonishing about it – incredible unity on a vast scale. I was driven to go by longing to see the ‘crazy’ vaulting in the Choir. Royston said it wasn’t crazy. But it is. At once symmetrical and asymmetrical.

Last week, I took Winter Wonderland, Hyde Park. We crammed into the Private Reception for Royal Parks staff and Trustees. Portacabin hung with red Christmas crepe paper. Mulled wine. Sausage rolls. Prawn vol au vents. Sandwiches.  Never again did I expect to be skimming people’s backs at a party in the winter or indeed at any time. The Queen was there, or rather a bean-pole man who runs her Household. Royston was talking to some other Trustees. They said they were planting 6000 tulips in Northern Ireland. It turned out they were an Earl and Countess! I could have screamed with thrill.  Royston’s great theme was ‘Whither the Royal Parks?’ and several people got quite cross.

Out in the main Winter Wonderland, very different clientele – shall we say Wembley and the like? Youthful, money to spend. Unbelievable scenes: people being flung in the air on strings or imprisoned in metal boxes and hurled along a vertical rail. They were queuing up in droves for this treatment. In fact the completely traditional fun-fare but now digitalised and with a greater range of colours in the lighting. There was a carousel. We had free rides and were tempted by the carousel but the other occupants were toddlers. So we took the Big Wheel – nice views. Had to squeeze into a pod with others. Then the Ice Show – minus 10 degrees in there. Couldn’t get out fast enough. Some idiot clambered over the fence to have her photo taken with an ice-sculpture, slipped and broke it. The Ice Show was extraordinary. Everything was ice. Whole parties of people in Christmas-type winter huts – all made of ice. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Tuesday was ‘Manor’ at the National Theatre. Show got zero stars in The Times. Somebody sitting in front of us actually had a cough. Packet of Stepsils proudly on view. But Merle Barr wasn’t bothered. I would have been furious to catch that thing for that. But ‘Manor’ did show the Landed Gentry in the good light. That was its message really. The main lady with the crumbling stately wouldn’t in the end falsely say that the black girl had shot the vicar to cover up that it was the alt right cult leader . He was offering her £6 million to do up her Stately which he’d got from a Just Giving campaign. No, she said, in the end, I’m not having it. I’m going on with the leaking roof, and the desperate attempts to raise funds. That’s England for you and why we’re a great Nation.

Wednesday was Die Walkure at the ENO. A whole Wagner in a Loathsome. Has anybody achieved that before? Superb Die Walkure. Brunnhilde was tiny and like a real girl.

Saturday we took Gucci film at the cinema. I thought it was boring and made no sense. Matt Driver sort of agreed. Laura Malcolm and Aunt Lavinia loved every minute.  Sunday to Hastings with Anthony Mottram to have fish and chips with Val. Val quite cheerful and anxious to shop his Christmas needs.

Lincoln Cathedral: Staggering Unity of Design

Lincoln Cathedral: Great Unity

Lincoln Cathedral: Did they do things in Threes?

Lincoln Cathedral: Conventional Vaulting

Lincoln Cathedral: Crazy Vaulting. Do you See the Difference?

Winter Wonderland, Hyde Park. View from the Wheel: Pretty

Winter Wonderland: View from the Wheel. So Much Construction Work. Hope

Winter Wonderland: General View. German Feel. Or Swiss

Winter Wonderland: the Ice Show

Winter Wonderland: the Ice Show

Angus Willis: Christmas Window, Hastings