An Opera and Two Houses
23 July
Things are moving on.
The week at work passed with ease. Thursday evening, I met Colin in town and we travelled out to Buxton together to attend an opera performance at the festival. Like many things this summer, it brought back memories. Over the years, I've seen a number of little performed works there - Kodály's Háry János (1982), Vivaldi's Griselda and Gounod's La Colombe (1983), Piccini's La buona figliuola and Galuppi's Il filosofo di campagna (1985) and Donizetti's Torquatto Tasso (1988).
This year it was Schubert's Fierrabras. With all of these operas, excepting Háry János, I cannot pretend that I would ever want to see or hear any of them again. However, I am extraordinarily glad to have had the opportunities to have savoured them once if only for the sense of understanding that the major masterpieces do emerge out of an historical context rather than an hermetically sealed vacuum of genius.
Fierrabras comes very much out of the German singspiel tradition of Magic Flute and, we are told, forms part of the link forward to Wagner. I'm not sure. I don't hear much of Wagner's exalted recitative in the piece. I'm more inclined to hear harbingers of the sound world of Rogers and Hammerstein.
Anyhow, the performance was lively and it was a joy as ever to watch and hear Thomas Randle. We journeyed home into the sunset. On the tops, near the Cat and Fiddle, I nearly drove off the road with the beauty of it all. The whole of the Cheshire plain to the left, Manchester to the right, Merseyside ahead. Threads and clumps of lights. Necklaces and webs. Tracery and filigree. And a sky of deepest smudged purple picked out by smears of green in the fading of the light. It could have been the Cities of the Plain in a John Martin canvas.
When I drove back from the performance of Turn of the Screw in Llandudno recently, there was a similar heartstopping moment as the coast road crested the headland and turned down the Dee estuary. There again in the darkening was the Wirral and Liverpool laid out for me. This is what I came home for. Vistas. The South East and London is too bunched, too on top of itself. Here there is room to see.
We got home at around midnight after an easy journey. I took the Friday off work. What a change - oh, my droogies. Years gone by and I would have soldiered in and worked twice as hard to combat the fatigue. Nowadays I know beyond all doubt that the world will not end simply because I am not around for a day. For the record, I spent the day helping Colin re-arrange the Music Room where I sit and do my well-tempered keyboard work to produce this Journal, shopping, ironing and generally tidying.
Come the weekend and it was house hunting.
Well, it has to be done.
I started in Crosby with a tour around four of the estate agents there, putting
my name on various lists. Most are very helpful. One in particular stands out
and that's Michael Moon where I get
treated to a sit down tour of houses in front of a computer so that I'm well
aware of what I might be getting long before I might think of visiting any
property. The youngman, Phil, is also quite cute, which helps.
Into Liverpool, lunch at No 7 because Cafe Vita was closed. A little shopping in town. Then out to Allerton and again a tour around a number of estate agents. This time, much less courtesy and help. Busier. Noisier. A lot more sales going on but, as the woman in Jones & Chapman said, they'll be very foolish if they forget their customers just because sales are brisk. I also came across on of the great typing errors in a property description, reproduced here as seen
DIRECTIONS:
From our Allerton office, proceed along Queens Drive in the erection of Childwall...
I keep saying it but you can't make these things up.
End of the day and I double back to Crosby to re-visit a couple of the estate agents there to make appointments for viewing.
Sunday and first up is a house in Cavendish Road. It's big, bigger than I might need and more than I am hoping to pay and it turns out not to be worth it. Oh, it could be lovely but all of the work that has been done on it by the current occupants was always a few pounds short of the necessary to produce the standard that the house deserves. So, as well as being highly priced, it's going to take a lot of money to put the place to rights. The place is also victim to Estate Agent speak. The leaflet boasts an ornamental pond in the back garden. This turns out to be a badly installed plastic featurette barely bigger than a bird bath tucked away in an overgrown rockery. I think not but let's not rule anything out at present.
The house is empty and so the lovely Phil had to leave his office with keys in his pocket to come and show me around. What a flirty boy he is! Before long I know that he was brought up locally, went to Merchant Taylors, didn't like rugby because of playing in shorts in the winter, preferred hockey because you got to wear track suit bottoms in the winter, went to college in Leeds, had just got back from holiday and had lived in a friend's flat for nearly a year before buying his own place where he has lived, locally, for almost a year now. Oh, and he drinks in Stamps where Ross and I went drinking with Roland a couple of weekends ago when we started this house hunting business.
Any how the house was quite nice too with lots of original features.
This one I feel could be it. I have a good feeling about it. But I want to look at more before taking a decision.