London: Trip the Second
7 February

Firstly, I guess that I need to say a word about the weather.

On the night of Sunday 1/Monday 2 February, it snowed.

The heaviest falls were in the Midlands, the South West and parts of the South East. According to media mythology, London was devastated with all services grinding to a halt. There were many similar scenes such as those below presented to justify the apocalyptic atmosphere.

There was even a little snow locally.

However, by the time that Roland and I arrived in London, we encountered no more than two inches of slush.

What I suspect happened was that, on the Sunday night, the bus companies contacted the local authorities about the gritting of the roads. The local authorities took the decision that, because manpower was costly on a Sunday, that they were postponing the gritting. The buses, quite rightly, said that they weren't taking chances on ungritted roads. So, on Monday morning, folk looked out of the window and decided not to drive the car. They found that the buses were off and the tubes were cancelled so they took the day off work.

And then a domino effect took place so that the capital was mostly deserted by its workforce. By four o' clock most places were closing down because of lack of business and lack of staff. Nevertheless, Roland and I managed to travel 200 miles. Pah!!

Meanwhile, in the height of irony, stories from Australia centre on dry heat and bushfires - the worst for many years. Whole communities have been burnt out.

The plumes of smoke could be seen from space.

What is incredible to me is that some of these fires were started deliberately.

So, back to the events of the week...

On Sunday Roland and I were in Manchester for Opera North's concert performance of Richard Strauss Elektra. This was good and left a decided tingle factor at the end. Our promised Elektra, Susan Bullock, deserted up but Janice Cairns stepped up like a trooper and gave the rôle some welly. Alwyn Mellor gave us a sweet voiced Chrysothemis whilst Rebecca de Pont Davies gave Klytemnestra her all. Robert Bork impressed in the difficult rôle of Orestes whilst Peter Hoare was an excellent Aegisthus. Richard Farnes conducted with subtlety and panache as required.

As we left the Bridgewater Hall, there was a smattering of snow on the ground. We made up our minds to keep to the plan and visit London. The journey was difficult but not impossible. We arrived in a capital city which had capitulated.

I would like to tell you about Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die tote Stadt at the Royal Opera House and to make sage comments about late German Romanticism but the performance was cancelled.

Making the best of a bad job, on Roland's suggestion I went for a look at the Wallace Collection for the first time. It is a delight and I shall certainly return. There are many iconic paintings in the collection including this - Franz Hals' Laughing Cavalier.

And there are plenty of naughty French works that you don't get in the national collections - like Fragonard's The Swing.

I also liked Poussin's A Dance to the Music of Time. I spent a very enjoyable few hours in there.

Much less interesting was the British Museum's Babylon: Myth and Reality. This seemed to be very thin. Much more about the myth than the reality. The best things were the glazed brick reliefs but even they seemed to be highly reconstituted from very small fragments. After some of the better exhibitions here, I was disappointed.

That evening I took in another show Three Days of Rain. This was an interesting piece about differences between generations - how one generation inherits from the previous in so many different ways and yet doesn't know that generation at all. It was well written and well performed by the three players - Lyndsey Marshal, Nigel Harman and James McAvoy.

The main draw for me was, of course, James McAvoy and I can say that, in person, he is just as completly sex-on-legs as he is on screen. I did actually get to see his legs. I did also get to see him cross the stage in his boxer shorts. I am happy about this. But I would also say that he is a very good actor as well. The whole event was good.

I also finished off After Tamerlane a good book about global empires over the past six hundred years. It's main point was that we ignore the existence and development of the other (non-European) empires at our peril.

So, thought I was disappointed by the capital's response to a bit of snow, I made the best of it and had a good time.