Funny Valentine
14 February

Well, it's been a funny few days.

I've had good news of a sort and good news of another sort.

Firstly, we had news at work about Connect2IT and it seems that the project has now been extended for a further, final three months. Why it wasn't just extended for a year last summer and then we would have all known where we stood?

So this means that I shall serve out my term at Connect as it is very unlikely that Colin will dream of making me redundant while the project is ongoing. We have meeting after meeting with him and he quite obviously doesn't have a clue about how to shape the future.

I've been given the task of sorting out a course for PTLLS that we can deliver. That's fine except that I know that I won't be around to bed the thing in. I also know that we need a marketing and sales team to make it work and that Colin got rid of the people with those skills some years ago now. Hey ho.

The other piece of news is that Dr Dye has given my prostate the all clear. The tests indicate that it is not cancerous. So, that's a relief.

I was also able to report that the tablets which I have been taking to reduce its size are doing the trick. As I commented to her "I am now pissing like a forty-year-old." She liked that remark.

And it's true. Instead of dribbling away, I can now produce a good, steady stream. Other benefits include not having to get up several times in the night for an insignificant micturation.

The downside is that I'm now pretty much committed to taking these tablets for pretty much the rest of my natural span. Ho hum. Well, at least I'm going to avoid having a clenched urethra and a complete inability to pass water without the use of a catheter.

Then into town on Saturday night for a showing of John Adams' opera Nixon in China. This was another of those Metropolitan Opera of New York world-wide telecasts which are taken by FACT in Liverpool. The production had been given by ENO in London last year and was a version of the original Peter Sellars Huston Grand Opera Company production given in 1987. So it was night to see the moment when the plane lands as in the photo to the right because that image crops up in most printed histories of late 20th Century opera.

Overall, I was most impressed with the work. The performers all gave first-rate accounts of their rôles with Russell Braun as Chou En-lai and Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon particularly outstanding. John Adams conducted.

But the contribution which I felt was the greatest was the one which was not acknowledged in the handout we received and that was the librettist, Alice Goodman. I'd love to see/hear the piece again just to grapple once more with one of the most intelligent librettos of the twentieth century. It encompasses politics, morality, fantasy, critique, history, sociology and, most of all, hope.

Valentine's Day came and went with much love.