I like the fact that, now and looking back, my life has been full of lots of "events".
The opportunity to attend a performance of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder was bound to be one of those. In fact, I have been waiting thirty-five years for that chance. The most likely venue was always likely to have been the Proms but I've never quite coincided with the right occasion.
So, when the work was announced as part of the Hallé's programme in a collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic, I was excited, Roland was excited, Nigel was excited and, in fact, the excitement was so intense that Roland's friend Brett travelled from New Zealand to join us. We all met up for a drink at The Briton's Protection beforehand.
It was quite a belting evening all round. At the start, Tom Allen gave a moving tribute to the recent Manchester and London attacks. However, as he said, we are all here tonight to make and listen to music as we always meant to be and that is as it should be. Life goes on.
By the end, we were all blown away. Just wow, wow and wow again.
It was a great achievement by all concerned, choir members, orchestral players and soloists alike. Graham Clark was an absolute star. Consequently, we were all very satisfied with an outstanding performance. Only Roland had previously attended performances of the work and, unfortunately for him, comparisons detracted from outright enjoyment. He felt that the muddy acoustic and Mark Elder's conducting did not encourage clarity and balance within the enormous forces. Personally, I think you have to be Pierre Boulez to pull that one off.
My beloved and I went off to exercise our franchise in a public place. As Bootle is a very safe Labour safe seat, I followed my normal practice of looking over the smaller parties and choosing the one which I should most like to retain their deposit.
So, what was the election result locally?
Well, biblically speaking, it's a Red Sea.
I like this juxtaposition of the two Donalds.
Both are quackers.
I'm still waiting after seven weeks to be given a date for my forthcoming tribunal hearing challenging the DWP's assessment of my suitability to receive ESA.
So, here I am, sitting in the back garden, typing up some notes for the hearing. I had a meeting at Crosby Carers. I had been hoping that they could supply an experienced person to accompany and support me. I was told that the service was so overstretched that they were unable to offer any advocacy service but they did give some good suggestions for preparation.
I'm sending in some further evidence to the Tribunal which includes an annotated copy of my Patient Records from Eastview Surgery alongside a synopsis referencing the salient points of current and previous treatments for depression. That should give the buggers something to think about. Ha!
I think that this film, Pride, is a minor masterpiece. Matthew Warchus has taken the actuality of organised gay support for mineworkers in South Wales during the strikes of the mid-80s and turned it into a humanely heart-warming social comedy of two strongly knit communities with very different world views finding unity against a common enemy (ie Thatcher's Conservative government).
Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton are such immensely grounded actors that they and the ensemble around them persuaded me of their Welsh valley roots and their conservative (small "c") prejudices about poofs which were gradually eroded by genuine and heart-felt support. And at the other ends of their careers, I expect that we shall hear more from the likes of Ben Schnetzer, George MacKay and Andrew Scott as well.
The emotional climax for me was the appearance of the South Wales miners at a Gay Pride March.
Unthinkable a decade earlier.
And I believe that that grass roots action was the well spring of an entire change of attitude within the TUC which led to enormous changes under Tony Blair's first two administrations.
As a quick PS, I found out later that Mark Ashton (played by Ben Schnetzer in the film) was an entirely real, larger than life personality who just three years later than the events in the film died of HIV related pneumonia aged 26. At the funeral, miners and their wives wept openly among the gay men around them.
I like a good Otello. I'm very easily persuaded that Verdi's take on the story is preferable to Shakespeare's as the Bard's version does drag on for so many, many minutes. Verdi plunges us into the story headlong into the teeth of a storm and doesn't allow the momentum to drop thereafter.
One of my greatest moments in the opera house was to hear Jon Vickers and Peter Glossop as Otello and Iago ride out the tumult of the orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta in their Act II closing duet Si, pel ciel marmoreo giuro. It was one of the most heroic male sounds I have ever heard - glorious but absolutely tainted at the core. My recall is so intense that my view of the stage is from the stalls rather than from the amphitheatre where I would have been sitting. My focus must have been so intensely drawn in that my perspective was radically altered.
The latest offering from Covent Garden did not match that occasion but, between them, Antonio Pappano, Jonas Kaufmann, Maria Agresta and Marco Vratogna gave me an evening to remember. I'm not sure that Keith Warner's production was best served by the direction of the cinecast but it was certainly better than the one transmitted from the New York Met a couple of years back.
The first two acts were musically stunning and, by the end, my withers were duly wrung. Bravi!!