The year has already brought me so much pleasure from seeing and hearing great performances and presentations. I continued as October moved forwards.
Matthew Bourne's work has been consistently strong for near on thirty years now. Ross and I caught Swan Lake in London when it was in one of its many initial incarnations. The company now simply calls itself New Adventures and I decided to give their new version of Romeo and Juliet using Prokofiev's music a try.
I wasn't much moved. Everything was moved into a coeducational correction centre set in the recent past. Costumes set all the adults apart from all young people since, as inmates, they all wore white. This gave an acute sense of adult oppression but completely lost any sense of there being two opposing sides among the teenagers.
I strongly suspect that this was one of those times when the idea sounded so much better in early development but then it became obvious as time went on that it wasn't going to work.
I was drawn to this concert by the unusual elements, Grazyna Bacewicz's Concert Overture and Florence Price's third movement (Juba) from her Symphony No3. Both women should be heard more often on the concert platform and on the airwaves. The overture was great fun and the juba, complete with swannee whistle, spoke of the social life of African Americans in the early twentieth century. I am delighted to have heard both pieces performed live.
The programme was filled with Gershwin's Piano Concerto, Ginastera's Four Dances from Estancia and Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Kirill Gerstein was our pianist and Joshua Weilerstein was our conductor.
Gerstein was outstanding in the Gershwin Piano Concerto. Weilerstein, meanwhile, was able to elicit a variety of sound worlds from the RLPO to match the mix of music. He got the brass to behave like a real swing band in the Bernstein and, by the time we got to the reprise of Somewhere, the string tone ensured there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
I finally managed to push, prod and cajole Ross into attending the Keith Haring exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Luckily, I was quite happy to see it for a third time. In different circumstances, I'd probably be quite happy to take his indifference as a reason not to take an interest in his well-being.
Still, it was fine and wonderful to wander through the various and different graphics for one last time before the exhibition closes.
Surely the BBC didn't really want this to be a must see moment.
I am so fed up with the Alt-Right's use of meaningless hyperbole.
But then I suppose that I would have been even more horrified if she's actually been as good as her word.
And I do think that, if you are going to write bots to try and cheat the algorithms used by the likes of Twitter, then you really should make sure that they work properly and don't fail leaving your enterprise exposed.
But then I have little but contempt for our current Prime Minister. He described the c£60million cost of the inquiry into historical child abuse as money "spaffed up a wall". However, his government has just spent c£100million on its 31 October Brexit ad campaign and considers it money well spent. Priorities, eh.
It is sobering to think that it is nearly forty years since I first saw David Pountney's production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen at the Liverpool Empire not really knowing much about the sound world or the theatrical world I was about to enter.
I can remember the delighted round of applause as the snow "disappeared", the joyous outpouring at the end of act two, the cry of dismay as Vixen was shot and the luminescent affirmation of the finale. Some experiences stay with you.
Both Roland and I share very fond memories of the work and the production and so the idea of a trip to Llandudno to catch it once more was easily agreed.
We were not disappointed as we were transported one more time into this celebration of the exuberance and fecundity of the natural world with its ongoing cycles. This time also I felt it was matched by a wistfulness about time passing, regrets and the arched narrative of sexual awakening and release.
Tomáš Hanus conducted a glowing version of the score whilst, in the main three roles, Aiofe Miskelly's Vixen, Lucia Cervoni's Fox and Claudio Otelli's Forester were all performances to savour. Another one of those great evenings in a theatre. My one slight caveat was that the work was not performed in English. Surtitles are very, very useful but nothing compares to the direct communication of being addressed in your own language.