The evening before last, I had a night out at our local Arts Centre called the ‘Artrix’ where was a feed from the Royal Opera House of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ and I knew that the total audience would only be about 40 for this and the tickets incredibly reasonable at £15.00. We were a little party of 4 in total as I took along my American friend as well as my son and daughter-in-law (as we had recently seen ‘La Traviata’ in the same venue) Now ‘The Magic Flute’ is not my favourite Mozart opera but, nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed every second of last night’s production by David McVicar. The look behind the scenes component of the broadcast was fascinating and the technical complexity of the puppetry, lighting and staging absolutely amazing. Just as a little historical note, Meg and I saw the actual Magic Flute and Magic chimes (played on a glockenspiel) used in the original production when we visited one of the Mozart museums in Salzburg some decades ago now on one of our European holidays. I can also claim to having (illicitly) touched Mozart’s piano in the same museum hoping that by some spiritual process I could commune with some of Mozart’s genius. After this experience, I consulted the web to see what other productions, particularly of Mozart, are available locally. There is a production of ‘La Traviata’ in Wolverhampton actually on my birthday in May but I shall be travelling back from Gloucestershire that day and so may give it a miss but there is a production of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ in the theatre in Malvern in July which I may well make the effort to attend if tickets are still available. Malvern is 23 miles away and, fortunately, the M5 will speed up the journey so will see if my friend wishes to accompany me. After my last holiday (after which I need a holiday to get over the holiday) I am thinking about logistics for future stays away from home and think that Yorkshire at the end of August to coincide with my sister’s birthday is probably the most important date for which to make plans- evidently, I have to start a savings plan at the same time. The weather is beautifully bright today and I am looking forward to a good old gossip with my domestic help who I have not seen for a fortnight since I went away on holiday and she has undertaken some jury service. Just occasionally, I glance back to what was happening a year ago as Meg was evidently failing and I noted that on the same day last year the only food I had managed to et inside Meg were a few spoonfuls of ‘tiramisu’ first thing in the morning about which I was inevitably worried and knew that the end was not too far off. In the meanwhile, my days are filled with thinking ahead to forthcoming U3A activities and excursions whilst at the same time praying for some fine weather to get some gardening (weeding!) done. The day before, for example, there was such a sharp wind that any gardening might have been a most unpleasant experience.
In the morning, our domestic help and I had a lot to talk about and I showed her my purchases of slipovers both in Scotland and also obtained through Amazon. I popped down into town to collect my newspaper and then went on to do quite a light week’s shopping. With having been away, I actually had quite a lot of stuff in stock. During the morning, I received quite a long call from my long standing Italian friend who lives down the road. To be honest, I thought was about to ‘lose’ her as she had fully intended to sell her house (it was, in practice, sold) and then go and live with her daughter in Gloucestershire. But events had conspired against her and every large property that she had intended to buy jointly with her daughter and son-in-law had actually been snapped up by the time they came to view it. This whole process of the intended move was actually making my friend feel quite poorly so now she and her daughter have decided to stay put in their respective houses. So I confided to my friend that I think she actually come to absolutely the right decision because I was not convinced that uprooting oneself from a community in which one had lived or 60 years was a sensible move. So I have agreed that I shall pick up my friend early on Sunday morning and that we can go to the church service together, followed of course by coffee and biscuits in the adjoining parish hall. I hope that my friend and I can have coffee with each other about once a week and that I can continue to persuade her to make the most of the various social networks that she must have built up over the decades. For myself, I could sell up and go and live in Yorkshire but now that I am developing a range of social contacts down here and it would moving away from my son, I would not really contemplate it. Returning to domestic political news, the view rapidly emerging amongst what I might call the ‘commentariat’ is that Keir Starmer had made a bad error of judgement picking a fight with the civil service and sacking a very able and well respected senior civil servant. The point is being well made that in order to pursue one’s own political agenda it is important that government, civil service, parliamentary parties and advisers are all pulling in more or less the same direction and not engaging in back biting and factionalism to which the Labour party seems to be particularly prone. On my son’s recommendation, I have my TV viewing allocated for this evening as it is the well known artist Grayson Perry conducting interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley in an attempt to see what makes them tick. The programme has received good reviews, and it appears that Grayson Perry is attempting to ascertain whether the rapidly emerging AI technologies can be used to humanise the world. Although it has been a theme of science fiction since the 1950’s,I do wonder though whether we might be on the threshold of a technology which is unstoppable and out of human control. After all, the whole growth of the internet shows that any degree of regulation or control is tenuous in the extreme.