Turandot

Fabulous, spectacular, LOVED IT!

It’s Mark’s favourite opera, and I happened to see it was on at the Coliseum so got tickets and sent him an email on his birthday, with this link and a lot of white space instead of dots or something to where I’d pasted the details of the performance date and seat numbers at the bottom of the email, where he didn’t find it.

Opening his presents in the pub, no-one knew it was his birthday so I sneaked the card, Marilyn Monroe, to one of his poker buddies who got various friends to sign. Chelsea lost to Wigan that day and MarkG wrote ‘sealed with a Wigan kiss’ on the back of the envelope. Rotten swine.

He liked his presents but declared I’d done a Deron Brown on him telling him the opera scarf was cheap nylon. Hmmmpppphhhh. It’s not.

Dinner was unfortunately so-so, if anyone wants to go to Preto for a lovely laid-back dinner, go in the early evening before they get busy and the service suffers.

Good call though unintentional on the opera date, between his birthday and mine. Sudden and momentary panic when I realized that giving him both tickets meant he might take someone else. He was gallant enough to say he doesn’t know anyone else who’d know what to wear.

Bad call on getting from work to the theatre, I needed to get changed into the wonderfully easy to wear but fabulous looking black dress MrsG gave me a long while back, with the super sequined black bolero top. I’d decided on the louboutin-like black patent platforms with the red suede heel, the Fiorella dinky red bag with the dangling red and black hearts, and, though I’ve still never got round to replacing the laces with black ones, full length red leather opera gloves. All that elegance was languishing in corporate heaven on the day. In the opposite direction from work to the opera house; the hotel being closer than the pub or Mark’s place but in entirely the opposite direction.

It seemed like a good idea to be waking up where my work clothes were; turfing him out when I left for work the next morning and had to check out would have been rather unkind so I decided it would be a good plan to leave work about 4:30, collect the glam outfit and remind everyone in his local that we love getting dressed up. They think we’re both nuts.

It was going quite well till the traffic caused a schedule reset about 6pm when the 24 bus had been sitting growling on the spot for at least 15 minutes on Victoria Street. Back to plan B, my private dressing room, aka the pub loo, scene of many transformations. Adam the barman coped admirably with my swanning in, ordering a couple of doubles then swanning upstairs to get changed saying I’d pay for them when I came down. By the time I’d done the transformation, and persuaded Adam to porter my bag downstairs, Mark had arrived, all hot horniness in top hat and the non-nylon opera scarf (he WAS wearing other clothes) and got stitched paying for the drinks.

Everything went wonderfully well after that; finished our drinks, found a taxi, managed to get there with about five minutes to spare (positively EARLY for me but Mark was twitching a bit) Compliments, compliments and more compliments from random strangers making a point of coming over and/or saying loudly that they were pleased someone had made the effort.

CLASS seats! I thought they’d probably be behind a pillar or something since they were right at the end of a row but it turned out that the only people in front of us were in the orchestra pit.

I can’t do it justice but searched some reviews to find out what real aficiandos thought
Good
good
ermmm & not so good

Sod ‘em – it worked for us. Totally bizarre treatment but it all worked, the spooky little girl was never explained, I managed to guess the writer’s part in it but missed the fact he got gorily massacred at the point where Puccini had died rather than work out how the opera should end. I doubt Puccini had pigs in mind but I thought they were wonderful, and casting Liu as a shabby heroin type was pretty cool. Kirsten Black managed to mangle english but in a full-on operatic fashion.

Even the taxi back to the pub was in the best tradition, Mark imperiously indicating that I couldn’t walk easily on cobbles to get to the taxi rank when the poor taxi driver was missing clues like the stick I’d recently refused to use. Anyway, it’s all wrong having to walk to a black cab when your imagination is working along the lines of a sleek black limousine purring to a stop exactly when and where you want it.

Time for bed. Holiday last week involved being miserable as sin getting over my flu, perked up a lot with the LLM chorus singing Happy Birthday to me and loading me with lovely gifts when I’d forgotten all about it, then chilling nicely for a few days. Wasn’t over-impressed with having to go back to work today, but the evil annual appraisal calibration convocation is over for another year and I decided to come home tonight and have to get up early tomorrow instead of having to get up early this morning – and Mark won the first poker game of the new league. Hurrah!

‘night

Will maybe write up the Brighton expedition in a while