Green Ariel

Knowing my liking for opera, my lovely Significant Other decided to take me for a weekend in London. He had managed to get a special offer on a room in the Hoxton Hotel, just round the corner from Old Street station, and had seen that the Royal Opera at Covent Garden were putting on a new, contemporary opera of ‘The Tempest’ which happens to be his favourite Shakespeare play. So he obtained two tickets for that as well: and it all came to pass last weekend.

The train down was crowded – end of term at Durham University, and well over half the train was reserved from Durham to London. And owing to the vagaries of Internet booking, you can’t get two seats together when one is with a wrinklies railcard and the other with a kiddicard (well, OK, Under 26 Young Persons card!) But the nice young lady in the seat next to me was quite happy to swap with Tommy so we were able to travel together. Just as well, really, as I’d made the sandwiches for both of us!

If you travel more than about twice within London, it’s worth getting an Oyster Card. It costs about £3 on top of the money you put on it, and you get that back if you give it up anyway. I’d been bought one as a birthday present, back in February, so our first job was to get Tommy one as well. This done, we headed for Old Street – oh, and it is so lovely to have someone else to carry the luggage. All I had to do was steer – somewhat necessary as certain people have a habit of heading for the wrong train, almost instinctively! On arrival, a brief study of the map showed the way to the hotel: I foolishly lost confidence at one point and asked a man for directions, only to find we were about twenty yards from the main entrance! We checked in, and found that the room was truly delightful – a lovely bathroom (albeit shower rather than bath, but a magnificent double shower, really good), a flat screen TV and a very comfortable bed. We had relatively little luggage to stow away, and then we had time to flop (well, use your imagination!) for a time until about four, when after a cup of tea it was time to dress for the evening. I had brought my glamorous asymmetric-hem black skirt and top, with clinky gold bling to wear with it, and my lace mantilla (genuine Spanish, if from a tourist shop in Torremolinos) to cover my shoulders. We were fortunate with the weather: it was a relatively mild evening, and I took the risk of not wearing my posh warm coat but going out with just the mantilla. A tad chilly at first, but I was to be glad I’d made that decision, the coat would have been a fearful nuisance most of the time.

We found Salieri’s restaurant, picked off the Internet, and chosen in spite of a couple of dubious reviews. There was a queue coming out of the door: normally a good sign for a restaurant, but a tad worrying when you’ve booked a table and there isn’t an empty one in sight. We weren’t the only ones: we tried to move to the front of the queue only to find that there were two other couples also with bookings. They clearly take more bookings than they have capacity! So we weren’t seated until 6.15, and with the opera starting at 7.30 we were somewhat anxious. But in fact the food was excellent, very good value indeed, and the service once we were seated was quick and efficient. Nice atmosphere, too: if you go to the website it plays the overture to ‘Figaro’, and in the restaurant itself, a piece I thought at first was Mozart but in fact, to my shame, was the last movement of Beethoven’s fourth symphony. Ah well, it was being played quietly and there was a lot of chatter noise to mask it, that’s my excuse.

The meal consumed, on to the Royal Opera House, a mere five minutes walk up the road. In spite of Doubting Thomas wondering if I was going the right way, we found it very easily, and went up to the gallery to find our seats. It’s a great building for opera, you can hear well from every single seat in the house.

The opera was stunning. I’d been a little dubious about a full length piece composed in uncompromisingly modern style (I’d listened to a clip from the Internet). But it was very atmospheric, very sensuous, very much putting over in the music the sense of what was being sung. Although it was in English, you didn’t have to strain to hear the words because they were displayed on a small screen above the stage – I’ve seen that done for translations many a time, but never before for an opera in English. The set was most imaginative – a centrepiece like two halves of an open book, though one had a circular hole in it, and it all revolved very slowly so you suddenly realised it had moved without actually seeing it do so. And the singers were truly first rate: Philip Langridge, who’s recently sung Loge in Wagner’s Ring cycle on television, Ian Bostridge, and the incomparable Simon Keenlyside singing Prospero. I’d not come across any of the women, but they too were excellent, especially Ariel - costumed in luminous green - who has a very high part, all the time singing at the top of her register. Even the comics, the drunken Trinculo and Stephano, were excellent. So all in all, highly recommended. The interesting thing for me was that I came to this from a very traditional classical background of Mozart and Verdi, whereas Tommy came from knowing much more of the contemporary music scene but not in the classical genre – and we both found the music more than just acceptable – it engaged us both at a deep level, and that speaks volumes for the composer Thomas Adès.

After the opera we went back to the hotel, not particularly feeling like staying out (my lack of coat becoming a factor here!) and knowing we had a bottle of wine stashed away there. We arrived along with a fire engine! Apparently there had been some kind of alarm in a room, and they were checking it out. So we sat in the bar for a few minutes before the lifts were back in operation (no way was I walking up six floors, not having done the ROH gallery once!) and we could retire to our eyrie. The wine was good, and with a sense of the sublime to the ridiculous we watched Match of the Day. We weren’t long in getting into bed, both tired but happy after a memorable evening.

That’s probably enough for here: episode two in a bit.

Omnibus, for all.

It’s been a long time since I put an entry on here. It’s not that I’ve not been doing anything – quite the reverse! I’ve just not found, simultaneously, the time, energy and inspiration to do so.

It’s feeling like a long winter: a long, cold winter. For me there has been a considerable brightening from my lovely younger man, who is a real soulmate and constantly surprises and delights me – not so much with what he does as with what he thinks and how his mind and values work. He’s perhaps a tad less greenish than I am – a distressing tendency to leap in a car, albeit a small, shared and energy-efficient one, and drive to places; but then he lives out in the sticks where there is about one bus a fortnight which goes to within two miles, that’s what they call public transport out there. I don’t know I’m born, living here on a load of bus routes and with several more not two minutes walk away, that will take me to Newcastle, Blyth, Cramlington, Jarrow, Sunderland and many other places, not to mention the metro within four minutes if you run as I had to this morning!

And we’ve just had this report that says that global warming is a certainty, and they are 90% sure that it’s due to human activity. Personally I can’t see where the doubt comes from: we know how much oil we’ve burned and how much carbon dioxide that puts into the atmosphere, so what other reason could there possibly be for the alarming rise in CO2 concentration. Frederick Forsyth, on Question Time last Thursday, suggested that the evidence isn’t conclusive: just how irresponsible can you get! If we wait for the evidence to get even more conclusive, it will be too late: the planet will be on an irreversible course to destruction, and that means my grandchildren won’t live out their natural lifespans. It’s that close, believe me.

So I’m in two minds about signing the petition against road pricing: whilst I don’t want to be spied on, I do want people to be very seriously discouraged from motoring. Not that this is the main problem: I personally think that it’s air travel, with its untaxed fuel, that is growing at a rate so alarming that we need to recognise, now, that we’ll have to live with inconvenience. And I say that having just booked to fly to Vancouver this summer. When I can afford it, I’ll be putting money into more efficient stoves in Mexico to reduce carbon emissions by the amount, or more, that my share of my flights will cause – but will the rest of the passengers? I doubt it.

Later this week, I’m going to hear a talk from a friend who’s been to see relatives in New Zealand – by boat. I imagine he chose this means of travel partly, at least, for green reasons – but have you seen what it costs to cross the Atlantic by sea? It’s about the same as club class travel on a bad day. This reflects my own experience last November, when I had to go to London for a meeting and found the cheapest rail ticket home was around £70, even with a railcard. (I’d gone from Chesterfield, having been at another meeting all weekend in Derbyshire.) However, I found I could fly home on EasyJet from Stansted for a mere £20, including taxes, plus another tenner for the train fare out to the airport. So that was what I did: someone else was paying my expenses, and I couldn’t justify asking for over twice as much. The plane was no quicker – in fact it was slower, and arguably less convenient as it meant a load of security hassle at the airport, including having to take off my shoes and have them X-rayed – but it was almost full, so at least the fuel emissions weren’t wasted on just a few passengers. But how can it possibly be cheaper to travel by plane than by train? The answer is that it isn’t, but you pay less because of pricing structures. EasyJet have found a formula for filling planes, and it’s simple: the first seat is the cheapest and from then on it gets more and more expensive. When I booked to go to Vancouver, my seat was £2 more than my friend’s, because I booked second. I don’t doubt the plane will be full: at about £200 for a one way trip, it’s a snip (BA and KLM are both around £700 return, almost twice as much). By contrast, GNER have a pricing structure that doesn’t fill trains because they’d be full anyway: it just does a rather pointless distribution of the cost unevenly amongst the passengers. Last week I came home, same trip, from London for £10! Now in Belgium, where they apologise if the train is five minutes late – contrast to the UK where they proudly announce that most of their trains are no more than five minutes late! – there is one fare. The single is twice the return: First Class is 50% more than standard. Peak trains may cost a tad more, though as I don’t usually travel on them I can’t say for sure. But there is none of this advance purchase and SuperSaver stuff: there’s one price and that’s it. If we had the same here, the train fare could beat EasyJet into the ground.

All this rant points to one conclusion: if we are going to be serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, we have to take radical steps to both improve and increase public transport. My experience of GNER is that most trains are full: that’s partly because I travel a lot at weekends as that is when my meetings are. But when I’ve gone midweek it’s not been very dissimilar. We need longer trains, then, to take more people – Virgin Cross-Country run little four or five coach units that are hopelessly small to take a lot of passengers, and hopelessly slow too. (How can it take longer to travel the 200 miles from Newcastle to Birmingham than the 300 from Newcastle to London?) We need cheaper trains, subsidised by taxing road travel more. Yes, there’ll be an outcry but people can become aware of what they do to the planet on the roads. And we need bus links to everywhere, not just the profitable routes. Buses should be a public service, not a commercial business.

Then, and only then, we might just have a chance of saving the planet.