On doggeral.

The Star didn’t show much interest in books at first.

That would have required lieing or sitting still for more than thirty seconds.

When he achieved the independence dragging himself around on his tummy gave him, he was too interested in investigating the dust build-ups on obscure parts of your furniture to bother with something Mama didn’t scream ‘No!’ at whenever he got close.

You would like to say that it was your persistence in dragging the Star off to the library every week that finally paid off, but you know the Star just went there on the off chance that he could make a break for the shelves and pull all the books onto the floor while all the other under fives were singing ‘… with a baa baa here…’.

In fact, the Star got hooked on books because your Mother in Law brought over a whole suitcase full of very brightly coloured, very ethnic volumes and spent hours pinning the Star down and pointing out the rabbits! The cows! The snow! The wolves! The silver birch trees! The bears! The geese! The porridge! The foxes! The squirrels! The cute red-headed children! The roosters! The samovars! The babushkas cooking! The dedushkas relaxing on the top of  the stove! The complete absence of any mother or father figures!

The Star’s repertoire of animal noises also came on apace, but he had a distinct preference for books which had a more encyclopedic bent over story books.

You faced a future of  hours spent on the sofa pointing out a red car, a blue car, a yellow car with four doors, a green car with four doors and a roof rack, a white car, a black van, a grey Renault Megane Sport Tourer with

• Air Conditioning
• 4x 15W RDS radio CD
• Height adjustable driver’s seat
• Electric front and rear windows
• Centre console with armrest
• Longitudinal roof bars
• 17″ ‘Sari’ alloy wheels
• Parking proximity sensors – rear
• Front fog lights
• Multi-functional Tunepoint
• Arkamys 3D Sound 4 x 30W RDS radio CD with Bluetooth
• Brushed aluminium effect door mirrors

But then the Star discovered narrative. It seemed to help a lot that you got bored with the board books and boldly went for the more complex floppies. Of course, this means that when you use them as an incentive for keeping the Star at the table and eating, it is much harder to hose them down before you take them back to the library, but then you do pay large amounts in fines on your own account every year, so you figure that evens things out.

Unfortunately, as well as actual stories, the Star has an unfortunate liking for rhymes. Unfortunate because so many of the ones written for children are truly awful.

You have developed a particular hatred for anything written by Julia Donaldson, which is the most unfortunate thing of all as the Star thinks she is so good that you have accidentally and extremely reluctantly memorised the whole of Stick Man.

The poetry rolling around in your brain now consists of part of Romeo’s balcony speech, A Broken Appointment by Thomas Hardy, snatches of John Donne and…

Stick Man lived in the family tree with his stick lady love and his stick children three. One day he woke early and went for a jog. Stick Man, oh Stick Man, beware of the dog!*

This is not as bad as The Snail and the Whale which is a million stanzas all dedicated to finding every conceivable rhyme for ‘snail’ Or possibly ‘whale’. But your real ire is reserved for this bit:

Here are the children running from school, fetching the fireman, digging a pool, squirting and spraying to keep the whale cool.

Now as far as wordsmithery goes, it’s got a nice driving but slightly choppy rhythm you actually approve of. But the accompanying pictures show quite clearly that while the children do the running, the fetching and some of the digging, it’s the firemen who are doing the squirting and spraying and this utter mangling of grammar drags fingernails scraping across the chalkboard of your soul every time you get to it. And that’s really what annoys you, because in every book of hers you come across there’s something, one stanza that is so sloppy it makes you cross. You appreciate it isn’t Shakespeare, it’s just children’s light literature, but really. Could she not have spent another day or two trying to nail the best possible, grammatically correct, phrasing?

Russian children, on the other hand, get Pushkin. Who, in fact, is the Russian equivalent of Shakespeare, even down to a shared delight in the odd filthy couplet.

Specifically, the Star gets the prologue to Ruslan and Ludmilla an epic fairy tale which both Babushka and Papa learned off  by heart when they were kids, with the Star now hot on their heels. He joins in key words already.

You have fallen back on Roald Dahl and his Revolting Rhymes. Which you enjoy, but which suffer from having been written at a time when marketing was presumably not designed to squeeze every last kopeck out of this cash cow and therefore crams six poems into one volume, with the sparing use of only one illustration per story. This, sadly, does not hold the Star’s attention as you might like and somehow it isn’t quite something you feel like memorising to spout on the hoof.

But you are coming to the conclusion that the only way to keep up with the Jonsikovs is to find some great works of rhyming genius to declaim. So any suggestions of poems that are worth the effort and suitable for small people would be extremely welcome.

Preferably fairly short ones though.

*Stick Man, incidently, looks like a stick. In fact you would go so far as to say he is a stick, except with (stick-like) arms, legs and consciousness.  He spends the entire book getting mistaken for a stick, and being outraged about it. You find this surprise very very irritating.

On the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Victoria and Albert Museum doesn’t expect many visits from the Star.

I’m not sure why this is true, given that its sumptuous cafe – there are glittering chandeliers, high ceilings, domes, columns, impressive interior tiles on the walls and the floors and the ceiling, as well as stained glass windows – was full of families with young children yesterday.

But having sculptures of interestingly textured stone at floor height is an invitation to disaster.

Of course you are now so very into your toddler game that, as you saw the Star heading delightedly for a particularly inviting looking East Asian dragon, you reasoned that, as they had put these statues out on display within easy touching distance of all and two-year olds, they must expect, nay, perhaps encourage, a bit of tactile investigation. And having run a mental check on how sticky he was likely to be, you let him get on with it.

But as the Star gave the priceless piece of work a few energetic pats, out of the corner of your eye you saw two museum workers give identical jerks of involuntary horror, came to your senses and dragged your boy away. And thereafter spent an energetic, although by and large succesful, half hour chasing the Star through the galleries, heading him off whenever he looked like he was getting too close to something irreplaceable.

You did have a slightly anxious moment when the Star started playing peekaboo around the bases of some busts. You were leisurely strolling towards him, having ascertained that none of the sculptures were in reaching height, when you distinctly saw George Wyndham* wobble. Surprisingly flimsy, those plinths.

George Wyndham, before his nose was mysteriously broken off.

With nightmarish visions of a Rodin masterpiece in pieces at your feet, you sprinted the last few feet and attempted to grab your son.

Who thought this was great fun and commenced playing hard to get.

The bust wobbled again, and I swear time stopped for a second or two.

However, the Star was retrieved without further incident in the end and escorted from the building, tucked firmly under one arm.

You will be going again, but perhaps you will stick to the collections behind glass.

The problem with that is just as your heart swells with pride as the Star lets our a howl of obvious delight and sprints towards a display case is what he is actually interested in is the little placard describing what’s on show. And the one in the case next to that. And the one next to that.

That Star, in fact, remained distinctly underwhelmed by the art and design masterworks, being far more interested in the fire extinguishers, the way his voice echoed when he shrieked, the marble steps in the Raphael gallery, the slipperiness of the floor and the pull out rope barrier dispensers on the walls.

*Although it could have been Honore de Balzac. Adrenaline surges really interfere with your ability to read plaques.

On giant shagging bunny rabbits.

You really should have been paying more attention, but when someone said, ‘Proms‘, you said ‘How high?’ without really enquiring too much further into the matter.

You did manage to glean that it was a Purcell concert, but you failed even to find out what was being played.

Which was probably a good thing. You have recently decided that you don’t go to enough classical concerts to waste one by repeating yourself too often and as it turned out you’d already seen this particular piece at at the Proms.

You took note of the start time. 6.30pm. This seemed a little early, but almost as if to prove your brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, you made nothing of this, not even when your more clued up companion pointed out that you weren’t going to be going home until gone ten. This did, however, seem to explain why, sold out though the performance was, your fellow promenaders were really rather thin on the ground.

Even the words ‘semi-staged’ didn’t clue you in. You had, by this point, worked out you were attending an opera, and so you just assumed you were getting some costumes and a bit of hand waving. Opera isn’t much more energetic plotwise than that anyway in your opinion.

It came as a bit of a shock, then, when, after an introductory parp from the orchestra, what the bunch of people standing behind them launched into was not anything to do with music but something which sounded suspiciously like A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And finally you realised this was the full version of Purcell’s Fairy Queen. With the bastardised Shakespeare script, but minus the scenery and some of the bigger props.

The Fairy Queen is the best kind of opera. The singing bits are almost entirely overshadowed by the talking bits. 

There was also a lot of dancing. Which was interesting. Obviously this production had decided to use up its equal opportunities budget all in one go and so had employed all the male dancers who are too short to get parts in a conventional company, but have the advantage of being easy to lift for the women who are too tall to get parts in a conventional company. Good though.

 As for the play, having got most of the plot out of the way in the first half, the singing did rather take over in the second. It also rapidly lost any tenuous connection to the storyline. I mean the entire final act is supposed to be a Chinese extravaganza for no better reason, you assume, than it was even more exotic and had the potential to really send the staging budget through the roof, which you rather think was the sort of thing that constituted a good night out back in Purcell’s day. The costumes! The slitty eyes! The fantastical mechanical gadgets powering Phoebus’ chariot and the flying swans!

But it wasn’t a Chinese extravaganza in this modern production. That wouldn’t be very PC. Of course, you aren’t sure how receptive Purcell’s audience would have been to them relocating the whole scene to the garden of Eden and having innocent Eve turning into a gum chewing burbury wearing mobile phone toting Essex girl slut. But then the right thinking churchmen of the time would probably largely approve such an interpretation of the ur-woman figure.

If there were any right thinking churchmen left after the overthrow of the Puritans and the Restoration of Charles II.

Anyway, safe to say that in the cut price Proms version of the Glyndebourne production of The Fairy Queen they didn’t just play it for laughs, they milked it for vulgarity. Hopefully, Charles II would have approved of that, at least.

You don’t know whether it’s something about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something about you that this meant the play part made a lot more sense than usual.

Certainly the rude mechanicals fitted in a lot better, although you did have another revelation about them. Shakespeare, you decided, had obviously spent a few too many rehearsals as the resident writer for the King’s Men being driven batshit by primadonnas trying to get all the best bits for themselves and insisting he add in nonsensical prologues.

Still, no matter how hard the actors, singers and dancers tried to shoehorn the maximum amount of knowingness into every given lyric, and believe me they tried hard, you just cannot imagine anyone ever thinking that a harpsichord could sound lewd.

But when ten giant pink bunnies bounded onto stage and proceeded to engage each other in energetic fucking motions in as many highly athletic positions as the music of the Haymakers’ Dance gave them time for you can’t say that you were actually displeased.

You really do get a bang for your buck at the Proms.

On Eurovision 2009.

About halfway through the results marathon for the Eurovision contest, Graham Norton, the UK’s new host for the event after Terry Wogan flounced off the show in disgust at the way that in 2008 the UK had come bottom again whilst the Eastern Europeans (and Finland) were having a run of good luck, mistily declared that this year, at least, political voting was dead, and people were just voting for the songs they liked.

The fact that Cyprus, as ever, voted for Greece, the Scandies voted for each other again, Ukraine gave another 12 points to Russia, Poland shunned Turkey, and nobody voted for Germany or France seemed to pass him by.

But then this year the UK came 5th instead of the more customary last.

Of course, our traditionally poor showing clearly had nothing at all to do with the fact that instead of sending someone famous or rapidly becoming so after heavy exposure on all the relevant airwaves of their own and all the neighbouring countries, with a song which someone had clearly taken some effort over, and preferably a few well known backing ice skaters thrown in for free, Britain would invariably turn up having studiously ignored the existance of Europe let alone Eurovision for the entirity of the previous year with either a complete unknown, someone who managed to sing off key for half the performance, a tongue in cheek song so bad it was not funny, or, mostly, all three.

Funnily enough, this year, the year we came 5th, Britain not only got Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the ditty but also to appear in the stage with the singer who, whilst still a complete nobody, was at least someone who could actually carry a tune. Quite well.

Shame that tune was all introduction and no resolution (and a bit of a dirge to boot). ‘It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here!’

Ordinarily you are all for repetition in Eurovision tunes. But after the fifty first chorus with no discernable verse in sight you were starting to get a bit frustrated. You wanted to know what she might be considering doing now she was there, in her time, after having earned the right to be there.

More importantly, though, the British team had actually bothered to do some promotion beforehand. They had toured Eastern Europe. They had braved the Balkans. They had even touched base in Malta. People had heard the song in advance. They had admired the singing voice of the vocalist. They knew Andrew Lloyd Webber was coming. They had been told who he was.

What the UK got this year, then, was a pat on the head for finally agreeing to play the game like a good girl rather than stand in the corner and sulk because no one was letting her just win.

Although, damn, but the Norwegian entry was a good one. Perhaps people were simply bowled over by its sheer brilliance.

On the other hand, perhaps it is a good thing that Mr Norton didn’t seem to have twigged to the fact that the Norwegian singer is, originally, a Russian speaking Belarussian.

You are not sure you could have stomached another tantrum.

On bathtime gurgles.

So as well as sellotape and oneof the six rattley shapes that fit into the shape sorter, the other thing that makes the Star giggle is when you sing to the him after his bath.

Not just any song. You and B have been doing spirited renditions of the Russian version of the smash hit toddler version of the Fast Food Song.

The toddler version is ‘A big red bus, a big red bus, miniminiminimini, big red bus. A big red bus, a big red bus, miniminiminimini, big red bus. Ferrari, Ferrari, miniminiminimini, big red bus. Ferrari, Ferrari, miniminiminimini, big red bus’.

The Russian version goes ‘Chorni khleb, chorni khleb, kasha kasha kasha kasha, chorni khleb. Chorni khleb, chorni khleb, kasha kasha kasha kasha, chorni khleb. Sosiski, sosiski, kasha kasha kasha kasha, chorni khleb. Sosiski, sosiski, kasha kasha kasha kasha, chorni khleb’ (Black bread, black bread, buckwheat cereal, buckwheat cereal, buckwheat cereal, buckwheat cereal, buckwheat cereal, black bread. Frankfurter sausages, frankfurter sausages, etc).

Yes, there are actions too. For both ditties.

This, however, doesn’t make the Star laugh. Mostly he lies there looking faintly horrified. He actually cries if you try to sing the Fast Food Song itself.

What makes the Star laugh is you chanting ‘I love my Mmmmmmmmmummy!’ over and over again.

Although he will occassionally giggle if you substitute ‘Ddddddddady’.

On the Royal Academy.

You are finding that certain things strike you in an entirely, and usually unanticipated light, now you have a child in tow.

Take the early darkening evenings, for example. You used to quite enjoy this. Coming home in the dark, twinkly lights, a chill in the air. It all gave you an excuse to eat hearty food and curl up under a blanket with your slipper socks on, a mug of tea at your elbow and a good book clamped firmly in your hand. Even if you don’t have a roaring fire to edge slowly away from.

You never noticed when it actually got dark either. Four, five. Doesn’t really matter when you rarely left before six.

Now, however, you are genuinely put out, not to say a little shocked to discover that even if you and the Star make it out by 3pm you’ve missed the best of the (quite impressive lately) sunshine, and dusk will be descending any minute. This is all wrong, particularly as your optimal routine calls for a walk between 3 and 4.30pm.

God forbid the facts of life should interfere with your routine.

You also failed to visualise what certain aspects of taking the Star along to an exhibition of Byzantium treasures at the Royal Academy would entail.

Not everything was a surprise. You are now totally familiar with the idea that for any trip out with the Star you need to start preparing well in advance. You have to check that the changing bag is well stocked. You need to make sure he’s slept fairly recently. You need to leave plenty of time to feed him before you go out. You need to remember to change him before you put his outside clothes on. You need to actually put his outside clothes on. Then you must dance around to calm him down after that a bit before pouring him into his bear suit. Then you need to take that off while you get dressed and then put it back on again, find the sling, put it on, add your coat, wrestle the Star into the sling, put his hat on and jiggle up and down in front of the mirror to stop him screaming, realise you left the keys upstairs, find the keys, unlock the door and make a break for the street.

And that’s just a regular trip. This time you also had to take bottle making accouterments as well.

However, all of that went quite well for once. The Star didn’t scream on public transport, despite your having to get two buses and you were early enough that you had time to find the cafe strip off all your outer wear, make up the Star’s bottle and be relaxing with a cup of tea for you and your Mother in Law and a cup of hot water for the Star’s bottle to stand in when your Mother and her friend arrived.

The Star, once fed, enjoyed being fussed over by your Mother, her friend, your Mother in Law and every single female patron of the gallery you met in the lobby. Who greeted his broad ’people, bright lights, bustle, shiny Christmas decorations, wayhay’ smile with positive cries of delight and who all said how wonderful it was that you were introducing him to culture early.

That was before you stepped into the dim hushed interior of the exhibition rooms proper and the Star, now thoroughly overstimulated, let out a squeal of excitement.

Excellent acoustics, this particular antechamber, you thought. That sound really carried.

Luckily, you were carrying the complementary leaflet the entrance guard had thrust into your hand on the way in. The Star soon busied himself with holding it, crinkling it, scrunching it and putting it in his… oh no you don’t, son. Here look at this big plate. This big silver plate. Look Star, shiny shiny.

The Star, usually so interested in the contents of your china cabinet at home was uninterested in jewel encrusted communion plates. Still, you still had the bit of paper, so that was alright.

For three of the eight rooms, whereupon, the Star, concerned that there was no noise and no light and no one telling him how cute he was decided to do some energetic commentary to compensate.

It was at this point that you realised that you had never before really noticed how quiet and how dark exhibitions of old precious things are, or how diffficult they are to escape from. Particularly when you have to track down the rest of your party first to let them know you are abandoning ship. 

Still, you managed to get out eventually, rescued you coat, wrapped the Star firmly back up in his snowsuit, accepted more compliments about how wonderful it was that… and  made it onto the street. Where the Star promptly went to sleep.

Happy and, probably, replete.

Because despite the fact that today was scheduled as the First Day of Weaning, and in the face of your carefully chosen packet of organic baby rice, judging by the condition of the edges of your complimentary leaflet, the Star’s first meal seems after all to have been a (small) bit of chemical encrusted paper ingested at some point during your distracted dash for the exit.

On The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay.

In case the gentle reader has not been convinced of William ‘Topaz’ McGonagall’s value by your mere words alone here is a little taster from this website dedicated to his works. Please note the sense of foreboding in the penultimate verse and then have a treat by reading the follow up.

BEAUTIFUL Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array
And your central girders, which seem to the eye
To be almost towering to the sky.
The greatest wonder of the day,
And a great beautification to the River Tay,
Most beautiful to be seen,
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave
His home far away, incognito in his dress,
And view thee ere he passed along en route to Inverness.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
The longest of the present day
That has ever crossed o’er a tidal river stream,
Most gigantic to be seen,
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
Which will cause great rejoicing on the opening day
And hundreds of people will come from far away,
Also the Queen, most gorgeous to be seen,
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
And prosperity to Provost Cox, who has given
Thirty thousand pounds and upwards away
In helping to erect the Bridge of the Tay,
Most handsome to be seen,
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
I hope that God will protect all passengers
By night and by day,
And that no accident will befall them while crossing
The Bridge of the Silvery Tay,
For that would be most awful to be seen
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !
And prosperity to Messrs Bouche and Grothe,
The famous engineers of the present day,
Who have succeeded in erecting the Railway
Bridge of the Silvery Tay,
Which stands unequalled to be seen
Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

On discoveries.

You are not in the least Scottish.

This has always been a source of faint irritation because you are able to conjure up in almost equal amounts a Welsh background, an Irish one, a Northern English past, a Southern English birthplace and a strong connection to the Channel Islands out of France. So to miss out on being definitively British (which includes the aformentioned episode of sticking two fingers up at France by emigrating) is really quite galling.

But it does explain why you had not, before Saturday, ever celebrated Burns’ Night. Which, it turns out, is something B is probably quite thankful for.

B has always maintained that whisky tastes like particularly nasty samagon (moonshine vodka). You are sorry to report that he wasn’t swayed at all by earnest comparison of the nose of different single malts or epic battles over whether or not to add water. This was a bit of a blow to his enjoyment of an evening which included quite dedicated whisky sipping.

You, on the other hand, were there for the food. You like haggis, even with whisky poured over it.

Haggis, counters B, just proves his point that all British cuisine revolves around the cooking of what in a more civilised country would be leftovers.

He did quite like the soup though. Well, you can’t go too far wrong with Cockaleekie.

However, it turns out that the original idea of Burns’ Night is actually to sit around reading Burns’ poetry.

And this is, on the surface, a pleasant way to pass the time, as long as the poems are rolled out in a suitable Scottish burr, which in this case they certainly were.

Unfortunately, Burns turns out to be a bit of an advanced political thinker. The wee timerous beastie for example is not, apparently, a mouse at all but a put upon Scottish highlander being put out of his house and generally crushed by enclosure.

While this does explain what had hitherto been to you his rather inexplicable popularity in Russia, or rather the USSR, it does mean that you and B have been sitting though an evening in celebration of a radical would be revolutionary lauded by communists everywhere, which given B’s family history is a bit of a faux pas in the B and Solnushka household.

However, you were quickly able to ignore the faint echoes of B’s relatives turning in their graves, as your hostess likes to double Burns’ Night with a celebration of another great Scottish poet.

Let me urge all readers that if they have not previously come across the glories of William ‘Topaz’ McGonagall, that they should immediately lay their hands on an anthology of his poems, invite all their friends round and hold a poetry reading session where the highlight of of the evening will be for all and sundry to join in by guessing the rhymes at the end of each line.

This is worryingly easy to do, except when McGonagall’s genius leads him to create such felicitous phrases as ‘stark dead’ to couple with ‘from foot to head’.

And that’s without even mentioning the glorious incongruity of throwing in, quite at random, a passing visit by the emperor of Brazil (incognito) to a Scottish bridge disaster, McGonagall’s obsession with opening poems with the day, date and time of events he describes as well as his splendidly pedantic interest in the precise construction materials and methods of the various structures that he was eulogising in the three poems you read. Really, you share the great man’s puzzlement that when he died still puzzled that no-one had given him the Nobel Prize. Although you are not quite sure what for.

It can safely be said that the evening ended with howls of laughter and your firm intention to eat haggis at a McGonagall Night sometime in January next year.

And yet what overshadowed the glee was the fact that the person you realised you most wanted to rush home, phone up and quote McGonagall to was your Grandad, and you couldn’t because you had buried him last Monday.

On Prom 41.

Last night you went to half a Prom.

It all started quite auspiciously. You both set off in good time, even allowing for side trips to that endlessly fascinating retail emporium, Boots the Chemists, and so you arrived a good 45 minutes before the start.

 At which point you realised that you had picked a popular Prom.

Now the thing about promming, for those not in the know, is that ‘prom’ is short for ‘promenade’, and the reason why that is significant is that they were originally conceived as a set of concerts to familiarise starving music students with the classics. Starving music students are not known for their bottomless pockets and the solution was for the chairs to be removed from the area immediately in front of the stage and cheap tickets would be sold to all who were happy to stand – or promenade – through the concerts.

This is still considered the way to go to the Proms. Acquiring a sitting down ticket is not entering into the spirit of things. And with the exception of a few season tickets, you can only get into this area by queueing up and paying for yourself on the day.

However, you are well versed in the ways of your husband, and so the first thing you did upon walking past the people in the arena queue… and walking past them a bit more… and a bit more was enquire as to the availability of seats.

Sold out.

Ever spent half an hour in the company with a Russian from Moscow who stood in what he firmly decided was to be his last queue ever sometime during the deprivations of the eighties? It’s not pretty. Even explaining that the queuing is supposed to be part of the experience and the careful application of edible distractions didn’t keep him happy. Of course, the drizzle didn’t help.

Although the discovery that the two bins near the entrance were exclusively filled with Marks and Spencer’s packaging did. It was nice to feel you were getting in touch with your middle classdom.

And at least it meant that when you did finally get through the doors, it was almost time to begin the concert.

Now usually when you go promming – about three times a season despite working within walking distance of the Royal Albert Hall – you pick a nice quiet Prom which means that you can spread out a bit once you get in. You’ll have a good view as long as you hang back a bit and they’ll even be enough floor space to sprawl on the floor or, in some cases, lie down.

Not so with this Prom where you were all packed in so that everyone had the personal space of a sardine and you personally had a particularly good view of the camera person’s back. Very nice dreds you thought.

Now this wouldn’t be too bad – you quite like crowds - except that you’d forgotten that for all it’s a huge space, the Albert Hall is also a bit of a hothouse. And on a warm humid evening where you are all also somewhat damp from standing in the rain, everyone soon started steaming gently and the atmosphere quickly became rather close.

So the first 15 minutes of Stravinsky’s Petrushka – a typically spiky piece of Russian music – were enlivened by everyone in the arena surreptitiously trying to remove as much clothing as was feasible in a public goldfish bowl surrounded by well populated red and gold velvet covered boxes and circles and galleries to the ceiling, and the second fifteen minutes by the collapse from the heat of the girl standing next to you and B.

Which kept B, who had been shifting restlessly and muttering darkly up to this point, happy. He’s a first aider for his work so he whipped out his pocket checklist and dived in to help until the Prom’s medical team, complete with oxygen tanks were able to get through the crowd and wheel her off.

You saw her in the bar later looking quite perky again, so no need to worry there.

Anyway, this left you with an uninterrupted span of about five more minutes of the piece, at which point the excitement of it all clearly caught up with you and you felt the world start to go grey at the edges too.

You spent the remainder of the first half sitting down, staring at the extremely proxime bottoms of those all around you and in the interval B decided that to hell with the authentic British cultural experience, it was time to go home and firmly escorted you, unprotesting, from the building.

You caught the end of the second half – the one you’d really gone to see – on TV when you got home. And much to your chagrin you realised that the improvisation around Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was not merely being supplied by some pianist as you had assumed, but that they’d also got a virtuoso jazz bassist in to assist too. You were torn by irritation at having let the chance to experience the bass’s one shining moment of the proms to slip past you and smugness that now at least you could actually see those fingers fly.

And then you noticed that this means that in total you have now been to minus one and a half proms.

Oh dear.

On being in Oz, Toto.

So there you and B are, sitting on a bench eating grapes and a pork pie, admiring the view of large tombstones which populate the square you are in, and basking in the unexpected sunshine.

Suddenly you become aware that the young lady next to you has not only come prepared with cutlery and a china plate to help her consume her Philadelphia spread crackers, but is in the process of squeezing a wedge of lemon over them and has got out the small travelling salt and pepper set and is about to carefully grind fresh pepper and what one can only assume is not just salt, but hand gathered, snow white, raw, unprocessed Maldon sea-salt over the food.

While you are watching this in a state of mildly horrified fascination, at that moment somebody’s chinchilla dashes, squeaking, into view and, really, it’s at time like this that you really appreciate you are in Chelsea. King’s Road to be precise.

Anyway, at the end of the street there’s a big department store, and at the top of the department store there is, as there usually is, a cafe. And the thing about this cafe is that it has a stonking view over the rooftops of London, which you heartily recommend if anyone is ever in the area and doesn’t mind fighting for a table next to the window.

You sat and gazed at the Royal Albert Hall. There is it. The flatish dome behind the pointy dome in the background.

Because, of course, you weren’t actually supposed to be in Chelsea at all. You were supposed to be at the Proms.

And you set off in good time, but the combination of getting distracted by an icon in a charity shop, missing two busses and the traffic jam that attends trying to hurl yourself desperately across a narrow bridge from darkest South London into the bright lights of North London meant that you were impressively late so you decided to go for a mooch instead.