Jabberwocky/Jaseroque/Jammerwoch/Barmaglot

As noted after I'd reeled out from the concert premiere of Gerald Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground in 2016, the composer sets the greatest absurdist poem I know in French, German and Russian. Having been struck again - twice - by Barry's genius in Antony McDonald's perfect Royal Opera production, I thought I'd do a trawl for readings of translations on YouTube. The only good one I found is the Russian version.

There's also, however, a consummate delivery of the original, savouring every word, from the great Christopher Lee.

Since I could spout the first two stanzas at will, I made an effort to learn it all by heart, and it's surprising how it trips off the tongue. Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice compares the best nonsense poetry like this to abstract art, and in both, he suggests, the artist should not struggle too hard to try and find connections which should flow unconsciously; as he points out re the likes of Getrude Stein and the Italian futurists, 'when the technique is taken too seriously, the results become tiresome'.

I seem to have spent a lot of time hanging around the Royal Opera House even when I wasn't going to see the show in the main house (which I did first on the press night - and wrote about it for The Arts Desk - and then to see the second of the two casts on Sunday at noon. Production photos here by Clive Barda). Saturday was a case of no good deed going unpunished; on Friday, I'd arranged with my beloved but scatty friend Edsy to meet her, husband Kit and goddaughter Mirabel plus various friends between shows (they had tickets for both). In the morning I fixed up a time for a backstage tour of props by my pal the wonderful Nicky Spence, since he does such a superb job here.

He was happy to oblige; his sister and her children would love it too. Yet despite four emails and five phone messages, Edsy was not to be contacted in time - I didn't see them come out of the earlier showing and the opportunity passed. Found them later; she'd lost her mobile IN DECEMBER. But this is boring for the reader; the fact that Mirabel and Kit weren't going to the second showing meant I could take them to Blade Rubber Stamps next to the London Review of Books shop and treat her to a Tenniel of her choice. I gave J this one and it's quite fun to sign off with when it comes to sending cards from the two of us.

In the end she preferred a row of (non-Tenniel) lizards to be reproduced in rainbow print. I left father and daughter at the British Museum, where Friends of the Earth were protesting BP sponsorship of the Troy exhibition (I'd been, didn't learn much I didn't already know, but it's a good education for lots of folk) with a wooden horse.

What followed turned out to be a long walk on the beautiful sunny afternoon before Storm Ciara struck - J was getting it in Galway at the same time - from the BM to the length and breadth of Bermondsey High Street before I took a bus from outside the Tower of London and then a tube to King's Cross for the 7pm Aurora Orchestra concert. For a start, it was good to see the first crocuses in Bloomsbury Square.

Had planned to go home for a couple of hours, but Temple tube and the District Line were closed, so I admired the first blossom by the Thames

 

and the dropped into Two Temple Place for a so-so exhibition of women collectors of fabrics (any excuse to see the rooms, but not quite sure where Yinka Shonibare's ship fits into it all),

crossed Blackfriars Bridge

to join the hordes from the Southbank Walk to London Bridge, then via some of the back streets to trendy Bermondsey - can anyone identify this astonishing yellow-flowering tree? -

followed by a pop in to the Eames Gallery - excellent linocut prints by  Gail Brodholt, excellent urban scenes though I especially liked the motorway perspectives, and covet this one -

and the White Cube where the latest Anselm Kiefer exhibition had so stunned us the previous week (need to post on that anon). The spaces are filled, spectacularly enough from one perspective though not from many as the Kiefers achieved it, with mew works by Cerith Wyn Evans, including fig. 0 in white neon.

Coffee at the south end of the street, which I hadn't reached before (we always stop at Pizarro for lunch),

 and then I noticed full moon rising.

I reckoned it would look even better on the river, and though it had risen further by the time I got to Tower Bridge it was still complementary to the rest of the twinkling lights.

Flash, when on, is erratic in doing its stuff; when it does, the image is sharper and of course the background darker.

Sunday was very different. I gave myself bags of time to struggle through the storm and catch a tube back to Covent Garden, though it came immediately, and missed the downpours both ways (they came later). So glad I caught the 'other' (not second or B) cast, because the two with the most to sing were piu brilliante: Nicky, going for broke in his last performance(s) as the Mad Hatter and others, and Jennifer France, who beamed out what I'm told are 98 top Cs with fearless brilliance. Here our two national treasures are with Robert Murray as the March Hare and Carole Wilson as the Dormouse.

A few more favourite tableaux: Carole's Cook and 'wah wah wah' chorus,

the Looking-Glass Train scene,

and very near the end.

Claudia Boyle and Sam Furness in the previous cast were excellent, but these two were off-the-planet fabulous. So were the brass, perfecting their tuckets and galops under Finnegan Downie Dear - cool as a cucumber, Nicky later told me. I wasn't intending to intrude after, but he appeared from the stage door just as I was heading down Floral Street (I'd been chatting with the wonderful Elizabeth Wilson, so good to see here there. She's taken part in recordings of some of Barry's chamber works). Then Joshua Bloom, such an excellent Humpty, appeared on his way to his last performance, and La France with a friend. Here's a happy group pic in the storm.

May they all be reunited in the inevitable revival as soon as possible.

They f*****d it up

That admirable human being RuPaul - to whom I've tried to apply something approximating to the colours of the EU flag - sent out a Referendum Day message with his/her famous catchphrase for the standoff at the end of each episode of RuPaul's Drag Race: 'And remember - don't f**k it up'. Sadly, the 52 per cent who wanted out were not in lipsynch with the r(R, Ru)emaining 48 per cent of us. Anyway, a good deal fewer of those want out now that the consequences have begun to hit so very quickly.

I'm told I should pity the disenfranchised working classes of the north and understand that they lashed out at the government, at a political elite which was bad but, for God's sake, not nearly as bad as the ones who manipulated them. Should they have been guided better? Certainly, but I still ask if it was too much for any of them to check the facts since one side failed to spoonfeed them sufficiently and the other constructed a campaign entirely out of lies.

The few Brexiters I've spoken to in recent days - anything but working class, like so many who voted for Brexit in areas with few or no immigrants - just parrot the lies and look startled when you tell them the truth. 'I had no idea' now becomes a refrain along with 'I didn't think my vote would count'. Sunderland 'had no idea' that £35 million from the EU kept their part of the world from collapsing completely once the government left them to rot. You couldn't make up the black comedy of the Cornish, having voted out, wanting the money the EU gave them to be continued by the Brexit regime.

So I cry shame on the whole pack of them, and have only one word, J's favourite as it happens (what a prophet!) - deluded. And I have no qualms about calling all, cynical leaders and misled populace alike, 'idiots' because the original word in classical Greek, ἰδιώτης, has the literal meaning of a person preoccupied with self-interest and just not concerned with the democratic good (the Athenians knew something about that). Don't forget - the one on the right is just as unprincipled and immoral, if not quite as stupid, as the one on the left, and not funny any more, if he ever was. 

No way can he allowed to become Prime Minister (Theresa May and George Osborne aren't vastly better alternatives, either). Instead, the chance of a general election early next year should force the opposition to join forces and make sure we don't get another government even worse than this one. Just a reminder of one of the many things BJ wrote before flipping a coin.

And let's lay responsibility at tragic Cameron's door for thinking he could stifle the rabid fringes of his party.

I fear that the world will lump us Brits together as many of us did the Americans when George Dubbya became President. And yet we will protest that 48 per cent of us voters don't deserve that. I am proud to be a Londoner under Sadiq Khan's (so far) wise leadership. Guess on which side the person was here who turned his back when Khan was elected.

I'm especially proud that our borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, led by our superb Labour MP Andy Slaughter, voted 70 per cent to remain (56, 188 to Brexit's 24,054 - a 40 per cent majority, and again around 70 per cent for the turnout)*. I'm proud of my godchildren's generation, who voted 73 per cent to remain, and apologise to them from the bottom of my heart that a lot of selfish old people who are going to die soon did them over yet again** as if the last two governments haven't done enough. My 85-year-old, Daily Mail reading mum, I'm proud to say, wasn't one of them, and was heading that way anyway.

After the walking-on-air after ENO's electrifying Jenůfa (the mob versus Laura Wilde's desperate heroine pictured above by Donald Cooper) on Thursday night, Friday was one of the worst days I can remember. Went to bed at 1.30am in despair at the Sunderland result, had only the most superficial of sleeps, woke up again at 5am to worse. The physical nausea I felt, part ascribable to tiredness, seems to have been shared by everyone I know who's been in touch. There were two points of catharsis - one finally catching up with the most impassioned speech of the campaign, Sheila Hancock's, which maddeningly can't be shown on YouTube but is at the bottom of the page here. The other was meeting Claudia Pritchard after an indifferent Royal Opera Werther - diverting, no more - and having a cleansing rant and hug together.

But with the brighter dawn of Saturday morning came the realisation that the fight is back on, whatever happens in the forthcoming week. J, who has been remarkably phlegmatic throughout, took me for a belated birthday lunch at Pizarro on Bermondsey Street - perfect food in an unpretentious setting, with pork to die for. Fine Spanish wines, too.

The area is yet another which merits exploring - this is the row of houses and the Strawberry-Hill-Gothic church opposite the restaurant.

and I was wondering when someone would have the chutzpah to call a cafe this.

Storm building over the City and St Paul's as I crossed London Bridge

to reclaim my bike, left at Covent Garden the previous night because I was too exhausted to cycle home.

And then I got caught up, to my delight, in the Pride march.

Hadn't planned to go this year - copped out when the whistleblowing got too loud and a BBC producer I know got tinnitus when an ex-boyfriend blew one in his ear - but it was just the tonic. How far we've come since the police used to glare at us - one stepped out of line to propose to his man this year.

Plenty of displays of solidarity with immigrants, who are already having a hideous time, at least outside London which will always welcome them* (OK, so it's the Socialist Worker, but good on them).

and Euroflags, not least the one by this woman - J says he knows her - who was yelling furiously 'six million Jews murdered' over and over.

And yes, I see that the path to extermination camps and guns and violence starts here. We can't let it happen. Half the world doesn't want anything like this, let's bear that in mind - and fight to the very best of our abilities. More flags by way of hopeful finale.

*Yet I just read of a graffiti attack on the Polish Cultural Centre just down the road in King Street, Hammersmith, something that hasn't happened in its 50 years until now. And racist tweets are being catalogued diligently by the Polish community. All should be reported to the police as hate crime.

**Yet a great many didn't. One of my students just reminded me of this before today's class, when Linda Esther Gray came to talk about Isolde and Goodall. Linda, as a Scottish socialist, is passionate on the referendum fallout, and so were the students who joined us at lunch. They have so much energy and indignation, it feels as if we're of the same generation - I've had this sensation before when sharing lunch with my (then) 94 year old friend Elaine Bromwich and her American pal Tom Cullen, who left America because he was, like her, one of the communists when the name denoted noble ideals.