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with.
    After which I can’t just toss off a ‘Best wishes’, can I? I’ve got a first-edition Kingsley Amis that says ‘Hi!’ Such a disappointment. You hand over your book to a master of the language and he writes ‘Hi!’ Call me foolish but I feel I owe my readers more than that – more in the way of words and, quite frankly, more in the way of feeling. As the book, so the inscription, surely. If your subject is the horror of the human condition you must convey a flavour of that in your message. Line up to get your Brothers Karamazov signed and you’re not going to be satisfied with ‘Have a good one! – Fyodor Dostoevsky’.
    And yet the last time I wrote ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery – Kind regards, Hay, 2004’ I got the distinct impression that the recipient was unhappy. Seeing what had happened, the next person in the queue was very firm in her directions. ‘Make it to Ann,’ she said, ‘without an e.’ Simple, you’d think. ‘To Ann.’ But no. ‘To Ann without an E,’ some demon made me write. ‘With love, with an E, from the author’ – and then what was I going to say? – ‘with an A.’ For which blather I had next, still writing in her book, to apologise. ‘Forgive this nonsense – with two Es,’ I went on, before it dawned on both of us that this would end only when I had defaced every page.
    I got the shop to give the poor woman her money back at the finish. I gave them all their money back. That’s another of the reasons I dread publication. I end up thousands of pounds out of pocket.

Rigoletto
    Just blown the best part of two hundred smackers staring into the back of someone’s bald head. This is called going to the opera. More precisely going to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. I visit Covent Garden infrequently for this very reason: if I’m going to spend my children’s inheritance on a seat, I believe I should at least be able to see something from it.
    I can just about reconcile myself to the cost. Seats for a coming Madonna concert at the O2 Arena are said to be changing hands on eBay for £700, which makes an upside-down bucket with your back to the stage of the Royal Opera House cheap at half a million. In fact, I’m lying when I say I can reconcile myself to the cost. I am of the generation that believes paying £100 for anything is irresponsible. I grew up in a house that cost half that. For £100 my parents were able to feed and clothe three children from the moment of our birth to our leaving home eighteen years later. And have enough left for a celebration party when we’d gone. Like everyone else I eat at expensive restaurants – what choice do I have? – but I still find any bill over £20 for two (three courses, champagne, Shiraz, but no dessert wine) criminally exorbitant, whereas people under forty we dine with consider anything under ten times that amount a snip.
    But all right, opera’s different. You’re paying for more than a night out. You’re paying to be reconnected to civilisation and, if laziness and too many dinners have stopped you listening to the music you loved when you were young, you’re paying to be reminded of who you once were, what you once felt, the melodious idealism which once made your heart flutter like a caged bird. And the building is exhilarating. And the bar is good. And people make more of an effort with their appearance than when they go to any old theatre, though still not a sufficient effort in my view. Grand opera requires that the audience too be grand. Dinner jackets should be mandatory. Would you want to be Rigoletto howling for his daughter in a sack while looking out at an audience in jeans and cardigans?
    All the more reason, then, when you’ve gone to the trouble and shelled out more than a banker earns in