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thirty seconds, to expect a view of something other than the bald head of the person in front of you. I know there are seats in the Royal Opera House from which you can see the singers, but these, like a place at Eton, have to be bought for you before you’re born. I exaggerate only slightly. Turn up at the box office a month before a production expecting a seat you can see from and they look at you as though you’re insane. So how is a man with a life to lead supposed to know where he is going to be a month from now? Opera itself teaches that our lives change from happy to sad, from purposeful to pointless, in the course of half an aria. But the decent seats at Covent Garden are bagged years in advance by people prepared to bank a) on their continued existence, b) on their precise whereabouts, and c) on the music they’re going to be in the mood to listen to.
    Couldn’t they reserve a few good seats for opera’s natural audience – the existential chancers and cultural vagabonds of our dull society? And couldn’t they, at the same time, insist that anyone over six foot three – actually, five foot three is where I’d draw the line – sits in row Z?
    The bald man in front of me is, I would guess, six feet dead. I know I should thank my lucky stars he is bald. At the opera you get many a shock-headed person trying to look like Simon Rattle – half the time, for all I know, it is Simon Rattle – which means you can see neither over him nor past him. But as it happens there are two shock-headed people in front of the bald man, so although I can twist in my seat to see either side of him, all I get to see is them, twisting in their seats to see round the Simon Rattles in front of them.
    I tell myself I’m here for the singing not the acting. I spend a quarter of any opera I like with my eyes closed anyway, so what the hell – just spend it all like that. But this is a notoriously raunchy production that’s been kicking round the repertoire for years – a Rigoletto that’s all humping (the pun is not mine) – and I want to see if it’s as naff as it’s been made out. The sexing up of opera rates as one of the great absurdities of our time. See an opera in Germany and it’s invariably set in a fetish club and sung in shiny leather sado-shorts. Even Mozart’s Requiem . But this is London where we are meant to have a keener sense of the ridiculous. Only not on this occasion. Naff it decidedly is – fellatio and cunnilingus to music, or at least I think what they’re doing is fellatio and cunnilingus, but given how far back from the stage I am and how many impediments to seeing anything there are, it might just be a more than usually excitable bridge evening at an old persons’ home in Pinner.
    And now, of course, it becomes positively unseemly, my bouncing about in my seat, craning my neck, lifting myself up by the roots of my hair, to ascertain whether those really are bare breasts on the serving wenches, or just flesh-coloured bodices. Do I care? Does it matter if that’s a nipple or a brooch? Thwarted, whether it matters or not, I fall to counting the hairs on the bald man’s head, all 117 of them. Three warts. Four liver spots. And a bruise, sustained, I imagine, the last time he ruined an orgy at the Opera House for someone less sweet-tempered than me.
    And yet in the end, somehow, somehow, the music works its magic. By the time we reach the magnificent quartet, mixing mellifluousness with cynicism, answering hope with desolation, tempering rage with love, I have forgotten where I am and it is worth it after all. Art doing what it’s supposed to do – making life supportable. But must there always be these obstacles to refined emotion? Does sublimity have to be quite so bloody expensive, uncomfortable and fatuously staged?

Pie Pellicane
    A pelican crossed my path on Boxing Day. Not in flight, on foot. And not in