Looks like it'll be Liverpool now, not Nottingham; and tomorrow, not today. I'm relieved. I'm not bothered about consorting with murderers. It's being in a car for six hours that frightens me. Liverpool's a lot nearer.
I spent the last of my money for the time being in fine poor Romantic artist style, on a ticket for a concert based around Schumann's exquisitely lovely Dichterliebe, held in Lancaster University's lumpen concert hall, with its stark lighting and the constant creaking of its various mechanical clutter.
Mark Padmore's mannerisms took a little getting used to. The jauntier rhythms caused him to bounce onto his toes; and after holding his hands like Jonny Wilkinson preparing to take a penalty (which is fine: that betokens seriousness and concentration, in chamber music as in rugby), he then leant back to take hold of the side of the piano. The appearance of being casual irritated me: it was the stance of a man about to tell you about his progress through a diversion they've put in near Wigan because of the new gas main. But he and pianist Andrew West produced a concert that I simply wanted to have all over again. I felt as though I were being stroked.
Although the Lancaster audience is well trained with mobile phones now, someone's digital watch alarm beeped the hours, jerking me out of the intoxicating bed of Heine and Schumann back to an unwanted sense of regimented time.
I met my pals Steph and her husband, who noisily rattled and shook his sheets with the lyrics and their translations. "I'm practising for the quiet bits." Five minutes before the end of the interval someone had left an almost vulgarly large glass of white on the table so I smoothly appropriated it and took it back in with me.
And as befits the morning after one has been taken away with love poetry set to beautiful music, Mary-Ann writes an almost painfully kind adieu.
