Saturday 28th June 2008
I’ve not been punting for a while, but today marked my return to the waves (and extremely choppy and breezy it was too).
The most incredible sight came in the first ten minutes, when we found a pair of coots having a scrap. It is a sad reflection on the state of UK wildlife that two small waterfowl embroiled in a hissy-fit could be one of the most incredible pieces of live natural history I have ever witnessed, but they are vicious little bastards and well worth ogling if you get the chance. Their fighting technique is really quite exciting—they sit back on their tails, grab one-another with their long, clawed feet and lash, creating a strange, spasming catamaran of entwined coot rage.
This continued for a minute or so: to a human onlooker, even an entranced one, it was unclear who had won, but left moorhen either asserted his authority, or gave up, by stiffening his wings into a mock Sydney Opera House and swimming slowly away from the scene of combat. Right coot followed suit moments later, acknowledging victory or defeat, and the two parted ways, another coot dispute resolved.
The evening had a slightly different tone to it; less serendipitous bird-baiting spectating, more high-brow middle-class self-satisfied self-satisfaction. We travelled to Cotswolds idyll Charlbury to watch an opera gala concert in a church. Charlbury is a slightly too-perfect Heart of England hamlet; every house has a manicured garden and pedicured soft furnishings. Even the front doors, fences and bricks look pampered. If the dogs do shit in this place, they would do so in such a way as to give a subtle air of rural authenticity without inconveniencing pedestrians.
The only giveaway that this whole place hasn’t fallen off the front of a postcard is the fact that every street, even the winding, narrow, gravelly, olde-worlde tracks which scurry between houses, even the courtyard behind the arch of the old coaching inn, is lined with pristine upper-middle-class cars. Powder-puff 4×4s abound, there are an unhealthy number of new Mini Coopers, and sparkling estate cars that haven’t seen a country lane, a sheep or anything more agricultural than a trip to the local pick-your-own are spread like the horse muck should be.
Between cars and the liberally sprinkled traffic calming measures (mini roundabouts and those funny speed lumps, clearly the work of a parish council of letter-writing middle-class professional housewives), any veneer of unspoilt English countryside was ruined…as were all my attempts at photographs.
The opera was more authentic than the town. The highlight was a rather stunning Italian soprano, but she only narrowly beat the baritone, whose powerful, deep voice, grey hair and goatee must mean that he’s only ever cast as an evil baron. Fortunately this is probably quite a common rôle—once you’re watching an opera, all pretentions of relevance and modernity (not to mention appeal across social classes) have been thoroughly cast off, so evil barons, in spite of their low prevalence in any storyline which is modern, accessible, or just not bloody stupid, are free to pop up wherever they choose. They will probably be forcing a daughter into marriage, or hunting down a witch who’s actually a good guy, or be desperately trying to get hold of a magical umbrella which will allow them to take over the World.
Anyway, baron boy spent most of the evening wowing us with his credentials in the lower registers. Forget wine glasses—he could probably have smashed a Mini Cooper with the power of his voice, plastering its insides with the entrails of the screeching chinless wonder learner drivers whose mummy and daddy bought it for them.
After a spectacular first one and a half halves, the latter portion of the concert descended into madness. A string of frivolous numbers came to a head when baron boy, forget Mini Coopers, smashed his entire reputation by cracking out a banjolele, set of stepladders and bucket and treated us all to a rendition of George Formby’s voyeuristic-tastic classic When I’m cleaning windows, complete with cheeky, nasal northern delivery.
One wonders how many years he’s been fostering this Formby fetish. It can’t be many gala concerts at which it’s appropriate to wheel out this particular hidden talent. How do you even gauge whether it’s appropriate to suggest the idea to the organisers? ‘I was, err, just wondering if you’d thought about including any, err, George Formby, perhaps somewhere after the Mozart and Bizet? Ha ha. No, thought not! No, no, don’t be silly, I wasn’t serious. No, there’s nothing in that bag. Put it down. Stop that! Oh, if you insist. Ahem. When I’m cleanin’ wind… Oh. I see. I’ll get my coat.’
The best bit of the evening, though, came during a performance of the quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto: as is the nature of a concert of extracts, ‘costume’ comprises white tie regardless of the scenario being enacted, and so actions and occasional props (like stepladders and buckets) are all you’ve got to work with. During this quartet, the cocky tenor donned some faux-cool shades and pinned the mezzo-soprano against a church pillar, by way of simulating a courtship ritual between a self-imagined alpha male and the object of his desire. This proved too much for a lady in the front row; the nervous, sideways-glancing fit of the giggles she entered into implied strongly that this was the raciest thing she’d seen in her entire life. The nervous looks around were probably to check if the rest of the parish councillors were laughing. I doubt that they have sex in Charlbury, and this woman looked like she had lived there all her life.
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Clym says (23:27 11/09/2008) ¶
Oh dear, I did enjoy your description of the town and its opera-plus-Formby concert; however those birds are coots, not moorhens. "Bald as a coot" should give it away. Moorhens have red heads.
Glad to be of ornithological service :)
Statto says (19:31 28/10/2008) ¶
Corrected…except the YouTube video. I don’t have all day!