Chateau Keyboard

Sunday, May 4: Going out

I still feel very Grown Up going out to the opera, and this afternoon's performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin is pretty good. Apart from Ira Barsky as Olga, who has a lovely voice but couldn't project her voice if she used a catapult. Irina Sandulescu-Balan is a pretty good Tatiana. Ivan Geissler makes a pretty believable ginger puff job of Eugene himself - it's a basic story, boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, boy says don't be so stupid, boy kills best friend in a duel because he's a ginger puff and has to flee the country for two years, boy comes back and finds girl has married the local prince, boy becomes insanely jealous and tells girl he loves her after all, girl says she loved boy all along but tough, she's got a prince now so get lost you ginger puff.
A nice opera, though, lots of good music and the new caff over the square from the theatre is handy for coffee before and a swift Perrier at half-time, sitting out in the sun.
On to Jan & Alex's where the Britnimes Bunch have ended up after their motorised treasure hunt - Mrs K and Axel won, apparently, but they make up for this by doing passable imitations of professional fly swatters whilst claiming to be playing tennis. Nice new tennis court chez J&A, by the way, very green - the sort of green you can see from orbit, in fact.
I've brought along a posh Mini brochure for Bob & Lynne who've also been treasure hunting, but new cars are apparently out and new roofs are in, their old one having been pronounced dead on arrival. Oh dear. And they were going to buy a Cooper S Works, too. Bob puts a brave face on it and says he'd rather have a decent roof any day and it seems churlish to point out that all new Minis come with perfectly good ones, whereas roofs over houses don't have 200 bhp and don't go VOOM! even slightly.
Still. I'm sure it's the Grown Up Choice.