On Sunday morning I walked out to Camber Beach, said hello to Connie whose ashes were scattered in Rye Bay almost four years ago and collected some sea shells to adorn my weblog. We are in the midst of an unexpected heat wave…memories of Stockholm in July 2006…so I spent the rest of the day aboard Vemara getting myself sunburnt…and I mean aboard because for almost two hours the high tides over the weekend cut me off from England. I surprised myself by using my time to swab the decks, scrub the sail covers and give the engine a good run.

The Saturday evening concert at St Leonard’s Church in Hythe went well. Lesley Brownbill…the Musical Director of simply opera as well as Ryesingers…would make an excellent Football Team Manager as she has the magical ability to produce peak performance from her choirs on concert night.

This particular event had been fraught with pitfalls. The original intention had been Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte but just as rehearsals got under way the main Soprano Soloist pulled out so a Mozart Concert was decided upon instead. This meant augmenting the small group of opera singers with a chorus. The first half of our programme for the concert concentrated on Mozart’s Sacred Music: Dies Irae, Tuba Mirum and Lacrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem; Canon (K317); Agnus Dei from Mass in C; Laudate Pueri and Laudate Dominum from the Vespers; Ave Verum and Alleluja from Exsultate Jubilate.

After the interval we did pieces from The Magic Flute (Opening Scene, Papageno’s Entrance, Oh Matchless Beauty, The Road You Trod, Oh Isis and Osiris and The Gentle Love), What is So Funny and May Breezes Blow Gently from Cosi Fan Tutte and the The Letter Duet and Now At Last I May Embrace You from The Marriage of Figaro before rounding off with a four-part harmony version of the Flanders & Swann classic Ill Wind. For good measure we sang…yes Virginia sang…the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro…arranged for four-part harmony and entitled Take it from Figure ‘O’.

Tenors as always were in short supply. Cancellation of the Radical Consultation allowed me to step into the breach at the last minute so simply opera ended up being fifteen singers…four of them tenors. In the final run-up disaster struck again when sopranos started going down with sore throats and summer colds. The large and very appreciative audience went back home to their radios and televisions to listen to the Last Night of The Proms…as I did…with the Flanders and Swann version of Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto ringing in their ears with the wonderful line. ‘I’ve lost my horn. I’ve lost my horn. I found my horn…gone.’

Ten years ago in one of my brief encounters with Westminster Party Politics I put my name forward as one of several prospectus parliamentary candidates for the constituency of Oldham West and Royton. For six months leading up to the May 1997 election I published a regular newsletter which gained me a personal written accolade from my Party Leader Sir James Goldsmith.

I had a few run-ins with the Powers-That-Be in the Referendum Party. My pledge to the voters to take out only a average wage and put the rest of my parliamentary salary into a lottery for the Oldham Poor was thrown out for instance. Another one involved Michael Flanders and Donald Swann and their Song of Patriotic Prejudice which I had to withdraw as Head Office felt it sailed a little too close to the wind. This is what Donald Swann had to say.

‘Our Song of Patriotic Prejudice was a jigsaw number full of curious bits and pieces in the show and on the record. But peering at it during editings I decided it was best offered in a simple form with regular verses and refrains whereupon it turns into a severely needed new English National Song…a need to which Michael refers in introducing it…after all the English, the English, the English are best. But please read the lyric at once for the ironic overtones'. About a dozen copies of the original issue of this Fortnightly Update slipped out to loyal Constituency Workers before it was replaced with the approved version...might be worth a bob or two as a valuable collector’s item.