The Prom was Berlioz and Strauss, but the Albert Hall is always the star for me. It is a lover’s gift from Queen to Consort which completes a circle of passion for a Queen who loved music and sex in equal measure. Strauss was a music president of Hitler’s Reichsmusikkammer, but in a private letter to his Jewish lyricist, Stefan Zweig, he said the whole regime appalled him. His letter was intercepted and his job went down das Klosett. Afterwards I went for drinks with my friend Fraser, who was playing second clarinet. We were refused entry into the Polish Hearth Club, so we ended up shrieking over merlot and crisps in a nearby pub in front of the penalties which sealed the Lionesses’ victory. Oh the glorious girls! I couldn’t be happier.
I have just been to Paris to see the Hockney show. It is the best exhibition I’ve ever seen. The journey on Eurostar, though, was lousy. We were herded like visitors to the Galapagos Islands into seats we had not booked. But Paris… what a city in which to be in love. Mind you, the last time I was here was to have all the pigment removed from my hair to appear grey-haired in the film The Pianist. After seven hours in the chair it emerged verdigris. I wept and made him put on a rinse. On the first day of shooting, Roman Polanski and his English producer came to my dressing-room and gave me a bollocking. I had ruined his film. I mentioned that his hairdresser had ruined my hair. A wig was ordered.
To Monet’s house in Giverny. The house was so much smaller and more informal than Interiors magazine intimated when I based my marital kitchen on his butter yellow and terracotta kitchen some 40 years ago. The gardens with those waterlilies and dense, febrile planting made me weep into my straw hat. Back in Paris, the Orangerie queue was too long to see actual Monets, so Aperol spritz and herrings won out.
What a tragedy to lose both Cleo Laine and Tom Lehrer within 24 hours. In a Paris jazz bar we met a young trio – an American, a Swede and a Norwegian – who had never heard of Cleo, so we located ‘It Was a Lover and His Lass’ on Spotify and toasted her beauty, bravery and brilliance. The next morning, when David, my soon-to-be husband, and I found out about Lehrer, we toasted him with hot chocolate and sang ‘Rickety tickety tin’ with a mouthful of croissant. As it happens, I was present at the concert 15 years ago where Cleo and family came straight from the deathbed of her husband, Johnny Dankworth. Cleo insisted on not telling the audience until the end. Her rendition of ‘He Was Beautiful’ from The Deer Hunter will stay with me for ever. How she stayed still and composed during that evening’s performance is beyond someone like me who cries at the sight of a bank of convolvulus.
I did an average of 12,000 steps a day in Paris, so I limped back to Eurostar, my feet covered in Elastoplast. We had booked seats facing forward at a table, weeks before. Would it surprise you to learn our seats were facing backwards and had no table? Wretched, I retched quietly through France. I remember once popping my mother on Eurostar for a respite. ‘Ooh, will I see the water?’ she asked. ‘I bloody hope not.’
When we got back to London, David forced me into a shop called Da Luna which was filled with Chinese silk and leather and insisted on spending a packet on a jacket for me. The next day I went to speak to some elderly people (about my age, as it happens) – and they loved the Chinese jacket so I convinced myself it was an investment. I spoke about love and loss and Coronation Street and, of course, anti-Semitism, because I talk about that all the time. I recently had an email correspondence with another Jewish celebrity who spoke out with horror about the IDF killing babies and nasty Netanyahu. I mentioned hostages, rapes and beheadings and queried whether she was equally outraged about the killing of poor Ukrainian babies, which, try as you might, is hard to blame on Bibi. At least her opinion is thought-through, measured and civil.
I arrived home to find the countries of the world, including our own, queuing up to proclaim statehood for‘Palestine.’ In my head booms the video of the ‘Palestinian’ sending the video home screaming ‘Mama,Mama, I killed ten Jews!’ In every generation…
Comments