Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

  A stooped, watery eyed New Yorker used to buy his programmes from me at Covent Garden in the early eighties. I asked if he would be coming to the new production of Norma .    He looked alarmed as he answered, 'Oh, no. I saw Ponselle as Norma at the Met in nineteen twenty-seven.   That woman's glory ruined opera for me forever, just when I was getting started with it.'   

   There was a classic car rally in Aldeburgh today. Down where the ice-cream van is parked during the summer.  The one Coochie Maltman used to deal from. I thought at first he might be a freemason, noticing the sideways-on handshakes going across the Mr Whippy counter. But, no, as Gerard explained, Coochie was your man if you wanted something buzzier with your cornet than a flake. 'And whatever the working class versions are of chopped pistachios or raspberry coulis, sweets.'   There was a Vauxhall Zephyr among the cars, like the one my dad used to own before his driving was legal, insured and under the limit. I thought how compact it was.  Dad's had looked vast to my six-year-old self. And how primly it seemed to be sitting up on its wheels. Dad's had brooded languorously.    Car owners milled around thanking each other for coming and saying not to forget such and such a date in such and such a place for the next meet up. The numerical br...

  Link to my nicely book, again...   Mendelssohn had his Songs without Words , so I can I have book launches without books  - events at which I read from my forthcoming e-book, natch.    The first for M y Tutu Went AWOL! was on Thursday at Metrodeco in Brighton. My rider included eats and drinks from the exceptional Metrodeco menu.  Nicely!  The event was well attended and people listened closely while I read, gamely following me wherever I went off-piste.    'One minute we're in Iraq, the next you're at a convent bun fight being ticked off by the Mother Superior for telling her the facts of life,' heckled Metrodeco co-owner Maggie Morgan. She then truly made my evening by requesting an encore of the off-piste material.  Do you remember the time I circumvented Therese, soprano, giving encores at our shared recital?   Read that little story again here...   For those of you not wishing to follow t...

  The letting agent asked me did I mind if the landlord put the rent up.       

  My Proper Nan Silcox  would use the line of Kipling quoted above when any of us complained of being lonely.    'Have you lost your library card? Lonely, indeed! Lonely having tea with Miss Bates? Lonely on travels with the Pickwick Club? Lonely at the Horse of the Year Show with Rupert Campbell-Black? And furthermore, let's remember that the banding together mentality is all lovely when it leads to The Huddersfield Choral, or the Massed Bands of the Coldstream Guards or those monkeys with the typewriters who are one day going to finish Timon of Athens - but not when it means the Gestapo or the WI, or when it leads to an epidemic of the illness of the moment...'    Serious illness was her thing - we had regular bulletins about complete strangers dying in lingering agony up at the Forty Houses  in Gelligaer - and she had contempt for what she called illnesses of the moment.    'Fevers of the faddy!'    In her time she calle...

   My brother couldn't stand the skin on custard or hot chocolate and would sit and cry until my mother scraped it off for him. My great aunt Blodwyn, when we went to stay with her, refused to allow  in her house  for the good skin to be scooped off and wasted.   'Oh, stop your snivelling. Has nobody told you about the witch who comes in the night and searches for that skin you've shamefully wasted each time? She goes back to her house down where the mine used to be and stitches the skin to the other skins she's taken. Night after night stitching - and measuring to see from time to time. Singing hymns to herself. And when that patchwork skin is big enough she'll bring it back while everyone's sleeping and lay it over you - as your shroud, because you'll be found dead underneath it in the morning.'   So easily my favourite relative.          

   Being such a sagging trifle of tired this weekend, all I could was sit watching Agatha Christie mysteries on Youtube and shout along with them. In the midst of which something from The Body in the Library reminded me of how damaging laissez-faire attitude can be.   Here's what I was shouting along with the various Marples and Poirots:   Basil Blake  once called Arthur a fossilised old b-u-g-g- etcetera.    I found a body. No, it's my body. I found it. In the quarry.    And we know fully well why she has her best nylons on, the silly great lump.   Arthur just gets a little avuncular at tennis parties. You do understand, Jane? After all - I've got my garden.    A platinum blonde in our library!    He called me Nemesis. "Let Justice Roll Down Like Water, and Righteousness Like an Everlasting Stream".   Remember Edith: always a pointy little mountain and not a dumpy little hill.    Oh, de...

                              Gerard always denies that this is him...  A violinist with the Britten-Pears Orchestra was selling two year's growth of her hair for three thousand pounds to a doll factory.   I know: how totally previously unheard of.    Except...   He was sitting with two others at the table in the Cross Keyes one along from Gerard and mine, opposite where the orchestral members were sitting, each beadily making sure to get his or her money's worth from two jugs of Pimms.    Indicating the violinist with a jerk of his head, he said to his mates, 'She'll either be under the feeding or starving regime with the hair growing. She'll be going into the doll factory once every three months for the gimp, who has the hard on for all matters hairal, to go over it like a grooming primate. Then they put these soya-mong beans in a petri dish, add honey that's alive ...

      Legendary variety producer Dougie Squires had always hoped to produce a Cinderella with the fairy cross-dressed but played straight. In 2013 he asked me to take on the role, saying,   'I know you'll stick to the panto fairy code and not go beyond because I hear you're going legit on us!'    There were plans for me to play Norman in The Dresser;  which eventually came to nothing as the rights to live performances of the play were frozen at the time the recent TV production was made, starring Sirs Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins.     When I play Dame, I decide which of my aunts or grandmothers the character most resembles and graft on her facial tics, speech patterns and gestures. For Sarah the Cook I imitated my aunt Sophia smoothing her girdle with the heel of her right hand from ribcage to belly button. As Mother Goose I used my Nancy Ak's holding back tears voice and her habit of suddenly breaking off mid-sen...

  Therese, soprano, never uses a library. 'I pride myself on always buying my books.'   Whereas I agree with Helene Hanff, who said that buying a book you haven't read is like buying a dress without trying it on. 'How do you know the dress will fit, Therese?'   'I always know what's going to fit me, book-wisely speaking. I tune into asking the universe what it needs me to read for the greater good, go into the bookshop and find that I'm drawn to a department, then a section of carpet, then the particular shelf and there will book the book, in a sort of outline of almost light picked out from the others around it.'   'But there are billions of books out there Therese, in umpteen shops, divided into squillions of bits of carpet and - '   She was giving me her look: a nurse at my hospital bed telling me that the prognosis was less than ideal. 'Yes, but with me it's narrowed down quite a bit to begin with. I only ever buy books a...

  Adam Greenford ticked me off for my post the other day about wanting to circumvent the dawn chorus with crushed temazepam on bird tables. Adam, aka Three Quarter Grown Lion, raises money for the R.S.P.B. and said that the wood pigeon was so close to me in the tree, it was probably picking up my vibe as I sat down with my early morning coffee and was joyfully welcoming me to the day.     Yes, well, yes, okay.    This reminded me of my Lower-Folding-in-the-Marsh Festival gigs over the years. The committee billetts me on erstwhile operatic soprano Joan Harmer-Wilkinson for hospitality.    Joan also likes to joyfully welcome me to the day; along with my post-gig drunk all the drinks hangover.   'No, not that teaspoon, Iestyn, it won't stir as well as one - here - from the set I got as a second wedding present, after I finally pulled myself together to leave the ghastly Slovakian and married the chair of the Lower Folders grammar schoo...

                                                               Fuck off!   Live in harmony with nature, we're told. Well, frankly, this is hardly a two way thing is it, birds?   Birds.    They may be all lovely in terms of the ecosystem, but they make way too much noise. What is with the little brown one sitting shrieking on a single pitch like a car alarm for minutes on end? Or the wood pigeon with its stuttering cuckoo call? True, the blackbird's song catches the heart. But, really, some of the rest of the little peepers..   People buy recordings of ambient birdsong. I'd rather buy a recording of ambulance sirens.    I'm a city boy that's moved to the country. It was quieter in my bedsit in Camden than it is here in Thorpeness. In Camden the only real noise pollution was the gir...