Four play

Purcell and the six degrees of Kevin Bacon effect ...

Meanwhile Bruce Wood's book Purcell - An Extraordinary Life is an extraordinary book. I have written about it for a rival broadcaster so it would be unfair to write too much here. However I was grateful to the author for unwittingly connecting Purcell with Nell Gwynn as I had tried in vain to do earlier this year on this blog. Wood pointed out that Purcell's collaborating lyricist for Queen Mary's Birthday Ode in 1692 was the poet Charles Sedley, aka Charles Buckhurst, whom I recognised as a former boyfriend of Nell Gwynn. He and she had spent a riotous summer of fornication at the Epsom races during the 1670s after she had split up with Charles Hart (Shakespeare's great-nephew) and before she took up with Charles Stuart the King. She joked that they were her Charleses I, II and III. Sedley, as Wood reminds us, is infamous for having got so drunk once at the Cock and Pie Tavern where Gwynn had worked as a barmaid, that he removed all his clothes, mounted the gallery, delivered an obscene sermon and urinated on the disgusted crowd below. As they hauled him away he could be heard bellowing that he did not regret it at all and would use the incident one day in a play.

On the money ...

Clearly I remember wrongly, Arenaprommer2, and the charity total last year did not keep pace with the prom number. My apologies. However, the general point still stands. The nightly call is not only tedious, but is also giving the promenaders in general a reputation for being interested only in money-raising.

I was brought up with the idea that talk in public about specific sums was rather distasteful, although I suppose as long as people applaud the announcement you are going to continue. I also resent the fact that the announcing promenaders choose to make a distinction between themselves and the seated audience as in 'Arena to Audience' as if they themselves were not audience and therefore presumably exempt from the nightly collection. It looks like you're targeting those in seats just because they have paid more than the arena crowd for the show.

Unfortunately promenading no longer attracts so many students as before who definitely would be more interested in the music than anything else and it wouldn't even occur to most of them to wave a bucket under the noses of people emerging from the hall transported, moved or harrowed by some sublime artistic experience unless it was for their own beer money. It would be a shame if promenading were to be seen as just another opportunity to rattle the collecting tins. No other concert halls in the capital allow this sort of behaviour. Personally I don't see why the Albert Hall or the BBC should either.