It is always a good time to put the clocks back

In the week when we endured the annual faff of putting the clocks forward, it was encouraging to observe some sterling efforts to put them back by decades and even centuries.

First there was the happy news that Australia’s Prime Minister had taken a moment off from superintending his country’s search for a very small aeronautical needle in a whole prairie of haystacks to announce that he was reintroducing the titles of knight and dame, after a lapse of nearly 30 years.

It would be a duller world that had to forego the possibility of another Dame Joan Sutherland or Edna Everage, so I was delighted to see Australia’s outgoing Governor-General become Dame Quentin Bryce.

Dame Quentin Bryce

This announcement proved of no interest at all to the British media apart from The Guardian, which was predictably outraged. In my experience this is always a reliable indicator of a positive development.

However, my pleasure in this Antipodean defiance of progressive nostrums was blasted into total insignificance by sheer awe at the monumental nerve of the theatre designer whose work I experienced on Saturday evening.

Because somehow, in a world tied in knots by the demands of Elfin Safety, a genius has managed to construct a near perfect replica of a 17th century playhouse. Which is to say a building made almost entirely of wood, and lit throughout by candles, in which people in floaty period dresses waft around in thrilling proximity to the naked flames.

This certainly created a frisson for those of us who remembered how a single candle set the dress of tragic soprano Susan Chilcott ablaze at Covent Garden in 2002: an event which, according to legend, allowed one newspaper to run the cruel and inaccurate headline “The show ain’t over till the fat lady singes.”

This miraculous place is called the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and is a sort of footnote or addendum to Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s South Bank. The performance was of Francesco Cavalli’s Venetian opera of 1644, L’Ormindo.

As readers of The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera will already know, the first true opera was performed in Venice on March 6, 1637, so this definitely qualifies as an early work. It was all the more remarkable, then, for its maturity and contemporary relevance.

Combining comedy and tragedy with those old theatrical favourites of disguise and mistaken identity, it struck a particular chord with me because at its centre is a feeble old monarch married to a beautiful young woman, Queen Erisbe.

So very like my own domestic arrangements.

Quite unlike the happily loyal Mrs Hann, Erisbe dallies with two fit young princes before deciding to elope with Ormindo. But she is foiled by Fate, which blows their ship back to Casablanca and her irate husband.

Who duly sentences the pair to death by drinking poison, for which someone kindly substitutes a sleeping draught.

Which is handy, as the two lovers awake shortly after the king has discovered that Ormindo is, in fact, his son. Implausibly, all are reconciled and live happily ever after.

It’s a bit like Romeo and Juliet or Tristan und Isolde, but with a happy ending.

Seating just 340 people on authentically uncomfortable wooden benches, the new-yet-400-years-old theatre provides a wonderfully intimate and memorable experience, with excellent acoustics if occasionally dodgy sightlines, and I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who finds themselves at a loose end in London and can grab a ticket.

Unfortunately at the time of booking almost a year ago I had overlooked the fact that our night out was on the eve of Mothering Sunday, requiring an early morning dash back to be reunited with our children.

Two-year-old Jamie has been delighting us for many months now by clasping both his hands to his head, waiting for all around to copy him, then beamingly leading a round of applause.

When we got back I duly raised my hands to my head and nodded to him. In response, I received only the Hann Death Stare to which I treat people who ask how my diet is going.

I know his growing up is inevitable and indeed desirable, but it did make me pine to put the clock back just another touch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Social mobility - sadly, it cannot be a one-way street

Everyone seems to agree that social mobility is a good thing, but we focus only on increasing the opportunities to move upwards.

Though since we can’t all be dukes or plutocrats, this is clearly only possible if other people are simultaneously moving in the opposite direction.

The post-war political settlement sought to achieve this with punitive death duties on the rich, balancing the grammar school ladder of opportunity for clever children from poorer backgrounds.

Direct grant schools like Newcastle RGS were, in the words of one Cambridge don I knew, “Powerful engines for turning lower-middle-class boys living in the north of England into upper-middle-class men living in the south.”

Which was perfectly true. Remarkably few of my own Oxbridge-educated RGS contemporaries ever returned to live in the North East.

Though this was balanced by the Durham and Newcastle graduates of my acquaintance who were born in the south, but loved this region so much that they could never bring themselves to leave.

I bucked the trend and returned to Northumberland because we Hanns don’t really do mobility. We have been hanging around the Alnwick area since at least the 1600s, and quite possibly longer (but we were not socially elevated enough for me to be sure).

Mrs Hann, on the other hand, is definitely from mobile stock, her immediate antecedents being Iranian or, as she prefers, Persian (because it conjures up warm images of cats and carpets, rather than bearded fanatics).

Having said that, there might be a touch of the fanatic here ...

She also continues to believe that holidays are best taken abroad, despite the tremendous break we enjoyed in Northumberland earlier this month.

Nevertheless, I would unhesitatingly place my wife in the “credit” column in the debate about that aspect of social mobility known as immigration. Though that, too, must come with the caveat that the entire human race cannot live in the UK, and those moving inwards and upwards must be balanced by others heading down and out.

These reflections are inspired by the fact that I am facing, with extreme reluctance, some potential moving of my own. I put my much-loved Northumberland house, with its marvellous views of the Cheviots and Simonside, on the market six weeks ago.

I did so because of the remorseless logic that my elder son starts school in Cheshire in a week’s time. And, once he does, our ability to spend time in the North East as a family will be greatly reduced.

It also reflects the lack of forward planning that can frustrate even the most determined would-be social climber.

The American songwriter Eubie Blake famously observed in his 90s: “If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” Similarly, if I had foreseen that I would have two young sons at close to what I always fondly imagined as my retirement age, I’d have taken care to save some cash rather than squandering it all on opera tickets and champagne (the rest, as George Best once said, I simply wasted).

On the plus side, this profligacy has equipped me to write the new edition of The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera, available from all good bookshops and tax-evading online dealerships just as soon as the ink dries.

So I have, late in life, finally achieved my ambition of getting a book into print, albeit not the blockbuster comic novel I have squandered a lifetime pretending to be writing.

I also find that I am deriving steadily increasing satisfaction from fatherhood, which may finally be edging me towards that elusive condition known as happiness. Which I already knew, from my wide-ranging acquaintance with both multi-millionaires and the comparatively poor, has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of one’s bank balance. (Though at least the millionaires get to be miserable in comfort.)

To date there has been an encouraging lack of interest in my house, though I await my estate agent’s feedback on today’s scheduled viewing with appropriate trepidation.

If it does sell, so far as I am concerned, it will definitely represent downward mobility of the worst sort, but at least it creates a golden opportunity for someone else to move up in the world. Does anyone fancy placing their foot upon the ladder?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Now there's a thing

 

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‘It’s not what you know, it’s what they think you know.’

Out Now | The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera by Keith Hann

‘An essential pre-season read for anyone attempting to navigate the pitfalls of post-performance drinks.’

DAVID ROSS, FOUNDER, NEVILL HOLT OPERA

Never again confuse a castrato with a contralto, a prima donna with sopratitoli, or O Sole Mio with an ice cream advert. Bask in the admiration of your fellow opera lovers as you pronounce confidently on the merits of Donizetti’s bel canto over Wagner’s leitmotiv, and hold your own against the most sneering of opera buffs.

‘A very amusing, knowledgeable and enjoyable introduction to opera by someone who has spent far too much time at Glyndebourne and not enough at Grange Park Opera.'

 WASFI KANI OBE, FOUNDER, GRANGE PARK OPERA

A 5-million-copy bestselling series, The Bluffer’s Guides® have been helping people out of sticky situations for over four decades. Now relaunched, they’re back – and not just in paperback. E-books are available from all major online bookstores.

The Bluffer’s Guides’ mission is to eradicate social embarrassment from this world, and (with the help of their witty and erudite experts) they’re well on their way to doing that.

The Sunday Telegraph described the original series as containing ‘an amazing amount of solid fact disguised as frivolous observation’ and Daily Mail hailed the guides as providing a ‘means to apparent instant erudition without actually having to know or study anything.’

‘Keith Hann's whistle-stop opera tour brims with his passion for this great art form – and contains many more laughs than any opera I have conducted so far.’

PAUL MCCREESH, CONDUCTOR

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1954, Keith Hann grew up in a household devoted to the music of the two Maxes, Jaffa and Bygraves, but luckily introduced himself to opera shortly before leaving school. Over the last 40 years he has watched the curtain rise on more than 1,000 operatic performances, and waited until it fell on 997 of them. In order to fund this addiction, he has been variously employed as an unsuccessful stockbroker and an incompetent but occasionally entertaining public relations consultant. Decades of skilful bluffing brought him to the brink of retirement without any lasting romantic entanglements, until a momentary lapse of concentration one evening at Covent Garden led to his marriage at the age of 54, and the subsequent arrival of two children. Keith currently devotes most of his time to not writing a novel and staring forlornly at his bank statements. In consequence, he values his now strictly rationed excursions to opera houses more than ever.

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