Of Choirs and Comedians

On Saturday night we went for one of our occasional visits to Downstairs at the Kings Head, Crouch End’s spectacularly low-ceilinged comedy club with the slowest-serving bar staff known to humanity. The comedy on offer this time was rather below par, but I guess that’s the risk you take. Comedians working the circuit are familiar with only two points about Crouch End: one, that it’s not on the Tube, and two, that it’s a suburb full of terribly nice middle-class people. So nice that the audience at the Kings Head are invariably polite, even when a performer is so poor that they’ve resorted to making spluttering noises down the microphone in a bid for laughs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a heckle there.
On Friday I attended an open rehearsal of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, a fairly impressive and respected amateur choir who perform regularly at the Barbican and the Proms. They have a challenging repertoire that they intersperse with the mainstream loud choral numbers. At the moment they are working on Verdi Requiem, which I can never resist an opportunity to go and sing. And they insist that members audition to weed out some of the tone-deaf chaff that tends to turn up at these institutions. But with these high expectations, I instead found Crouch End at its most middle class and most terribly nice and that the CEFC was like every other amateur choir in the country, full of 50-something women called names like Binky and Fifi and Nena, who gush over the conductor but sit gossiping amongst themselves whenever he tries to teach them anything. I won’t be going back.

REBECCA

Round Robin II

Last night, I met Dad to go to a beautiful Handel opera at the Barbican. Together with the usual pile of junkmail that he passes on at such rendezvous was Bernadette’s Christmas letter, the one I slated in advance sometime in mid December. It was nauseatingly true to form. Their children are still in excess of perfect, their lives are full of exotic holidays and allegedly brilliant achievements (“Matthew was promoted to Senior Credit Analyst with Bayern LB and continues to evaluate enormous property deals as the London property specialist for his bank. Amanda passed her gruelling Graduate Training Programme teaching qualification with flying colours.” etc) and they are just orgasmic at the thought of being grandparents. “Felicity and James are now enjoying the different stages of him smiling and gurgling.” (There are stages of smiling and gurgling?)

Nothing ever goes wrong. The fact that Bernadette lost one of her best friends and colleagues in April to cancer was of course entirely forgotten: there is no gloominess in their utopic world. But how insulting to send this letter out to my father, with their last line about how they are looking forward “to a real family Christmas when we are joined by Catherine and Robert (whoever they may be), Claire and Mark (likewise), Matthew and Amanda, Felicity and James and Benjamin” – when a “family” Christmas is something that we will never be able to have again. People don’t want to read this purified, exaggerated and highly spun nonsense – it’s nothing more thoughtless, offensive crap.

REBECCA