It is midnight, and so I will not be writing very much.
Mark is in the shower, and I have retreated to bed with an outbreak of post-adventure indigestion.
This is entirely my own fault because of having eaten a very lot of very nice things, all of which I suspected might give me indigestion but which I ate anyway because they were so nice.
Fatty garlic sausage is never going to be good, even if it comes from Marks and Spencer and has an exotic foreign name.
We have eaten and drunk until we were so replete we could barely waddle back across to the car.
Glyndebourne is amazing.
We did not bother preparing a picnic. We piled into the car this morning and went to Marks and Spencer. This was a bit like going shopping with the children, in that everybody put the things they liked best into the trolley so that when we got to the checkout the total made everybody’s eyes widen a bit, but which led to an utterly glorious picnic.
Our friends had brought two bottles of very splendid champagne, none of your Prosecco rubbish.
My friend Amanda had organised it all. She had booked an actual picnic table in the marquee for lunchtime and a table in the restaurant for the evening.
Glyndebourne provides little trolleys so that you can tow your picnic halfway across the gardens if you like. I was very impressed with these.
It is the most wonderfully smart black tie event, with beautifully dressed ladies and immaculately polished gentlemen. They were all so splendid that I could quite easily have looked at the audience just as much as at the opera, although of course I didn’t, because the opera was lovely.
It was the story of a chap whose girlfriend has been kidnapped and taken to a harem, so of course he goes to rescue her. We thought that he was a bit rubbish at the rescuing bit, and that probably we would have told him not to bother and just stayed with the villain, who was a suave and dashing sort of chap with a scimitar.
He did not rescue her at all in the end. The villain was overcome by humanitarian grounds and let them all go.
The singing was divine.
This happened over the course of three acts, which we interrupted with a brief mill around the gardens in one interval, and a very civilised three-course dinner in the other. We had eaten so much picnic we did not really need dinner, but we ate it anyway.
The gardens are amazing. There are lots of trees that would never grow in the Lake District, I could not even persuade banana trees to survive in the conservatory, never mind out of doors, and there were lots of others.
We had a last wander around the gardens when it finished, although it was dark by then. Partly this was because there was a queue to get out of the car park, and partly it was because I was dying to see the gardens by then. There was a real ha ha, the sort that you have to try not to fall in to, not the sort caused by witticisms over dinner.
I am going to go away, because of being exhausted, but we finished the day with a last, contented cup of tea in the courtyard outside our bedroom and thought how wonderful the world is.
It has been amazing.
Glyndebourne is really worth putting in an application for the middle classes, really it is.
I think perhaps I ought to give it a go.
