A concert from Ukraine

Birgitta Kenyon is a choral workshop leader, helping to build new choirs in schools, and to support existing ones. Besides supporting schemes for Parkinson's Disease, Senile Dementia, and a new Summer School for Young Carers, she was equally well known on the cabaret scene, with such numbers as Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer in her persona as A Girl Called Fred. One may then imagine her surprise when she discovered two Ukrainian refugees in her home town who were exiles from the Ukrainian opera house. She immediately set to work to organise a concert to support the Ukrainian cause, and this brilliant evening showcased their work, a mixture of folk melodies and classical arias. Birgitta was accompanist and included some piano pieces to sandwich the singing. She was a performance in her own right, constantly jumping up and down from the stool to raise or lower the heavy piano lid, flexing her muscles, selecting loose music sheets from a huge stack to spread across the stand, wedging them with tissues to stop them fluttering across the keyboard and pausing to wipe her brow, yet never missing a beat to what must have been unknown music to her. The tickets had waited for five months pinned to my cork board: Edwin and Andre's delayed Christmas present of a concert in support of Ukraine. This, then, was the background to a wonderful entertainment, though inevitably tinged with sadness as we remembered the brothers and husbands left to fight there against a brutal invasive force. 

Edwin and I had been to a Ukrainian opera before when Ukraine won the Eurovision. We had flown to Kiev for the competition, and next day Edwin bought tickets for a Rimsky-Korsakov opera in the opera house there, a truly memorable performance but this time the singers sang nothing by a Russian composer.

Andre, Edwin and Rachel come to stay

Andre's sister flew out from Brazil to stay with them for a week before they all go to Rome to meet up with her parents. On Monday, Ann and I went to the pictures in Bury and bumped into them by coincidence as we came out of the cinema, so we shared a meal. Rachel is a stunningly beautiful girl with a degree in chemical engineering and is now manager in a large aluminium smelting plant in the north of Brazil. On Saturday, the three of them came to stay overnight before their flight out. She has good English, especially technical English, but occasionally misses a word. For some reason, our conversation turned to the French people and their willingness to enter ménage à trois. Rachel described the extra woman as "the man's mattress" that caused much laughter but in which she joined happily.

Yesterday, we got to Heathrow comfortably (Andre was driving), but coming back I stopped at the South Mimms service station for a break. I have been there many times before, but this time missed the carpark entrance and ended up on some tiny wandering country lane ending by serendipity at a pub called The Stratford, where I thought I'd better eat as they were serving all day Sunday lunches, which was much better than any fare I might have found at South Mimms.