Proms 2012

There's always a curious sense of deflation when you've geared yourself up for a marathon billious rant and it turns out that everything goes smoothly. At the stroke -literally - of 9 this morning, I logged on to the Proms booking site, confidently expecting a cheery message informing me that I was 4000th+ in the queue and advising me not to let my eyes stray from the screen for the next three hours. For the last 3 years, I think my highest position when booking opened has been 3500th. But lo and behold, I was 100th in line, and 6 minutes later had got all performances and seats asked for.

I have posted this fundamentally uninteresting, if not downright boring, news in the spirit of joy, world peace and repentance (or something like that) 

To whom is this addressed? If it's to my post, then the answer is no, I don't feel any need to 'expand'.

Yes, it's difficult to know what other similarly boring details I could have fleshed it out with, Troyen.

And thanks - now all I have to do is not stage a repeat of the multiple cock-ups of last year which included: turning up without the tickets for one concert, doing the same for another concert and then finding out at teh box office that we hadn't in fact booked for it in the first place, and turning up for one concert with the tickets for another one. This give Mission Control considerable ammo in the caustic remarks territory, and I confidently expect the incidents to be referred to in the coming weeks.

I blamed the unseasonal weather and unusual sunspot activity, but I don't think it worked. 

Not far at all - about 4-5 miles away in Sarf London, but a long-lasting foot injury is currently obliging me to drive in to work every day in Central London, rather than brave public transport. The trudge up from South Ken is out for me at the moment, so I tend to drive over to the RAH where parking is surprisingly easy if you time it correctly.

I have to say that the staff in the box office at the RAH are always unfailingly helpful in my experience and were gracious enough not to look too full of pity at the first(?) signs of mental decrepitude I displayed in the repeated ticket fiascos of last year.

Apologies for that last post which at least proves that my IT abilities are sometimes indistinguishable from my ticket-remembering skills.

No apology necessary at all, Mark. In fact they usually come up trumps if you show them the credit card the tickets were booked with. I'm thinking of a cunning plan to baffle them by turning up with tickets for the wrong year, but suspect I'll get short shrift from Mission Control.

It's a great pity that Kauffman has cried off from the Trojans run - that was the first 'must have' ticket we put down on this year's shopping list. You've always got to feel sorry for the replacement in such circumstances. I remember eagerly awaiting a Proms Song of the Earth some years ago, only for Siegfried Jerusalem to cry off at the last minute and be replaced by Jeffrey Lawton, who sang well but it was an uphill struggle for him to win over a disappointed audience.

There's always the very occasional result the other way - some 20-plus years ago there was an ENO performance of Lohengrin (or was it Parsifal?) where the tenor cried off and no substitute was available. Strangely, Siegfried Jerusalem was in town and stood in for one performance at the last minute, singing in German while the rest of the cast sang in English. Unfortunately I had decided against going - ho hum.