London diary, day three (Sunday)

More or less since booking the tickets for my trip to London I'd been wondering about where I'd be spending my final night: I'd have liked to spend the night at Luke's, but the prospect of having to get up horribly early again to get to Gatwick airport, on the other side of London, probably at some expense, was not what I'd call enticing. Loath though I was to admit it, as I was already to spend Sunday evening in town, the simplest option seemed to be to spend the night at the airport ...

The morning was pleasant enough - after a light breakfast of croissants and blackberry jam, Luke, Darin and I went for a leisurely walk in the park, pausing for a moment to chat with James and Craig in the midst of their game of tennis. Lunch back at the flat, after which Darin gave me a lift to Victoria, where I was to leave my bags before heading to the Royal Albert Hall to queue for the Prom. I balked at the prices, prefering a bruised shoulder to paying an unreasonable sum for the convenience of having less to carry for the space of a few hours.

I'd deliberately not brought any reading material as I planned to buy a copy of Harry Potter and the half-blood Prince to see me through the queuing for the Prom and however much of the night at the airport. As I sat on the Albert Hall steps, the woman in front of me said the queue at yesterday's Prom - Gilbert and Sullivan and nothing but, not altogether to my tastes - had been full of people reading the book and the usually irritating regular prommers had a message from "wizards to muggles: please turn your pages quietly!"

I'm not going to review the new book here, partly because I wish to re-read it first (yes, I finished it at the airport at something like 1am) but more particularly because this day was more about the Prom, a performance of all the music from Purcell's score to The fairy queen, an elaboration on A midsummer night's dream. I'd seen Paul McCreesh conduct Handel's Saul at the Proms two years ago and had equally high expectations of this, a much lighter work with a great sense of fun about it. Mhairi Lawson was in particularly fine voice for her Proms debut and, among the men, Mark Le Brocq stood out for his camp turn in the dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa as well from a vocal standpoint.

One thing that did strike me was the difficulty in voice casting, as many of the higher male parts were really within the range of a tenor and counter-tenor at once, meaning a frequent change in tone on the part of the singers, depending on the register. The effect took some getting used to but did not marr an excellent performance.

I was in no hurry to get to the airport so after the concert was over let the other Prommers get on the buses ahead of me, eventually catching a train to Gatwick about an hour after leaving the Albert Hall. The rest of the night was just a matter of whiling away the hours before checking in for my flight home: I didn't get much more than two hours' sleep (not very comfortable ones at that) and was glad the plane landed in Edinburgh sufficiently early to allow me to go home, shower and get changed before going into work.

Though I did drop off for an hour or so in the early evening, since then it's been more or less back to normal. Usually it takes a day or two for my lack of sleep to catch up on me, but now, a good four days later, I've yet to feel the after-effects - which gives further credence to my theory that I destroyed my body clock during my student days ...