I was sitting in a vegetarian eatery the other night with a friend, eating a most peculiar sausage – since my passionate remorse toward the animal kingdom I’ve become bemused by food – and we were talking, the way one does, about class structure in nineteenth-century England and how it has evolved – this is a subject that interests me, now I’m immersed in research for my Edith Cavell book. I said we’re all tories now, and I listed my own capitalist transgressions and those of my once lefty friends. He said he thought it was more complicated than that and that now there’s a new class – the urban confident. I think he’s right. They’re everywhere and they’re so….. confident – about the sound of their own voices, and wines from the Garonne, and Alessi kettles and where to go on holiday, and whatever’s on their iPods, and their circle of friends, and the carelessness of their own opinions…

Then I worried that I was urban confident. He said I wasn’t, I was urban unconfident, so I worried about that too. Then we shared a piece of carrot cake and drank our fresh mint tea.

And more on why that screening of Macbeth Live from the Met was such a touchstone – such a faith-renewer. It’s just so marvellous, in the sense of marvelling, that there’s William Shakespeare in about 1600 writing this sort of Ang Lee psychodrama about the controlling force of sexual passion, and then Giuseppe Verdi 250 years later, follows on, takes the drama further, and shows how flawed, self-seeking leaders destroy the lives of ordinary people, and then about 160 years after that Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera House thinks about how to bring opera to a wide audience, and Adrian Noble thinks about how to stage Verdi with resonance for now, and those technological physicist wizards, whoever they are, do what they do with digital sound and high resolution whatevers, and live satellite transmission… and then this Russian Goddess, this Maria Guleghina, comes via heaven, understands all of it and pours out this extraordinary music and for three magical hours transports us £15-a-go (with discount) punters. Truly a good night out.

One of life’s Saturday evening pleasures for me is – or was – to hear opera live from the Met on Radio 3 on my DAB radio. Now that’s old hat. Yesterday evening, screened at the Barbican, I saw the first of the high-resolution videos the Met is beaming to Europe. It was of Verdi’s Macbeth with Maria Guleghina as Lady Macbeth. The whole thing seemed like genius. Apparently there were about ten cameras in the opera house and what we heard came from Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.

We watched the Opera House audience taking their seats, saw the nervousness of the musicians, sneaked back stage and into the sound technician’s box, saw the sweat and dentistry of all the performers, understood what was going on because there were subtitles, and were musically, emotionally and artistically mesmerised. I’m ashamed to say I’d only ever half heard this great opera. Maria Guleghina was stunning. She’s from Odessa. She’s like some huge goddess who pours out divine sound. And Lado Ataneli was just as big as Macbeth. He’s from Georgia. John Relyea was brilliant as Banquo and Dimitri Pittas was brilliant as Macduff.

I felt a bit silly clapping in the cinema, but it was hard not to. It was like being a special visitor in the Opera House while a masterpiece was performed.

My roof garden is now a war zone. It’s not the work of amateur terrorists from some Ealing backroom: this is Ground Zero.

I don’t know if they’re the same blackbirds as nested in the yucca last year and caused panic and alarm every morning when gulls came to murder their babies. There’s a he and a she and they’re always together and they appear to be in love, or at least married, but without being ornothologicalist beyond blackness or brownness, all blackbirds look the same to my unfamiliar-with-them eye.

They’re a pair of scuffing blackbirds and they’ve taken over my terrace.

Last month I assiduously and laboriously replaced an inch or so of topsoil in all my plant containers, bedded everything down with bark chippings and anticipated a blooming spring. Then this pair turn up and scuff the whole lot out of the pots. They’re always at it. It’s an occupation in both senses. They never go away. They’re extravagantly unafraid of me no matter how I glower and insult them.

I wouldn’t mind so much if they scuffed just to the front of the pots so I could sweep up neatly – but they scuff to the side and the back and every which way, and as I’ve placed all the containers close together to create a sort of herbaceous border effect, the only way I can get to their scuffings is by backbreakingly moving the pots. And there’s no point in doing that anyway, because they’re back in ten minutes for more of it. Flaunting their ASBOs.

I’ve partly myself to blame. It is my habit to put a handful of nuts and raisins into my breakfast porridge, and seeing them both out there one morning in the tidy days before the occupation, I put a handful out for them too. I shouldn’t have. I started something. She in particular loves fat raisins. She gets a funny look in her eye about them, particularly the ones from Marks & Spencer. She gobbles them down, shits on the wall, then scuffs. It’s her way of communicating with me.

It puts me in a moral dilemma. Having started the nuts and raisins malarkey, is it right to stop. Also, I fear whatever the problems I’ll miss them if they go. I’ve found that to be painfully true and to my cost with other combative relationships. But it does strike me that the reason why, as a species, we kill or drive away everything that breathes and eats and does its own peculiar thing, is because everything and everyone else is different and inconvenient and messy, demanding and unreasonable. That’s why we cut ourselves off in tidy well-sealed rooms and buy anti-allergenic dustbags.

So I’ll go on with it I suppose for a while: sweeping up and muttering and putting out raisins.

smoking seriously damages your health
‘I never smoke seriously.’

‘”Is that a dead body in the road?”’
“It’s only a badger.”’

‘“He asked me to marry him.”
“What did you say?”
“Crumbs.”’

‘She ate seven chicken legs. I counted.’

‘A lot of people die in the lavatory.’

‘I’m going up to vacu pack the duvet.’

tbc