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October 25, 2006
Tired ballerina, or rather...
...tired retro-variety artiste with certain skills.
People looking concerned about how tired I am.
Because?
In the last six years, next door has had three tenants. Each of them has gutted the house from roof to basement. The work each time has been frazzling and taken at least six months. This is allowed by law.
Building work can take any length of time as long as the daily hours are restricted from eight to six Monday to Friday, and eight till one Saturday. It is not allowed on Sundays or bank holidays. Odours are not allowed, either. (Whether from the work or the workers is not made clear).
I think the law should be changed. Fouettes are tiring enough without being woken at eight am on the day of a performance.
What can possibly have been so wrong with the house each time? Surely it's a case of more money than sense? Actually, on second thought, the tenant before last was director Bibon Kidron. If what she left was anything like the mess she made of Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason, the new tenant would have found mezzanine to atrium Armageddon.
But, take the roof, for one example. It isn't thatch or Japanese paper. Good old slate tiles are quite tough and lasting aren't they? I'll say next door's needed to be to withstand a goulash of Eastern Europeans smacking the hell out of them with entrenching tools all day five and a half days a week for six- out of every twenty-four-months.
Oh, my sainted aunt, says Edward Lane. Photo Ed Lane.
The first day of Bibon's own roof farce was a Saturday in July. She had the Goulash up there by eight sharp. She made them all tea – I could hear her for twenty minutes banshee-like canvassing milk and/or sugar wants - then stood outside leaning on her car, shouting up how they had a perfect day for it, shame she wasn't there for any of it, just off to her sisters. True, her smile stalled when the jazz musician at thirty-one a flung up her window and called her an f-ing anti-social slag. And she got hers over Bridget Jones.
I had a downer on her anyway, because of my mate Lis. German ROH head usherette, mid-eighties, remember? Looked born to play Heidi? Known affectionately as “kraut”? Prone to pulling down the grille of my bookstall at fraught moments and feeding me change of cast slips through the bars?
I inherited my bed-sit in this house from my mate Lis. Lis is a contralto. And she is more dedicated than a Marion Keyes novel. All of us trainee thesps in the foyer from those days learned from Kraut.
Aged seventeen, she came to London and worked for five years as an au pair so that her English would be good enough for her to study here.
When the audition panel at the Trinity College of Music said that her musicianship must be brought up to the standard of her actual singing, she used her savings to rent a mutual friend's cottage in Aldeburgh over the winter. She hired a piano and only looked up from her Associated Board book of Musical Theory in all that lonely time to knit, raid the bakers or read every single Agatha Christie left summer in summer on the bookcase beneath the window that looks out on Ethel Keane's cottage.
"Every night on my way up to bed as Christmas got nearer", Lis remembers, “I would see Ethel hanging yet more and more cards on string across her window. With ten days still to go you nearly couldn't see her pottering about any more."
Meanwhile, back in Foyerland, the rest of us we were picking up sinus infections from the fire-resistant Kingdom Of Sweets shit all over the foyer in honour of the new Nutcracker.
When Lis graduated from Trinity, mid nineties this would be now, I was living in Aldeburgh. Every week she travelled three hours back and forth and we worked on her pieces for Music Society auditions. She's a great one for doing what she calls "the things that you do."
"If you're an oratorio soloist," she said, "you pay the few hundred pounds for the address labels of all the music societies, and you pay another few hundred to record your CD of Messiah and Matthew Passion arias to send to them, and you go up for the open day and do your audition."
For months we worked towards this open day, fitting in lessons around her full-time job as receptionist for an aeroplane manufacturer. She got so tired she stopped singing about Telling Good Tiding to Zion in favour of Selling Tidings to Tie-on, and so anxious about coming down with a cold I once had to talk her out of gargling with Toilet Duck.
At last, here was the open day. And she got two hours sleep.
Nerves? No.
Illness? No.
Because Bibon had a party? Yes.
All Bibon had to do was push a little "sorry, there'll be noise" note under her neighbours' doors. Lis was deputy house-keeper for the Danish Church in Regent's Park. Had she been warned about the party, she would have collected the key for a hospitality room and slept there. But, no. Next door was raucous till dawn.
All right, she sang very well and got bookings. But that isn't the point. If you live somewhere residential, you make whoopee in night clubs, not on the other side of a wall that is as soundproofed as hardened Reddy Brek.
Anyway, back to the building work.
I sent an e-mail to the estate agents for forwarding to the new owners, asking when all this might be over please. I included the above anecdotes to keep things chortley and suggested they have a Working Bee with all their friends and get it done spit spot.
"Shame Bibon isn't there any more", I ended up, "I would have been straight round and missed the wall with the entrenching tool a few times accidentally on purpose".
I got an e-mail back from the estate agent saying that my e-mail had been duly forwarded; and I might like to know that the new owners and Bibon are very close.
I drew myself up un-cowed and sniffed queenily at the pc screen,
"That's probably it for them on the friends' front, then, anyway."
Am off now to buy enough wax earplugs to last at least till Christmas.
2012.
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