A Life Less Ordinary

Having spent the first fortnight away from the security of full-time employment, what have been the unexpected highlights that make up for it? The list can go on and on but here are a few of them:

Being caught completely unawares, already late in the day (it started the day before apparently), by the queue of Apple faithfuls for the launch of I-phone 4:

Being able to have lunch like this, courtesy of the tourist-free Bourough Market on Friday morning:

Having the time to look up at London streets properly and discovering pop-up monuments like this:

Finally getting around to the backlog of magazine reading (this pile has now disappeared):

Hearing Icecream Man's van ringing out its tune in the streets, at 3pm, which brings back a flood of memories of my earliest days in this country. The tune remains perpetually the same of course.

A Brand New Life

My so-called 'new lease of life' started in a blur - the days immediately before and after The Big Departure (well, from a full-time job, so not that big a deal really) were again jam-packed with cultural and outdoor activities. Welcome to Thebes at the National and The Late Middle Classes (on which more later) at the Donmar were both powerful in equal measures, despite the vast difference in size between the spaces. On what was quite possibly our last visit to Glyndebourne for a few years to come, the weather was sadly true to form - grey, (just a little) wet, and unseasonably cold, exactly as it had been on our previous trips there three years in a row. The Grandage production of Billy Budd was worth bearing the chill - and the vastly overpriced dinner - for, and yet we didn't feel too sad at the prospect of not going back there next summer. The resolutely un-sunmmery weather persisted well into Sunday afternoon, and only after we had finished our strawberry-picking trip (first, very late crop of the year, but scrumptious as always) as well as the meat-heavy pub lunch, did the sun finally, but still very reluctantly, grant us an audience. A rare blockbuster opera date (the Zambello Carmen at Covent Garden - an excellent Christine Rice redeemed many other flaws of the cast) was followed by a totally transformed Royal Court (Roy Williams's Sucker Punch - excellent). Tomorrow brings the highly anticipated Headlong production of Salome (why do I sound like the marketing department at Hampstead Theatre?), and there's more opera to come later in the week.

I digressed. I meant to ponder on the fact that the first day of my Brand New Life unintentionally coincided with Summer Solstice - the longest day of the year. Sure enough, after Carmen and Don Jose both languished and we all filed out of the opera house humming 'Toreador', there was still a hint of a twilight high above. Nothing beats the delusion, no matter how brief, that you've just somehow managed to steal more hours in a day without the bank managers noticing. But being the idealistic pragmatist that I am, my thoughts immediately leaped to the not-so-philosophical implications this brought on: that every day from now on would get a little shorter, and so our lives shall continue, in frustratingly predictable cycles of days, months and years that go by, that will never end until the end is upon us.

It was with an almost existential need to be rid of a predictable, stable life that I made the decision to move on. Perhaps all such stability in our lives is also ultimately a delusion - or, as a wonderful Japanese conductor said to me in response to my departure announcement, 'the only consistency in life is Changes'. Whatever the future brings, I have made my move first, and I'm proud of it. And if anything could be nerve-racking, melancholic and exhilarating at the same time, the moment of turning over that leaf certainly was.

While the plot for the next act (or indeed the opening line) is not yet written, I think I shall just enjoy the suspense for just a little bit longer, at least as much as the British sunshine allows me to. Perhaps, just perhaps, that truly surprising twist is crouching just around the corner, waiting to leap out.