Surreal comedy

Today, with much improved weather after yesterday's all day deluge, we took Eddie and Anne for a trip down to the mouth of the Ogwr valley, lunched at the farmhouse tea room close to Ogmore Castle, and then walked along the river bank down to the pebbly bar where it meets the sea. It wasn't nearly as muddy and wet underfoot as it might have been. The grass was firm underfoot and well grained apart from the occasional pothole.

We spotted a colony of a dozen cormorants flying up and down the river and settling in the various places where they usually fished.

Just beyond the pebbly bar, hidden from view until we'd mounted a slope to reach the top, there were about a hundred Canada geese feeding in a riverside tidal water meadow just fifty years away - a wonderful surprise.

We were astonished at the number of empty plastic bottles, and escaped balls of every kind golf, tennis, rugby, beach, even those small ones which are deployed in their millions in children's play enclosures, all washed up along the high tide-line. I longed for a re-cycling sack to gather them up, and add a little value to our stroll. Next time, maybe.

Then this evening we went to a delightful performance of Mozart's 'Magic Flute' at the Millennium Centre this evening. The libretto was an excellent English translation, optimising the humour with the use of contemporary idiom. The setting and decor were modern too, minimal with forms and colours resembling a Magritte painting. This added something special to the whole, bringing out the bizarre and strange elements of the original plot. It's quite a while since I've heard as much laughter during an opera of this quality. It brought out the kinship with pantomime, and made a great musical classic accessible to all ages and cultures.

Service at the bar during the interval was so slow that the we received our drinks as the second bell was summoning us back to our seats. This was most annoying, especially as one is not allowed to take glasses into the auditorium. The simple solution would be to stop taking new orders after first bell. If the interval can't be extended to accommodate the thirsty crowd, it would be a common courtesy of the house to issue a suitable warning.