Jonas Kaufmann has asked me over the same evening Philip Roth wants a game of dartsDecember is the cruellest month. You wait all year to be invited somewhere attractive,then December comes along and you have more invitations than there’s room for on the mantelpiece. There are three parties at opposite ends of London I particularly want to recede to this week, one carol service, and one St Matthew Passion,one Chanukah dinner and two mince pie happenings in bookshops. The exertion is, they’re all on the same night.
I dont know how this comes about, or but there is always one evening that everyone fixes on to hold their event,and it is always the same evening that Jonas Kaufmann invites you over to his region for a Mahler lieder singalong and Philip Roth happens to be in town wanting a game of darts. This happens too often to be coincidence. There must be some herding intuition that explains it, a memory trace of the day we all leapt out of the primal soup together. Or it might be beyond our volition, and an imperative of the non-human calendar: the transit of Venus,a volcano erupting in Bali, a bad night on telly. But the reason for these clashes isn’t the issue. Etiquette is. Who does one say no to?Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk