I
wince at the recollection. We were in the opera house at the Buxton International Festival watching an ingenious mash-up of the songs of Ivor Novello. Michael Williams’s composition and drama was engaging but my problem with Novello is that, madly popular in my grandparents’ time, the songs have for me a whiff of lavender that takes me back to Beckenham, Kent, and the smell of bedlinen from Grandma’s blanket box. There was a moment, though, when (for me) the whole thing came alive. The tenor George Arvidson (playing Vera’s secretly gay brother, Edward) sang Novello’s My Dearest Dear, and sang it with such passion, even ferocity, that for a moment my surroundings faded into background. I burst, alone, into wild applause.
But there
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