Olive Ate the Cavalry at Knotty End

(this article will probably not be appearing in the April issue of the parish magazine)

When the Boss worked as a senior medical receptionist the word ‘fraught’ cropped up frequently in the sort of anecdotes you tell at dinner parties, because she was once asked how to spell it by a novice at the job.

”F,R,A,U,G,H,T”, the Boss explained, helpfully.  There was a frown and much biting of pencil.  “It don’t look right”, said the novice, after a few minutes’ judicious thought.  “I mean fraught, as in ‘sore fraught’, like what this lady on the phone are got.”

And fraught is what Bring-and-Sing events are. When you invite all and sundry there is always the possibility of alligators, and tonight’s do (Sat 6 March) was no exception.  It started off innocuously enough, with a rehearsal belt-through of Mr Maunder’s timeless Victorian masterpiece of  church schmaltz, Olivet to Calvary, but at a very early stage rioting nearly broke out.  A visiting lady of imposing presence, who was obviously far more knowledgeable about music and singing than any of the rest of us, complained to the soprano in front of her that she was too tall to see over, and when said soprano obliging moved behind her the complaints continued – now she was singing too loudly.  The only possible riposte in such circumstances is of course to draw up the shoulders haughtily, peer through the lorgnette, and say, in the frostiest voice one can manage:  “Madam.  It is not I that am singing too loudly, but you that are singing not loudly enough”, but who thinks of withering ripostes in the face of such breathtaking rudeness unless they be Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw? (or even Mae West or Dorothy Parker?)

But not content with reducing the voice of one of the few really competent sopranos in the assembled multitude to a sod-you-then whisper, this lady then turned her imperious attention to another soprano in front of her, who she considered was paying insufficient attention to what the conductor was saying, and prodded her in the back with the sharp corner of her music score, a lèse-majesté unthinkable in civilised circles such as pertain at our church, where we don’t even poke curates in the small of the back with sharp instruments, let alone Canons, even when said Canons are in mufti and only there because they love the joy of singing in good company. This grande-dame of inappropriate behaviour didn’t know how lucky she was to emerge with her hair-do intact, considering that Sop 1 in this anecdote could easily wrestle a carthorse to the ground while simultaneously doing the washing-up, the ironing and helping her daughter with her homework, not even drawing breath the whiles, and Sop 2, after 35 years as a missionary in Africa, is regarded as definitely off-limits and off-menu by even the hungriest of lions and crocodiles in that far-off land, for they have seen what she can be like when she gets even the teeniest bit annoyed (a 40-minute sermon at the very least on faith, hope, charity, and not going round eating people up willy-nilly.)

The little-known Adams’s Law of Ego ( E ∝ 1/C ) states that ego is always in inverse proportion to competence, the living proof of which is that the world is stuffed to suffocation with bureaucrats and committees.  Them as do, do.  Them as don’t do form committees to tell them as do do how to do, even though they haven’t the faintest clue themselves about how to do what the people who do do do, and you try saying that three times quickly without losing the companionship of your teeth.

Incidentally (and to bring this month’s sprawling column to a close) - did you know that Herod the Great had at least ten wives (though not necessarily all at the same time), and that the first of them was called Doris?  I didn’t.  Isn’t it interesting?  


Oh all right then.  Be like that.