Across the pond

Rushing to the theatre last night, Janet had an uneasy feeling that her handbag had suddenly became lighter as we we pushed our way from Picadilly into the Haymarket. She checked and found  her purse was missing. She thought she might have dropped it after paying the minicab, but my guess was that it was one of Fagin’s children. And that these days they learn all about filching money from credit and debit cards as well as developing their light fingers as they did in the days of Charles Dickens.

The play would have to wait so we first rang Smile Customer Services, to get the irritating message ‘We are presently experiencing a large volume of enquiries.’ While she was holding on Lee rang Directory Enquiries and got a telephone number for Stolen cards emergency. I got through immediately on my mobile and got a human being on the second ring. But when I passed the phone to Janet, they could not find either of her accounts. She kept giving them more and more of her security information, shouting above the noise of the traffic and the early drunks.

It was now nearly 8 PM so I sent the children into the theatre, while we continued to insist to Smile that we were long-standing customers. Their computer finally found them after we gave them the post code of our new London flat. Nothing had gone out of the accuonts so far. So we began the same procedure for her Nat West credit card. By this time the play had started, the house was full and our seats were in the middle of the row.

So it was gin and tonics in the theatre bar and read the programme notes and think was there anything else in her purse which a thief might be able to turn to advantage. We could not do anything about the £70 in paper money. But what the hell we did not want our night out spoilt so we ordered drinks for all at the interval. £20 for five glasses of wine felt like another form of robbery.

 I was hoping to get a detailed report of the first half of he play but Kathy had checked her text messages, and according to her friend, Amanda, Camden Lock was on fire and there were twenty fire brigades fighting the blaze. Quite enough to stop the 24 bus getting through to take us home. So it was a black cab and a long detour around the smoke through Kentish Town.

Oh, the play? it was Brief Encounter, the Musical. The classic 1944 film of un-fulfilled illicit romantic love on the railway platform spiced up with some of Coward’s songs and some jazz music (which Coward also loved). The hero gazed longingly into the heroine’s eyes on the railway platform drinking railwy tea and listening to the train whistles. There was a moment when they started getting undressed that I thought we were going to see some un-1944 copulation on stage. But after a shake of her head, they slowly got dressed again all the time gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.

Very enjoyable. But I am still trying to understand the director’s programme notes, where she says what the play was really about was Coward’s own love life, which was blighted because he preferred the boys to the girls, and in those days, homosexual acts were against the law.