Last Night of the Proms - in Hyde Park

Saturday was a lovely day. In the morning I went to Borough Markets and the afternoon saw me at the Last Night of the Proms in the Park – Hyde Park to be precise.

I love the Borough Markets. I love tasting new and strange cheese, discovering new varieties of fruit and vegetables I didn’t know existed and drinking freshly ground coffee from freshly roasted beans. And then there’s the beer and sweets, and meats and breads, and jams and olive oils… and, and, and.

I was blissfully happy just wandering around tasting things. But, being a girl on a mission, I reined in my greed and bought all the essentials for a good picnic, including a roasted chicken, lovely sweet grapes and chocolate brownies for desert. Helen and Richard joined me to supervise and for some additional snack buying.

Then it was back home for me to make the salad, pull apart the chicken and wash the fruit. And then wait. And wait. And wait until Jason turned up. An hour late – but that’s pretty much par for the course with Jase and not much of a surprise. So off we went to Hyde Park.

I couldn’t get tickets to the event in the Royal Albert Hall itself for love or money – they’d all been sold out eons ago and you had to be a subscriber to be eligible to buy them anyway, but I was able to purchase four tickets to the Hyde Park part of it and so took Richard, Jason and Helen along.

It wasn’t quite what I had expected it to be. There was very little classical music for a start – it was more of a family concert, and by the end of the evening there were many, many VERY drunk people around. Even most of the presenters were a little tipsy The English sure know how to put it away! And the fireworks at the end were a total fizzle. I’ve never been to an event where there were so few before.

But these deficiencies were more than made up for, in my opinion, by the extraordinary experience of being one amongst forty thousand standing people, swaying to the music, enthusiastically waving national flags (yes, I took an Australian flag with me) and generally putting every last ounce of passion and energy into singing at the top of their lungs. Along with many other tunes, we sang Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory, Jerusalem and the National Anthem with much verve and vigour. Jason said he’d never seen such patriotism from the Brits before.

I just lapped it all up. I think I was jumping up and down in excitement at one stage and I rang my poor mother and made her listen to the crowd singing Jerusalem. I was ecstatically happy. Drunk on joy, and surprisingly, considering the general tendency, not on alcohol. I added up what I had consumed, and I couldn’t possibly have been even slightly tipsy at the end of the night, but I was most certainly flying as high as a kite!

It was awesome!

Next year, Albert Hall!!