Dido and The Anus

 I did O level music in the early eighties, at a comprehensive school. There were seven people in my class and only two of us played classical instruments. I can’t work out why there were so few, as the school was quite good at music. We had a thriving choir, an orchestra and put on shows like Cabaret. The peripatetic music teachers were all first class musicians (I think the elderly bassoon teacher, Vernon, was Ivor the Engine). The exam had no practical element and was theory and history based, with six pieces that we had to know inside out. We learnt that Giuseppe Verdi, or John Green’s (a we called him) 2 children and wife died tragically early, causing him to write sad music and that Bach’s prolific output was because he had twenty children to support. There was no mention that only half of those children survived to adulthood and that those children were spread between two wives. I suppose that didn’t fit the narrative. Bach didn’t write particularly gloomy pieces. 

The set pieces included printed out extracts of the score that we had to be able to replicate accurately from memory, in an exam room, where singing was banned. Musicians have always despaired about the the assessment of their subject for 16 year olds.

One of those pieces was from Purcell’s opera, which didn’t really speak to the youth of Essex in the eighties. However, when you are forced to listen to something over and over it becomes part of you and so I’ve decided that I am going to sing Dido’s lament at my funeral. 

“Oh, Sir, do we have to do Dido and the anus again?”

“Yes, Smith, we do. You are all still missing the chromatic the baseline.”

“But Sir, it’s so miserable.”

No one ever corrected Smith on his pronunciation of Aeneus, or even laughed about it. I will never know if that’s just what we thought it was called.

Purcell’s opera is based on Virgil’s classical poem about Dido, the Queen of Carthage and her tragic love of Aeneus, son of Athena. (Spoiler: she kills herself when he leaves her). Comprehensive schools didn’t really teach the Classics, so the story was lost on us.

Dido isn’t a name you hear very often. There was the pop singer and now the woman that has been given the job of head of the new National Institute for Health Protection, which is to replace Public Health England. If you thought this government wouldn’t push ahead with privatisation of the health service during a global pandemic then you were wrong. It’s simple. Rename the body, make it responsible for ni(h)p and tuck. Appoint someone with a track record for failure, named after one of the most miserable characters in music or literature. 

Does that make Matt Hancock the anus?