The threads that bind us

In August, I brought Suzie to see Baltiboys House in County Wicklow where Ninette de Valois was born (I grew up just a few miles away). Last night, during the interval at Sadler's Wells that preceded Checkmate, I mentioned this to Howard Friend (a music publisher and Stephanie's husband).

Was there a blue plaque, he asked? No, I told him. It must be, he assumed, that she was not thought important because she was Anglo-Irish. No, I replied: we were incredibly proud of Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Beckett - they were all Anglo-Irish. The truer answer was that ours was a literary culture in which the word was valued utterly and the lyric arts less so (A CD of which I'm rather fond, Silver Apples of the Moon gives a taste of Irish art music of the first half of the twentieth century, and I thought of it listening to Malcolm Arnold's Solitaire). It's only in the last few years that we've produced a composer who's internationally-known: Gerald Barry, whose opera The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant was recently performed by ENO.

Now, as it happens, Gerald Barry and shared a study desk at school: and we kept in touch until I got married (strange what marriage does to friendships). But these dinners could be incredibly testing evenings at which we spoke past each other. Gerald ended one of them, saying, "Well - I don't think tonight was a great success -do you?"

When Madam died, her passing was - at first - disgracefully under-reported by The Irish Times. Eventually, Kevin Myers, wrote this elegant reflection on de Valois, her family and the threads that bind people - and peoples - to each other.