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Before I get on to TV, can I tell you about my horrible health-scare thing, oh, can I, can I? Right, well I’ve been having this horrible health-scare thing and I’ve been out of my mind with worry — to the point where I’ve been saying, ‘Oh, please, God, let it just be cancer...’ Very likely it will prove in the end to be all purely psychosomatic — I am the most dreadful hypochondriac: not that that stops it feeling any less real — and what I’ve vowed to do if I come out the other side is to stop whingeing about my life so much.

King Idomeneo Birmingham Osud Royal Albert Hall Last year Birmingham Opera Company imported La traviata from Verona, and performed it to huge and enthusiastic audiences. Result: the Arts Council, in its infinite malignant imbecility, axed its grant, along with that of many other institutions which survive on an annual budget that would keep one of the metropolitan ‘centres of excellence’ going for a week or two. Gratifyingly, the outcry was such that the BOC was ‘reprieved’, and, to demonstrate how up and running it is, has staged one of Mozart’s most impressive but lengthy and demanding operas in a disused rubber factory on the outskirts of Birmingham.

The first-ever visit of this ardent Wagnerite to his festival at Bayreuth coincides exactly with my 20th anniversary of contributing this column to The Spectator. How satisfying to combine them! Whatever reservations, the experience of seeing all seven mature music dramas within nine days in Wagner’s own theatre was pretty mindblowing. I’ll begin by setting the scene. Arriving by rail, the initial aspect of the little town is somewhat humdrum — an impression later dispelled as one grows familiar with layout and feel.

Fifty years ago, when the Irish Georgian Society was founded, the bulldozer was a familiar sight in Ireland, trundling along elegant urban terraces and drawing up at the gates of country houses. One of the bulldozer’s prominent Dublin victims half a century ago was No. 2 Kildare Place. This 1751 gem, just next to the Dail, was in excellent condition; the house was only destroyed because the state, which owned the building, had no desire to maintain it. One government minister even said of the Kildare Place demolitions, ‘I was glad to see them go. They stand for everything I hate.’ Fifty years on, and things are a lot better.

Dybbuk King’s Theatre Britt on Britt Assembly Rooms Surviving Spike Assembly Rooms Perhaps it should be the Inter-notional Festival. The posh bit of Edinburgh, the International Festival, is incurably besotted with the idea of conceptual hybrids, of cross-fertilisation between cultures. Their first offering is Dybbuk, a show about Jews, ghosts and exorcism, set in Poland and performed in Polish with an idiot-board over the stage showing a translation for English-speakers. The story is a little hard to grasp. A bride has been possessed by the spirit of her dead lover on the eve of her wedding. Meanwhile, an emigrant somewhere in America is being haunted by a Holocaust victim who is also his half-brother. Establishing these complexities takes an hour.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny Usher Hall Ysaye Quartet Queen’s Hall The Two Widows Edinburgh Festival Theatre The Edinburgh International Festival got off to a soggy start this year. The Usher Hall, where as always the opening concert took place, is heavily shrouded, while Stage Two of a renovation process which will make it even more of a ‘centre of Creativity and Inspiration’ (isn’t it time those two had a rest?) is completed, but once you find the temporary entrance the interior is reassuringly familiar, and we began with a large-scale piece for big forces, Brecht–Weill’s most ambitious collaboration, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. H.K.