We laughed until we cried watching the BBC Orchestra

After ten years of marriage, life together, particularly with children, can seem a little routine and mundane. My husband and I occasionally have lunch, but we end up discussing plans or change of plans. Once to my horror, I realized we were scheduling operations – him something to do with his knee, me a hernia. It was deeply depressing.

 We haven’t spent a night alone for about two years. We are a family without an extended family and have no one to leave boy 8 and girl 5 with. My husband’s parents are dead. They died in a shocking brutal way when my husband was 8. Their small aircraft crashed to the ground over a mountain range in Peru, leaving three orphans. I can still cry thinking about it now.  My mother lives abroad, my father has a new young family.

 We don’t ever seem to properly escape from the trials of family life and when we do go out we are usually mildly irritated with each other; but the other evening we laughed until we cried. We laughed as though we were single and could stay up all night, dancing. And I remembered why I loved him, and wanted him as the father of our children.

 We had been given tickets to a recording of a BBC concert. No one seemed to know what we would be listening to. The BBC had no idea and nor did the venue, but at the last moment we decided to go anyway.  We imagined it would be a classical concert. We arrived with two minutes to spare and there was no room to sit together. We were the youngest people in the audience by at least thirty five years.  I do not exaggerate.

The conductor came onto the stage and the audience roared with appreciation. He was middle aged, wearing a tail coat with sandals and his hair was longish like a public school boy circa 1975.  I could imagine him at home, somewhere like Somerset, with a glass of wine and a splif. He seemed the wrong choice for a concert like this, but maybe he had fallen on hard times. Or had smoked too much dope. A nice blond woman, a dj from Radio 2 came out in a black dress and humoured the audience by telling them they were good clappers. I had already begun to laugh and was half pleased half not, that Luke was three rows in front of me. You see I knew he would be laughing too. I knew that if he was sitting next to me, I would be laughing in that way, that hurts. And then I saw his shoulders shaking.

You would have recognised the songs. Best ever hits from well known musicals, played by the BBC orchestra and some solos and duets  by two, not particularly current,  West End musical stars. We laughed at the two singers, particularly the man who looked uncomfortable and twiddled his hands a lot. The elderly woman next to me hummed all the tunes in a warbly out of tune voice.  I laughed until the interval and then we laughed all the way home. It was better than the most bonding kind of sex, better than anything.