As I turned the corner of the street a couple of nights ago I had a big surprise. The full moon was neatly suspended from the hook of a giant crane. I have heard since that this was the brightest it has been since records began and certainly, had I owned some, I might have put on sunglasses. My sublunary source, a friend of ours called Annie, is a midwife and she can testify that at the hospital where she works there was all manner of heightened nocturnal activity. One wonders what the babies will be like. Will they become the 'feral children' of whom the novelist Pat Barker recently spoke? (My wife saw her interviewed at The Institute of Psychoanalysis, its address, curiously enough, 'Byron House', which was a terrible place for all three of them to be.) Also, the moon that night figured hugely in the two short operas we went to see, Bluebeard's Castle and Schoenberg's Erwartung, in the second of which a clearly demented woman wanders through a moonlit forest and stumbles upon the corpse of her lover whom she then and at length berates for having been unfaithful to her. Who was the captive audience, then, the corpse or us? My wife fought a rare fit of the giggles. Still, Inga Nielsen sang beautifully in her red satin dress while managing not to trip over the débris scattered all over the stage. She could not see, after all, by the light of the silvery ...