The model of a modern major opera fan

A wandering minstrel I am not. Nor have I ever been the model of a modern major general. Although I would like to be able to claim that a more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist or admit that I have walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in my medieval hand, the fact is that I have never actually sung in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.

Let me rephrase that.

I have never actually sung in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera except in the bath.

In those enameled, warm, and wallowy shallows, deeply submerged among the loofahs and face cloths, the soap and the pumice, I have performed in virtually every G&S operetta known to man with the exception of "Ruddigore" and "Princess Ida." Singalong "Sound of Music" has nothing on my singalong "Iolanthe," let me tell you.

From, I don't know, about the age of 7 or 8, the G&S repertoire was undeniably one of my favorite things. My first double LP was "HMS Pinafore." Our gramophone, a giant affair in a large wooden chest, stood in the room adjoining our bathroom. I rarely took a bath without a record playing loudly enough to penetrate the sound of running hot water.

My G&S enthusiasm lasted a long time. I finally kicked the habit at about 19 or 20 and since then, until now, have not found it in me to admit openly, even at a G&S Anonymous Meeting, that I am a Gilbert and Sullivanolic. Although I haven't attended, or even listened to a tape or CD of any of the operettas since that time (apart from seeing a fascinating but rather, I felt, overresearched film about the duo a year or two ago), I secretly retain a small corner of fondness for that talented – and by now surely outmoded – pair's productions.

They are not forgotten. In tongue-twisty vocal-exercise preparation for my current amateur efforts on the boards, I have lately taken to singing from memory (but only in the privacy of the car) "To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock/ In a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock/ Awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock/ From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block." I even follow this with the refrain, "Big black block! Dull dark dock!" and so forth. It definitely does a good job tripping the tongue and loosening up the lips. But at the same time I can't help still admiring Gilbert's brilliant verbal inventiveness, his way with rhymes, his pompous absurdity. And Sullivan's capacity to make music that fits such impossibly tortuous torrents of alliteration is not be sniffed at. Not at all.

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