‘I believed: opera, how hard can it be? Songs. Pretty girls dancing. Nice scenery. Lots of people handing over cash. Got to end up being much better than the cut-throat world of yoghurt, I thought. Today everwhere I proceed there’s…’

Death, to become precise. And plenty of it. In unpleasant variants. This isn’t actual life. This isn’t even cheesemongering. It’s opera. Where the music issues and where an opera home is being terrorised by a man in evening dress having a white face mask, lurking in the shadows, sometimes killing people, and most worryingly, sending little notes, writing maniacal laughter with five exclamation marks. Opera can do this to a guy. In such situations, life has obviously reached that desperate point where in fact the wrong move to make has to be the right thing to do…