A day in the life of... Dame Felicity Lott - BVA patron
BVA patron
How to choose a day when one has never had any kind of routine so no two days are the same? I tend to wake up very early, especially in spring- 4.30 or so, when the birds are really tuning up outside the window, and even in the season of mellow fruitfulness I can be wide awake at 5.30. Our neighbour has milk delivered by a local firm at about that time, and in the silence of the countryside, tyres on the gravel and the car engine running sound quite loud. On beautiful mornings in summer, I might go down to the sea and swim early in the morning: we live on the south coast, about a mile inland and if it isn’t too cold and windy it’s blissful to swim and have the whole beach to oneself. I went a few times this summer and one morning there were shoals of fish jumping all around me, sparkling silver in the sunshine. I wished I’d taken a net!
Breakfast these days consists of fruit, coffee, and a pile of pills. When I’m in Paris, which is not quite often enough, I go to the local market early and bring back peaches: in summer they sometimes have strange flat ones which look as though they’ve been sat on but which taste wonderful, and Muscat grapes. Maybe the occasional croissant too... My last long stay in Paris was when we did ‘La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein’ at the Châtelet theatre with the brilliant French director Laurent Pelly, and it was a very physical production, in which I spent the whole performance climbing stairs and rushing about madly. I had to sing a bit too. I was so fit by the end of the run that I could eat croissants and pains aux raisins and not worry about fitting into my costume, but now that I seem to be doing more recitals than operas, I have to be rather more careful. Thanks to Laurent and his energetic productions, I’ve been fitter for the last seven years or so than ever before: I shall have to take up cycling if this recital business goes on! I couldn’t go to a gym: I did enrol once but find it really tedious running on the spot: there are glorious walks close to where I live and I must take advantage of them more often.
I’m always trying to learn new repertoire so I will sit at the piano- if there’s no-one in the house- and try to accompany myself a bit, wishing that I’d done more piano practise as a child. I was always very impatient and could sight read a little, but the more I worked at my piano pieces, the worse they became so it was rather dispiriting. Singing was altogether an easier option and I loved that- I still do. It’s rather sad that I grew up in a house where everyone sang all the time, for fun, and now my house is rather silent because you can have too much of a good thing! I love it when people come and play my piano and we all sing the old, popular songs, like we used to do when I lived at home with my parents, and dad would sit down and pick out any tune on the piano: he wrote a few for my mother to sing. Sometimes, if I am trying to learn songs for a new programme, as I am now, a friendly pianist will come over and play the music for me. I bought a beautiful Steinway grand a few years ago, but not being a real pianist I find it a little intimidating. I keep saying that when I grow up I will start having piano lessons again and raise the roof with my Beethoven sonatas. I wonder about taking up the violin again too, but I have too much consideration for my neighbours.
I put in my Who’s Who entry that one of my hobbies was gardening….I’m afraid my gardening mainly consists of my saying to Gabriel (my husband, Gabriel Woolf) that such and such a plant is looking a bit sick and why are the leaves dropping off that and can I pull up all these dead things but I usually mustn’t because we are saving the seed-heads. This has been a great summer for home-grown produce, for which I regret I can take no credit. We had the last of many delicious artichokes this week, and sweet-corn, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, beans, carrots, and when we checked on the trellis which gets a bit wobbly in the high winds, we discovered that it wasn’t the wind but the weight of grapes on the vine which was bringing the trellis down, so we are having the best grapes ever in the wettest summer on record. We have a small pond in which various kinds of fish make a lot of whoopee and soon they will have no room to swim: we tried to catch some to give them to a neighbour but they resolutely refused to be caught so I presume that overcrowding is only a problem in our eyes. One of my regular daily tasks when I’m here is to feed the fish. In the early days of the pond, we were losing fish and thought a heron was the culprit but after putting up anti-heron wires and posts the fish were still disappearing. Then we found a two-foot snake in the garden so now the fish live happily protected by a metal fence, made as a kind of sculpture by a local artist.
If I’m in London or Paris, I like to go out and see plays or operas but once I get home to the country it takes quite an effort to go anywhere or see anything and home is a very beautiful and relaxing place in which to recharge the batteries. The only downside is that I suffer from hay fever and various allergies and live here surrounded by cornfields and haymaking. A glass of champagne in the evening sorts out most things.