I woke up this morning, and got those Monday morning blues.

The roof is leaking.
Child three (of four) is being bullied at school and refused to go in this morning prompting a thousand phone calls and delayed departure (and now I discover he hasn't gone at all)
Child two has his first GCSE this morning.
One of the cats escaped: witness me chasing it down the road in pouring rain in just socks.
And my ex wife phoned to moan about our son.

But... BUT...

On Saturday I went to Cardiff, to the Millenium Centre and the Welsh National Opera. We had the most fantastic experience. The building didn't blow me away quite as I expected it to, but it is interesting and the bars are nice, as is the tapas; one of my favourite ways to eat.

Inside I feel it is just a little too like the National Theatre. Not that it has the odious concrete of the South bank, but in form and feel it is, I find, similar. Like the National, the Millenium Centre lacks intimacy. The auditorium itself can feel a little oppressive. I was glad we were in the circle and not in the stalls.

My frame of mind on Saturday was not great. Having moved on Tuesday and Wednesday, and been working 16 hour days since putting up shelves, rewiring (failure), unpacking, sorting, finding, losing, finding again, cooking, cleaning and di da di da, we were both exhausted. I (and maybe both of us) was going out of a sense of duty. My OH is a very close friend of one of the lead soloists and he'd got us tickets, and we were bringing him home with us afterwards and so on. Duty called. And it felt an onerous duty. Mazepa is a rarely performed Tchaikovsky opera and, we had been warned, was long. 'Rarely performed' strikes terror into the heart, but not as much a 'long' does when it appears in the same sentence as 'opera'.

So I went fully expecting to fall asleep somewhere during the overture and awake only if I was pinched for snoring, or because there was an interval. I'm not even a particular fan of Tchaikovsky.

But...but..., from the opening bars of the overture until the last quiet note ebbed away almost four hours later I was utterly transfixed. Mazepa is a total triumph. I didn't yawn once.

Occasionally something happens in a theatre that stays with you for ever. For me the Brian Cox and Roberts Stevens King Lears and the Brannagh Hamlet represent those kinds of moments. I know for others, my mum for example, Richard Burton's Hamlet (what would I give to have been there) was considered one of "those" moments.

Well, this is one of "those". The second act is extraordinary. It piles the pressure on and you are drawn forward to the edge of your seat, and the tension is only relieved when one of the characters begins to sing a prayer as he faces execution. I didn't realise I was crying until I felt the heat of the tear on my cheek. Luckily (he huffs and puffs because crying at an Opera as a bloke is not big or clever), in the interval that swiftly followed it was very clear I was not the only one.

At the end, which is properly tragic and very low key, the curtain came down to utter silence. And then the staid first night audience erupted. Every performer was cheered back on stage and each of the soloists given a massive cheer, each more enthusiastic than the last. And you could see the performers gripping hands and congratulating each other; they shared our joy and we shared theirs. It was a truly memorable evening.

But here's the tragedy. This production has only eight performances in this counry: two in Cardiff and six on tour. I urge you, if you have any soul, find it and try to go. You will not be disappointed.