At any rate the Dome is packed for the first time in England, and this makes Thomas decide that today is the day to improvise his mime about the relationship of a non-musician to musical instruments, in which (he reveals later) the cello becomes a buxom wench, the double bass an interfering mother, the viola a cute toddler, the violin a passive baby between a bored couple, and the piano a car. He decides to insert the mime between the Bach solo flute Partita and Schubert's Trout Quintet, but it quickly becomes evident that this is the wrong programme for it, partly because of the length of the programme in relation to people's lunch hours, and partly because of the personality of this audience. After Michael has given a splendid performance of the Bach... the Trout is about 40 minutes long, and it really is the Trout that people have come to hear, as is clear from their blissful faces during the performance. Towards the end there is a sudden rainstorm which sounds quite deafening on the cover, and it almost obscures the forte passages on the last page. People comment afterwards on how nice it was to listen to music in the rain, and in particular a sort of watery piece like the Trout. The applause is fairly deafening too, but I'm surprised to find that in many ways I prefer our smaller audiences, the quality of whose attention seems finer, at least judging from the sort of things they say afterwards. << less