President’s cure

It is all the fault of John Tusa. He’d been slated to give a lecture to launch the RSC’s autumn festival of new work. This year’s focus has been on the West’s relationship with what is usually called the developing world. The talk was to have been at 11.00 a.m., and I’d booked into a hotel for the previous night. But when Tusa cancelled I did the same for the room. Time enough to drive up on the day for the first event at 2.30 p.m. But that was without reckoning on a massive blockage of the M6 due to a serious accident.

After a couple of hours, the local radio station said we’d be lucky to be moving by 6 p.m. And then, just as we were considering an in-car enactment of Breakfast with Mugabe (whose text I had prudently obtained in advance), the traffic began to move. We arrived too late for the two short plays by young American writers, which I’d particularly wanted to see.