Opera’s fine — but my daughter looks destined for a life of grime

Classical music makes babies more intelligent, or so it is often said. I hope not, because at four months my daughter has decisively, noisily rejected it. She especially hates choral music — last week she screamed the house down at the sound of a Thomas Tallis motet.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the pitch. I suppose all those high notes could be agitating for young ears. In contrast, she enjoys the heavy, bass thuds of rap or grime (though that’ll get her mother screaming) and Humphrys’s low drone on Radio 4.

So, keen to see if I could nudge her in the right direction, on Monday morning I took her to the Royal Opera House. Not to some six-hour production of Götterdämmerung, I’m glad to say, but to Opera Dots, a new, jolly music session aimed at babies as part of the revamped ROH programme.

Things got off to a promising start as I sat with her on my lap in a circle with other parents and babies in front of a solo singer and her accompanying pianist.

“Welcome to Opera Dots,” the singer trilled to the tune of La donna è mobile. My daughter seemed engaged and content.

But then, oh dear. When we got to the meat of the show, a heavily pared down version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, she let rip. Out of the 18 babies in the room a few others cried, a few filled their nappies; mine was, I think, the only one to do both. She was certainly the only one to do both with such gusto.

Eventually, when her capacity to be heard in the back of the Upper Circle began to rival that of a star soprano, I had to leave the room, blushing and muttering my apologies.

For now, at least, we’re stuck with Stormzy.

Enjoy a slice of the postwar art market

The Price of Everything, Nathaniel Kahn’s cheeky documentary about the art market and the billionaires driving it, is in cinemas this week.

One of the film’s most endearing figures is Stefan Edlis, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor who fled to the US from Austria at 15 and made his millions in plastic manufacturing, who has an insanely impressive postwar collection. Though he’s a true art lover, his way of talking about it is wonderfully unpretentious. “Do you think this is art?” he is asked of some of the more eyebrow-raising works in his possession.

He hesitates and then smiles. “Well, it’s not food.”

Andrew Neil x Nicki Minaj? That’s a rap

“I’ve just had the most bizarre request of my life,” Andrew Neil tweeted earlier this week: “to be the rapper on Nicki Minaj’s Starship [sic] song (nope, never heard) at (and for once caps justified) THE ROYAL VARIETY PERFORMANCE??!!”

Surely the This Week presenter is the target of a prank? I have so many questions. Of all of Nicki Minaj’s raps, why Starships, which is six years old (that’s 42 in pop chart years)? Why approach Neil? Is the joke that there isn’t a connection?

Still, Neil hasn’t officially stated that he’s declined the offer. We might yet be subjected to him spitting Nicki’s bars: “Bad bitches like me is hard to come by” and “F*** who you want, and f*** who you like/ Dance all ya life there’s no end in sight”. Please, no.

Instead, Neil’s conservative leanings would make him better suited to a cover of Minaj’s guest verse on Lil Wayne’s 2012 song Mercy: “I’m a Republican, voting for Mitt Romney/ You lazy bitches is f***ing up the economy.”

King Charles I: faithful to his wife

At an event at St Pancras Church on Monday night John McDonnell quipped that many hereditary seats in the House of Lords “are based upon who Charles I or II slept with”. The shadow chancellor has used this gag before, but previously just said “Charles II” rather than dragging poor Charles I into it too.

It is true that Charles II fathered at least 20 illegitimate children and did dole out peerages to a few of them. But Charles I was, by all accounts, famously devoted to his wife and certainly had no children out of wedlock.

Let’s not tar our Charleses with the same brush.