The nightingale’s song is drowned out by building – and blackbirds

Now is the time to catch the song of the nightingale. If you’re in the perfect place (southeast England), in the perfect season (right now), and in the perfect location (sort of wild scrubland), you’re in with a chance of hearing the most famous songbird in our culture. There aren’t many left: about 5,500 breeding pairs. But we ticked all the boxes on the chalklands of Lullington Heath in East Sussex.

It would have been good to encounter the bird any time. But after the horror of a journey from London Victoria on a bank holiday – the tension of trying to buy a ticket when half the ticket desks were closed; standing room only on the train; a queue for replacement buses that snaked down two whole levels at Gatwick Airport – you’re up for anything Nature can throw at you.

What we got was spring flowers and summer weather. But I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I heard the bird we’d come for. It didn’t help that I didn’t know precisely what a nightingale sounds like, other than what I could remember from Tweet of the Day on the radio. The medieval poem about The Owl and the Nightingale says its song incites women to lechery, but that’s not usefully specific.

I did hear a skylark (which sounds nothing like Vaughan Williams). The trouble is, the other birds don’t shut up: it’s a free-for-all out there. I may have heard warblers, blackcaps and even blackbirds (which I can hear perfectly well in my mother’s garden): they all sounded mellifluous to me.

Mind you, there will be even fewer places to try to hear nightingales if Medway Council in Kent has its way. While it has alluded to creating “other land for nature conservation”, it is consulting on plans that could result in thousands of houses being built on one of the best places in the country for the birds to breed. Stop them, someone. Actually, Michael Gove is a nice civilised man who’ll have read his Keats on nightingales. Over to him.

There’s a row under way about elitism at the English National Opera. Is it discriminatory to ban audiences for musicals from bringing food and drink to their seats, when different rules apply for people attending operas?

I normally go to the ENO for opera but I went to a musical, Chess, last week, and I can tell you that, on account of all the singers having microphones and belting it out whenever possible, it was really, really loud. You could have eaten crisps during any of the big numbers without the person in the next seat hearing.

By contrast, in its recent Traviata, the heroine, sung by Claudia Boyle, was only occasionally audible in the first act.

I can’t see why people have to bring picnics into an auditorium; there are intervals for eating and drinking, you know. But if they must do it, better do it in musicals.

John Mccain, one-time Republican presidential candidate and no fan of Donald Trump, is now very ill. He has let it be known that he doesn’t want Trump at his funeral – he’d prefer the vice president, Mike Pence. Ouf!

While George Carey did in fact attend, I recall the rumours that the late Cardinal Hume said of the then Archbishop of Canterbury: “I don’t want that man at my funeral”.

It’s all the more wounding because you can’t answer back; it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead or dying. The ultimate snub is posthumous.