So here we are on the penultimate rehearsal day of Falstaff. The general is tomorrow, and we open the run of seven performances on Saturday.
This job typifies everything that is simultaneously wonderful and difficult about English Country House Opera. Iford’s much-praised cloister is indeed exquisitely beautiful: it’s also cold, clammy and up a hill, separate from the main house, which is where there are dressing-rooms, toilets and hot drinks.

The cloister is one of a number of picturesque follies placed at vantage-points around an extensive garden. I can only imagine that they are souvenirs of some ancestor’s Grand Tour and that had the Elgin Marbles not already found a home in London, we would perhaps have a larger performing space. However, even this idyllic venue struggles to enchant under a blanket of sheeting rain, of which we have had a lot this week.

That it has never been this bad before is scant consolation if one of us gets trench foot. It’s more Glastonbury than Glyndebourne at the moment and plans for some filming in the gardens tomorrow may end in tears

However, time spent between scenes in the moist, off-stage waiting tent is relieved with bouts of charades and snail golf. (It’s not as unkind as it sounds and involves briskly smacking the tent wall from the inside so as to catapult the snail that has climbed up the outside of the fabric into the long grass. Points are awarded for distance and straightness of trajectory)

There was a brief gap in the clouds while we rehearsed but now that we’re on a break the heavens have opened. Once again there is mud everywhere – on the floor on which we later have to lie; on costume hems; on shoes that should shine with knightly splendour.

Our Dr Caius has sprained his back. His energetic physical characterisation is now reduced to cautious pottering and there is no question of stuffing him head-first down the well.

At least not today…

The orchestra joined us yesterday and is coping valiantly with an error-strewn set of parts that have, in places, made Verdi sound more like Berio.

None of this is unusual for this kind of job. Iford is a well-regarded and well-run example of the ECHO genre and yet it is largely kept together by Blitz Spirit and a collective ambition to do good work with colleagues we like. That makes any job more worthwhile but here it’s a casting discriminator as much as the singing itself – there’s simply no room for divas. If the weather were beautiful everyone would be jolly anyway – what’s essential is that people are able to find reasons to be cheerful even in the mud.

Our production is set just after the Great War – let’s hope that the car-parking field doesn’t end up looking too much like the Somme, otherwise we might be stuck here for weeks.

PS the sun came out at 7pm. Finally.