I’m en route to hear Pavarotti in Pavarotti City, Hyde Park. O Paradiso. Opera buffs cross oceans to listen to him. But will the power of that single human voice send ripples across the Serpentine? And will there be a sing-along?

I brave forth, being stabbed with brollies and thinking of the 10 miles of cable the organisers said they used and the 50,000 ice-creams they anticipated selling. All this for the so-called man of the people – 100,000 of them (and most of them in anoraks) as it turns out.

The ground is strewn with bedraggled people wearing black dustbin bags and media people bearing portable phones. There are also a few City suits. Mrs Cartwright, modelling a noir trash-can liner, had arrived the night before from Shrewsbury. ‘We saw him this afternoon when he practised. He was marvellous. Mind you, we’re not going to see him now’ – she gestures to the crowds. Mr and Mrs Cheeseman, 68 and 72, sit on the damp grass. ‘We’d have come here in the snow.’

The splendid pink, red and columned stage stands beneath a grey sky – 70 feet wide and 200 tonnes of Greek (pop-gone-rococo-style) theatre. It’s 5.30 pm – and the crowds at the front are as thick as at a pop concert. Above a helicopter hovers and speakers hang suspended from cranes. There are also three 30 ft Starvision screens and an Oriental wholefood bar (among others) which seems to have attracted a fair crowd.

John Major arrives on the screen, with a brolly crumpling over him. Then Charles and Diana arrive. She appears to be wearing an umbrella. The atmosphere becomes wet and expectant.

Now it’s 7 pm. The great signor, the wow-ee vocal artist, The Voice with the massive midriff is about to appear. This is the loudest man in London, the maestro, a natural phenomenon and the best tenor in the world . . . and to herald his arrival, the heavens open.

I’m as close to the stage as I can get, about a quarter of a mile away, I fancy. And there I am, waiting in the drenching rain looking at shoulders and umbrellas, corporate and otherwise. It’s like standing under an overflowing drainpipe while people start to look as if they’ve been in a communal carwash.

There are claps and cheers – so apparently He’s arrived. ‘I’m not sure the acoustics are very good,’ says Jackie Rennie, who types for Kenneth Baker and wears a PVC mac, standing in the al fresco crush bar. Something to do with the ceiling, perhaps? ‘He’s lost his voice,’ says somebody else. And it’s true, you can hardly hear him.

Ten people sit under a home-made plastic tent, occasionally coming up for air. Now the rain has let up. ‘Down, down, down,’ howls the crowd – talking about the view-obstructing brollies. Now I push forwards, up closer to the place where they say things like ‘Shhh’ – and don’t talk while he sings. Ahhhh, Puccini.

The big voice fills the big space marvellously. Here, I hear the tenor of the century – unique, strong and honeyed – issuing through speakers at the back that don’t synchronise with those at the front.

Then Pavarotti says: ‘I ‘ave never seen a woman like that. I would like to dedicate this to Lady Diana.’ At least, that’s what it sounded like. The teenagers around me are drinking Pils and saying ‘Go on Placido’ and ‘In’t he fat?’

The park is starting to smell of damp jumpers but there’s excitement in the air. A cry goes up with O Sole Mio, the ice-cream cornetto song – one feels the raspberry ripple of enjoyment in the crowd.

It gets the biggest cheer and a few bravos. Then there’s a whirl of approval and clapping when we move into Nessun Dorma, the World Cup song – and huge applause before he finishes.

At 9.50 pm, people begin pushing under the plastic cordons. Then they start leap-frogging the metal barrier. The orchestra goes off. One assumes Pav has too. And a big boo goes around the park. ‘Not the best thing in the world, but good fun,’ says a soaked lady.

‘CHESS’ proclaims the huge banner outside the drab one-time cinema that is now the Playhouse theatre in Edinburgh. Scarcely noticeable beneath it, a small strip reads ‘Rudolph Nureyev’.

The audience file in, looking as if they were going to the local bistro, no one particularly glammed up for the occasion.

Inside, an usher gives me-and every other woman in the front stalls-a pink rose, to throw on stage at the end of the performance. An adolescent girl in jeans and T-shirt (no pearls and fur coats here) asks her companion: ‘Where’s the orchestra?’ There isn’t one. For the £30.75 ticket and £6 programme you get pre-recorded music, on a diabolical system. The performance is billed as part of the 16-stop Nureyev Farewell Tour, the road show which reaches Wembley Conference Centre on Friday. But what we are witnessing tonight is the pathos of The Long Goodbye, the tragedy of a legend who cannot let the final curtain fall.

Has it really come to this? Inexorably, the man who enthralled millions around the world is joining the ranks of those who destroy their own mystique. The Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald Club.

The first time I ever saw Nureyev, he was in the Russian Orthodox Church in Kensington. The incense burned, people chanted gloriously and he paraded in an ankle-grazing sable coat. He had that distinctive haughty tread and trademark cap pulled over his thick brows and dark eyes.

This was the international superstar incarnate; defiant, handsome, magisterial, proud, temperamental. And now here he was playing in a provincial theatre in Edinburgh. It was a bleak, undecorative and charmless affair.

In Sunderland, on the opening of the tour five days ago, 50 fans demanded their money back. His performance at Liverpool was described by critics as lacklustre. ‘Nureyev leaves them shouting for less,’ said the headlines. Here in Edinburgh, there were 700 tickets still on sale the night before. During the performance, there are rows of empty seats at the front. But where is Nureyev? Ah, yes. He comes on just before the interval. He does no solos and after a little exertion in The Lesson, the fiery Tartar sits breathless. Sweat pours off him. He is in constant pain and virtually disabled by a calcium spur on his heel. He’s 53 years old and for more than 20 years has performed a near-masochistic 250 performances a year. His body has grown weary, his stamina nigh gone.

Tonight he is no longer playing virtuoso roles, but ones which depend on dramatic presence. Imperiously, he milks the audience for applause and to be fair he still has a fading sexual charisma and compelling stage presence, but it is based on an association with the glorious past, not the now. What he is now doing is really low grade theatre. The soundtrack crackles dismally out of the PA, ugly great speakers set to the fore of a space that has no stage set and no design to relieve it. It is as alluring as a school hall on a Sunday night at midnight. The whole evening grows artistically like . . . like . . . well, like something thrown together by the promoters for the sole purpose of spinning a fast buck.

So there we sit with our pink roses. If they are meant to be thrown to the maestro, nobody does.

So why does he do it? Not for money, ambition or fame. ‘I am a dancer. I am a dancer. Maybe I am the dancer,’ he once said. There is a demon inside him. He is simply a man obsessed; one consumed by a passion; one for whom dancing is the focus of life.

He is also a man who has always fought against critics, competitors, his own muscles and even gravity. He is a warrior who has the will to fight-even when he is losing. He won’t give in to loneliness, old age or infirmity. At the end of the evening, the audience dutifully claps. But there is none of the foot-stamping or whistling that denotes serious approval. A girl in the stalls calls ‘Bravo!’ Nureyev’s eyes light up as he hears it, the single voice in the dark. A lone cheer that is of little cheer. Where is the retinue of yesteryear? The fans straining at the police cordons? The autograph hunters? Gone are the nights of 89 curtain calls. As the performance ends, those watching file out. Many leave before the applause is through.

The dancers’ hero bids farewell DANCERS lost their most formidable champion last night when Wayne Eagling gave his final performance for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Flowers cascaded from the balcony, and bouquets materialised from both sides of the stage, as he blew a departing kiss to the cheering audience and turned to snap the assembled company behind him for his family album. His talents as dancer, choreographer and fighter for dancers’ rights were generously acknowledged by Mr Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, who found him a testing adversary during the dancers’ strike in 1989.

‘He steadfastly championed the cause of dancers in debate and dispute with management,’ said Mr Isaacs.

‘He has fought hard for them and in spite of the spats and recriminations, he is widely respected for his experience, flair and powers of leadership.’

As a dancer, Mr Isaacs continued, Eagling ‘had a formidable technique, a handsome presence, and masculine vitality. He played every prince that ever was’.

For Eagling, who moves to Amsterdam in August to take up directorship of the Dutch National Ballet, his farewell was not an occasion to rake over old coals. ‘I told my mother that I would not say anything controversial,’ he joked.

He said: ‘I have a very warm place in my heart for this building and this House. I hope it remains one of the best in the world-along with the Dutch National.

‘After 25 years with the Royal Ballet-22 with the company and three in the school, which I hated-I’ve a lot of memories. I will miss everyone that’s around.’

He paid tribute to a long list of inspirational dancers-Rudolf Nureyev and Royal Ballet Director Anthony Dowell among them-and to choreographers like Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton.

* THE BBC is joining with the Royal Opera House, the Kirov Theatre, the Opera de Bastille and other organisations to show a new production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace by British producer Graham Vick at the Kirov this summer. Viewers will be able to see the production, which marks the centenary of the composer’s birth, relayed live from Leningrad on 14 July.

Sue Smith first went shooting 20 years ago, when she was seven. Her father, a gun-smith, took her on a duck shoot. At 10, she was giver her first gun, ‘a 28-bore, the next size up from a 410’. She went pigeon shooting.

Then she started deer-stalking. ‘I got my first roebuck at 12,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a picture of it.’ In the following years she shot fallow deer, then red stags. Now she shoots pheasant and rabbits, too.

Smith, who works for a gunsmith as a professional gun finisher, is a crack shot. She is also anti those who are anti-blood sports, although she finds their views acceptable if they are vegetarians.

‘Most of them are just rent-a-gang, student recruits paid Pounds 15 a day to disrupt things.’

To those genuinely concerned about creatures’ suffering, she says: ‘An animal in an abattoir suffers far more because it knows it is going to be killed. When you stalk a deer, for instance, it doesn’t even know you are there.’ Occasionally, she concedes, a bird gets wounded. ‘But it is picked up instantly.’

She never feels upset about killing. ‘What? With the things I have to do as part of my work? Gutting rabits, skinning them, gralloching (gutting) deer and butchering them?’ Her father has started up an oven-ready enterprise.

She derives immense pleasure fom her sports. ‘I love being in the open air and getting exercise.’ Duck shooting is her favourite.

‘It’s the atmosphere out there on the marshes, when there are just three of you shooting in the dark. It’s freezing, and then you come back to a lovely fire.’ As far as pheasant shooting is concerned, she says: ‘It’s a bit naughty, but I suppose it is the thrill of seeing them drop from the sky.’

And rabbits? ‘You sit in clumps of grass or little hollows to get out of the wind and it’s fun because of the element of surprise.

Rosemary Cleverdon, the 49-year-old Joint master of the West Street Hunt, also enjoys the element of surprise. ‘We only get about one in every 25 foxes; they’re terribly crafty.

A former secretary in South Africa, she has been hunting for 15 years. ‘It’s exciting to see a pack work their way through a wood on the line of the fox. When they find a fox, the adrenalin gets going and the chase is rather fun.’ She says it gives her something to look forward to when everyone else is dreading winter.

The haunt takes out approximately 15 1/2 couples of hounds – ‘you talk about hounds in ‘couples’ and always take out an odd number’ – twice weekly from November to mid-March. In season, she probably dedicates about 25 hours a week to hunting.

With the other two Masters, she has to ‘draw covers’ (put the hounds into woods to try to find the fox) and decide where the hunt should go. She also has to obtain permission from the farmers, build a jump occasionally, organize fundraising events, visit the kennels, exercise her horses Mish and Dudley, and go to ‘masses of meetings.’

As Joint Master of the hunt, she maintains charge of the ‘field’ when they ‘move off’ (tells them where to go), and talks their way out of sticky situations if, for example, the hounds chase sheep or go into a garden.

She is not paid for her work; she pays a subscription to the hunt and contributes towards drinks at the meet. She estimates that a season’s hunting in her area costs at least Pounds 1,000.

‘A good coat costs about Pounds 800 and you pay aroung Pounds 250 for handmade leather boots,’ she adds.

The hunt expects to kill ’10 brace of foxes’ in a season. It is, she feels, the fairest and cleanest way to keep the animals down.

‘It’s a way of conservation – it is a service for the farmers – and the fox has an equal chance. Unlike shooting, you cannot just wound the animal.

‘Fortunately,’ she says, ‘we haven’t had too much trouble for the antis.’

Betty McKeever, an 86-year-old great grandmother and Master of the Blean beagles, says she had a ‘helluva’ time with them last season.

One of them – ‘some darned chap called Hey Ho or something’ – apparently gave them an awful ‘pasting’. In the subsequent chase, a policeman broke his ankle and had to be ‘carried off the field of battle.’ One day she was arrested.

As a matter of policy, she says she won’t allow ‘fisticuffs’. One of her fellow beaglers, she explains, disguises himself as a tree and watches out for people who squirt the hounds with acid.

Despite a recent hip replacement and failing eyesight, this season she has followed the hounds, walking for more than one and a half miles and has had a ‘rippling’ time.

McKeever’s mastership dates from 1909, when her father gave her some beagles. She has been in the parish almost all her life – she now lives in a part-13th century farmhouse with a pet bat.

As Master, she is responsible or the hounds’ upkeep. ‘I feed ’em on bibles (bullocks’ stomachs).’ They hunt from September – ‘as soon as we can get on the corn land’ – until March.

mcKeever has a huntsman and two or three amateur whips on a Saturday. On thursdays, a doctor, who is ‘supposed to be the best nuclear physicist in the world or something’, hunts the pack.

It is, says McKeever, an elderly or really young person’s sport. Three gentlemen in their seventies always go out with her.

She explains her enjoyment: ‘For a kick-off, you are in different country every time: Lovely woods, huge arable lands or marsh country.’ Beagling is very social, too, she says. On Boxing Day they meet at the Brewery, ‘all free drinks’.

If beagling is made illegal, she says firmly that she will move with her pack to Ireland. She doesn’t like killing anything unnecessarily but, she says, the hares damage fruit trees and are otherwise hunted by the fox, shot or snared.

‘I never feel guilty about killing them. I don’t think they think the way Beatrix Potter made out.’

If you have not heard of Una-Mary Parker yet, you soon will have. She is currently embroiled in scandals that involve sex, drugs, fraud and embezzlement, and last week she masterminded a hijack and broke down in tears after a friend took an overdose and died. ‘I have experienced some of these things,’ explains the charity queen-turned-novelist, ‘but 90 per cent come from my imagination. ‘ They occur, in fact, in her still unfinished second novel, Scandals (her first, Riches, is due out this summer).

Una-Mary Parker, 55, is named after her aunts Una and Mary. ‘My mother thought she was being clever – but neither of them left me a bean,’ she says in her baritone voice, laughing throatily.

Until this year, Parker was the ‘unrivalled’ organizer of charity balls. She spurns the tabloid label of society queen – ‘that conjures up visions of ladies in pearls, flowered hats and print frocks’ – preferring to be called an events organizer; ‘much more professional,’ she explains. She had been Tatler’s social diarist, attending as many as five fucntions a night and acquiring a contracts book that one imagines needed to be carried on wheels. ‘After 10 years on Tatler, I thought I would have a breakdown if I had to go to another cocktail party. ‘ But film premieres, dances, fashion shows and gala exhibitions for charity were another ball game.

Parker decided to ‘major on decor’ (ballrooms transformed into jungles and deserts), and to become a stickler for detailed organization. By the time Parker hung up her ballgown, she was arranging 19 major events a year, ‘practically each one attended by a member of the Royal Family’.

Such a blue-blooded coterie was familiar to Parker. She was a debutante who did the deb scene’, and had a coming out ball. ‘I came out in 1949 in court – at a drawing-room tea party in Buckingham Palace with the then King and Queen Elizabeth. ‘ Then she married her late husband, society photographer Archie Parker – and had ‘the traditional 1,200-guest wedding reception’.

Archie Parker left Lloyds to become a protrait photographer at a time when, Parker says, it wasn’t the done thing to leave the City to become a snapper. ‘We did all the royals at Windsor and some came to our Knightsbridge studio. ‘ they also photographed showbusiness personalities and celebrities (‘we spent a weekend with Somerset Maugham’).

Parker has no regrets about leaving her charity career. ‘I had gone as far as I could in 15 years, and writing had become an obsession for me. ‘ She ‘felt a bit shy and inhibited’ – understandably since she dubs her first novel, Riches, as being the Dynasty between the sheets. Nevertheless, she sent the half-written Riches – about the different ways enormous wealth affects people – to a New York agent. ‘She said it was terrific. ‘ Parker will not reveal how much money she’ll make, saying only that ‘there are a comfortable number of noughts involved’. Small wonder that she now intends to write a novel every 15 months.