From opera to arena and back again. That's my working day, imagine it's yours too, everyone of us probably. Be it at the helm of a laptop, or a trawler; piloting a blackberry, or simply picking them; jump-starting a stalled heart in the operating theatre, or re-wiring a broken down car on the side of the road, I don't think I'm far wrong when I say all our days go like this.

Think about it. The arena is the workspace, where we do what we do, the cockpit, where the conflicts happen, the dramas, the successes, the failures. Everyone casting an eye upwards looking for some sort of sanction. These days it's not so clear-cut as it once was. Voted out of the Roman arena is n't like being voted out of the Big Brother house. No, not at all, in any way, shape or form. Yet, the principle of today's arena is as constant and as enduring as it ever was: it's approval, we want it, have to have to it, covet it.

Where do we celebrate or commiserate or prepare ? Why, the opera, naturally. What better place is there to revel in glory, cock-crow, preen? The emotion of what you're going to do, that raw, heightened state of trepidation, excitement and anticipation, just as much as the drama of what you've been through in the workplace arena, where it can be anything from wound licking and high dudgeon, all the way to glory, needs a home. It certainly needs a symbol, so why not Opera. Find me a better home for melodrama.

The arena is about focus; the opera about letting it go.

So now, I don't go to work: I wrestle in the arena, have my nose rubbed in the dirt from time to time, on occasions climb out of the ring, weary, but with a notch on my belt, and then onto bare my soul at the opera