Glyndebourne is more than a night at the opera; it is music for the rest of your life.

Forget fancy. Forget toffs. Forget silk bow-ties and Jimmy Choos; you’ll want to wear those anyway, probably in the same outfit, but if you prefer Goth leather or something you sewed for yourself the night before, you won’t be made to feel out of place.

One of my favourite stories is of the cheery chappie, all in tails, who decided to cool his wine in the lake. During the Interval he went to the lake to retrieve it, and fell in.

Crestfallen and bedraggled, he was about to make his exit, when a member of staff spotted him, took him to Wardrobe, fitted him out in brand-new kit, sent him in for the second half, and laundered his lake-sodden outfit, ready for him to take back on the bus at ten o’clock. The bus! The bus is a Glyndebourne institution.

If you catch the train to Lewes, a bus will speed you to the opera house, and speed you back to the station for the last train to London. It is wonderfully old-fashioned in the right way. It feels like being inside Virginia Woolf’s diary – she and Leonard were always catching or meeting the London train. ‘To Charleston yesterday in the rain. I take the train to Lewes; shop; 4:35 bus, reach Charleston for tea.’ (August 17 1937)

Whether or not you choose to visit nearby Charleston, home to Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell, and her lover, the painter Duncan Grant, buses and trains are somehow essential to the Glyndebourne experience.

You can pile down there in your car and enjoy free parking on-site, but then you would miss the wonderfully surreal event of ladies in full evening dress, and men in penguin suits, sedately travelling standard class, on the afternoon train to Lewes.

These visions from another life carry picnic baskets and handsome travel rugs, and from time to time they take modest sips from hip flasks hung at gun level under their DJ’s.

It is true that we are dangerously close to the Glyn...