The bass guitarist in A Girl and the Unicorn was Daryl Runswick who was asked to write the next one. This was entirely secular and told 9 stories from various parts of the world.

Dreamtime was our only ethnic opera. In 1980 we had once again run out of composers and decided to do a small scale Nativity piece by Herbert Chapell, already published, called Mak the Sheep Stealer together with Britten's Ceremony of Carols which Royd Barker conducted. In the latter piece, some of the older children had an opportunity to concentrate on some fairly complex singing without the distraction of production moves.

For the next opera the setting moved to Czechoslovakia. Timothy Kraemer wrote a blood curdling story, Good King Wenceslas, but with effective music.

George Fenton who is nationally famous for the 9 O’Clock news jingle collaborated with Timothy (the librettist this time) in composing Birthday, a story about gang warfare in Bethlehem in the year 0 with the nativity quietly going on in the background. It was this year also that I became involved in the formation of the cousin of the W11 Children's Opera, The Dublin Children's Opera. The week after the Birthday performances I went to Dublin to conduct the new group in Good King Wencelas which was an extraordinary déjà vu experience.