Month: January 2025

You cannot open any webpage without becoming swiftly embroiled in a barrage of questions, increasingly probing and personal. I’m all for privacy and protection of my data but I can’t help feeling that by ticking these boxes I am neither contributing to my privacy nor maintaining it.

Go onto YouTube for instance. Five years ago this was easy and the limit of the interaction was to click the box. This brought up the video one had chosen, be that Japanese Taiko drummers, Christopher Hitchens spewing bile or The Great British Bake Off back catalogue. Or it might be Gavin and Stacey, Britain’s Got Talent (which on the whole, it often didn’t) or cheesemaking in Tasmania. That sort of thing. You click on the video, it starts, it finishes. End of relationship. That was fine. I liked that. YouTube was full of little nuggets. There were even Wagner operas there if you looked for them. YouTube was like the best attic you have ever visited, full of Edwardian candelabras, raffia baskets, wooden automata and Thunderbird models.

Try the same manoeuvre now and see what you get. Two minutes of videos advertising holidays in far-off destinations, served salmon pink cocktails on the beach at sunset by glamorous bronzed nymphs in bikinis. Or you can be told that the latest device for trimming nostril hair is “sweeping the nation” or perhaps “taking the world by storm”. Evidently these nonsenses work to the same script. One presumably generated by AI. And let’s face it, not the best advertisement for AI. In any case, unless you are very lucky in life, bronzed nymphs and cocktails are a world away from the windblown beach at Skegness in February, breakers lashing the rocks and sending more sanding into already gritty eyes.

You came to watch a short video on housing – remember? Well no, but by now you have completely forgotten what it is you sought in the first place. Oh yes, I remember – retirement homes in Sussex. The website itself is uninformative. They will be happy to furnish me with information but only if you I sell out an online form with my name in full, my preferred form of address (I rather like “your Imperial Majesty” but it doesn’t fit into the box), my email address, telephone number and availability over the next week for a sales representative to call me. This gets my hackles up immediately. I know a hard sell when I see one. And in general hard selling is reserved for those paragons of the property market, the timeshare. I click the box, against my better judgement and immediately another appears, telling me that I have failed to fill out several other previously unnoticed boxes such as the names of my children, criminal records, my bank account and so on.

After an eternity of filling out what seem to me to be utterly irrelevant answers to their questions I lose interest. If the retirement homes were that good value, the vendors would make that clear rather than rely on their persuasive powers on a phone call. Those of you who know me well would not put money on the sales rep in a mano-a-mano. I eat cold callers for breakfast. All of this shenanigans is sufficient to persuade me that I’m not interested in their retirement homes. I hit the back button, with the intention of clearing previous entries into the form, only to discover that this is somehow locked into the system. Whether or not I wish to buy their property, they still have my data. And as if that isn’t insulting enough, a pop-up appears from nowhere asking me to grade my experience. I’ll get to that in a minute. What was intended to be a few seconds skimming through possible retirement homes has turned into an odyssey of lost data. Fill out the form or not fill out the form? I am caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh yes, that assessment form. We cannot interact with anything these days without being invited, cajoled or blackmailed into assessing them in some way. Was your experience (A) ordinary, (B) fabulous or (C) amongst the most sublime experiences of my life? This kind of assessments are clearly not written by scientists. There is little space for anything except fulsome praise. And even if your experience was pretty negative clicking the “bad” box embroils you in a further cascade of misery – why was it bad? What could be done to make it better? Sisyphus knew all about this.

YouTube then and now. And don’t get me started on cookies. In five years YouTube has changed from being information delivered in a sprint. Nowadays it’s Iike wading through treacle. Get rid of it. All of it.

Okay, you can leave the bronzed nymphs behind. Everything else can go.

It has been my habit, and the habits of my parents before me, to mark the beginning of the New Year by watching the broadcast from Vienna of the New Year concert, with a glass of champagne in hand. The programme, based around the waltzes, polkas and gallops of Johann Strauss and his family, never fails to throw up a few novelties and surprises. In recent years (the last couple of decades) it has featured dancers from the Viennese ballet, performing in one of the many gilded palaces in Vienna, providing a stunning visual counterpoint to the musicianship on the stage.

The conductor this year, and it changes every year, is maestro Ricardo Muti. I haven’t seen him in concert for some while and he appears to have not slept in the intervening decades, with bags under the eyes the size of steamer trunks. Yet he remains a suave presence in front of the orchestra punctuating the music with the occasional gesture or baton flick. Every conductor finds their own way of communicating that intangible essence at the heart of every piece. Strauss came from the most absurdly musical family. We forget, in the light of his hundreds of waltzes, polkas and so on, that his father, brothers and even mother wrote music and, gradually over the years their music has been accorded equal status with that of young Johann.

The end of the concert is always the same. The last two pieces, invariably unlisted in the programme, are The Blue Danube and the Radetzky March by junior and senior Johann Strauss respectively. There is always a little bit of teasing here as well, with the conductor playing only the first bar of the Blue Danube, to the traditional audience applause before turning to the audience and assuring them that he and the orchestra wish them a happy New Year. The waltz, played then without further interruption is then followed by the Radetzky March to close out the show. The march, in celebration of the Habsburg Field Marshal Johann Josef Wenzel Anton Franz Karl, Graf Radetzky von Radetz, is as brief as the general’s career was long. The conductor turns from the orchestra to the audience and encourages their clapping along with the music. Nothing more you understand – none of the absurd audience contributions that mark, or should that be mar, the last night of the Proms in the UK. This is Austria, perhaps the most straitlaced and stiff collared of all nations.

The orchestra remains overwhelmingly male (perhaps 90%) and Austrian although it makes great play upon its international nature. It’s 2025 and high time this changed. Every once in awhile I briefly entertain the idea of applying for tickets. But being allocated tickets alone occurs approximately as often as total solar eclipses. In any case this is an idle exercise – without selling a kidney or two (perhaps throw in some liver) they are out of the range of mere mortals such as myself.

Oh well…Until 2026, Ein glückliches neues Jahr to you and yours.