It’s summer. It’s London. Why not taste the treats on offer? When you look at the entertainments out there you may well not want to participate. Tina Turner, The Musical; The Jersey Boys: We will Rock You. You would have to tie me down with washing line to make me watch any of these musical extravaganza. All that high decibel warbling and audience hysteria. Get me outta there already! Even Shakespearean theatre is to be eschewed these days with its ideologically driven takes on the classics. Henry V as a study in immigration. Titus Andronicus a feminist reading. You can pay hundreds of pounds for this nonsense. Here’s what I did last night. I put my feet in a bucket of hot water. Then I lay down on the settee with headphones on and listened to the first four movements of Mahler 7. Not the last movement, obviously. This relaxed me sufficiently to sit down and read German for two hours (Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March , followed by Heinrich Boell’s Katerina Blum). Both in their own ways exemplary. I have never slept so well.

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