Stream

It takes me a while, sometimes, to get up to speed with the 20th - sorry, I mean 21st - century. I seem to be always lagging behind. Things like mobile phones, and microwave ovens, and satellite navigation systems, and newspapers, tend to become commonplace before I get around to trying them out. I am hardly an early adopter. Even this blog: I thought I'd leave it a few years to see how they caught on, rather than find I was churning out volumes with there being no-one out there with the technology to read them. As it is, I can now churn out volumes in the knowledge that no-one will ever spot them in among the countless millions of blogs cluttering up the blogosphere.

I never used to bother listening to music while working on the laptop. Mainly because the television would generally be on, and listening to music while watching television and writing on the computer seemed somewhat impracticable. Although my daughter appears to manage it readily, and will even combine it with simultaneously texting a friend, eating her dinner and doing her maths homework. And videoing the cat. But such is the precociousness of youth. Anyway, I discovered recently that the entire Naxos catalogue is available online via our local library service. Which is pretty impressive, given that it stretches to umpteen thousands of recordings, and delves into the remotest nooks and crannies of the repertoire that other labels tend to ignore. So I was listening to a bit of Silvius Leopold Weiss the other day, the great master of German baroque lute music. Not the sort of thing that usually makes the Top 30. (If they still have Top 30s.)

Meanwhile, I have been trying to find a local Chinese restaurant for my daughter's birthday. Which you would have thought was an easy enough task: surely you simply need to step outside your front door and there are dozens in front of you to choose from. But it is perhaps an indication of how long it's been since I last went to a Chinese restaurant that I have had enormous trouble finding one: all the old haunts seem to have disappeared (along with most of the rest of our high street stores). There are plenty of takeaways about. Perhaps she wouldn't notice if we went for a takeaway. And insisted on sitting inside to eat it.