A friend of ours is in a West End play at the moment, and I wanted to read the reviews. Simply by typing the name of the play into Google News, I had all the reviews lined up neatly before me. Click! click! click! click! click! and I had surveyed the full range of critical opinion without moving from my chair.

Until quite recently, when I had played a concert and wanted to search for reviews, there was no easy way to do it. I had to go to a shop and buy all the relevant newspapers, only to find that there might be only one review amongst them. This process had to be repeated for several days on end, before I either found all the reviews or concluded that there weren’t any. It was expensive, too. In due course I learned to peek at the arts pages to see whether or not there was a review before I bought the paper. But this wasn’t always possible, depending on how the papers were displayed. So in the few days after important concerts I would trudge every day to the nearest large newsagent and bring home several pounds (and several pounds’ worth) of newspapers, only to discard most of them. It wasn’t long ago, but already it seems such a primitive method!