Authors Electric

Fuelled partly by guilty displeasures... I've been enjoying, and contributing to, a facebook thread of Julie Burchill's about 'guilty displeasures' - we are all familiar with guilty pleasures, but Mark Mason, in his Spectator column , has exposed some of his GDs, things he hates which are supposed to be cool. In his case, strawberries, Ella Fitzgerald, and champagne head the list. This has got me thinking and raging about my own guilty displeasures, such as classical music. Virtually all of it does nothing for me, though I have a liking for early polyphonic choral music such as William Byrd. Classical music makes a nice soundtrack in films playing in the background while you are watching stuff happen. Classical concerts are the worst, watching people do something totally not visually interesting, with no way of alleviating the tedium. I've been assumed to like it many many times because I'm involved in 'the arts' and have caused shockwaves by sayin...