Don’t tell me to ‘unwind’!

00:00 06:37

Craig Brown has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The most irritating word of the year was ‘unwind’. ‘Unwind with one of our artisan cocktails in the curated ambience of…’ and so on. For most of us, the call to ‘unwind’ promotes the very stress it purports to alleviate. Radio 3 is currently the station most fretful about unwinding, beseeching us to ‘ease into your day with welcoming harmonies’ and ‘focus for the morning with stress-busting music’. Its new ‘24/7 stream’ is called ‘Classical Unwind’. Is this a wind-up? If you’re still feeling anxious by the evening, Classic FM offers ‘Calm Classics’ at 10 p.m.: ‘The perfect soothing soundtrack to help you wind down at the end of the day.’ Oddly enough, the contemporary composer most often picked to help us unwind is Philip Glass, whose repetitive work sounds like a migraine set to music.

For the past 11 years, two rock star neighbours in Holland Park have been finding it desperately hard to unwind. Things kicked off back in 2013, when Jimmy Page, then aged 69, first complained of plans for a 3,600 square foot ‘basement complex’ submitted to the council by his new neighbour, Robbie Williams, then 38. Their neighbourly dispute has rattled on ever since. In 2019, Williams was finally granted permission to start digging, but Page then won a counter-ruling that meant Williams’s builders could only employ hand-held tools. So it went on. In 2016, Williams accused Page of spying on him (‘It’s like a mental illness’), a claim he was later obliged to withdraw. In May 2022, Williams was refused permission to cut back an 80ft robinia tree; the following year, he withdrew an application for a two-storey fence around his property.