After many years writing about my enthusiasms, I’m still fascinated by the relationship between expectation and actual enjoyment.
After many years writing about my enthusiasms, I’m still fascinated by the relationship between expectation and actual enjoyment. How often have we seen a film everyone has been raving about, and been vaguely and obscurely disappointed? Or read a book of which we expected nothing, and loved it to pieces? My most complex relationship of this sort is with the CDs I have bought but haven’t played yet. They sit in a drawer in my desk, silently berating me for not having put them on as soon as I got home. It’s not that I buy so many that I don’t have time to play them (well, I don’t think so, anyway). But just as one might delay eating the best piece of pizza until last, so I feel inclined to put off possibly indefinitely the discovery that the latest album by some chronically underperforming former favourite of mine is just as poor as the past few have been.
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