text: Spectator letters: Indian soldiers, wigs, PR and 1984 | The Spectator
  Spectator letters: Indian soldiers, wigs, PR and 1984
  Festivals of hedonism
  Sir: Toby Young posits a theory (Status anxiety, 23 August) that festivals are consumerism disguised as counterculture. I was one of the 400 people who squeezed into a tent to witness Toby's excellent speech on monogamy at the Wilderness Festival. These consciousness-raising bits of festivals are a teaspoon of brain food to offset the hedonism. The other 29,600 white middle-class attendees were busy letting their hair down among like-minded people, with no pretence of anything countercultural. Festivals are the new holiday camps; more Hi-de-Hi! than Woodstock.
  Annie Fischer's gusto
  Sir: Damian Thompson's piece on Annie Fischer (Arts, 23 August) sent me searching through my diary. I discovered that on 15 March 1974 in St Albans, I saw Harold Blech conducting the London Mozart Players in Rossini's overture to The Barber of Seville, Beethoven's first symphony, and two Mozart piano concertos 'performed by Annie Fischer, in the first of which she lost her way'. What I particularly remember is the tremendous gusto with which she played Mozart, the heart-stopping silence during her brief period of recollection and then, after a smile and an apology to the audience, her getting straight back into it with vigour as if nothing had happened.