People power has now been seized by a vocal minority I imagine it's that people are just too busy or, frankly, too indifferent to take part. While multitudes in Libya and Pakistan queue from early morning to exercise their hard-won voting powers, the jaded democracies of Europe have falling turnouts at elections, while those who can be bothered are on the rise: Ukip and the BNP. "Serves you right" doesn't quite cover it. Music to my ears I don't download my music: I buy it on CDs. I prefer it that way, though of course hearing it in the concert hall is best. I have not moved with the generational change, not because I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but because there are different ways of listening and I prefer music out in the open, with the atmosphere as part of the experience. It occurs to me that John Cage's legendary piece 4"33"" can't easily be recorded and anyway makes a nonsense of iPods. It is simply the sound of silence surrounding the pianist as he sits immobile at the keyboard. There must be many of us who have problems with our ears. I don't mean being tone deaf, but simply having an ear configured by nature in such a way as not to hold an ear-piece firm and steady. I own an iPod, but have to use headphones with it, which is cumbersome and unsightly. That's why I need the CD to survive and not be engulfed by ever newer ways of listening. Progress is all very well, but it can sometimes overtake things we know and love. A mind field The new biography of Jonathan Miller is called In Two Minds: the title can scarcely do justice to the multifarious ways his intelligence works and the numerous directions his life has taken - medicine, opera, television, writing, sculpture... the list goes on. I was a fellow Cambridge student in the mid-Fifties and he was already bouncing with intellectual energy and curiosity. I recall his stopping me in the street to enthuse over some new insight he had just discovered in the work of Wittgenstein, himself recently dead in the same city. I nodded encouragingly at the flow of words. And I've been nodding ever since.