Mobiles phones and concerts

Sir, – Writing about the contentious matter of dynamic concert ticket prices, Brian Cullen (Letters, September 5th) suggests that “the real puzzle” is the behaviour of concert-goers who record parts of their experience on mobile phones. While this argument is often made, that is the suggestion that one cannot fully experience a moment if recording it, I cannot see the logic implied. I’d suggest the opposite, save some of the experience for the future, although you don’t need to record an enormous amount. Ditto the antics of your children while young, the voices of your ageing relatives, the party pieces of friends and family at celebrations of whatever sort.

The experience of living is too fleeting and ephemeral. One of the miracles of mobile phones is that they enable us to freeze it and savour it again later.

I’m not particularly a fan of Oasis, and I’ve never been to the hills above the river Wye to which Wordsworth’s return prompted him to write the long poem usually called Tintern Abbey. But we should all have, as he did, memories which we fall back on to give consolation in hard times, through which “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened” so that “by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy we see into the life of things”.

If you can have such a sustaining resource in return for taking a gadget from your pocket and pushing a button on it, I’d say roll with it. – Yours, etc,