Pharrell Williams may give the brain a cheap thrill. But for proper cerebral excitement, you’re still better off with Shakespeare

Just back from a few days’ holiday in the sun, the intended calming effects of which were vitiated more than a little a) by the fact of there being more sun back home and b) by the hotel’s piping music in all its public places – niggling tunes that snagged the ear and sank the heart. Imagine “The Girl from Ipanema” synthesised through the nostrils of a depressed camel from 8am until midnight and you have still not approached the torment of it. One particular melancholy repetition of sounds – I suspect Bedouin in origin, for no other reason than that it suggested long uneventful nights in the desert and the disappointments of another insufficiently spiced tagine – entered my brain on the first morning of my stay and remains with me a week later. The word for a tune that lodges in this way is an earworm, said to be borrowed from the German Ohrwurm, but it could just as easily be a corruption of earthworm, for that is exactly how it feels – as though an earthworm has invaded your head and is slowly and with a circular motion burrowing through your occipital lobes looking for whatever it is that earthworms eat, all the while humming to itself.