The Great Grammarly Groan.

Nearly every YouTube video I pick up these days is preceded by an ad for some dippy English language tuition course called Grammarly. I don’t want Grammarly, I don’t need Grammarly, and my advice to anybody who wants to learn good English is not to pay money to the damn Grammarly people but simply to read a few good books instead. (Try something by Charlotte Bronte. It's a bit archaic, but smooth as a strawberry milkshake.)

So there I am, just clicked onto a picture of JS Bach in sunglasses so I can listen to one of the master’s rather nice pieces of music, when this awful woman’s voice leaps at me through my headset. It isn’t a nice voice. Some American accents I like; this one I don’t. In the course of a single phrase it drops down the scale from something sounding almost feminine to something resembling a frog in pain.

It’s extremely irritating.

And so I reach for the Sound Off button and press it. And then I wait for the Skip Ad button and press that. And then I have to go back to the Sound Off button and press it again to get the sound back on. Only now the rather nice piece of music has already started so I’ve missed the first few notes – and that’s important, you know?

So it’s off to the Pause button, then slide the search bar back to the start, and then press the Pause button again. Right: now I can listen to the master’s work from the beginning as it’s supposed to be listened to.

Ironically, it occurs to me that this is an example of Google getting it right for once. They’re obviously doing it to irritate the life out of me so I’ll subscribe to the premium service. Nice one, Google, but I’m not playing your sordid little game. I do understand that if I’m to have free music I have to pay for it with ads because that’s the way the money-obsessed free market world operates. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as free music. But isn’t it a bit like meeting an ice cream vendor who says:

‘Hey kid. Would ya like a free ice cream? OK, but it has to come with a spoonful of dog’s diarrhoea on the top. You can either lick it off or scrape it off, and then eat the ice cream. Your choice. Am I kind, or am I kind?’

Oh, and I forgot to mention: When the master’s nice piece of music ends it goes straight into another ad for bloody Grammarly. The ice cream vendor didn’t tell you about the spoonful of dog’s diarrhoea at the bottom of the cone, did he?