Hi, I’m Robert, and I’m a cultural omnivore. There is, I fear, no cure.

I came across this useful term recently on an American website .  Cultural Omnivores, it seems, are those who regularly participate in a wide range of cultural activities, making little distinction been ‘high’ and ‘low ‘culture. Cultural Omnivorism is associated with the baby-boomer generation, that is, those born before 1955 (so I just squeak in). And, inevitably, that generation is starting to die out, and in America at least that’s causing a major drop in audiences, as each lost CO leaves behind a particularly large hole in attendances.

I thought I should try to track just how far my own Cultural Omnivorism goes. We’d both had a very heavy week last week, so a Saturday devoted to Rest and Recuperation, with a little light shopping, some household chores and gardening, and some cooking, seemed the ideal day for such an exercise. Here then is my (far from comprehensive!) Cultural Diary for Saturday 9th April 2011.

Breakfast: we listened, via Spotify, to Vaughan Williams’ ‘London’ Symphony, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. I’m having something of a Barbirolli season on Spotify at the moment—I’ve been a fan ever since I just missed hearing him live when I was a teenager, as he died (too young for a conductor) a week before he was due to conduct the SNO in Glasgow.

Shopping: we dropped into Beauly Library and I discovered a magnificent Taschen publication on the travels and photographs of Burton Holmes, the man who invented the ‘travelogue’.  I’d never heard of this extraordinary man, who in the first half of the 20th century travelled all over the world and gave over 8,000 illustrated lectures about his travels.

Once home I pored over his amazing hand-tinted colour photographs while listening to the last act of Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ in the famous Knappertsbusch recording from Bayreuth in the 60s—I’d picked up the CDs a few days earlier in a charity shop for a fiver.

Lunch: we sampled the Dutch minimalist Louis Andriessen’s opera ‘Writing to Vermeer’, setting a libretto by film-maker Peter Greenaway. This is the kind of serendipity Spotify throws up—I’d come across this while hunting for something else entirely. We agreed it was rather haunting.

Gardening: I had to strim a lot of long grass, so with my MP3 player’s earphones under my ear defenders, I listened to podcasts of the latest of David Attenborough’s wonderful ‘Life Stories’ and a recent ‘Last Word’, Radio 4’s obituary programme.

Afternoon: I finished reading the last edition of the London Review of Books. The new edition has been gazing reprovingly at me from the kitchen table for some days now. They come fortnightly, and usually demand to be read from cover to cover. I’m afraid this time I cheated and skipped a very lengthy and demanding article on the politics of Brazil by the formidable Perry Anderson.

Dinner: I’d discovered that Spotify has a huge catalogue of comedy, so while cooking we listened to ‘An Evening (wasted) with Tom Lehrer’ which was still sharp, even shocking, and wonderfully funny after more than 50 years. Then over the meal itself we listened to some 70s jazz-funk from the great Brecker Brothers, which prepared us nicely for:

Evening: the magic of Freeview allowed us to finish our dinner without rushing and then sit down to a delayed STV screening of ‘Mamma Mia’. Now, Abba songs have been a guilty pleasure of mine, I’ve been in love with Meryl Streep since ‘The Deerhunter’, and I’ll watch anything Colin Firth does, so this was, I have to confess, a treat.

Later, as a palate-cleansing sorbet, we listened to four Nocturnes from a remarkable CD set called ‘The Real Chopin’, his complete works played on pianos from the 1840s, and bought from Amazon for a pittance.

Bedtime: before going to sleep I finished Carlo Lucarelli’s crime novel ‘Carte Blanche’, which I’d requested from the library after it had featured on BBC4’s excellent documentary on ‘Italian Noir’.

Far from suffering cultural indigestion, I slept like a log and woke with Abba songs in my head.

Now there are three points I want to make about this (far from untypical) diary, and none of them is about my cultural gluttony, or the vagaries of my taste.

The first is about the sheer excellence of what we had access to that day. The Barbirolli and Knappertsbusch recordings, though made back in the 60s, are still reckoned by most critics to be the best ever versions of those two major works. Tom Lehrer remains the absolute acme of sophisticated comedy with music. And, whatever its merits, ‘Mamma Mia’ was, until ‘Avatar’, the highest grossing movie ever in the UK. Too much quality for just one day? Should I try to have the occasional ‘culture-free’ day, as I aim to have alcohol-free days?

And then there’s the sheer accessibility, much of it inconceivable even ten years ago: from Spotify to podcasts, from pausing live TV to requesting library books online. Most of the technology used, moreover, was either cheap or long-lived. A £15 FM transmitter links the Spotify on the PC to any FM radio. My MP3 player cost less than £30. My Hifi includes an amplifier that’s over 30 years old. Our Freeview-cum-hard disk recorder is entry-level, and our TV is over 6 years old and hence pre-flatscreen.

And so, finally, what does all this mean for the future of live performance, seeing that we aging Cultural Omnivores can have access to this wealth of the present and the past so easily and cheaply in our own homes? Well, I’ve long believed that the future of live performance lies in fewer actual performances, but each one a real event in itself. In a way, that’s what you get in the Highlands and Islands. Each visit, of a major orchestra, of a dance company, even of Essential Scottish Opera, is a distinct event—no one is locked into a weekly subscription where live art can so easily become mundane and taken for granted.

What about my own situation, then? Am I addicted to culture? I’d rather think that it’s the medium I exist in, and that without it I’d be like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I guess that’s what it means to be a Cultural Omnivore, and proud of it.