I am not sure why I was chosen to go to Salzburg to cover the opening of the Sound of Music museum. Before I was told that I was going, I’d not seen the film. Of course, I had a vague idea of what it entailed – Julie Andrews, Nazis, hills – since it’s one of those movies, like King Kong, Alien, or Deep Throat that is sufficiently embedded in the cultural subconscious that you feel like you’ve seen even when you haven’t (basically, I could hum a couple of the songs). But I also didn’t have a particular connection with the city. I’d been once before, for an evening, to see a Mozart concert with a Bavarian ex-girlfriend. On the way there, when I realised we were on the Autobahn, I asked her to turn off the composer’s music and play all 23 minutes of Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ instead. Incidentally, we broke up not long after that.

I did consider going on the trip without watching the film, planning Fear and Loathing in Salzburg, a Gonzo exploration of Austria’s fourth largest city, desperately trying to blag my way through press conferences and receptions, hopping from stein to stein. But I’m too much of a coward. So I watched The Sound of Music and fell as hopelessly in love with it as any other viewer who doesn’t possess a heart of stone. It’s The Great........

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