You call all that torture? I'll tell you what musical torture is - I suffered under it at a singaround on Monday evening last week.

It was a lady with a high, dismal, toneless voice singing an interminable ballad that she hadn't bothered to learn, had "written it down yesterday for the first time", from sheet after sheet of paper. It was utterly, incredibly boring and seemingly endless. When the third sheet had been turned over, I lost the will to live and fell into a coma from which I could only be awoken by liberal helpings of Dark Star Winter Ale.

Now that's torture.