About six months ago the reading lamp in my room in Reading conked out. I am not sure what was wrong with it, but I chucked it out without much ado and bought another halogen lamp. Like the old one, the new lamp sits on one of the low Japanese tables, the only furniture in my room, which I use for writing. One small difference between the two lamps is that the transformer is built into the base of the new one, whereas it was a part of the old one’s plug. And now comes the clincher: I noticed only today—again, some six months after I bought the lamp—that the transformer makes a faint humming noise. The funny thing is that the sound immediately transported me to the Turbine Room at Tate Modern: you can hear the humming only after you become aware of it. Once you hear it, though, you cannot but hear it all the time. It can drive you batty. Worse, every time I go to Tate Modern, I first stop to listen to the damned transformers once again. And now the humming has come to haunt me even in my own home.