I’m all in favour of testing my boundaries – but Percy Grainger?

Saturday lunchtimes often find me on the road from Greenwich to Kent, listening to Jess Gillam’s This Classical Life on Radio 3. Gillam is an award-winning young saxophonist who spends her weekly show chatting to a fellow musician about their musical likes and dislikes. Last Saturday her guest was the South African cellist, Abel Selaocoe, who uttered a sharp hiss of dismay when Gillam admitted that “until recently, I wasn’t the world’s biggest Mozart fan”. In response, he quoted a friend who had “decided to listen to music I don’t like”, on the grounds that even if he didn’t care for a genre – thrash metal, say – a lot of people did, and it might be interesting to “open the boundaries that you already have”.

There followed a blast of Slayer so brutally unexpected that I almost ran over a passing pheasant, before we returned to Leonard Bernstein’s account of the Mozart symphony in G minor. A couple of bars of Slayer weren’t quite enough to demolish my thrash metal boundaries; but the idea of sticking with an uncomfortable experience, rather than instantly closing it down, seemed like an interesting experiment, with a reach that extends beyond the musical.

In a recent interview, Daniel Craig – poised to embark on his fifth and final outing as James Bond – bemoaned the current tyranny of approval.

The “like” culture, he complained, was “anti-art [and] anti-creativity”. On a personal level, the habit of swaddling ourselves in a protective cocoon that excludes all difficult ideas might feel like a comfort in discomforting times, but the ensuing narrowness of vision is soul-sapping.

Oddly enough, the most reliable antidote to feelings of dread brought on by something we dislike – whether musical cacophony or unpalatable political opinions – is not to flee the encounter, but to try to analyse its appeal. “Nothing human is alien to me,” said the Roman playwright, Terence. It is a mantra I shall try to remember the next time my boundaries are tested – whether by the coming election, or by my personal musical bête noir, the ineffable Percy Grainger.

The power of art to console, as well as challenge, will be tested between now and the end of the year, as the eight-part adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy unfolds on BBC One. All dramatisations of literary classics are contentious: doomed, inevitably, to bruise the cherished imaginings of innumerable individual readers. But adaptations of children’s classics are particularly tricky, because the alternative reality of childhood reading so often has an influence as formative as quotidian experience.

As adults we read or watch television to be entertained – “taken out of ourselves”. But for a child, the boundary between the real and the imagined is profoundly porous: children read, not to forget everyday life, but as a way of constructing and interpreting it.

If the beloved heroes and heroines of children’s literature – Lewis Carroll’s Alice, E Nesbit’s Railway Children, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and Pullman’s Lyra Bellacqua – encounter relentless jeopardy, from social embarrassment to deadly curses, the message of their adventures (and the reason we love them) is not that we should learn to avoid danger, but that we should acquire, as early as possible, stratagems for facing it: courage, humour, friendship and forgiveness.