I DO not know if it is quantified or quantifiable, but those adept at such things should be able to construct a graph determining the average enthusiasm evinced by a restaurateur or waiter as he or she attempts to persuade you into their premises. Then  chart the subsequent lowering of the attention and consideration levels throughout your meal.

By the time you have finished your repast and sought to settle the bill, the attention level, which has dropped noticeably, leaps upwards again as a tip and the opportunity to fill your table with new customers prompts rejuvenated motivation.

It is ever thus but we found that tendency more apparent in Vienna. There was a certain world-weariness among the waiters as if they accepted the role-playing with resignation but were in fact eager to strip the process down to basics: we are here to serve you as quickly as efficiently as possible, and you are here to eat, pay, leave a tip and go, preferably as quickly as is seemly.

Ellie does the cooking at home, and has done so for the past 45 years, so it is understood that when we go on holiday, we eat out and eat well. The evening meal is one of the highlights of the holiday: not just a matter of refuelling to regain energy.

We ate al fresco at an expensive restaurant in the Greek quarter in Vienna, behind a hedge in front of an ancient church. The ambience was great and so was the food, but the waiters tended towards briskly-executed functionalism, which we found was generally the case in the Austrian capital and, to a degree in Prague.

After the surprisingly delightful Budapest, we may have got off on the wrong step in Vienna. Trains from Budapest were fully booked, unless we were prepared to make numerous changes, which we did not wish to entertain with our suitcases etc. We discovered that for roughly a quarter of the price, taking the same amount of time, we could catch an Orange coach to Vienna. It was smart and the journey was pleasant but there were two drawbacks. The air-con had broken down and the toilet was out of order.

We did stop for a “toilet break” but there was a man and his wife barring the way, in front of a plate. You do tend to forget that you have to pay to use the toilet in certain countries and I had, wisely I thought at the time, used every last piece of Hungarian currency (forints) on the last morning in Hungary.

Ellie found some ‘shrapnel’ in her purse and passed it over, while I walked round the service station, trying to cool down from the heat inside the coach. So we gently glowed, as Ellie would have it, all the way to Vienna - such inconvenience is hardly worth mentioning when recalling the House of Terror and comparing the journeys of those who were conveyed in cattle trucks without toilets and standing room only for three days.

Our taxi driver, who collected us from the bus station, chuckled at the thought of us travelling on a Hungarian coach and laughed again when we told him we were going back on a Czech coach, to Prague. “It is typical. You will find things have broken down on that as well. You will find Vienna clean,” he told us with just a hint of ingrained racism.

In fact the return trip at 16 euros per head, for a five-hour drive to Prague, was great. Wi fi, air con, and a selection of English-speaking films to chose from and shown on your screen in front of your seat; headphones and free coffees: it was also clean, as indeed was Vienna.

We were delivered to our nice, modern hotel, which was undoubtedly the best quality of our holiday, and subsequently we walked down the road to the city centre. Frankly we were underwhelmed that, on Saturday afternoon, the majority of shops appeared to be shut and our first trip on the tour bus, taking in the famed Schoenberg Palace, took us through a particularly dreary part of Vienna with a cutting to one side containing a railway line and something between a stream and a river, which did not see much bothered about going anywhere, as can be the case with such urban water courses.

The Palace was big and so, impressive, but not our scene. If we were in the market for buying a palace in Europe, we would dismiss Schoenberg immediately: just not our type of architecture although we enjoyed the shade of yellow. However, not a lot of people can wear that colour.

The next morning we were to revise our opinion of Vienna as we travelled on the tour routes, taking in the neighbouring countryside, the wine-growing villages,the local mountain, and the city centre, plus a good look of the Danube and the many splendid, elegant and dignified buildings.

But as a city-scape, we did not rate it and while it is a lovely city in one sense, the buildings are very much from the same period, and unlike Budapest, Vienna did not seem to have a soul: much like the waiters - it functioned but without a genuine smile.

My parents had loved Vienna, travelling to the city several times, and I read only this week it has been voted in a poll, one of the best cities to visit but we found it the least impressive of the four capitals we visited, perhaps because we expected more.