IPods for idiots

It is three years since I last wrote about my iPod. When I first bought the blighter, my then 12-year-old son warned me that it would prove a disaster and he was absolutely right.

Unable to cope with the technology required to load the thing I enlisted the help of my nephew, Tom, who agreed to transfer my favourite CDs for 50 pence a time. By the end I had some 2,000 tracks on a machine the size of a cigarette packet. I was a little frustrated because it was capable of holding 10,000 tunes, and poor Tom’s computer had given up the ghost, but how I enjoyed putting on those smart white earphones on my rail journeys to London and choosing whether to listen to the Stones, the Grateful Dead or classic soul.

Days after writing my column, however, the bloody iPod got jammed. You could still listen to it, still turn it on and off, but it was stuck in shuffle mode.