My troubles began while I was tidying up my CD collection, the decaying fruit of a misspent youth. I don’t mean alphabetising it, merely sorting through the piles of scratched silvery discs and putting them back into their cases. The process reminded me just how much music I don’t listen to, simply because of the archaeological dig that would be required. And so I started to think of copying all this music into some wonderful electronic box, and chucking the CDs away.

After a bit of research, I now realise that I have a dizzying range of choices – media PCs, iPod docks, dedicated music servers and wireless “bridges”. Don’t ask me to begin to enumerate the pros and cons, although it seems clear that most of them do things with music that it would have been hard for most of us to imagine 10 years ago. The human response is bewilderment. The economist’s response, of course, is “I wonder how many of these gizmos are in the inflation statistics?”