Kindling

When I was a kid, I used to watch 'Tomorrow's World'. This programme showcased inventions that would someday change the world, or at least your front room. For instance, Michael Rodd was the first, and only, man to spread jam on a CD to demonstrate that it did not impair performance. Everyone who subsequently bought CDs and discovered that a speck of dust could cause the CD to skip like a kid with ADD and a haribo habit concluded that maybe Michael would have been better off showcasing the weapons-grade laser that must have been used to read the preserve-smeared disc, as anything that could do that could probably shoot down an ICBM, a much better use for a laser than being used to bring forth the musical stylings of Dire Straits.

They also showed an electronic book. About the size of an etch-a-sketch, each book was on a micro-chip, which you slotted into place. The text displayed in red LED of the sort then popular with digital watches. This, we were told, was the future of reading. I agreed, I had read 'The Hitch Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy' and knew that electronic books were the way forward. It never went into production, possibly because of costs, probably because it was a bit of a shit idea.

Now, of course, it appears that just about everyone has an electronic book. Kindling used to be something you chopped or collected or, if a tourist on a cottage holiday, paid too much a bagful for, now it's a description of a popular pastime.

After years of waiting for an electronic book, the kindle is an enormous let-down. Its so...grey. The screen is grey, the plastic case is grey, the text is black (there's variety for you). This is not the sort of thing that Ford Prefect would tote around. There is nothing science fiction about the kindle, it's as exciting as an iron. And you know the big selling point for the kindle? You can read the screen in direct sunlight. Whoop de fucking do because, you know, you can't do that with a book, can you? The point of an electronic something is that it should be better than the non-electronic version. The computer is better than the abacus because you can't play 'angry birds' on an abacus.

An electric book needs to have two features to make it exciting. First, it should narrate books, in the voice of Claudia Winkleman. Second, you should be able to download books from the future.

Only these would overcome the tremendous drag factor of the many things that the kindle cannot do. It's shit at providing future fodder for second hand book shops, and if you are the sort of person who derives please from a well stocked bookshelf, a slab of plastic the colour of a dead sheep lying there does not have the same effect.

Worst of all is the lack of being able to annotate. I bloody hated French at school, each lesson an exercise in misery, until I opened what looked like an unremarkable exercise book, a battered hardback text book that had been through the hands of countless boys before me. This one though, was different. Some hero had, with a black biro and a tremendous surge of filthy imagination, annotated every illustration accompanying the stories of Jean, Xavier and Marie with illustrations and speech bubbles (in English) that turned even a simple trip to the bouloungerer into a pornographic festival of filth. When I turned the page to 'a visit to the stables' I had to work so hard at suppressing my laughter that I nearly ruptured something - nothing I've since seen on the internet has even come close.

Years later I was to encounter the artfully defaced book once again, this time flipping through the pages of Dickens to find that all of the illustrations had been re-captioned, with shocking and surprising results. If you want the formula for hilarity - it's using the word 'cockflicker' in the context of describing a picture of an earnest looking bloke in a top hat.

Try doing that on a kindle.

Postcard from Winchester - the Itchen

Winchester's river is The Itchen (it's too much to hope for that wherever Winchester is twinned with has a waterway called The Scratchen). Apparently in Roman times, the river was a bit of a bother, with being wet an all. The Romans got in their engineers and moved the river a few hundred yards to the left. The result is that today, the Itchen is possibly the most well behaved and mannered river I have ever seen, perfectly in keeping with the atmosphere of the town itself.

The river is about fifteen foot wide and a foot deep, and runs along what is now, thanks to building on both sides of the town, the backs of houses and a rather attractive footpath. It has all the advantages of a river; calming influence of water, ideal location for a riverside pub, ducks and so on, without the disadvantages that they can sometimes bring - raging angry torrents of water, graveyard for shopping trollies, bloated corpse lucky dip, that kind of thing. Apparently the river used to be twice as wide - oooohhhhhh, terrifying.

'Sire, hostile forces are massing on the other side of the river!'
'Worry not, they will never get across its expanse.'
'But sire...they have wellington boots!'
'Arse!'.

And so on.

The town still has a working water mill. Naturally this is now run by the National Trust and so one could buy bags of flour milled at the mill (I trust them, and did not look too closely at the empty bags from catering packs of Tesco value strong white flour in the bins round the back) as well as all the other necessities that populate a National Trust gift shop, such as jams, plush otters and a lady volunteer behind the till flustered by more than one customer at a time.


Because the temperature was so cold it hurt to take a deep breath, there was an interesting effect in the churning waters at the foot of the mill race, the spray had frozen to the lowest parts of the vegetation growing on the riverbank, giving the waterside a festive, decorative appearance, for all the world like those LED icicles that people hang from their guttering at Christmas, except not so chavvy.


The river wanders round the backs of houses and gardens, the gardens backing onto the river. One, rather magnificently, backs onto an area where the river diverts around...well it probably qualifies as an island, just, as 'stump in the water' sounds mean and it did have a population of three ducks. It also had space for somebody to nail up a (small) sign that read 'private'. What might seem like a mean and petty gesture was, in this instance, transformed into a magnificent one - imagine being able to say in all honesty that you had your own private island. Surely that is a privilege reserved for people like Richard Branson or Bond villains. Maybe Winchester is where Bond villains retire to, and the owner of the private island is constructing a death ray in his shed, an occupation he describes as 'pottering'.

Postcard from Winchester - the Great Hall and the round table

One of the most common occupations for the guides at Winchester Cathedral is redirecting tourists who wander the place in search of the Round Table. Apparently they take quite some convincing that the round table is not, in fact, in the cathedral, but is in the nearby Great Hall and no, you can't have your entrance fee back.

The Great Hall is a pretty spectacular space, it has four main attractions, the table itself, high on the wall at one end, huge and imposing, like a vast medieval dart board, the stained glass windows, the wall decorated with a family tree so vast it's like a family forest, and the gates.

The space itself is astonishing, huge thick walls and lofty beams. This is the sort of place that can be easily populated by the imagination with feast tables crammed with people eating medieval food, which I think was basically things killed in the forest that could have an apple shoved in their mouths or up their arse for a garnish, or equally filled with soldiers and nervous horses about to ride into battle. Or tourists. Actually you didn't have to imagine that last one. There weren't actually that many tourists there but the ones that did come and go were at least polite enough to shut the door, not that it mattered as the Hall was unheated but it was a nice thought.


The table itself is an astonishing piece of work, and the connection with the Arthurian legend is a powerful pull. It's seven hundred years old which means, even if Arthur himself didn't sit there sipping mead from the grail or whatever, it's a pretty potent artefact. And it's round! How cool is that! That means everyone is equal and so sits at the head, or that there's no head. It also means that the folk sitting at the table had to find other means of establishing their seniority, such as getting a tall chair, or a swivel chair, or butchering their neighbour with a broadsword following a trifling argument over pudding. It is not known if the round table etiquette also did away with he traditional knight maiden knight maiden dinner party seating arrangement, and if a kiddy table version was ever used, it is no longer in existence.


At the other end of the Great Hall is a very imposing piece that must have seemed like a really, really good idea at the time. Two gates, made of stainless steel, at least thirty feet high and breathtaking in their design, looking like a something from Lord of the Rings, crossed with art deco, they remind one of the sort of doors that Flash Gordon used to punch Ming the Merciless through. Cut into the top is a C circling a D. Yup, these gates were installed to celebrate the marriage of Charles and Diana. Oops. Guess that makes them as historic an artefact now as the round table.

Postcard from Winchester - the cathedral

Winchester cathedral, possibly the finest example of a Norman cathedral ever to have a pop song written about it. It's home to quite a lot of distinguished remains. There's the tomb of Jane Austin, with an inscription so genteel that it completely omits to mention that she was a writer. This was because writing books about bonnets and so on was considered an unsuitable job for a woman at the time rather than her other accomplishments being so astonishing that the writing was very much an afterthought. The tomb is visited by three types of people, there are those who come to pay homage to the great writer, there are the Japanese, who appear to have a particular affection for her (just why is not clear, possibly it's the Japanese fascination with manners, or bonnets, or just that somebody some day started the rumour that Japanese people are fascinated with Jane Austin and so you notice them more than most. Everyone in Winchester is too polite to ask.), and there are people who are baffled that somebody who wrote a screenplay for a BBC three parter earlier in the year died without their hearing about it.

The other famous resident is St Swithen. If you want to prey for good weather, this is the tomb for you.

There is another, very famous resident - an Anthony Gormley statue donated by the artist that stands in the crypt. The figure stands holding a bowl and when the crypt floods every year, the water laps at the statue's knees. It's quite an eerie presence, standing alone in an empty (one hopes) crypt. Just what is he considering? Some say he contemplates his soul, others that he is pondering why anyone would build a cathedral on a spring that gushes to life every year when it rains in the hills.

One does the cathedral tourist thing, wandering around with head craned back, trying to take in the details and knowing that there are a thousand masons' marks and features hidden in the gloom or behind a pillar, knowable only to god. Ones wanders round muttering 'how did they do this?', the answer of course lying in either block and tackle, or alien assistance. Prayer may have come into it but a shitload of stone imported from France and a sustaining turnip soup for the workers is probably a better bet.


A special place among the kings and queens and saints and bishops and one lonely crusader is reserved for a statue of William Walker. Essentially, the cathedral was built on a marsh, and a spring. Obviously while the monks excelled at piety they were not the greatest surveyors in the world. So they put down a raft of trees and built the cathedral on those. A few centuries later and the building develops a list. One side of it needs to be underpinned, so they dig down and, the hole floods. How to work underwater? This is the turn of the century, and while the snorkel has been invented, sexy wet suits have not. So, a bloke called William Walker gets on his diving suit and, often working in complete darkness, replaces the rotting foundation with concrete blocks. He literally saved the entire cathedral with his bare hands, which is what the inscription on his memorial says. Not a bad epitaph. Also...straight to heaven!

While the the choir was practicing for the evenings performance. What's the only thing better than beautiful choral music in a cathedral? Free beautiful choral music in a cathedral!

The cathedral itself is one of those huge Norman 'we are here to stay' jobs that dominate the landscape and at the time would have given rise to lots of middle class angst as people sat around discussing how the thing was really not sympathetic with the surrounding landscape or the architecture that it was being built next to, except that when the Normans were building cathedrals there was no middle class, no such thing as angst, people were too busy subsistence farming turnips and dying at age thirty (like some sort of medieval 'Logan's Run') to mutter darkly about planning permission, and any architecture that the Normans didn't like near there cathedral quickly became either kindling or hardcore, depending on its construction.


Finally, one of the best features is the stained glass window. During the Civil War the Roundheads, to show their piety, broke all the windows and decorations in the cathedral. Oddly, this did not result in direct devine retribution, which was put off until the restoration, instead the monks gathered the bits of stained glass and hid them. Then when the restoration came they, er, restored the stained glass window. Except they didn't bother to re-assemble it as it was. Obviously not big jigsaw fans, the result was a marvellous, modernist Picasso style window, centuries ahead of the modernist movement.

Postcard from Winchester - the town (and the gowns)

Zoom! What's that? Zoom! There goes another! Looking out of the window of the pub as I wonder if my headache might be eased with the ingestion of a cheeky breakfast pint, I am occasionally distracted by a flitting figure charging past. The third such blur in motion gives a better chance of examination and the sprinting forms reveal themselves to be schoolboys, rushing either from or, given their haste, to, a lesson. Not to be outdone, the last of them is followed some minutes later by a loping master, his gown billowing out behind him in his wake.

Schoolboys and masters abound in Winchester, home of course of the famous school. I marvelled from my breakfast table that the boys seemed to have lessons on Saturdays and Sundays as well as no doubt in the week. Still, at around six grand a term, I'd bloody we'll expect a seven day a week timetable as well. The academics lend Winchester a certain chalky charm. The boys are typical public school types, tall, with good teeth and hair just short of the maximum permitted by the school rules. They seem to exist in a constant state of rush, with either a folder or some sort of sporting item under their arm. The masters, the loping one excepted, make much more stately progress along the street. Shaped by rather too many rather good dinners, with their gowns on they look like Batman after he has really, really let himself go.

There were schoolboys too in the shop across the road from the pub. An odd place. It was the sort of shop that you would expect to see in a small village where the posh second home owners arrive with their own shopping and only need to shop for either wine or recreation, and where the locals only do a top up shop occasionally, getting most of their stuff in the nearby big town. Thus it has one of everything when it comes to vegetables, a goodish selection of canned stuff and a whole room dedicated to very posh wines. Because of the schoolboys, it also has a selection of the sort of stuff that schoolboys love, sweets and pop and porn. OK, it doesn't have porn, but it has lots of sweets and pop and pot noodle.

The town itself is lovely. Lots of tourists mean a big tourist information centre, where you can get a map of the town in case you get lost on its one high street. The tourist information centre also sells books about the area and I was tempted by 'Haunted Winchester'. However, flipping through I saw that the Wykeham Arms wasn't mentioned. This is probably a good thing as, while of course I love a good ghost story, the only spirits I want to see when I'm staying in a pub are the ones sloshing about in my glass. Poltergeist activity does not make for a restful night, and when one tries to explain away snoring and trumping in the dark, or the loo seat being left up as paranormal activity, one tends to run into the sort of scepticism that would make Richard Dawkins blink.

Postcard from Winchester - the inn

The Wykeham Arms in Winchester is astonishingly good. The place is decorated with the stuff that the landlord has collected - which appears to be everything in the world, and then every pewter tankard ever made. A bloke would describe it as the interior of the ultimate shed, a woman might describe it as charming, and tolerate it in a way that would baffle and annoy any chap who has been forced into disposing of his plastic dinosaur collection on eBay because the space in the back room is needed for a wardrobe, or a baby. I suppose the difference is that given the place is cluttered to the point where you suspect the landlord is a hoarder, it's all astonishingly dust free. I suspect dedicated staff, or elves. The place looks like a posh junk shop that's licensed. Luckily, it also has wonderful open fires, sells fabulous beer (Jack Frost) and has regulars that lend it, well, charm.

In a perfect world, my own home would resemble the rooms at the Wykeham, especially with regard to ale on tap. But it takes a lot of space to make a room look good by cramming it with curios. The ceiling has to be high to enable the tankards to dangle freely, and the art on the walls has to be arranged just so, with oil paintings cheek by jowl with framed post cards, cigarette cards and the odd Victorian porno shot in sepia to see if you are paying attention.

The regulars pack the place out, and one has to be careful where one steps for fear of treading on dog. The resulting look of hurt that any of the charming and well bred animals that litter the floor on a Saturday night would give you would be almost as bad as the savaging one might also expect if you tread on the wrong paw.

Idiosyncratic charm through cluttered curios can be a look that's hard to pull off. Beer helps, both serving it and drinking it. If in Winchester, this is the place to drink. There's a lot to see in the city but equally a lot to see in each room of the pub. They should do one of those booklets where you have to spot a certain item in each room, spot them all...win a pint!

Croydon Tours - on the other hand

Every town should have a tour. Every village, hamlet, postcode and tree should have a tour. When a country like Great Britain gets to be the age it is, something interesting has happened in just about every square yard and if an area is so dull that nothing has ever happened there, then it is likely to be the birthplace of somebody famous, who left at the first opportunity because the place is so dull.

I love guided tours around towns, and the more obscure the better. That's why there are so very few straightforward city tours. The benefit of city tours is that so much has happened on more or less the same spot that it's essentially multi-story history and you can enjoy a fifty minute lecture about the varied history of an area, roman to space age, without having to walk more than about twelve yards. Also, most major historical events in cities are chronicled in guide books or plaques on walls, leaving little room for the guide to make stuff up, surely the only reason to be a guide. That's why alternative tours tend to take place in cities, like ghost walks, or pub crawls. These allow one to actually see something of the city while learning unusual things, such as what pickled egg is actually made of.

Tours of towns are a different proposition. More intimate, one suspects that any tour of a town will contain about 30% fact, 30% folklore and, depending on how much attention the out of work actor taking the tour paid during maths class, 40 to 70% bullshit or, as it's been rebranded recently, civic pride.

And I love the idea of actually having to turn up in person to take a tour of a town. Anyone who has ever seen 'The Rough Guide' on BBC2 would probably agree that that there is a place for a travel programme presented by hopeless fact and talent deprived armatures and I'd love to see a Youhoo channel where folk upload shorts about their favourite street, car park, post-box or building which are then stitched together into a wee documentary about a place. Eventually, no village no matter how small would be without a tiny tourist information video with some chap in a blazer (what else?) standing in front of a road sign and explaining how in the thirties it was turned round to confuse the Nazis, then revolved again to confuse the tourists, then again to baffle the immigrants and most recently to place Doubt in the minds of those who follow sat-navs unquestioningly.

If the BBC can continue to use the same piece of landscape as the backdrop to slightly different programmes, for instance 'Coast' and that new one with the bloke from 'Outnumbered' for people who find 'Coast' too difficult to follow, then it stands to reason that the same town can support more than one tour. So the history tour starts at six, the ghost tour starts at six thirty, the alternative tour starts at seven and the 'they film some of Morse here' tours run all day.

Surely, Croydon can support more than one tour. For a start, there's the unexpected Croydon tour, where people are led along leafy side streets and quiet residential areas, marvelling that somewhere like this can exist so close to a city centre that is now forever linked in the national consciousness as the eye of the riot storm of 2011. The only drawback to taking this tour is that when stepping backwards to take any photographs you have to take great are not to be creamed off by a passing tram that also, against all reason, appears to trundle down leafy side-streets.

For the more adventurous, there is the city centre tour. What a lot of people overlook is that Croydon actually has a busy and quite built up town centre. It has the UK headquarters of Nestlé foods and their office block is easy to spot as its the one with the giant flaming eye at the top of it.
I would dearly love to do a ghost tour of Croydon. OK, there would be initial problems because that staple of ghost tours - violent death - is not in short supply but basically boils down to shot, savaged by dog and hit by tram (make sure you get the right era, was it last week or last century) and so some inventiveness is called for - poisoning is always good (the day e coli came to Tennessee Fried Chicken) as is death as result of tragic romantic misunderstanding (Darren got a txt intended for Wayne and as a result went out, got a tat proclaiming his true love for Kristie and their son/daughter 'name to be added' and contracted septicaemia. How often have we heard that sad tale).

It's easy to knock. And if the rest of that sentence was 'Croydon down with a bulldozer' then the world may indeed be a better place but it it certainly a better place when the sort of person who is running Croydon Tours actually has enough faith in being able to make the town interesting that he's willing to put his job seekers allowance at risk and make a go of spreading the word about the delights of Croydon. Eight quid for five minutes though, is that not a bit steep?

Croydon Tours

Croydon has, for many years, closely resembled downtown Kabul after a heavy night on the bombing. Driving a tram link through an already deeply unlovely environment left the place littered with the sort of water and twisted metal filled craters that one expects as the result of a laser-guided MK 12 'beardbuster' warhead, not the installation of a light rail link. Now that the dirt has settled and the tram is actually in place, Croydon still resembles downtown Kabul due to the large number of unemployed people milling about, the amputees (the tram link runs along the street and the locals have yet to learn how to dodge) and the violence, looting and burned-out buildings.

Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.

Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.

Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.

H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.

That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.

Romance ahoy

One of the best things about renting films on iTunes and streaming them is that there are no tedious adverts to sit through. In particular there are no 'piracy' adverts (not, you might imagine a timely public service announcement about giving the coast of Somalia a wide berth if in anything less than an battleship, but about movie piracy, and not the ones starring Johnny Depp either). If the authorities are serious about catching the movie pirates then I suggest they do a round of pubs and arrest the people selling dodgy DVDs out of a basket (why the hell is it always a basket?), or go to a car booter, rather than litter the front end of DVDs with crap adverts

Those adverts were hellish annoying, and, for those of us who have seen it all before, doubly irritating.

Because back in the day when they had proper record shops (independent, small, dusty, run by staff who cared deeply...about being smug), proper records (vinyl), and proper pop stars (blokes wore more make up than the women, hair like a startled seagull, shoulder pads you could land a 747 on), records used to come with a little sign in the corner of the sleeve declaring that home taping would kill the music industry.

No, Simon Cowell did. What home taping did was allow the cation of the mix tape which, before the invention of STDs, was the best way to show somebody that you loved them.

Back in the 80s, nobody could be arsed with the analogue version of file sharing, that is, copying an LP onto a cassette for your mates and then handing them round in the playground. Instead, everyone used to go round each others' houses and listen to the music together. Home taping was more or less reserved for taping the top 40 on a Sunday, a practice that nobody ever indulged in more than a couple of times because of the nerve-shredding skill required to record a song without the DJ talking over the intro and then speaking again over the last few seconds. I am sure that attics and sheds the country over are full of recordings of the middle of pop songs and the first syllable of 'that was...'.

As a romantic gift though, the mix tape was ideal. It was personal, it sent a message and it was cheap, leaving a young man (men make mix tapes, women receive mix tapes) plenty in the budget for Lynx should things go well. They also make the ideal anonymous gift, being easily posted, deposited, or gaffa-taped to the front door of the object of your affection.

The small card inlay is an ideal canvas for not just the track listing, but exquisite biro art, with plenty of hearts and flowers. The tracks can be jaunty pop songs interspersed with the occasional gushy ballad. It's all about hitting the right note, conveying how you feel about a person. Having the same song played over and over and over again rarely results in a successful seduction but if it does, hold onto the tape because when the inevitable break-up occurs, you'll be able to listen to it repeatedly while sobbing and thinking this was 'our song'.

The tricky thing was gauging the reaction and judging whether to risk public humiliation and private heartache. Best result, you hear her saying how great she thought the tape was, casually reveal you were glad she liked it and you arrange to do something interesting involving chips. Bad result, you hear her saying how great she thought the tape was, some other scrote expresses an interest in the same bands and she either lends him the tape or they arrange to go off and do something interesting, involving chips. Apocalyptic result, you get the tape back the next day, it has been recorded over, with the sounds of her brother and his friends doing very bad impressions of you declaring your love for his little sister. It ends not as you are now hoping with a death threat, but instead a message from the object of your affection kindly explaining that you appreciate the thought, but don't ever speak to her again, posting stuff anonymously is creepy, being spotted in the bushes doing so is worse, and your taste in music is atrocious.

The mix tape was a rite of passage and recording one, even if you never sent it, was an important formative cultural event in the life of a young man. Today it's easier than ever to make a mix CD or playlist, and I wonder if there are lovelorn bedroom DJs out there patiently assembling a twelve track message of affection, or if it's a thing of the past. File sharing may well be piracy, but using music to send a romantic message is surely what the damn stuff was invented for in the first place. Send somebody a mix tape, you're not a music pirate, you're a love buccaneer.