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I have found a new way of expanding upon your musical tastes, and it goes like this:

Stage One, Lose your iPod.

This sounds like a bad thing, I admit, but to be entirely honest this was the easiest part of the entire enterprise. There I was, sitting in a pub somewhere in Soho (The John Snow, London Pub Fans. No relation to the news reader) and the iPod fell from the iPocket of my iJacket. Obviously I had, at the time, no idea of its latest desperate bid for freedom, and discovered nothing of the plan for an hour or so, on the tube home, when I discovered nothing of the iPod. Headphones? Yes. Desire to listen to loud bangy music? Check. iPod? Nope.

I was… distraught. Unhappy. It’s not that music is a large part of my life, or that I spend almost all my existence with a background soundtrack of music or other people (Currently listening to: One More Won’t Kill Me, by the Hedrons, the iTunes store free single of the week), except in the ways that it, you know, is. My iPod was lost, my iPod was gone, alas and a lack of music. I walked home to the sounds of the Underground, Walthamstow High Street on a Sunday evening, and the quiet of a sleeping flat.

When you order an iPod from the Apple store, they ask if you want something engraved on the reverse. Being something of a creative soul, I spent hours – literally – wracking my brain for a pithy two line quote to go on the back of my music store. /dev/music was good, but too geeky. “If music be the food of love, play carbonara” too Shakespearian, any Divine Comedy lyric too long. Bored of the entire enterprise, I eventually just fed it my email address.

Very few times in my existence will I be more thankful for my lack of creative endeavour on demand, as the Pod was picked up by – amazingly – an honest soul, who is also an aspiring DJ, and emailed me to let me know he’d found the little black box of magic. Picking it up, it wasn’t working, so he’d plugged it in at home, and iTunes had – in its helpful way – erased it and replaced it with his music, which is what it contained when it got back into my hot little hands yesterday. Hours upon hours of new music to listen to, until eventually I marked down the stuff I liked, plugged it into my laptop, and got my music back on it once again.

It is good to sometimes be reminded that parts of humanity are worth the effort.

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