Back in February I succumbed to the hype and bought an MP3 player: for the sake of argument, we'll call it a Pony Talkman. It's a nice little thing (much like me, really) - slim, elegant, charming, musically adept if a little quirky, and with a splendid little shuffle monkey that chucks random tracks at me like a hail of ripe bananas.

This weekend, however, things started to go a bit awry. The shuffle monkey was as fit as ever, but suddenly I couldn't select and play a specific album, artist or genre. Indeed, any attempt to do so caused the music box summarily to turn itself off. Frustrated and a bit annoyed (remember, this toy is barely 3 months old), I turn to the leaflet marked "Troubleshooting".

Hmmm! This seems to be written for the Very Hard of Thinking:

Symptom: There is no sound
Cause/Remedy: The volume is set to zero - turn the volume up.

Finally I find mention of a reset button. So I press it. Several times. Nothing happens. At least, nothing to fix my problem.

So I turn to Pony's so called "support Web site". There I find a "Troubleshooting" FAQ. This is basically the same as the aforementioned leaflet. Grrrrrr!

After a bit of ferreting about, I find a way to submit an email support query. Then I wait.

Two days later, I get this reply:

Thank you for your recent e-mail received on 10/05/2009 08.26 PM.

I am sorry to learn of the problems that you are experiencing with your Sony WALKMAN Pony TALKMAN.

Unfortunately, beyond normal FAQ's and troubleshooting found on our website, it is not possible for Sony Pony to offer diagnosis via e-mail and with this in mind, we would suggest that your product is forwarded to Sony Pony Central Service who repair this category of product. For full instructions on how to do this, please go to www.sonypony.co.uk.

Go to the Support section
Select Repair Service
Select the Relevant Article

For products that are repaired at Sony Pony Central Service, you will be asked to fill out the on-line Repair Registration form.

This area on the website provides instructions on how to send your product in for repair and gives fixed cost repair prices where relevant.

I trust that this information is of some help. In the event of any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours sincerely
Blah Blah Blah

W!

T!

F!

The depths of wrongness in this email are so profound, I don't know where to start! Why the devil do they have an email enquiry function if they're not going to do anything with the damned query when they get it? And "fixed cost repair prices" - it's less than 3 month old, dammit: I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for it to be fixed, not to mention the postage to get it back to their Central "Service". Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

As I fulminate, Best Beloved remarks, "I had a prob a bit like that with my i-pod - think I had to press a combination of buttons together to fix it". Nothing ventured, nothing gained - so I press the "Back" and "Option" buttons together and hold them for a couple of seconds. Job done! Full functionality is restored. I am happy.

And Pony can FAQ off.

Pressing on with the task of transferring CDs to my Walkman, I find myself mining a rich seam of PattiSmithitude this fine afternoon. So my question to you all is:

3 versions of Gloria (one studio and two live) - is this:

(A) too few?
(2) too many?
(iii) just right?
(z) I'll have a pint of mild please, and while you're at it, you couldn't get us a bag of scratchings, could you?

Ta very much.

... right now?

Just interested in how we're all spending our Sunday afternoons.

Me, I'm on "The Crane Wife Pt. 3" from The Crane Wife by The Decemberists.

And jolly good it is too.

The first time I set down a Desert Island Discs lists, I focused on the lacrimose but today, as I'm feeling mighty chipper, if a tad sleep-deprived, I'm off to the opposite end of the emotional spectrum.  Yes, today, I give you my Desert Island Songs That Make Your Head Explode With  J O Y

Now I'm not just talking 'happy' here, or 'mildly entertained', or 'giving a little, crinkly smile', but sheer heart-bursting, face-cracking, can't-stop-those-limbs-from-waving-around-in-what-in-some-cultures-might-be-classified-as-dancing, highest of high octane Joy with a captial OY.  Harder to come by than tears in the world of song, I reckon (maybe wrongly) but a marvelous, marvelous thing to be celebrated and lauded and made into lists.  Like this:

1.  Free Money - Patti Smith  Whoa Lordy, crank up the juice and shout it out!  If you ever see a small, strange person in a blue Saxo, driving down the M6 singing along to this with full-throated abandon and being a danger to traffic, that'd be me.

2. Kuben - Hoven Droven (the coolest folkrockband in Sweden, so they claim on their website). A bit of a slow starter, this one, but once it hits its groove it's big grins all the way.  Can't resist sharing the sleeve note with you: "Bosse could'nt believe his ears.  There it was, adduced by Gustav and his African party trumpet: the men's choire!  Woozy with inspiration he sat down, brought out pencil and paper and proceeded to draw a...cube!"  And who wouldn't, under the circumstances.

3. Dig My Grave - assorted McGarrigles, Wainwrights and hangers-on family friends A rip-snorter of a song about death and burial.  Oh give me two, two to my head and two, two to my feet.

4. One in a Million - Chris Wood  Not loud, not fast, not noisy, just fantastic storytelling of the most heartwarming kind.  With chips.

5. Bandera del Sol/Flag of the Sun - Tish Hinojosa  OK, OK, I know it was on the 'weepers' list, but it's fab, I tells ya.  It's about love, and justice, and freedom, and the dignity of the human spirit, and it fills me with joy when people sing about those things ... cos I'm a big, soppy, wet liberal, and proud of it.

6. Also Sprach Zarathustra - The Temple City Kazoo Orchestra It's not just that this is funny (though it undoubtedly is) but that it's so wholehearted and faithful to the orchestral version in its kazoo-ish fashion.  It's as much homage as piss-take.

7. Zobi La Mouche - Les Negresses Vertes  When I bought one of those USB turntable thingies a couple of years back, this was the first (and so far only) of my many LPs that I digitised.  Watch me do my famous arm-waving dance as dentally-challenged Frenchmen sing about ... a fly called Zobi?

8.  Praise to the Holiest in the Height - Edward Elgar  Huge choir, huge orchestra - what's not to love?  The soul of Gerontius makes it to the gates of heaven and gets this magnificent chorus as his welcome.  Mind you, he then gets sent to Purgatory for a bit - but if you can't do the time don't do the crime, I say.

So there's my Great Glow of Joy*.  Now, what gets you a-grinning and a-spinning?

*I snurked this from the title of CD by Husband's pal Derek Luckhurst - cheers, Des!

Oh, and I'll eat a celebratory Mars Bar in honour of the first person to correctly identify the source of this post's title. Overgenerous, or what!

When I was 17, Miss Webb took the A Level French group to Paris. This was an occasion of many firsts in my life: first trip abroad, first holiday away from parents, first stay in a hotel, first flight in a plane, and and so on. It was not, however, my first experience of unrequited love: that had happened when I was five and David threw my valentine's card in the bin without even reading it. Which pretty much set the tone of my relationship with lurv for the next decade or so.

Anyway, on the Paris trip the object of my moonstruck gazing was Richard. He - tall, dark and fairly handsome - was however largely oblivious of me - small, mouse and fairly gruesome (it took me a while to grow into my beauty but I did, in the end) - choosing instead to set his cap at my roommate, Julie of the dark ringlets and womanly curves (in retrospect, I can see his point).

However, he and I did discover a mutual love of Curved Air (though in his case, I think it was more a love of Sonja Kristina than the band in toto) and fell to talking about music in general. And it was thus that I learned for the first time of Fairport Convention. Richard loved them with an all-consuming passion and, in order to give me a taste of fairporty goodness, taught me the words to Matty Groves. Yes, all the words - well, we were in Paris for a whole week.

When we got home, I went out and bought History of and a lifelong love of folk music was begun.

So I went to Paris hoping for a snog, but instead I got this great, rich, wide musical tradition. I think I got the better part of the bargain.

Cheers Richard.

You know how it is. You're walking through the sitting room on a Sunday morning (or a Friday, if you're a lazy slacker like me), a bit of Radio 4 accidentally gets in your ears and, before you know where you are, it's out with the paper and pencil and you're committing your carefully considered 8 discs (plus luxury item and book other than the Bible or Shakespeare) to paper just in case you ever get famous enough to be asked to participate in a long-running British radio institution!

Or is that just me?

Anyway, having long ago failed to narrow down the possibilities of my Desert Island Discs to under 1000, I've recently taken to categorising them (being an ex-librarian) into subgroups: Desert Island Folk, Desert Island Patti Smith, Desert Island Classical,Desert Island Kazoo Orchestras and so on.

So today I offer for your entertainment Desert Island Weepies – the eight records which, above all others, make me blart my eyes up (or “cry” as I believe you call it on this planet) every time I hear them . If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now:

1. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning – Richard Thompson
   Not the whole song (though it is damned good) but just the bit where he sings “I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome/ swooping down from heaven to carry me home”. Even typing it now brings a lump to my throat.

2. Bloody Motherf***ing A**hole – Martha Wainwright
   She sings the refrain with such desolate passion – gets me every time

3. Mama Hated Diesels So Bad – Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen
   So corny, so cheesy – a real quesadilla of a track – but so very, very touching once you get past all that.

4. Bridge Over Troubled Water – the Johnny Cash version
   Not got much time for the original, which is far too sweet for my taste, but Johnny Cash plays a blinder and you just know he's singing it for June.

5. No Man's Land – June Tabor
   Quintessential WWI story, quintessential English folk voice. I love June Tabor so much I want to have her children.

6. Bandera Del Sol – Tish Hinajosa
   Not all my weepy songs are sad songs. This one is beautiful, triumphant, celebratory and makes you want to go “yeah!” very, very loudly.

7. Beneath the Southern Cross – Patti Smith
   What can I say - she is a god, I am her acolyte and this makes me cry.

8. Individual – Rose Kemp
   17-year-old scion of folk royalty sings about being as good as anybody else; “Every girl wishes she was/ thin like all the other girls and / pretty like all the other girls and/ smart like all the other girls are”. My own story exactly.

Luxury item; neverending box of tissues. Book: The Nation's Favourite Poems for Funerals. And bring on the blartathon.

OK, I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. You know you want to.

Back in 1970 when I was 15, and the only regular entertainment available to us was the weekly Youth Club discotheque in Blackheath, my friend Dangerous Hazel got wind of something special happening in Dudley: a club, she said, a club for people like us - weirdos, prog rockers and crypto-hippies - somewhere we could get to hear stuff other than the chart-toppers and bubblegum pop that was the Youth Club's staple fare.

It took her a bit of digging but finally Hazel tracked it down. It was (and still is) called JB's and, at that point in its history, was based in the clubhouse at Dudley Town football ground. Not long after, it moved up the town to the back of a gents' outfitters near Top Church and, for the next five-or-so years, this became our musical home-from-home.

On Thursday nights there was a disco of sorts, but without the dancing. Fridays and Saturdays were band nights. In those five glorious years I must have seen hundreds of bands, most of whom I've forgotten now, but some standout gigs remain in the memory banks - Richard and Linda Thompson several times (even before they were married and Linda was still Peters), Dr Feelgood at least twice, Stan Webb's Broken Glass and Chicken Shack, legendary bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (yes, I now all bluesmen get called legendary, but this pair really, really were). People say the mid 70s were rubbish for music, but not from where I was sitting, they weren't.

There was memorable drinking to go with the memorable music. The beer of choice was Newcastle Brown, drunk from the bottle. One night John Woodhouse peeled the label off his bottle and gave it to me as a memento - I kept it for years, sellotaped to a peice of card in a box with all my concert tickets from Birmingham Town Hall and the stubs of two joss sticks from a Quintessence concert. At that point in my young life, though, I was not much of a beer drinker, preferring the more girly delights of port-and-lemon (10p) - the infamous post-Sonny-Terry-and-Brownie-McGhee port-and-lemon-bath-staining incident did not please The Mater one bit.

Anyway, in 1976 I headed off to university, discovered folk music, let punk pass me by, started to feel I was 'too old' for that kind of thing and lost touch with The Club (as my particular group of regulars called it). Even when I moved back to the Black Country after university, I never re-established my JB's habit.

I still miss it though.

And I did perform there once, myself, in the early 80s, as a member of Dudley and District CND's Street Theatre troupe - I think the audience was just slightly bigger than the company, but not much.

Because of my great age, I no longer find it easy to access Young People's Things like new bands and stuff. I try listening to popular music combos on the wireless but am more-than-somewhat offoput by the enormous amounts of inter-song wittering that seems to pass for entertainment these days. I mean, John Peel, taciturn though he may sometimes have sounded, was never really a man of few words but he knew when to shut up and play the record, unlike today's mindless yahoos who seem to believe we have tickled our cat's whiskers for hours just to hear their mindless babblings (and, yes, I do number Stuart Maconie and his oppo whose name I forget, for all their often excellent taste in music, among the number of the babblers).

So [pausing to draw breath] ...

... where does an ageing listener turn for her fix of new beat-musique when the trusty transistor lets her down. Well, lately, I've been doing rather well with cover discs from The Word. Most of the stuff I find pleasantly entertaining (though some is pretty unlistenable), but occasionally there's an absolute gem - like the mighty Decemberists, who've featured twice, and my current keep-playing-track-over-and-over-til-Husband-wants-to-throw-cd-out-of-car-window favourite The Mountain Goats, whom I now like so much I've bunged a YouTube thingy on my Facebook wossname, so my friends can all like them too ('cept they've probably known about them for y' know, like, years! and now think I'm hopelessly jejune for even mentioning them.