Older, but no wiser

Back in pre-history, music used to come in round, black, vinyl packages. As well as lugging half a ton of equipment up and down stairs in gig venues, DJs would arrive with crates full of these things - maybe as many as a couple of thousand?

Times have changed. At my daughter's 18th birthday party last night, the DJ arrived with no such crates, not even CDs. His entire music collection was on his laptop, containing several tens of thousands of MP3s.

I thought I was getting old, but took some comfort in the fact that the equipment needed to PLAY all these MP3s at conversation-killing decibel levels looked exactly the same as it did 30 years ago. It seems some things don't change - the laws of physics still require very large, very heavy and very black boxes in order to make lots of noise. There's something peculiarly comforting in that kind of changelessness.