Me and technology

I am in love with technology. I'm not interested in how things work, building my own computer or pulling things apart but I do love sleek design. The affair began when I was a college student in 1975 and encountered my first futuristic Bang & Olufsen record player. It was love at first sight. I was told (because back then I had to be told what I should and shouldn't like) that really you were paying for the B&O name and it was all about appearance rather than sound. It's a bit like Apple/Mac today - people say that it's all about name and design rather than performance. But it isn't.

If any object is going to have pride of place in my life, it's got to have visual appeal as well as effectively fulfill its function. My favourite techno-thing, without which I could not do, is my iPod. What a genius piece of gadgetry it is. It's sleek, shiny, smooth, minimalist and a joy to hold and behold. My hands are as dry as paper because I stopped using handcream so as not to make finger marks on the screen.

Fond as I am of sleek and minimalist design, I'm not exactly a sleek and minimalist person. I crave cosy, warm and comfortable too, so the stainless steel, rubber-floored industrial look is not for me. I like the warmth of wood, the drapery of curtains, the softness of leather and the plushness of carpets. I want my walls to be a 'complication' of art and bric-a-brac so I paint the walls in a neutral background colour. (Why not use complication as a collective noun? It's a fitting word to describe my kitchen wall.)

But technology is a different thing. I got my first record player, made by Fidelity, in the early 1970's - it was given or sold to me by a friend who had got a stereo. It looked exactly like this:



In 1975 I got a white Fidelity stereo record player which cost £50 and was an 18th birthday present from my grandparents. You can see one here. I kept it for several years, until I saved up enough money and replaced it with a Philips stacking system. Now I was really getting somewhere. It played records and had a dual cassette player so I could now (illegally) record my records on tape and make tape to tape copies too. It even came with a chipboard wood-effect veneered cabinet with a glass door. Oh yes, I was at the very pinnacle of cutting edge technology - at least, that which I could afford. However, I was told that the very best stereo system was manufactured by Pioneer, so several years later, I upgraded once again to a Pioneer stacking system in a black cabinet. I am not a purist so I wasn't going to bother building my own system with seperate components. Besides, it wouldn't look good!

About the time I got that system I became aware of the existence of compact discs. At that time, in the early 1980s, shiny cardboard holographic versions of them were hanging tantalizingly from ceilings in a particular record shop in Germany. I wanted those shiny things more than anything. But they were soooo expensive and besides, I had nothing to play them on. So let's fast-forward (a technophrase that we all use now) to 1991 when I finally got the Holy Grail of stereos - a black and gold Pioneer stereo midi system with record deck, tuner, graphic equalizer, double cassette deck and six-disc CD player! I was in music-lover's paradise. Slick, classy and now that cabinets were 'out' I was definitely 'in' with this new display of electronics.

However, I've now had it for 18 years and it sits looking old, dated and big in our living room and I rarely use it. Hubby uses it for the radio and we do occasionally still use the record deck to play old LPs, but annoyingly you can't plug an iPod into it and the speakers are the size of small tables and have trailing wires. The once proudly owned CD collection hardly gets used either - I just bung the CDs on the iPod and then they sit there gathering dust.

For me the next pinnacle of listening lust is the iPod touch (which I have) and a Bose speaker and radio system on which to play it. I bought a cheaper Altec Lansing InMotion speaker/radio system which I like well enough, but Bose is still beckoning. Or maybe perhaps Bang & Olufsen are making one...