Remember I bought a CD writer - do you? I do. Fucking piece of arse!! I wrote a CD on Saturday morning for my long suffering friend Kev who’s been providing oodles of Tom Waits-ery recently without so much as a thankyou from me. So I thought I’d return the favour and provide some Scott Walker-ery for his listening pleasure. So I wrote the CD and it was good.

However, when I went to start the whole process again (for there was another) the CD writer just whirrred a bit and refused to accept that I had "put a blank CD into the drive". In fact it then on refused to accept that I’d put any CD in the drive. In the manual it says "green light = drive empty, blue light = reading CD", the light stayed resolutely green throughout. So I turned the whole thing off and started again, but the same thing happened. So I turned it off and went for a coffee, on my return the same thing happened. So I forgot about it for a while.

Trouble was every time I passed the room I couldn’t help popping in and giving it another try. You know, just in case. This went on until Sunday morning.

On Sunday I was getting more desperate and more irate and was “giving it one more try” while chatting to Kirsty about whether Dixons would let me return the goddamn thing after a month. It wasn’t working and I was convinced that it wasn’t a software thing - the drive just wasn’t recognising a CD when I put it in. So I picked it up and turned it upside down, and it worked.

Then it worked fine (I put a number of different CD’s in there to check it) and so I wrote a second CD. This CD was good too, and then it stopped working again. Just like before.