Diary – 17 January 2004

Hurrah! At last we get the MP3 player we bought our son for Christmas to work. Four adults, working in shifts, couldn’t get it to work on Christmas Day. The same four adults, still working in shifts — very ill-tempered shifts — couldn’t get it to work on Boxing Day. The instructions, provided by Hyun Won Inc., and most loosely translated from the original Korean, were not of much help: ‘Pause now you are in shortly, stop.’ The Internet site we bought it from had shut up shop until well in the New Year. We tried the people at PC World. Utterly useless, predictably enough. We waylaid anyone who had the look of a geek about them. (A well-thumbed copy of Lord of the Rings is usually a promising sign.) No joy. In the end, I had to wait for the site to open to be talked through it, which took most of a day, what with uploading and downloading, folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders of the sub-sub-sub-folder variety. I was thrilled when I got the first bit of music to play, and charged downstairs when I heard my son come in from school. ‘I can work it! I can work it.’ ‘Great,’ he said, ‘but the thing is I think I’ve changed my mind. Can I have a mobile instead?’ No, I didn’t take it badly. ‘What a joker you are,’ I said, as I sold him to some passing gypsies. ‘Also, your artwork is crap and I only put it on the fridge out of consideration for your feelings,’ I added, as I waved him off.

Anyway, we haven’t had such a traumatic time on the Christmas present front since what is still referred to as ‘the Year of the Playmobile Castle’.