THIS IS NOT RATIONAL. HATE rarely is, but for anyone who knows me this will seem a particularly strange object for my ire: I hate the iPod.
Why? Because it's ruined my life and those of countless others, and created a whole new strata of trash cu
lture, that's why.
I used to have a life. It wasn't much of a life, but I could go out on an evening and generally enjoy the normal social intercourse other people did. Come Christmas 2003, I was given a 20 Gb iPod and the slow deep rot kicked in. I stopped going out, I had too many CDs to upload on to my iPod. Then I started downloading tracks off the internet - legally, by the way, should any record company lawyers be reading this. It's a bit like drugs, I suppose. I no longer wanted to go out; the phone stopped ringing. It was just me and my iPod.
And I've seen it happen to countless others. They think they can cope, then suddenly they find the siren call of their little white music box too much and that's it, another friend is lost.
But that's not the whole story. What I really hate about the iPod is the horrible all-embracing culture that's sprung up around it.
Everywhere you look, there is an iPod reference of some sort. Shops stock every type of extra, all prefixed with the letter "i": iPod armour, extra iBatteries, iSpeakers, iCarry cases - £70 for a designer wallet, anyone? It's reached a point where the music is secondary, it's all about owning one. I know of certain people who have all of five CDs and yet they have one, just because they feel they have to.
And even if you do have a sizeable music collection it's unlikely that you'll ever really listen to more than a quarter of the records you've got on it. Take it from somebody who recently tried to load a Gram Parsons' record on to their iPod, only to find that it had been on there for more than a year without actually being played.
And then there is the pseudo-intellectualism that has sprung up around the damn thing. A book has just come out written by Dylan Jones, editor of men's fashion mag GQ, called iPod, Therefore I Am. It purports to be a personal odyssey of how it has transformed his life and changed culture. No, really.
The reality is that it's just given desperate magazine editors another list to fill those endless column-inches: "Celebrity iPod", "My 25 most listened-to tracks", "Desert Island iPod", each as meaningless as the last, because you can bet not one of these people will confess they're really listening to the Crazy Frog song.
It's got to the point where we now judge somebody by the contents of their machine. You could be Francis of Assisi, but if your iPod shows your taste stretches little further than brass band music and Morris dancing tunes, then to the cognoscenti you're not worth spit. Remember the headlines when the contents of President Bush's machine came out ? Beyond sheer nosiness value, who cares what they listen to?
Even worse, stories abound of a woman in Canada who treats hers like the baby she could never have, or the married couple who claimed to be happier since they bought iPods (perhaps it means they never have to listen to each other). This madness has to stop right now.
Can we just get a few things straight here? The iPod is a triumph of marketing. Mp3 players have been around for ages, even if they had smaller sizes and smaller memories. Truth be told, iPods are not the best of their type either. Yes, they're lovely to look at in a Space 1999 sort of way, but I will never forget how appalled I was when, after just a week's ownership, there was a whacking great scratch right across the screen. The first of many, I'm afraid, and now, two years on and even with the addition of some black rubber armour, it is severely battle-damaged. Personally, if I was designing a piece of transportable electrical engineering, I'd make it pretty shockproof and scratch resistant. But then, what do I know?
Then there are the upgrades. Apple excel in making your own machine outmoded and useless within weeks of your buying it. Every few weeks I get an e-mail: better battery life (something more than the 30 minutes I seem to get, I suppose); more space (for what? Those Andean nose flute CDs you've been dying to download); or perhaps you want to carry your digital images around in your pocket (Again: why?). And all more expensive than the last version.
Yes, the iPod has become a monster and I am willing to strap on my armour and slay this beast. Unfortunately, just like Frodo and his Ring, I can't bear to part with it.
Craig Brown is a Scotsman reporter.
