Sorry readers. An exhausting couple of days clearing out the parental garage.

This old radio of mine emerged – a hefty but magnificent Pye Cambridge International. 

One of these cost a huge 42 guineas in 1954, the auspicious year of my birth. Not easy to say with any certainty what that price means nowadays, but one nifty website aids the calculation: either £789 (using retail price index) or £2,181 (using average earnings). So in any event a superb piece of kit.

This valve radio belonged to the Embassy in Belgrade and when new technology arrived it was no longer needed. So I bagged it, back in 1984.

I tried to start it today for the first time in twenty or so years. It came to life but wisps of smoke appeared – dust on the valves burning as they wheezed back into life?

So, off to be overhauled it goes. When I can find a box big enough to ship it…

Alas such marvellous engineering achievements are worth next to nothing now – almost certainly less than the cost of restoring it. They are just too big and clunky for modern houses. Just like my LP collection and the Linn LP12 system and huge heavy speakers which drive them, driven into obscurity by the iPod and its fit-in-your-pocket cleverness.

Which for no good reason reminds me of one of my first postings, musing on the awesome Khazzoom-Brookes postulate – the idea that the invention of more energy-saving devices makes it cheaper to save energy, so we use more of it overall.

Another radio memory from communist Yugoslavia. I visited a house in Vojvodina one day in 1982 or thereabouts, where they had an old working radio the size of a modern fridge if not bigger. The sound was magnificent: deep, rich, strong. I bet it’s still there somewhere.