The day the music died

It must have been in 1979 that a colleague on the Daily Mirror who had just returned from a trip to America approached me in the newsroom, placed a pair of headphones over my ears and said: "Listen to this." That was my first experience of the Walkman.
Now, 31 years later, obituaries are being written for this revolutionary personal stereo, made obsolete by the i-pad, i-phone and presumably other methods of playing a soundtrack to your life while on the move.
How different it all was in those days. No mobile phones except for a few the size of a bungalow; no internet; no emails. And how different politically, too.
Mrs Thatcher had only just come to power and it was difficult to take her seriously. Though it was a lot harder to take the Labour Party seriously in the months ahead.
The Walkman Years were marked by the irresistible rise of the Thatcher right, melding seamlessly into New Labour.
When it comes to gadgets, we are beginning to realise that they have a finite existence. How long will the newspaper survive? Or petrol-driven cars? Progress nowadays moves with exponential speed and nothing can be guaranteed a future.
But politics and politicians change very little. Some are a bit better, some are a lot worse. They keep on keeping on, though.
And we let them. Just like The People have let them throughout the ages.