It seems if you don’t learn something new every day in the technology race you will get left behind.

As a kid growing up in the 1970s and 80s I loved listening to music on the radio – which was only available on the AM frequency.

Once a week I used to tune in to an American Top 40 program that gave everyone an insight into the latest music.

The big buzz back then was to put a 60-minute blank audio cassette into the cassette player and record all the ‘hip’ songs, which probably featured ABBA and all the other groovy disco hits.

Unfortunately I wasn’t one of the cool kids and my first cassette player did pretty much just that – it only recorded and played music.

It didn’t have a built-in radio so I had to put the microphone near the radio speaker to record the song.

The trick was to know when the adverts finished and the radio announcer stopped talking so I could hit the record button.

The end result were very crackly and clunky recordings which also featured any other background noise in the room, probably from my sister who would open my bedroom door and ask me what I was doing at the time.

But that was the technology of the day and as a society we didn’t know any better.

We then progressed to cassette players with built-in radios and 90-minute tapes with better technology. Eventually they made way for the compact disc, and again not being one of the cool people, I was one of the last people to make the switch. And in continuing the theme of me being one of the last people to catch up to some technology, it was only earlier this year our household welcomed a couple of MP3 players.

These handy little gadgets, which are about the size of my phone, house mine and my wife’s entire music collections.

The instructions on transferring the music across seemed pretty straight forward and one day I decided to listen to the songs, only to realise I didn’t click all the right buttons and there was only a classical music song on there which came with the machine.

Thankfully I have now mastered it and all without the help from my very computer-literate children.

I guess now it is not only a matter of time before they get their own MP3 players, but in the meantime I think I might go looking in one of those dusty boxes in the back of the shed for a cassette player and a couple of blank tapes.

I am sure they will appreciate playing music like we used to in the ‘old days’.