"Rerecord not fade away."

Life I have something to say and it's taken a few days for me to pluck up the courage to talk about it. On Monday morning, my dvd recorder died. It was a Panasonic E55 (or something) and we'd been together since the January sales in Boots the Chemist in 2004. My parents had gifted me a different recorder from Sanyo (or someone) for Christmas but that hadn't gone well and I received what would affectionately become known as the Panny in exchange. In those good old days it was a miracle - being able to record programmes onto a dvd with a picture sharper than VHS. The ability to start watching Have I Got News For You whilst it was being still being recorded.

Recently though, the signs were becoming all the more apparent, it hadn't been well for a while. For the past six months Panny had randomly begun rejecting the CD-Rs which it had previously loved and become ratty when asked to finalize anything. Sometimes it would sit and judder or end a recording before it's time, cutting off the ends of programmes and ignoring the setting it had been given. Then on Monday it began to power off when it should have begun recording and that was the last straw. I checked online for remedies but the price was too high and the time taken for repair to long. It was time to put it out of its misery.

So on Tuesday I visited Richer Sound in Liverpool and bought a brand new Panasonic M25 (or something). Not quite the Rolls Royce of the range (no hard disk recording) and about what I still can't afford it. Nevertheless it accepts a vast range of different types of blank disc and has a built in Freeview tuner. So not only will it record on pretty much anything, all you have to do is select whatever it is you want to timeshft from the electronic programme guide and it changes the channel at the right time and does exactly that for you. I know you spacemen with Tivo or Sky+ will laugh at this backward technology, but for cavemen like me, this is magic. I think we can really make a go of it.