Thanks for this trip down memory lane, Philip. There's something very reassuring about clunky buttons that perform a mechanical function, rather then just passing a fingertip over an indistinct zone of shiny glass or plastic and prompting a digital response.

And yet the Walkman perhaps heralded the decline of human civilisation, by ushering in the era of individual isolationism, cut off from the outside world and inhabiting our own bespoke taste bubble.

The shadow of doom stretches long.