My youngest daughter got an iPod for Christmas.

There was a bit of a battle beforehand, as she fretted about whether the model we bought could accommodate sufficient songs.

It held 500 – far more than I had in my record collection when I was a teenager. I pointed this out, to which she replied that 500 was “nothing” and some of her friends could store 2,000 on theirs.

Everything is so different nowadays. It may be a great thing to be able to store thousands of songs on a device the size of a matchbox – you couldn’t take a stereo complete with turntable and speakers out on a jog – and be able to download them easily from a computer, but these advancements have eliminated many little pleasures we had back then.

I loved my records – even those by Gary Glitter (how was I to know?) – and took pleasure in looking at the sleeves and reading the blurb. I’d sit with my friends, playing them and poring over the album covers.

I can remember some of them clearly – the black and white stripes of Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Talking Heads’ Remain In Light, with the blotched red faces of the band. One of my mates loved Roxy Music, whose albums had amazing covers that I loved looking at, despite not being a fan.

Record shops were like mini communities. You’d see the same people every Saturday afternoon, browsing. You didn’t have to buy – we often didn’t – just being there and checking out what was new, and who was there, was enough.

I’d go with my boyfriend to Alan Fearnley’s in Middlesbrough, a small, quirky den with records piled high like a second-hand bookshop, and while away a couple of hours. Even the less characterful aisles of the WH Smith record department, which took up half the store, were a meeting point for music lovers.

Supermarket-like stores, such as HMV, with their aisles of CDs and DVDs just don’t compare.

When you found a single you’d wanted for ages, it put a spring in your step for the whole day. Like with a secondhand book, sometimes the sleeve would bear evidence of previous owners, with little scribbles and doodles, even telephone numbers. Downloading tracks from cyberspace just isn’t the same.

My daughter’s love of the charts is rubbing off on me, however. After decades of complete ignorance as to current sounds, I can now identify many artists. My husband couldn’t believe it when, in the supermarket the other day, a woman buying a CD for her grand-daughter was trying to remember which band sang a certain song, and I confidently told her, “JLS.”