Sorry to sound like a fusty old colonel randomly dribbling memories on his way to the graveyard, but I remember the days when carefully compiling a C90 cassette of personally selected tunes for a friend was a key bonding moment in almost any relationship.
You'd assemble a collection of your favourite tunes (interspersed with a few ironic flourishes or comedy tracks), then spend an hour painstakingly inking the titles and artist names on the inlay card, which never had enough room on it unless you scratched away in tiny capitals, as though manually typesetting a newspaper aimed at squinty-faced ants in a dollhouse. It took effort and patience. It was a tailored gift. It showed you cared.
Making a compilation for a friend was one thing. Assembling a tape for someone you wanted to see naked was something else entirely; a real high-wire act. Open with something earnestly romantic and you'd mark yourself out as a sexless drip. Go the other way, spicing up the playlist with an explicit rap in which the protagonist lists 5,000 assorted and sobering tricks he can perform with his penis, and you'd fail twice as quickly. And if you somehow avoided sex entirely, and concentrated instead on showcasing how eclectic your musical tastes were by segueing from the Jackson Five into a self-consciously difficult 19-minute electronic epic which sounded like someone hitting a gigantic metal pig with a damp phonebook while a broken synthesizer slowly asks for directions to the kettle factory, you'd alienate them completely.
Nonetheless, compilation tapes were a joy. The best had a quirky theme, such as Surprising Lyrics, or Appalling Covers, or Music to Slay Co-Workers By. That last one opened with Xanadu by ELO, which works better than you'd think.
But then progress jiggered it all up. First CDs smothered cassettes. Then 50% of 18- to 34-year-olds started running their own DJ night, which was just like compiling a tape minus the faffing around with the inlay card, except you had to take it more seriously and pretend you were cool.
Boring. And then finally everyone got iPods, effectively granting their existing musical collection a monopoly over their own ears. Compilation tapes were dead.
Or not. The other week I was tinkering around with a bit of software called Spotify. If you're not familiar with it, it's effectively a cross between iTunes and a customisable online radio station. I'd heard people raving about it and didn't grasp why, until suddenly I realised you could compile a playlist, then generate a URL for it that others can click on. It's like being able to mass-produce a compilation tape in minutes. OK, so it's broken up with irritating adverts now and then, but hey, it's easy to use and it seems to work.
What this means is I'm suddenly in a position to offer you, dear reader, a free compilation tape. But rather than any old tape, I've rustled up a specialist challenge.
Summer's here. Consequently many of you will be embarking upon thrilling new romances. Others will be cementing existing ones. But passion can be fleeting.
Today's heart-fluttering sexpot is tomorrow's irritant. How can you be sure the pair of you really like each other? By trying to have sex while listening to a deliberately off-putting musical playlist, of course. After all, in moments like that, what goes in your ears makes a big difference. Once, in my early 20s, I was enjoying an impromptu eruption of mid-afternoon "adult fun" with a girlfriend while a radio blasted away merrily in the background. Suddenly the music was replaced with a news bulletin - specifically a live police press conference in which two parents tearfully begged for the return of their missing son. As mood-killers go, it was on a par with looking down to discover your own genitals had suddenly and impossibly sprouted the face of Alan Titchmarsh, and he was looking back up at you and licking his lips and grinning and reciting limericks in a high-pitched voice. We broke up five years later. I blame the radio.
My playlist, while tasteless in parts, doesn't contain anything quite that horrifying, but it should prove one heck of an obstacle course. All you have to do is download and install Spotify, then go to this URL: tinyurl.com/moodkill. Click around a bit and it should open the compilation. Don't read the tracklisting, it'll spoil it (that's why I'm not divulging it here). Beckon over your beloved. Dim the lights. Get yourselves in the mood, press play, and prepare to test your ardour to its very limits. The first couple to successfully slog their way through the entire list wins a trophy or something. It's a hefty running time, so don't expect to conquer it all on your first go. There's no set order; you can put it on shuffle if you like. And you're allowed tackle it in chunks over the course of a few weeks if need be. But no declaring victory until you've managed the lot. If that's too much, total respect will still be accorded to anyone who manages to kiss with earnest animal passion for the entire duration of the St Christopher Ensemble's Gregorian Chant version of I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues, then upload the evidence to YouTube.
It won't be easy. But if you make it to the end, then congratulations: you've proved your love will abide through the ages. Oh, and as a bonus, pick one of the entries for a wedding song. Then watch all your guests throw up.