At this point the Minister will be taking a short sabbatical as he spends the next few evenings mending his laptop and reinstalling all his software in a last desperate attempt to stave off having to buy a new one for a few more months or – worse still – having to use The Minister’s Wife’s PC.

Fortunately, Apple’s introduction of Time Machine in the latest version of the Mac operating system and the Minister’s investment in two more external hard drives means that the second draft of The Novel should not completely disappear into the ether when some hardware next goes tits up.

What did we do with all our spare time before computers meant we had no spare time?

The good news is that the next SMIP is 90% complete (it’s been quite a researching job, this one) and, therefore, almost ready to be released into the wild; it’s also safely tucked away on the flash memory drive of the Minister’s EeePC…

I have had precious little to say of late because (a) I’ve been unwell and on some serious medication, (b) it’s been the silliest of silly seasons for some years, and (c) my laptop is at least as unwell as its master, if not more so.

My lovely 3½-year-old PowerBook G4 1.33GHz 12″ keeps crashing with messages such as:

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0×300 – Data access DAR=0×0000000000000000 PC=0x000000000002C334″

so I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation.  (I am reliably informed by t’Internet, by the way, that this means the pooter’s memory is – in technical jargon – knackered.)

What I really want is a nice, new, shiny MacBook Pro 2.4GHz 15″ but the Minister’s Wife won’t wear it.  She feels – and can you believe this? – that replacing rotten window frames and sagging lounge furniture is more important, particularly when we have a “perfectly good” (sic) Hewlett-Packard laptop I could use instead.  (I could use it, if I wanted to wait half an hour for it to boot up; attract 20 viruses, Trojans and bits of malware an hour; and have it crash three times a day because Microsoft Is Shit.)

I have reluctantly compromised by ordering a new gigabyte of Mac memory and a tiny Phillips screwdriver, in the hope that I can hamfistedly break into my pride and joy and replace the faulty stick of memory without knackering the unit even further.

If that doesn’t work I shall, of course, drift further into a depression, particularly in light of the discovery yesterday that the current exchange rate means I could currently buy my inamorata for a 23% discount ($2,499 in the Yankee States of Doodle against £1,599 here) if I (a) cashed in my Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles, and (b) successfully smuggled the new unit through Customs on my return.  If you ask me, it’s absolutely worth the risk of a criminal record and the damage to the environment.

You can keep your overhyped and overrated iPhone and your equally-overhyped but less overrated (though nevertheless inadequately capacious) iPod Touch but, to paraphrase National Treasure Jarvis Cocker(TM), thinking about the MacBook Pro just makes me wanna come.

And mention of National Treasure Jarvis Cocker(TM) reminds me that I am considering introducing a new occasional publication by the Ministry (to fill the gap left by togger), to wit: The Finest Individual Moments In The History Of Popular Music.

The intention would not be to wax lyrical about particular songs or artistes (for it has already been established that I am actually really rather crap at writing about music), but to highlight those little moments within recordings that, as the C&C Music Factory would have it, make you go, “Hmmm.”

More in due course, if I can think of more than four or so such moments.

But enough about me.  How are you?

A couple of months into this venture it has surprised me how little I have posted on the subject of music, given its dominance in my life.

For instance, the failure of my 250Gb LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface on Monday night, taking with it (among other things) my 125Gb iTunes music library, was the first event of 2007 to reduce me to an incoherent blubbering mess. A large part of my weekend will be spent seeking to rectify the situation; if that venture proves unsuccessful, a large part of my February salary will be spent engaging the services of a data recovery outfit. (And before any clown mentions the word “backup”, I have a backup: I just haven’t refreshed the backup for a couple of months, that’s all.)

When the Minister’s wife had her iPod “burglarised” last week, she was a bit miffed but got on with life.  If the Minister’s iPod had gone, we would have had to have a lengthy period of official mourning and at least a couple of days off work.

Yesterday, a colleague’s early morning remark had The Beatles’ A Day In The Life replaying in my head all day long, with particular emphasis on that final E major, three-piano chord (which, incidentally, sounds amazing re-mastered on the new Love album when played loud through a pair of these).  Today, for reasons that are not entirely obvious, the Minister’s internal jukebox is stuck on Joe Tex’s Show Me (“Show me a man that’s got a good woman/I’ll show you a man that goes to work hummin’…”).

The recent news of The Police’s reunion caused a little frisson in my corner of the open plan, while word of Crowded House’s imminent new album and tour rendered all efforts at work for the rest of that day entirely futile.

To a large extent, it starts and ends for me with The Beatles: if you’re going to strand me on a desert island with a solar powered iPod that only has enough room for a dozen or so albums, please make them the official Beatles releases.  If Apple’s Superbowl advert on Sunday night heralds the launch of a Beatles iPod, as widely rumoured, there’s a decent likelihood I will be queuing overnight to get one.

After The Beatles come a plethora of acts and genres that fill up the rest of the My Top Rated playlist.

I am currently going through something of a soul phase. (If we’re talking Lottery win-sized Wish Lists, have a butcher’s at this. The 1966 release is out now: in that year, 75% of all the singles Motown released made the charts. Re-read that last sentence again and then have a bit of a lie down.)

While Tamla Motown went for – and located with absolute precision – the commercial pulse, the smaller, less showy Stax label was really where the soul was at.  And whether Motown likes to admit it or not, there would have been no What’s Going On had it not been for the likes of Respect Yourself.

Imagine this:

In spring 1967 British audiences got the opportunity to experience the Stax Revue for the first time. The 13-date tour boasted a wealth of the label’s talent – Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Arthur Conley, Carla Thomas and Eddie Floyd – performing with the musicians who had recorded dance-floor and jukebox favourites such as “Knock on Wood” and “You Don’t Know Like I Know”.

In an age when the word is overused to the point of meaninglessness, to witness the Stax Revue must have been amazing.

I’m waffling.  I don’t know where this is going.  This is why I don’t write about music – I can’t. 

There’s an interview in the new issue of Mojo with George Martin in which he is far more eloquent about music’s etherealness.

Anyway, the above extract is from an article in today’s Independent by Gavin Martin celebrating Stax’s 50th anniversary. It’s worth reading.

And there’s a new series called Soul Britannia from the team behind 2005′s wonderful Soul Deep, starting tonight on BBC4.  Could be good.

I’ll get back to Joe Tex now.  S.Y.S.L.J.F.M…