Cdddb

In the dark ages between the Mrs Ivans 1 and 2, I found myself living in a pretty but tiny and very isolated cottage in Staffordshire with only Radio 4 for company. So I did something that I had previously scorned and took out an ad in the personal column of a national broadsheet.

It was a large and eccentric advertisement and I look back at the experiences that followed with a mixture of amusement, pleasure and outright horror. I met many extraordinary women, the psychiatrist was the most extraordinary but that's another story, however the process was too random to be very useful in finding a prospective 'life' partner.

I discovered that a quick browse through an individuals music collection was a good pointer in terms of whether you were going to get on, but not in any hard and fast manner, the presence of a surfeit of Celine Dion was not a definite contra indication as one would suspect, but you could form a general impression.

On this basis I would suggest that an internet dating service that required you to upload the titles in your cd collection (yes ALL of them even the christmas presents), analysed them and provided matches with other users would be loads of fun and provide a more targeted source of 'friendship and maybe more' as they say.

The matching algorith would have to be a lot more sophisticated than merely finding others with the same recordings as this would be very dull, it should account more for the quirks and traits of personality exposed by a lovingly assembled collection.

It has to be said at this point that shared musical appreciation isn't the be all and end all of course, I fell in love with Mrs Ivan 2 in spite of and not because of the contents of her cd rack. Indeed it is only the lightness of spirit that her companionship brings that compensates for her unnatural penchant for Enya.