Number 4: there was an advert in the recent Observer Music Monthly (bizarrely for Nokia which I didn't get the connection with at all) which showed a bloke - why a bloke? - shuffling record shelves with a remark like "he knows Indie music that makes indie music look like it isn't indie music" (or something like that). Sorry, it just came to mind. Basically, indie music can be all sorts of things from jangling white guitar boys to rowdy girl rock and everything between. Enjoy what you like and be open to new things (XFM probably won't help there...)

The Sopranos has been described by some as the finest television series ever made but, for various reasons, I never quite got round to watching it. I confessed my predicament to a friend, who introduced me to the DVD revolution; the entire first series of The Sopranos in one boxed set. It has lain on my shelf for nearly a year, unviewed. This week, I decided to hand it back.

It has been strangely liberating. The earth has not stopped turning, nor have the central foundations of my sanity crumbled. Instead, I feel rather wholesome and expansive, like someone just back from a weekend in Dorset. There?｢どｨび｢s now one less thing I have to do in my life, and the lifting of the weight has brought a rush of tremendous relief. And confidence.

I now want to shout out loud all the other things I?｢どｨび｢ve never seen and now know I needn?｢どｨび｢t see without any adverse affect on my overall happiness. I?｢どｨび｢ve never seen a single episode of ER, Sex and The City, Only Fools and Horses, Emmerdale or Dalziel and Pascoe. There! That doesn?｢どｨび｢t make me sick or deranged, does it?

As for new things, I have to find them somewhere, but I'm too lazy to go hunting further than XFM at the moment.

But instead, it's been dragged out for far too long as more and more money has been dangled in front of David Chase. The last season the show was just spinning its wheels. And Chase has even gone so far as to rip off one of his own plots from an episode of 'The Rockford Files' just to keep the series going.

And yet so many others over here keep referring to it as one of the pinnacles of Television, and I just don't get it. I really don't think they're looking at the overall series, but are still focused on either the first season or perhaps individual moments since then.

I think it's going to take the distance of History for TV critics and others to finally see the show for what it was - good, but not great.

Agreed. I suffer for someone else's art. Those early episodes of Torchwood were way too much suffering. Even Caruso himself would have turned his nose up at some of them.

And Rob, go brave the Christmas crowds and get Spaced now!!