Doubtless I am not the only person who associates Marks & Spencer with floral print frocks and sensible underwear so I was not a little surprised to find myself buying an internet radio from their on-line store a few days ago. I'd have been even more surprised to have found myself buying a floral print frock but that's by the way.

When I was a wee boy one of my greatest pleasures was to lie in bed fiddling with the radio trying to make out what was struggling out of the little box from faraway places through a cloud of crackles and whistles. Actually the boxes were quite big in those days but again that's by the way.

I've never lost my taste either for radio or for things foreign so the opportunity that broadband gives to sit down in Scotland and hear with perfect clarity Radio Moscow's propaganda broadcasts to Latin America is for me one of the twenty-first century's greatest boons.

That, coupled with the demise of Jazz FM as a digital broadcaster here, commercial radio's complete absence of jazz and the pathetically minute proportion of their output that the BBC's five or six music stations devote to the genre has made the computer an essential listening tool. One of the best jazz programmes that comes from the BBC comes from Radio Scotland, not one of their music stations, but once more that's by the way.

But the computer, even when it's called a laptop, is not ideal; with its tiny speakers, its keyboard and its mouse - especially when you are lying in bed. So the internet radio, or computer in disguise, has long been on my wish list and now I've got one that ticks all my boxes. It has DAB and FM as well as the internet. It can play music that's stored on my computer. I can connect it to my hi-fi or I can have on my bedside table.

That's where it is now. I went to sleep last night listening to TSF, a jazz station that I used to listen to via steam radio in Paris. The machine has a sleep button of course. That's an essential for me. It also has an alarm but I can live without that.

And this morning I got my news from Europe 1. I'm leaving Moscow for a special treat, although I believe their propaganda effort is a pale shadow of its former self.