Oh, that was easy! (I wonder why I have a mental block about these things... it's not a direct 'save as' link, though - you do have to click through to the site briefly if you're desperate to hear some of my awesome teenage taste.)

I forgot to say earlier: Lawrence specified songs you liked at the time, not songs you discovered years later. This makes everyone's list a little less cool and a little more truthful! So I might as well be chronological and start with 1990, a year lost so far in the mists of time that even my horrible perm is now invisible... thank god. I was fifteen.

Dub Be Good To Me - Beats International

You have to hand it to Norman Cook here: it's an early sort-of mashup! The Clash with the SOS Band, I believe. Of course, this is with the benefit of a 'series of tubes' and years of music-nerd-dom behind me. At the time I had no idea what made up the constituent parts, and I just thought that this was, erm, 'jam hot'. Luckily, I still do. I've heard this song 20 times over the last few days and I completely love it. So what does 'Tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty' mean anyway? And what's up with the awesome humming-dude breakdown? How on earth did anyone think of doing that?

Miraculously, I have managed to whittle down my list of songs into a top 40 of the 90s: my favourite songs from that decade. The last few rejections were a total killer, and I was pretty surprised that some of my long-term artistic favourites didn't make the cut at all - Beck, for example, was pipped at the post, and one of my favourite albums ever, The Sundays' Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, was nowhere to be seen. The rules of the game involved no double-ups on artists (this removed a Massive Attack song in a pretty soul-crushing maneuvre late in the day, due to Tricky's appearance elsewhere on the list), and the need for all the songs to have been singles (although I think a few of these don't quite follow that rule to the letter). Unlike Lawrence, I am physically incapable of ranking these songs, so they're going to have to be 'in no particular order'.

If I can find some nice website to host my files, I may actually get all mp3-blog on your asses. Watch this space for the list to appear, slowly but surely...

Today, a man came into the library and asked me to find him 'the latest book' on quantum physics. I found him one, but it came out in 2002. He then asked me to go into the future - 2010, to be precise - to get him one. 'They exist, you know!' he said, completely seriously. 'We just have to go and get them!'

I am afraid I failed to provide 'excellent customer service' in this particular instance, as I was unable to travel to another dimension. I feel like such a failure.