In the annals of business acumen, no single act of commercial chutzpah can surpass the company manoeuvres carried out by Rupert Murdoch over the period 2010 to 2014.

To assess just how revolutionary, how completely beyond the reach of what any human individual had yet achieved in more than 30 millenniums of civilisation his actions were, it is useful to note that prior to the year 2010 the figure of Rupert Murdoch was one respected but never adored by people of influence who considered themselves his peers. True, he was the world's most successful and influential publisher.

Now in his mid-70s, he showed no sign of loosening the reins of power he held so firmly in his two gnarled hands. But there was talk. What would happen when his mental powers started to fade? Why had he not planned any orderly succession, whether to someone in his family or to a trusted colleague?

And how sure was his touch, now that the print media as well as film and television were fast looking obsolete against the rise of the digital citizenship. In short, was he beginning to think he was both infallible and immortal?

And so, when Rupert Murdoch called a meeting of his entire executive committee on 12 January 2014, many were expecting something momentous.

At the very least, the demand forming among the mass of executives and expensively shirted dogsbodies shortly before the great man entered the room was that, unless he laid before them a very clear pattern of succession, they would resign en masse and thus, surely, cause a collapse in his parent company. In one way at least, he met their demands.

The man, the figure, the legend, entered the room and asked for the lights to be dimmed. He began his powerpoint presentation, flashing a quick succession of slides and charts before this, his most important viewing audience. Corporate declarations tumbled out of him. 'I have purchased a 59 per cent stake in Sun Microsystems'; 'News Corp has consolidated its share position on the boards of 14 South Asian cellphone networks'; 'I have merged Transmutual Holdings with our southern American division to form a new parent group for all terrestrial entertainment networks.'

On and on they spurted. '... taking all the European subsidiary companies and merging them with a new North African web presence ...' No one knew where this was heading, but neither had anyone seen Murdoch so energised since his last marriage. '... promoting the chairman of Digital Investment to the new post of vice-president Corporate Sustenance ...'

And the phrases became stranger, introducing concepts and references that few in the room had heard before. '... executive director of the Mother-Board...'; '... a billion-dollar investment in skin and infrastructure ...'; '... company cells multiply exponentially ...'

And in the end it came: the announcement that would transform the world.

'And so, ladies and gentlemen, I have thrown into action a complicated sequence of company mergers and buy-outs, and a logarithmically positioned series of investments, that now mean all my main subsidiary companies form a unique pattern across the globe. It's a pattern so complex that no other sequence of values come close to it, save for the integers of DNA.

'And that is no accident. For I have arranged my companies in the one precise global sequence that will set the conditions right for the birth of life itself. My company is now so complex, so intelligent, so diverse and yet so intricately controlled that it has acquired all the first properties of a living organism. My company has become a life-form!

'Primitive at first, it will need nurturing from a top team of hand-picked executives, but within a year it will think for itself, feed itself, learn, defend and, if necessary, attack. Behold, I have created a living company. I have created Child International!'

At this, the magnificent man raised his left arm and the curtains behind him parted. On a large screen dominating the chamber could be seen a complex web of numbers, flickering and scrolling across the plasma. As the audience stared up at the figures, the pattern of digits seemed to alter slightly, as if winking back.

'That,' said Murdoch 'is Child International recognising your presence and, within the space of a microsecond, calculating the amount of shares it needs to buy and sell on Nasdaq in order to make it look as if it's blinking.'

The men and women in the room gasped in surprise and a little fear. 'What were the consequences of that action?' asked one middle-aged executive known for his good personnel skills.

'Our share value went down by 0.04 per cent and we had to lay off 1,500 workers in China.' The people groaned. Immediately, the screen flickered and the numbers on it formed the shape of a smile. A package arrived at the door to the room and, when it was opened, a small cube leapt out making the noise: 'Only joking!'

'You needn't worry,' said Murdoch. 'Child International was able, in a nano-instant, to pour just the right amount of financial investment into technological development that it was able, within 12 seconds of its last action, to launch on to the market a new electronic one-inch cube that can make more than 13,000 entertaining remarks. The Chirpy-Blok has already made us $4bn.'

There was silence in the room. The numbers on the screen stared accusingly at the people round the table, who each knew in their hearts what had to be done. One by one, the executives tendered their resignation, knowing that Murdoch had indeed appointed his successor and it wasn't going to be human.

So the living company, Child International, carried on trading successfully on its own for the next 24 years until, in 2038, it was bought by the Chinese and, two days later, committed suicide.

If, while walking your dog, you see a black Opel Vectra with a top-heavy pole sticking out of its roof, do not be alarmed. It is not a UFO or a van checking for TV licence-fee dodgers, but a Googlecam. As it proceeds, the eight cameras mounted on the top of the pole take an endless succession of digital pictures of the road and its environs. Each image is tagged with its precise location using GPS.

When the car returns to base, all the images and their GPS data are uploaded to Google, which then overlays them on Google Maps. The idea is that you type in a location and - Bingo! - you can see what you'd see if you were driving in that neighbourhood. In fact I've just taken a virtual drive round Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, something of a holy place for us ageing hippies.

Welcome to Google's Street View, which is currently available in some US cities and probably due in a lot more soon. The prospect that it might be coming to Britain has got the Daily Mail into a lather. This sinister technology, it raves, 'could be a privacy-invading nightmare'. Google's cars 'will photograph EVERY door in Britain'. The service 'will allow anyone in the world to type in a UK address or post code and instantly see a 360-degree picture of the street. It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say the site is a 'burglar's charter' that makes it easy for criminals to check out potential victims.'

Given that the Mail has been gung-ho about Britain's addiction to CCTV cameras, its newfound worry about privacy is laudable, but the grounds for its concern are puzzling. After all, Google Maps and Google Earth already provide invaluable information for burglars; they show who has swimming pools and unprotected back gardens, for example. So it's difficult to see what the larcenous value-added is from Street View, other than it may reveal which houses have burglar alarms and which do not.

The multiple sightings of the Googlecam in the UK - which have been cleverly overlaid on Google Maps by the online journal, The Register (see tinyurl.com/6lag7m) - suggest that the company has embarked on a large-scale UK trial of the technology. But it's not clear that the service would be legal here, or indeed in Europe generally, because our data-protection and privacy rules are more stringent those than those in America.

In Europe, litigation could be triggered by, say, images of an ageing rock star entering a rehab clinic, or by even more 'sensitive' pictures: the chap who's 'off sick' out shopping or the adulterer tending her lover's roses.

And it doesn't matter that the pictures were taken in a public place. 'If you are caught on camera and complain to Google,' says Struan Robertson of lawyers Pinsent Masons, 'Google will remove the pics. But that may not be enough for Europe's courts. Our data protection regime lets us take holiday snaps, even of strangers, provided we're doing so for private purposes. But if we're taking snaps for commercial use, where individuals are identifiable, there is no such exemption. We need to notify the subjects, and that's hard for Google to do. Even a loudspeaker on top of the camera cars ["Hi, it's Google here, say cheese everybody!"] might not suffice.'

Quite. But in a way the issue is not whether this Google innovation is permitted or not, but the general direction we're headed and the role Google might play in our collective future. Last week I wrote about the legal ruling which compelled Google to hand over to Viacom its computer logs of every single viewing of a YouTube video, including those by UK residents. The privacy implications of that ruling have since been mitigated by agreement that the data can be 'anonymised' by Google before handover. But, again, the direction is towards a world in which everything we do is monitored and logged - mostly by one company.

Google's mission, according to its corporate website, is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. What we perhaps haven't fully realised is that these guys really mean it. Their ambition is at least as megalomaniacal as Bill Gates's vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. So it's time we started thinking about what a world dominated by Google would be like. As it happens, some people have - and they've been publishing the results on YouTube. Then pour yourself a stiff drink.

john.naughton@observer.co.uk

You can suffer more than culture shock when holidaying abroad: there is a risk of electric shock too if you take your home-bought gadgets with you or are using foreign electrical goods bought from back-street stores.

Most travellers know that plugging in a hairdryer in Helsinki or an iPod charger in India requires an adaptor, but that is not the only consideration, says the Electrical Safety Council charity (ESC). Some adapters are not up to the job, especially for appliances that need an earth connection, such as hairdryers and steam irons. If you are packing electrical items this summer, look for the safety standard BS5733 on any adapter and always buy from a reputable source, preferably in the UK.

The perils of buying electrical equipment in foreign countries from uncertain sources were highlighted by the case of seven-year-old Connor O'Keefe, who was electrocuted on a family holiday to Thailand in December 2006. He was playing with his Game Boy, which was plugged into a faulty charger bought in Thailand.

Haidee Ryan, campaign manager at the ESC, says: 'Travellers should check ahead and also be vigilant at their destination, especially in Third World countries. Make sure there are no bare wires or light fittings without bulbs and report anything unusual like equipment that is giving off a buzzing sound or a burning smell. '

If the country you are visiting has a different voltage (this can vary from 100 to 240 volts; in the UK it's 230 volts), you might need a voltage transformer or converter, unless the appliance or its power supply has dual voltage rates.

If the frequency (the speed of the current) differs from the UK's 50Hz, as it does in the US and Mexico, where it is 60Hz, your appliance might not work properly. According to the ESC, a 50Hz clock may run faster in these countries. Holidaymakers unsure of a country's voltage could look at a lightbulb, where the voltage is usually printed.

Electrical retailer Currys reports an increase in the number of customers with second homes abroad who are seeking advice on technical problems because they have kitted out their foreign property with equipment bought in the UK. The company says differing radio frequencies, manufacturer programming and unpredictable electrical power can render this equipment useless. Radios, DVD players and TVs can cause particular frustrations.

John Wright, electrical engineer for Currys, says: 'While with many household products it's just a matter of swapping the plugs, others may only offer limited use, or in some cases will not work at all. People who are purchasing products to take abroad should always check with the manufacturer or store so they are not left disappointed.' Homeowners are also advised that adapters are for temporary use only. 'If you are living abroad you should make longer-term arrangements.'

Currys warns shoppers that digital radios may let them down abroad: just 20 per cent of stations in France and Spain and 5 per cent in Italy transmit at the required frequency. Televisions more than five years old are unlikely to work, and even the newer models will offer limited access to digital services.

The hazards of using incompatible electrical equipment also face visitors to the UK. The ESC says fire services report a rise in the number of incidents caused by visitors using the wrong plugs, particularly eastern Europeans using two-pin plugs in three-pin sockets and jamming a screwdriver into the third hole.

Phil Buckle, director of the ESC, says: 'While two-pin plugs are safe to use in their countries of origin, they are not designed for direct use with UK electrical installations.' He said eastern Europeans could easily convert their appliances for safe use in the UK with a three-pin conversion plug.

Time-wasting is not just an irritating habit. It is an affliction that ruins millions of lives and often requires therapy and other treatment for sufferers, psychologists have warned.

According to new research, one person in five now suffers from the problem so badly that their careers, relationships and health are threatened. Many researchers blame computers and mobile phones for providing too many distractions for people.

'The subject is seen as joke,' said Professor Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University in Chicago. 'But the social and economic implications are huge. These people need therapy. They need to change the way they act and think.'

Ferrari says that chronic procrastination is now so serious a condition it needs to be recognised by clinicians. In a study to be published later this year, he estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of people are chronic procrastinators. 'We now have data on 4,000 people, and it doesn't seem to matter what age you are, or your sex or background.'

He has devised a questionnaire to help diagnose the condition, which he says is 'much more common than depression or common phobias'. Procrastination also has knock-on effects - it encourages depression, lowers self-esteem, causes insomnia, and indirectly affects health by discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor. Sufferers are also more likely to have accidents at home involving unmended appliances.

Cognitive psychologist Professor John Maule, of Leeds University's business school, agreed that a significant proportion of the population were prone to procrastination, and argued that mood changes - particularly depression - might be to blame.

Research by Professor Piers Steel from Calgary University indicates that the incidence of chronic procrastination has risen dramatically in recent decades, from one person in 20 to one in four, as new technology has come to dominate our lives. Even the beeps notifying the arrival of email are said to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.

Ferrari, however, is less convinced that new technology is to blame for time-wasting. 'People have wasted time for centuries,' he said. 'Lots of people, particularly people who often have to work under time constraints, put work off because they kid themselves that they work best when under pressure, when there's a deadline.

'Studies have shown this isn't true. They're conveniently forgetting the times when it all went horribly wrong - and selectively remembering the odd occasion when things went well under severe time pressure.'

Once, humans probably did have stronger excuses for delaying chores that didn't need immediate attention, say brain scientists such as Alan Sanfey at Arizona University, whose work has shed light on the evolutionary origins of procrastination.

It appears that the brain is divided into two parts. One triggers 'automatic responses' which take precedence over everything else - such as fleeing sabre-toothed tigers. The other governs 'deliberate responses' - writing that report due next week or booking a visit to the optician. Evolution has dictated that the former take precedence. Today there aren't any sabre-toothed tigers, but we still put things off.

Almost a million UK households could access websites known to host images of child sex abuse despite a government pledge made two years ago to stop access to paedophile sites.

Last night a coalition of leading children's charities, including Barnardo's, the NSPCC and National Children's Homes, described the situation as 'completely unacceptable'. They have written to the Home Office minister in charge of crime reduction, Vernon Coaker, urging him to take immediate steps to ensure all telecom companies offering internet access block customers from being able to see images that in some cases show children as young as a year old being sexually abused.

Around 5 per cent of consumer broadband connections can access the images because their internet service providers (ISPs) chose not to subscribe to a scheme introduced by the Internet Watch Foundation to bar known paedophile websites.

The list is available to all ISPs and companies such as BT and Vodafone have signed up to take it. Updated twice daily, it contains between 800 and 1,200 live child-abuse websites at any one time. But the revelation that some internet companies are refusing to sign up to the list undermines a key government pledge to tackle paedophile material on the internet.

In May 2006, Coaker said he hoped all internet companies would sign up to the scheme and that, if there was not 100 per cent take-up by the end of last year, the government would look to compel the industry to 'face up to its responsibilities'.

In their letter to Coaker, the children's charities said it was now time for the government 'to draw a line under this issue' by getting 100 per cent compliance from the industry.

Volvo S80

£20,304

Miles per gallon: 49.6

Seats: 5

Good for: born agains

Bad for: porn barons

There are many thoughts that could flit across the mind of the owner of a forecourt-fresh motor: the smell of the leather, the glint of the polished bonnet, the lure of the long road ahead, the carpets still free of fromage frais and breadsticks. But few will be thinking of the disposal of their new car at the end of its life. And yet we should. An EC report has stated that by 2015 all cars should be 85 per cent recyclable and reusable. From material selection in the manufacturing and low-emission motoring, to its final journey to the knacker's yard, carmakers are being forced to consider a vehicle's entire life impact.

Over at Volvo, they didn't feel the need to wait another seven years to meet these targets. Like the class swot who hands in his homework days before it's due, Volvo made these grades in 2002. It's all part of the marque's 'clean inside and out' programme. This year its factories in Sweden and Belgium switched to green electricity in the form of hydropower; the steel, iron and aluminium used in construction is all from recycled sources, wherever possible - the plastic battery covers of old Volvos become the wheel-arch liners on new models for instance.

Now, the brand's top executive saloon is going green from cradle to grave. The comfy and classy S80 was 'refreshed' last year, and has now taken possession of a super-efficient 2-litre diesel engine, enabling it to do almost 50mpg, compared with the piffling 23.7mpg of the top-of-the-range, all-wheel drive

V8 version. A pair of constipated Friesians would produce more effluvium than this eco-conscious executive runaround.

The focus on cleanliness takes its toll on performance - the S80 is so unengaging it makes eating a bowl of noodles with your dentures out seem like an adrenaline sport. But if arriving safely at your destination - perhaps enjoying a lower-back massage and the benefits of a cool-ventilated seat - take priority, then the S80 can't be beat.

Safety is a mantra for Volvo and the cars take a zero-tolerance approach to danger. The Blind Spot Information System uses warning lights in the A-pillars to alert you when an overtaking vehicle is in your blind spot; Adaptive Cruise Control keeps you at a safe distance from the car in front, and a Personal Car Communicator has a transponder with a heartbeat sensor to let you know if someone is still in your Volvo after the alarm has been activated. The alternative being that it is a pulse-less zombie who has stolen it.

Volvo has also announced plans to introduce a City Safety system, which at speeds of under 19mph uses laser-sensor technology to detect vehicles up to 10 metres in front. If the gap between you and the car in front closes and you remain inactive, the car applies the brakes automatically. (Surveys show three-quarters of all collisions take place at speeds of under 18mph, and in half of them there is evidence the driver has not braked at all before.) It's all part of Volvo's plan to keep you - and its cars - out of that graveyard, no matter how eco-friendly it may be.

martin.love@observer.co.uk

It seemed an ordinary day at Google's offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Until an alarming discrepancy glued eyes to computer screens. Google Hot Trends is a feature intended to give 'a snapshot of what's on the public's collective mind', according to the internet giant, by displaying the fastest-rising search terms on the web. Top of the list was not Batman, iPhone or sex. It was not a word at all. It was a swastika.

Somehow, the icon appropriated by Nazi Germany, not readily found on computer keyboards, had caught all-powerful Google napping. The company was forced to issue an apology over the failure of its automated system to 'identify and remove inappropriate or offensive material', leaving its engineers to manually take down the symbol after two hours.

How did the swastika get there? Why did so many people search for it at the same time? It was a demonstration of how peculiar fads, jokes or videos can come out of nowhere and run riot across the web. Such phenomena are known as 'memes' - cultural fragments that catch someone's eye, get forwarded to friends and spread like a virus.

The invisible hand behind many memes, apparently including the googled swastika, is a website called 4chan. From semi-literate cats to the 'ironic' comeback of singer Rick Astley, this online community is building a reputation as a nursery of all that is weird and wacky and likely to be landing in your inbox tomorrow.

Suddenly, 4chan's elusive creator found himself the subject of articles in two of America's heavyweight publications: Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, which named him as Christopher Poole, a New Yorker who was only 15 when, with the help of his mother's credit card, he launched 4chan from his bedroom five years ago. Time hailed him as the 'Master Of Memes' and described 4chan as 'the wellspring from which a lot of internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles'.

But how does it work? 4chan began as a simple message board with pictures and text. Anyone could contribute on any subject, posting a photograph of their pet, sounding off about a politician, debating the merits of a player. Sometimes other users will reply and begin a strand of conversation. The images and comments now appear under 44 topic headings ranging from fashion, sports and video games to weapons, the paranormal and 'sexy beautiful women' - the most popular by a long way is 'Random'. Inspired by a forum in Japan, the site has an unpolished retro look, as rough and ready as a scrapbook. It is an online community at its purest and rawest, the antithesis of polished networks such as Facebook: 4chan is like a brick wall where people can daub graffiti without fear of a comeback.

Child pornography is banned, but otherwise there are few rules. Some posts are gloriously childish and nonsensical. Others can be racist, homophobic and misogynistic and peppered with four-letter words. Unlike most social networks, no one has to register a name or sign in. Consequently, the community has been described as a lawless Wild West of the web, a place of uninhibited bawdiness and verbal violence. A teenager in Texas posted a photograph of hoax pipe bombs and a threat to blow up his school on the anniversary of 9/11, but another user contacted police and the teenager was arrested.

However, the free-for-all has also been liberating, turning 4chan into an ideas laboratory and unleashing a ferocious creative force. Though most of what appears soon vanishes and is forgotten, the stuff that survives can easily jump to the wider web community and 'go viral', passing from person to person across the world. It is an ability envied by advertising agencies, which have long sought to drum up publicity by word of mouth or now through viral videos of their own, relying on users to do the work for them. But 4chan just does it for fun with the help of a big army of users: 8.5 million page views a day and 3.3 million visitors a month. The swastika was one such stunt. It appears that a post on 4chan instructed people to Google '...#21328;'. When thousands did, they discovered that it was a piece of code which, when processed by a web browser, translates into a swastika. Their collective curiosity unwittingly sent the symbol soaring to the top of Google's Hot Trends.

One of 4chan's biggest hits is a prank known as 'bait-and-switch'. You receive a link to an 'amazing website'. But when you click, it is in fact a link to a music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit single 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. It is estimated that more than 10 million people have been 'rickrolled'. The first such joke on 4chan was 'duckrolling', in which a link to a popular celebrity or news item would instead lead to a photomontage of a duck with wheels.

In another parade of silliness, 4chan users began a Saturday ritual of posting pictures of cats, for no particular reason except that they could. This soon became known as 'Caturday', with humorous phrases posted beside the so-called 'LOLcats' - now the subject of LOLcat T-shirts, buttons and fridge magnets. When a plump grey cat appeared with the caption 'I can has cheezburger?', it caught the imagination of a man in Hawaii and became the subject of his blog, icanhascheezburger.com. The blog was sold for about $2m (£1m).

Last week 4chan was at it again. The site rallied users to search for 'Scientology is a cult' and, written upside down, the words 'fuck you Google'. Again, both leapt to the top of Google Hot Trends before being removed. 4chan users were also accused of attacking Habbo, a virtual world for children, by flooding it with avatars made to look like black men wearing Armani suits. In a previous raid, they lined up avatars to form the shape of a swastika.

Poole had never revealed his identity until Time and the Wall Street Journal came calling. When contacted by The Observer through email, he replied: 'I am extremely busy this week and will not have time to conduct a phone interview.' He suggested questions by email but did not respond to them. His message was signed 'moot', a code name he uses on 4chan for reasons no one has yet fathomed. 'My personal private life is very separate from my internet life,' he told Time. 'There's a firewall in between.'

Poole set up 4chan because he wanted to share his passion for Japanese comics and TV rather than as a moneyspinner, which is just as well. Although the site is popular, its scurrilous reputation makes it difficult to sell advertising space. Poole said: 'That's been an uphill battle for me personally. My biggest time spent has been convincing companies in marketing potential in 4chan but no one sees eye to eye.'

For now he will have to be content with shaping western culture as the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of. 'Coarse as it is, 4chan has no rival as a hothouse for memes; they're bred and refined, and then they can escape and run amuck through the culture at large,' Time enthused. 'For better or for worse, this is what the counterculture looks like today: raw, sarcastic, bare of any social or political agenda but frequently funny as hell.'

A virulent infection is destroying the audio and videotapes once used to capture important moments of family life and great historic events. The fungal blight, or 'tape mould', has already ruined thousands of miles of audio and video tape in Britain and, according to specialist restorers, much more is likely to be deteriorating, unobserved, in storage. The infection of VHS cassettes and of the audio cassettes popular in the 1980s and 1990s is increasing at an alarming rate.

'We used to get around one or two cases a year, and now about 10 per cent of all the work that is sent to us is mouldy. But sadly there is nothing we can do about it here,' said Chris Frear, who runs a restoration business in Scotland.

The wet summers of the last three years have taken the problem to epidemic proportions.

'It has got to the stage that we open up all the packages of tapes we are sent in a separate room, away from our playing equipment and then we wash and disinfect our hands, because it is so contagious. If it got on to the tape heads in our machines, it would spread everywhere. It's almost like the measles.'

Tapes of family footage stored inside cardboard boxes in damp domestic cellars or lofts are at particular risk, but curators of larger private and public archives are also often unaware that damp conditions or temperature variations can allow one infected item to decimate an entire collection.

'We do see tapes with fungal growth, and if we catch it early enough we can often save the recording,' said Nigel Bewley, head sound engineer at the British Library Sound Archive in London. 'We use a quarantine room and send mouldy tape away to be sterilised first, often through a process of irradiation. The danger is that live spores could reach the rest of our collection.'

Video and audio tape is made from cellulose coated with ferric oxide, but, just like the sticky tape on an old parcel, it dries out and becomes brittle with age. Modern techniques can combat this ageing process, allowing the tapes to be digitally copied, but mould that has eaten into a tape is defeating conservationists. Typically tapes with the fatal fungus look as if they are covered with a fine white dust.

'Mould is a much more serious thing than snapped or worn tapes, and it's heartbreaking to have to ring up a customer who was so thrilled to have at last found a missing tape, just to tell them its unplayable,' said Beth Frear, who works with her son in their family business, Precious Voices, based in Dumfries and Galloway.

'A typical museum collection is just boxes on a shelf or in an ill-ventilated store cupboard. Few curators realise the material is degrading all the time and think that it will keep until some miraculous budget bonus will allow them to digitise it,' said Frear.

Yet the value of preserving personal recordings may be impossible to estimate. 'It's hard to pick out special examples - but there was a gentleman in the British diplomatic service who had been under siege in his residence during the partition of Pakistan into the present Pakistan and Bangladesh. Each day he had rung around his British friends to see if they were still alive and recorded their phone conversations on his reel-to-reel machine. It's all terribly stiff upper-lipped, but there, blow by blow, is a daily account of who was attacked and who had been mortared in the previous 24 hours.'

The Frears have rescued many aural histories, including the account of the life of a stallion walker who led a shire stallion from farm to farm to breed the horses for ploughing and a recording of a Scottish kippering girl who tells of her gruelling work in the 1870s and 1880s, following the herring fleet as it moved south each year from Aberdeen to Lowestoft.

'Just in the last few days we had our first birth recording,' said Frear. 'It was taped in Brazil in the 1960s and is a blow by blow account of the journey to hospital, the birth of the baby and its first cries.'

The British Library Sound Archive advises that all stored tapes, audio, visual and computer, should be kept in the dark, away from heat sources and with no extreme temperature fluctuations.

Save your souvenirs

VHS and audio tape should not be stored in:
· garden sheds
· lofts, cellars or anywhere where the temperature fluctuates

Tapes should be kept:
· in the dark
· away from direct heat sources
· labelled in a cool cupboard that is heated during the winter

How to deal with tape mould
· Look for a fine white dust
· Don't blow it away across the rest of your collection
· Don't play the damaged tape (you could infect the machine)
· Don't throw away mouldy cardboard casings or surrounding storage boxes without noting down the details of the recording, such as the date, location and names
· Do not place near other newer tapes
· Wash your hands thoroughly after touching infected tape
· Send partially damaged tapes for professional sterilisation (either through irradiation or in an oxygen vacuum). The dead spores can then be delicately brushed away. The tape should be cleaned with swansdown, which is a lint-free cloth