I realised the other night, as I was waiting for Nagi Maehashi’s Vietnamese pork dish to caramelise and singing a London Grammar song into my spatula, that both of my last two blog posts have mentioned music.

It felt like a sign. Time for my music and snobbery piece to break free of the drafts folder, expand beyond its initial brief, and become a celebration of music in all its forms.

Because there has always been a hierarchy in music – a sense that some bands are cool and others deeply uncool. I have spent most of my life cheerfully on the wrong side of that divide.

And honestly? I think I’ve had more fun because of it.

In the earlier years of my childhood, growing up on Harris, the selection of music on offer was limited. I had a dozen or so cassette tapes that I played on repeat. Kylie Minogue. Jason Donovan. Runrig, Clannad and Capercaillie.

That core music library was supplemented by the occasional snippet of Fleetwood Mac or Tracy Chapman from my mum’s collection, and the occasional blast of Kim Wilde or AC/DC from my brother’s bedroom – and that was about the extent of it.

I know this makes me sound like a fogie, but I genuinely don’t think the generations that came after mine realise how much easier the internet has made access to music, film, books and every other kind of culture.

In some ways, that’s a truly wonderful thing. What magic, to be able to find just about any song from history with a quick online search.

But I also wonder if, for all its benefits, our endless access to music has robbed us of a certain kind of anticipation – an anticipation that was an integral part of the joy.

The collective experience of listening to the Top 40 every Sunday night to see if your favourites had climbed the charts. (Although let’s be honest, as a Runrig fan that wasn’t really on the cards…). The whole family setting in for Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening. The agony of trying to record songs off the radio and cutting the DJ off at exactly the right moment.

And then there were the small joys: discovering the B side of a new single, poring over the lyrics in the cassette liner, and choosing which dozen CDs would make the cut for a long bus journey.

I also don’t think current music fans realise what a different level of access they have to their idols. Sure, there were fan clubs, where you would send off your cheque for £12.99 and wait three months for a membership card and a poster to arrive in the mail. If you were really lucky, you’d get a signed photo too.

But that was very different to the possibilities now offered through social media, where it feels like there’s a far more direct relationship between an artist and their fandom.

When we left Harris, we moved to a small town in the Scottish Borders where there was a newsagent – John Menzies, later WH Smith – where I could browse the albums every day after school. I’d also make a start on reading the magazines, and rarely got told off by the staff because they knew I’d end up buying them eventually anyway. Smash Hits was the best of the bunch, although I spent all my pocket money (and a bit extra) on whatever was available.

The first band I really, truly loved were Take That. I had the tapes, and then the CDs. I had the videos, the annuals, the stickers on my schoolbooks, the posters on my walls, and all their lyrics memorised by heart… a heart that then broke when my fave, Robbie, left the band.

We were on holiday in Greece when that happened, and I returned home to Scotland completely unaware. Funnily enough, the good people of Paros didn’t care as much about Take That as I did. There was a letter waiting at home from my brother, letting me know the news, and for a good few hours I thought he was playing a prank on me. But my first trip into WH Smith and a glance at the cover of all the music mags was enough to let me know it was true.

Robbie was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

But heartbreak fades, and teenage girls are resilient creatures.

For all the tears that were shed in the summer of 1995, it was only in retrospect that I realised Take That had been the support act. The real stars of my teenage years were waiting in the wings.

Boyzone.

Dear God, I loved those five very ordinary Irish boys with every ounce of my little heart. There was nothing – NOTHING – I didn’t know about them. I collected facts about Ronan and co like other girls collected trinkets. Three decades later I can still tell you all of their birthdays, and what a feckin’ useless piece of information that is to still have rattling around inside my brain.

Boyzone were the first band I ever saw live in concert, at the SECC, and I missed most of their first song because I was sobbing with the overwhelm of it all.

(A dear friend recently took her daughter to see Stray Kids in London, and she said it was very much the same. There is something so HUGE about seeing a band live for the first time. It brings out ALL THE FEELINGS.)

I went on to see them another half dozen or so times, mostly in Glasgow but once in Newcastle, each time dragging my long-suffering mum along and making her hang around outside in the cold for hours in case we caught a glimpse of them heading in for a soundcheck. (We never did – although one time we met Nicky Byrne from Westlife, who looked a little bit like Ronan if you squinted hard enough…)

There was no inch of my bedroom wall that did not have Ronan Keating’s face plastered on it. Not a single piece of merch too tacky for me to buy. (I still have a Ronan necklace upstairs in a jewellery box.) Not a single school essay assignment that I didn’t somehow try and twist to include a mention of them.

A biography, you say? Of a historically important figure? How about the wee blonde bombshell from Dublin?

It is mortifying to look back on now… but only slightly.

Because what I really remember from that period was the absolute joy that came with it all.

They weren’t cool, Boyzone, even at the height of their success. I wasn’t winning any street cred in the hallways and corridors of my high school, where most folk had moved onto Britpop. The manufactured rivalry of Blur and Oasis. The female-fronted Sleeper and Elastica. The whinge of the Manic Street Preachers and the tedious, send-you-to-sleep drone of Ocean Colour Scene.

They may have been cool. But I was definitely having more fun. And I think when it comes to music that’s the only thing that matters.

I moved on again, of course. Because that is the other joy of music – the endless discovery and growth.

(Although, of course, moving on doesn’t always mean forgetting. Some songs stick around whether you want them to or not. 35 years after we first sang them at primary school assemblies, a friend and I still occasionally send each other text messages made entirely of lyrics from the Come and Praise hymn book or songs from our Year 7 production of Blastoff. It turns out that even the songs you don’t choose to keep can lodge themselves permanently in your brain.)

Anyway. By the final year of high school, while I still held a place in my heart for Ronan, I’d made space for other frontmen too. Joe Washbourn from Toploader. Brian Molko from Placebo. Fran Healy from Travis. Roddy Woomble from Idlewild. Huey Morgan from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. Paul Heaton from the Beautiful South.

The occasional glossy Boyzone poster came down, making space instead for a page or two ripped from Q or NME, Select or Melody Maker. I made a heap of pen pals, all found through ads in the back of these magazines. We would write endless letters, exchanging notes about our respective passions, and swapping articles, gossip and surplus-to-requirements merch.

There wasn’t a lot of live music in the Borders, so my friends and I would head up to Edinburgh for gigs at the Liquid Room or the Corn Exchange. And while the vibe was certainly different to the SECC – fewer glowsticks, less Impulse bodyspray – I still loved those concerts and everything they taught me about enjoying music as a communal activity instead of a solitary one.

Instead of me and my stereo in my bedroom, it was me and hundreds of other people, all jostling for a drumstick thrown into the crowd and leaving at the end of the night soaked in sweat and beer, covered in bruises and on the highest of highs.

At uni in Edinburgh, more of my bursary cheque was spent on CDs in Fopp on Cockburn Street (RIP) than on books in Blackwells. Quickly realising this wasn’t sustainable, I got involved with the student paper, and later a dedicated reviews magazine that published during the Edinburgh festival.

Not only did I get free press tickets, I also got to swank around with a lanyard, and even scored the occasional interview. When 21-year-old me caught up with Mark Owen for a chat in the Potterrow student union, 13-year-old me couldn’t believe her luck. He was both as tiny and as polite as I had always imagined, and it was completely underwhelming.

That was all great fun, for a few years, but eventually the shine wore off and I realised I’d rather be at home chilling with a book than catching the train to Glasgow to watch yet another mediocre indie band.

With that realisation – and with everything that followed: marriage, parenting, work – music really came full circle for me. Which is not to say that I don’t love a good concert. I do (as long as I get a seat and it’s over by 9.30).

But my love of music has become less of a public demonstration, and more of a private joy. I don’t need a necklace, or even a t-shirt these days, to feel like a proper fan.

I just need the car radio turned up loud so I can sing along, not really caring if it’s heavy metal or Christian rock.

I need the CD collection that still lingers on my shelves, despite repeated requests from DorkySon to sort through it and move some of it on.

(I will not!

I will not evict Michael Stipe or Neil Finn.

I will not evict the Windjammers, with our dear old friend Archie on the clarinet.

I will not evict Da Rosa, the soundtrack to my favourite Paris café.

I will not evict DorkyDad’s shelf of jazz and 60s rock.

I will not evict Fauré’s Pavane performed by the Wimbledon Choral Society – perhaps better known as the theme music for the BBC’s coverage of the 1998 World Cup.

And I will certainly not evict the great towering stack of mix CDs burned by friends.)

Most importantly, I need my crappy old in-ear headphones and the music library on my phone. The library is so big, and the phone so old, that every software update means deleting the whole thing and then downloading it all over again.

Along with that, I need a spatula to sing into.

Still not cool; still having fun.