If you’re the kind of person who, when walking or driving through town, spots a car registration plate with ‘ASD’, ‘HLM’, ‘SXL’ or ‘CFP’ and it sends a little shiver of recognition through your body, then please feel free to read on. If you’re not, then smile kindly at me and cross over to the other side of the street.

If I can’t sleep, I’m not the sort of person who has much success with counting sheep, but nothing keeps the mind ticking over nicely until Lethe finally sets to work, than casting my thoughts back to the days when record numbers meant something.

It’s tempting to think that it all went to the dogs with the demise of the LP in the mid-1980s: record numbers – which we actually used! – had a logic all of their own. What could be more disarming than HMV’s front-line ‘ASD’? ‘A Stereo Disc’ couldn’t be simpler; a real example of that awful expression ‘like it says on the tin’. You could tell so much from just a trio of letters and three numbers. When the CD arrived, you could still glean quite a lot from the combination – PolyGram’s suffixes were reasonably eloquent with G standing for DG, P for Philips and D for Decca, and then an H meant full-price, M meant mid-price and often B was for budget. But then back in those days, the companies would go to elaborate lengths to persuade as to buy the same old recordings over and over again. I didn’t mind because it was done with such style – would having Herbert von Karajan’s signature really persuade us to buy his 1962 Beethoven Ninth yet again? Probably, as our previously acquired LP was beginning to sound a little ratty.

Nowadays, record numbers have virtually lost their meaning. If you try to search Amazon or iTunes with one of them you won’t get very far. And though that superb retailer Presto Classical features the numbers quite prominently, do we ever use them? I, for one, always search using as few words as I need – ‘Kopatchinskaja’, ‘Ligeti’, ‘Naïve’ would find me the 2013 Gramophone Recording of the Year with ease. We may not need them, but I have to admit a little nostalgia when a car with an obvious Decca full-price LP number drives past…