IT SHOULD have been so simple. On Friday night, having watched Led Bib and Chik Budo play a brain-scrambling London Jazz Festival gig at the Luminaire in Kilburn, my friend Seb and I hatched a meek plan: head back home to Hackney for a quiet pint before bed.

"I know!" I said. "Instead of getting the Jubilee Line all the way to Baker Street, catching the Circle Line to Liverpool Street and finally making the tortuous journey to Hackney, let’s get the Overground!"

The Overground, sharp-eyed Londoners will have noticed, has recently made a surprise appearance on the tube map, a dark orange worm conveniently linking the extremities of north London. A neat advertising campaign, packaging the service like a Hornby train set, averts attention from the fact that the line has always been there, and was formerly known as the Silverlink.

The Silverlink, notoriously, was the most useless, least manned train line in all of London, still serviced by mule-drawn cart until 1995. But surely, we thought, given the eye-catching campaign, TfL must have revamped it accordingly, and at least phased out steam by now.

But no. The last train to Dalston, we were informed by a scrappy timetable, had left at the staggeringly early time of 11.20pm. On a Friday night!

So we wandered to the underground, and made the unhappy odyssey detailed above. By the time we reached Hackney we were thirsty indeed.

But the pub on the corner by the station was no longer there. Nor were any of the binge drinkers who have apparently flourished since the change in the licensing laws, and nor indeed was there any pub, restaurant or café open in this usually busy part of town that might have allowed us in to enjoy our quiet consolation. Except, we remembered, the Dolphin - a rather yukky sweat-pit that lay a 20 minute walk and a £5 entrance fee away.

Something like this seems to happen almost every weekend, in whichever part of town I find myself. At no time is the lie about London being a 24 hour city more apparent than at shortly after 11pm on a Friday night. Our new all hours culture has been blamed for everything from mob violence to a decline in morals. But I'm damned if I've ever seen much evidence of it existing at all.

En route to the Dolphin, Seb told me he knows the publicist who was charged with coming up with the concept of 24-Hour London. "So what did he actually set up?" I wondered. "Nothing at all", Seb replied, "he just had to promote the idea of London as a 24-hour city."

With scarcely any venues finding it viable to open late, this strikes me as nothing less than doublethink - suspiciously similar to the kind of doublethink that trumpets a new railway which is precisely as disfunctional as the old one. On a bitter November night, hot air does little to keep one warm.

What is this, nestling in the lining of my satchel, a secret pocket, an alternate dimension I have carried for months without an inkling of its existence? Why it is a set ouf house keys I had long ago lost and given up finding again! But hang on - what's that wire? Oh. My. God. It's a set of headphones. And what's that at the end of them? It's my cocking iPod.

Yes, that's right, despite having moaned last week that I had lost it, despite accusing some imaginary bastard of stealing it, despite greeting each commiseration with a stoical sigh, despite all this I was carrying the stupid little thing around with me the whole stupid time. I hereby hang my head, albeit while listening to Primal Scream's Movin' On Up (I was lost, now I'm found).

This leaves me in a quandary: Christmas lists to rewrite, telethons to be cancel. For all those who have donated to my iPod Appeal (registered charity #43109670), I promise I will pass the cash on to a worthy cause. When "Victor Victor" sent me an email last week saying "Your column is a load of shit. Seriously", little did I know how right he was.

The crowd for Arcade Fire's triumphant set at Alexandra Palace on Sunday night was strangely subdued, not the usual maelstrom of elbows and boots.

In fact, looking around, it was clear the Canadian band's bombastic music hit the assembled mass in a subtler way. They hadn't come to an Arcade Fire gig to toss plastic cups of cider in the air and jump up and down. They had come to stand in numb awe and shed a tear as half-forgotten feelings stir within. Everyone was doing it. My friend Jack summed it up nicely in a text, post-show: "Good emoting with you".

It happens all the time to me these days. Whilst I cannot remember the last time I cried at anything that, like, actually happened in my actual life, I find myself constantly welling up in London's auditoria.

It happened at Shepherd's Bush Empire the week before, as I watched my favourite band, The National. And it happened when I went with my girlfriend to see Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden. Something about the way Edward Watson (the blinking man's Carlos Acosta) danced around the tiny Leanne Benjamin in the seduction scene brought back the flush of first love: I was off.

It nearly happened, too, as I watched the horribly sentimental Shadowlands at Wyndham's Theatre, a show precision-tooled to set stiff upper lips quivering. Only poor Charles Dance's climactic speech was overshadowed by cries of "Whoah Johnny Johnny" from the pub next door: England had just beaten France in the rugby. I was unconverted.

My inner hooligan tells me I should learn to release my emotions in a more manly way: punching someone in the neck, perhaps. However, so widespread is the emoting reflex among men nowadays, I have few qualms about admitting to all of this.

Part of it is, no doubt, the result living in such a cosseted, mediated world. Sometimes it takes an Arcade Fire song to pull you out of it. And part of it is simply growing up: I'm sure the advanced years of opera audiences is less to do with the expense than the fact that the melodramatic storylines only truly appeal to those with a few decades worth of regrets behind them.

There is a fine line between mawk and the superior stuff (come to think of it, Keane make me want to punch someone in the neck, namely that singer of theirs). But without succumbing to cheap sentiment, I think it would be more honest to shift the focus. The official way of valuing a piece of art is in terms of cash: album sales, auction prices, box office receipts. But would you not be rather hear that Charles Saatchi had broken down and wept at an art student's show, rather than simply paid a million pounds for it? I know which would impress me more.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone - my iPod has been stolen, and I must turn to WH Auden's dreadful eulogy to express my woe. (And before you chide me for calling Auden dreadful, mark you the next line: "Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone". How old was Auden when he wrote that? Eight?)

But who cares? My black, 30 gigabyte, 5th generation videopod - my north, my south, my east, my west - went missing last Wednesday and I am bereft.

I have been through all the phases: denial, anger, depression. Last week's launch of the new iPhone could not have been more cruel in its timing. All those gleeful consumers, emerging from the Apple store, holding their expensive trophies aloft - if they only knew what a fragile, ephemeral thing they have in their hands!

What is it about this pretty little box that so stole the heart of this Luddite? I have a pathological fear of telephones; I once had a fist fight with a DVD player. But despite resisting the iPod for a long time, I grew deeply attached when I did succumb.

Aside from the expense - that's £180 down the crapper and no, it wasn't bloody insured - it's the amount of love I poured in that makes losing it so miserable. I had painstakingly filled those 30 gigabytes of memory. Will the light-fingered scoundrel who stole it appreciate the quirks of my playlist? Will they work through all 50 episodes of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour? Will they admire the B-sides of the National, the obscure snippets of French electro? Or will they get home, wipe the memory and fill it up with 50 Cent?

We had our arguments. It went into sulks and crashed. But I learnt how to massage it back to life with a judicious combination of buttons. And then I would always be rewarded - it would drop into a random playlist a song so ingeniously apt, I wondered if it didn't know me better than I knew myself.

How to move on? I have taken to using a massive old dictaphone for my ambulant musical needs. This has its charms - it has reacquainted me with a drawer-full of old compilation tapes - but the sound is awful and it looks like a Sputnik.

I cannot help noticing one thing though. Since she has gone, I have taken to playing my guitar again, something I haven't done with any great zeal since about two years ago - exactly the time the iPod stepped into my life in the first place. I am now channelling the thought that once went into compiling playlists into composing melodies. It's a small consolation - but when those iPhone owners find themselves mugged at the bus-stop, they might choose to replace it with, say, a ukelele. At least, in their pain, they would have something to write a song about.