So long as you realise you didn't need to do the deal, fogie. I recently gave away an old noarrow-bore trombone (oosey & Hawkes) - a pig of a thing I was glad to be rid of. (But not as glad as I was to be rid of the Otto Langey tutor manual that went with it - nearly an inch thick of tedious scales and exercises that I had to grind through in childhood.

I went to eBay about three weeks ago, also in search of an instrument. I wasn't sure if I was already registered from way back, so I entered my email address and was told there was no password associated with it. I then started to register but backed off when I saw their uncompromising terms about use of my email addresses - as I now remember doing on an earlier occasion.

As a direct consequence (or so it seems) of this tentative sortie into eBay, I am now for the first time in eight years plagued with spam, some of it addressing me as "eBay user" etc. Is this par for the course?