First inflation was the bogey. Then deflation. Now there are already the first vague stirrings of inflation making a come back.

How come? Nothing to do with the underlying state of the economy, which is as bombed out as ever.

No, it is collapse in the value of sterling and the knock-on effect that has for imported goods that is just starting to make itself felt.

Anything made in Japan - and that includes a huge proportion of the TVs and cameras we buy in Britain - is now earning their manufacturers only half as many yen as 18 months ago.

Even with falling costs of production that cannot go on forever. It won't happen immediately but as the boss of John Lewis Andy Street admitted to me, it seems a racing cert that some of that will have to be passed on to consumers come next Christmas.

Talking of racing, Hornby, the makers of Scalextric and the world's best toy train sets admitted today that the fall in the pound is killing its profit margin and that higher prices may be inevitable.

Another high profile victim is the fashion group Mosaic, which owns the Karen Millen and Oasis brands among others. It lost all its currency hedging cover when the Icelandic banking system went down and is now horribly exposed.

The trouble is that many of its rivals will have protection in place, probably through to the summer. It will impossible to push through prices increases when competitors are still discounting like crazy to keep shoppers coming through the doors.

There are other inflationary risks. At some point the oil price will bounce, possibly triggered by some nasty international incident affecting one of the major producing countries.

Although interest rates are likely to remain low for some time to come, when they do start to rise many home owners will be saddled with horrible interest rates. The average tracker is currently at 2.36 per cent above the Bank of England base rate. That's fine when the base rate is 1.5 per cent. But if it returns to more historically normal levels of say 4 to 5 per cent that translates to an mortgage rate of around 7 per cent or more.

There are so many bear traps in this unprecedented downturn that the authorities hardly know which way to look. They had hoped that inflation would not be one of them. But the chances are it will be.

It dawned on me yesterday that it is almost half a lifetime since I bought my first LP. (Kids, this was the recorded music technology format squeezed in between wax cylinders and compact discs - or as my eldest son calls them, "those really big black CDs.")

It was, and I'm not afraid to admit it, Abba's fourth album Arrival. This seminal moment came in the post-drought Autumn of 1976 and funded by a £2 record voucher received for my 11th birthday.

While most of my school friends were casting aside aside the prog rock and glam favourites of the early Seventies in favour of the nascent Punk revolution I was very much an Abba man - or boy.

(It could have been worse, my first single - like an LP but smaller, children - was Boney M's double A side Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring, bought mainly because two chart releases on one disc seemed really good value for money.)

Even at their mid Seventies peak Abba was not a particularly cool choice for a lad growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in, er, leafy Cookham in Berkshire. Don't sneer, it could be pretty nasty around chucking out time at the Copper Kettle tea rooms, actually. The Clash, the Damned and the Sex Pistols had a much better playground image.

But great bands though they were and important figures though John Lydon, Joe Strummer are, (no, not Captain Sensible) they have all been eclipsed by the naff Swedish quartet. Remarkably, it is Benny and Bjorn who rank alongside Lennon & McCartney and Jagger & Richards as the greatest song writing duos of the Sixties and Seventies.

And I still love the music dammit. It is not supposed to be like this. You are meant to grow out of your pre-pubescent musical choices and graduate to trad jazz and Gregorian chants. Like few other bands ever before them, with the possible exception of the Beatles, their music is starting to leach down into the next generations. And up into the one above. We watched the Mamma Mia DVD on Christmas Day and the age range of the viewers was 16 to 82. I wanted the Singalong version but perhaps sensibly was outvoted. There are limits.

Mamma Mia is now officially the most successful ever movie at the British box office and it is by far the best selling DVD. So it's not just me.

Somewhere in the attic that dusty old Arrival CD still nestles in a box between Pinky and Perky's Greatest Hits and the Geoff Love Orchestra Plays the Bond Themes. Naff it may have been but there cannot be many debut album buys from the Seventies that have stood the test of time like Arrival.

But even the greats have their off days. Even as an 11 year old I cringed at the Side A excrescence of Scandinvian cheese entitled Dum Dum Diddle. How that got on the same collection as three classics of the quality of Dancing Queen, Knowing Me Knowing You and Money Money Money, only the great Swedes themselves will ever know.