If Music Be The Food Of Love....Then I'm On A Diet

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Yesterday (Monday) the wife had the day off. I was going to be working the afternoon/evening shift at work and she intended spending the afternoon before our daughter returned from school watching that Royal family drama on Netflix. The sort of show that should be grouped together under the heading "When women have control of the remote".

However for the morning she had an idea. She suggested that we go through our small number of cassette tapes and basically culling them to practically nothing.

The wife had a point. In the spare room there is above everything else gathering dust the only machine that could still use them. Bought decades ago and what was used to be called "a ghetto blaster". Laughable given that it had never seen anything remotely describable as a ghetto in its life. The cassettes had not been used in years and this cull would be a quick hit.

(As a quick aside alongside the blaster of the ghetto is a VHS recorder which is kept for exactly the same reason. However the process of conversion would be slower and, if we include the things that were recorded onto blank tapes, more expensive)

I have many books as I think you realise by now. But I don't have that many albums. Online use Amazon for the music I want to buy and Spotify as a sort of "try before you buy" process. I've sixteen full albums (as opposed to the odd individual tune...I'll come to that later) online and thirty two CDs.

Nowadays looking at my online and CD albums my tastes seem to focus on German classical (not operatic) music and what is lazily described as "easy listening" (it's a term I hate. It implies that orangutans could do it). Not I stress the sort of James Last style of getting a pop tune and ageing it but original tunes. Clearly it reflects that I'm not young anymore.

But the cassettes mainly come from a different time and a different me. Where I lived in London with my parents and the idea that all these years later I would be living in Wales would not have bothered to knock the door let alone entered my head.

The first to go are the blank tapes full of old radio shows. No point in keeping them now. What with podcasts and everything else you can get.

Some albums get ditched because I don't like (nor understand why I liked) them anymore. Spandau Ballet's greatest hits for example. Must have been drunk and didn't know it. Thank whatever Gods you believe in that Duran Duran never passed through this house.

Of course the internet means that you can ditch an entire cassette album and just put a couple of songs online. Heaven 17 and Swing Out Sister (because I'd a crush on Corinne Drewery with her Louise Brooks hairstyle) fall into that category.

I found myself losing interest in Sam Cooke (ditched) but realising I appreciate Diana Ross and Srevie Wonder more than in the eighties (to be kept with the intention of eventually having their music online).

Most of the classical music albums go (there's only about six) pointless to keep them. The Inspector Morse album goes because I now have it online. The funniest ones though now are the Wagner cassettes. Not so much a ring cycle as a mild wash as it's just about an hour or so of "highlights". Wagner Match of the Day style.

The last few cassettes I bought were bought when my wife and I started courting in the nineties. Bought them out of curiosity knowing that at the time I wouldn't understand a word. They were by Caryl Parry Jones and the girl pop group Eden. I'd like to get them online but might have to settle on getting the CD instead. Need to investigate further.

What seems not to be online is the album of Vivaldi Cello concertos played by Ofra Harnoy. Breaking the German rule re classical music I loved this album and was only one of two where I followed wife's example of getting CDs of her cassettes.

The other? Madness. The only cassette I've got that I want online and on CD. They could sing about laughter or despair and it would always be quality.

Until the next time.