Back soon

 

Hello readers. You'll be happy to know that my move to the Midlands is now complete. The dust isn't quite settled yet and there's a lot to sort out, and my wife and I were actually living out of bags in hotel rooms and AirBnBs for two months due to various agency and vendor driven issues, so it's been a complicated journey.

The next entry will go live on Sunday and I'll try to keep this blog updated as often as I can from then.

At the moment I'm looking forward to exploring my new town and the surrounding area, but some memories still nag at me. One thing I keep remembering about my last home is the fact that I lived only a short distance from a senior gentleman who always intrigued me. I'd generally pass his dwelling at night when I was giving my dog her evening walk; he lived in a pristine, modern ground-floor flat overlooking the beautiful award-winning local park. In the winter in particular I'd see him projected like a film through his window, illuminated by his overhead light. He was usually smartly dressed and wearing a hat, plucking vinyl from enormous, carefully catalogued shelves on his living room wall, often while settling down to enjoy a mug of coffee. I saw this evening routine of his dozens of times and through continued brief glimpses got more and more fascinated with his arrangement. 

He looked at least twenty years older than me and I'd walk past with frozen hands, jealous of the indoor warmth and his record collection, thinking to myself "What a brilliant retirement. What a fantastic place to live and wonderful things to fill the room with". Some people in the area would send out messages of their wealth and the fact they had done well in their lives through their large Victorian houses and new cars with personalised registration plates. Me? I always thought this man had got it right and nailed my own aspirations for retirement. I always hoped that one day before I left I'd see him out and about and we'd somehow have a chat about music, but it never happened. So I have no idea what he was listening to, whether it was classical, jazz, soul, funk, classic rock or even just the world's biggest collection of James Last records (though that would have been interesting too). 

I'm pretty damn sure his knowledge was vaster than mine, though, and I'm also sure that if he wrote a blog - and perhaps he did - the music would be an enviable selection and probably better, more carefully curated, than this one. It's inevitable. As I've established, he had at least twenty years on me, and I'm never going to catch up to that in any kind of one-on-one competition. 

I say this not because I'm fishing for compliments, but because it's both truthful and a clear reminder of what this blog is for. The reason I started this up nearly fifteen years ago was to share unusual finds with people, in the same manner I would with my friends in the old days when they had time to visit at all hours of the day and not just once a lunar cycle. It wasn't to strike a statement about my abilities as a collector (I'm more of an acquirer, really, sifting through endless bits of tat in the hope that some of them are interesting). So if you read this blog and think you could do better - and if you even feel moved to comment to that effect - my only advice would be to redirect your energy and just do it. The more the merrier, and in this day and age nobody is stopping you.

That said, it was a source of annoyance to me that in the rush of the house move a couple of blog entries got loose whcich had errors in their research, and I've since deleted one of them entirely. Getting facts about records and the artists who recorded them wrong is small beer in the grand scheme of things, but disinformation of any kind online always irritates the shit out of me, and I don't want to be one of the many people out there contributing to that. So in future, if I don't have sufficient time to do a reasonable job on this, I might pause for a brief while. And if I don't actually know something for certain, caveats will be stated in the entries as per usual. 

And with that, up and on.

Enjoy the video, by the way. It features both the best of the Midlands and the finest moment of Stephanie de Skyes. [Citation needed]