As our weekend here is going to be entirely given over to Team Middemarch, today must be for some levity before the brougham trots in, and I need your help.
I have been reading Richard Mabey's perfect little book, The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn because I am even more heavily into noticing what is around me now. Therein five essays on the five senses and nature, and amongst many of the interesting points Richard Mabey makes is the way that senses can return you to a place...how a smell can transport you back in time to an event in the past, and how sounds can do likewise.
In fact he really means rural things like birdsong and nightingales and things in this context, but it works all ways I find.
Do you all have a cupboard full of these??
Recognise any from the blurry spines??
Funny, I can spot Kiln House by Fleetwood Mat immediately and I had forgotten I even had it, and I think that might be the Electric Light Orchestra right next to it and I'm sure that's a blue vinyl one...
If so do you have plans for your cupboard full of these??
And if so what are those plans??
Do you still play them??
Can you still play them??
I'm sorry to ask so many questions but I open the cupboard every so often
...have a look and wonder what on earth you are supposed to do with them nowadays??
I actually can't bear the thought of buying a turntable and listening to them all again but I ponder what I was doing when I bought Question of Balance by The Moody Blues (exams) or Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd (best forgotten)
It all reminds me of that essay in Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, 'Marrying Libraries' where she and her husband merge their books too, because the cupboard is a conglomeration of my brother's LPs which I inherited, so that explains Through the Past Darkly by The Rolling Stones (I just wouldn't have spent my hard-earned 24/- on that) Then I married Bookhound and he brought David Bowie and The Who into this relationship, all fortunately outnumbered by my Simon and Garfunkel and Tom Paxton and bolstered by a good showing of Stevie Wonder and a load of cheap classics, peculiar cupboardfellows all.
I don't actually even need to hear any of them; having played them so much they are too well imprinted on my cerebral cortex to ever forget.
...then I think it is time to get rid of the whole lot.
...then I think but what if one of them is worth a fortune.
...supposing that Tír na nÓg (did you see what I did there) was one of only about a hundred, which seems very possible because who were they??
So I close the cupboard until the next time, when I go through all this again but with a different selection of LPs.
No turntable in sight and do I ever really want to listen to all my 1970s America LPs again and rekindle the joy of living in close proximity to Haringey Dog Stadium whilst singing 'I've been through the desert on a horse with no name, it feels good to be outta the rain...'
Or that Bread LP Manna bought for me by a very distant long-ago boyfriend (didn't last)
Or On the Beach by Neil Young bought for me by a very romantic Italian boyfriend ( didn't last)
I don't think so..
But what if...
And then if I was going to allow myself to keep say five for old times' sake which would they be??
Probably Bridge Over Troubled Water...Bookends ... and oh look, there's Fog on the Tyne squeezed in on the end, how could I ever part with Lindisfarne??
How about you, any sounds that would transport you back in a thrice??
Which would you have to keep from a cupboard of your own like this??
And what should we do with these??
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