Vinylrichie’s Weblog

 Vinylrichie is no more. I can’t call myself vinylrichie for any longer unless I decide to revert to a weird liking of vinyl products other than records, such as pseudo ’leather’ jackets from car boot sales or cheap flooring. Or sex toys.

I’ve finally quit my job.

Therefore I thought I’d have one last whinge to entertain those of you that bemoaned the end of the blog, which has had a very loyal following since its inception. A few of you vinyl junkies that actually visit the record shop as well as read this (all three of you) might be a little shocked at this news as well as annoyed that you will lose my generous discounts, fabulous wealth of knowledge and my miserable face. You’ll just have to start downloading like everybody else (the music, not my miserable face). So I’m off to pastures new which means I can say goodbye to the things I won’t miss, forever.

 Most of all I won’t miss going to the London store once a week, this has been mentioned before but not nearly in enough detail and I’m feeling frivolous.

Previously I have told you off my hatred of the journey there – the 3000 stops before arrival whilst being mentally assailed by loud kids, mobile phone users, sticky seats, graffiti’d windows and endless, endless announcements. A couple of weeks ago after the long and interminable diatribe about keeping your belongings with you, keeping feet off the seats, engineering works etc I was quite amused to hear the guard announce that ‘This train consists of eight feet’. So that’s one passenger with the train driver sitting on his or her head is it? I knew that Network Rail were downsizing but that is a bit over the top. My mirth did not last as I contemplated the day ahead: Seven uninterrupted hours of crushing ennui and er, colourful characters. Each week there is almost exactly the same as the last. Even the stock is exactly the same and things are precisely where I left them the week before even though there has been a gap of week and the shop has actually been open and staffed without me.

 Upon arrival I will be met by the people from the office upstairs who congregate in the street and smoke for a living, occasionally nipping upstairs for a crafty work break. (Seriously, I counted one day and they had fourteen cigarettes in six hours. Each.) Through the fug of smoke I’ll wrestle with the archaic door that yelps like a stepped on puppy when you open it and enter my prison for the day. I immediately put the kettle on. Drinking coffee and tea is my main activity here, my second is urinating. Sometimes I go the toilet just for something to do, and I mean that, it’s not much of a hobby but it’s free and easy to do – I’ve been doing it for a few years now.

Usually my first visitor of the day will be the cheap sovereign ring  wearing shouty chav family who come in after doing their weekly shopping at ‘Wilkinson’s’ up the road. They communicate by verbally assaulting each other (and that’s just the children – four of them) whilst rifling through the cheap CDs to find £1.50s worth of R&B. Then there will a small window of about two hours where no one at all will come in and I start swearing about having got up at the crack of dawn to make less than two quid when I could just come in at noon and stuff that same amount in the till just so I could have a lie in. I’ll perch myself on a hideously uncomfortable stool and start my half hearted ploughing through newspapers. By lunch time I will have gone through at least three, and tried to do all the crosswords. My favourite is the local rag that tells you how many people have been assaulted and stabbed that week, how many junkies have been arrested for nicking from ‘Wilkinson’s’ and how many childrens’ playgrounds are covered in raw sewage, as well as the weekly rant about cyclists versus pedestrians.

Next up is usually a guy with a silly hat who goes through the £1 LPs and buys one. He always comes in, without fail every Friday. That in itself annoys the hell out of me. Then the bald man that doesn’t ever buy anything whom I’ve mentioned before visits…. mid-day Steve with glasses comes in and might buy one CD. It’s so painfully predictable, the same people every week and the same stock. The afternoon goes by in a blur of excitement as I spend most of it looking out of the window, through the cloud of the full-time smokers’ efforts. By this time the local street drinkers are out in force clutching those blue carrier bags full of Tenant’s Nuclear. Sometimes they  see me looking bored and come in to ‘cheer me up’. This is dreadful – I had one last week that proceeded to dribble and spray his way through telling me that he’d been released from prison after a ten stretch. I didn’t ask any questions, you may think I’d be intrigued, but the main rule of people you want to get shot of is never ask them anything because they’ll answer you at length. This is due to them having absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do.

At least twice a day I’ll see ‘Wilkinson’s’ security men running after a thieving oik with a few fat Community Support ‘Police’ officers in close-ish pursuit. I want to know what you can steal from that pikey store that has a resale value, maybe they swap scourers for skag on the streets these days. The tea-leaf (thief for my readers across the Atlantic) is usually accosted outside the pub next door which I have never been in as it looks incredibly right-wing. It holds metal and punk nights, the owner is covered in tattoos and the logo of this pub is very similar to the Nazi eagle. There is no end to the hideousness – even the street where all this occurs is permanantly covered in dog shit although I never see dogs down there. Maybe the council have a contract to keep the streets faecalised and they deliver it in the mornings ready for people to slip in on their way to work/shoplift/rehab.

Just as I’m about to openly weep as the day nears it’s end the real timewasters come in. There is a rather large selection of bargain LPs that are priced at £1 each or you can get ten for £5. A favourite past time for the hoards of cheapskates is painstakingly going through each title and inspecting the discs for marks or scratches. People actually have the audacity to ask for them cheaper if they find any nano-scratches. They are ONE FUCKING POUND! Honestly, If I hadn’t have left already I’m sure I would be the next person in the local newspaper to be reported for stabbing someone, but the only sharp thing in the shop is the fork I bought from ‘Wilkinson’s’ to eat ‘Pot Noodles’ with so it would have to be a rather drawn out attack with a very compliant victim with a few hours to spare.

Around four thirty I kick them all out (naughty – I’m supposed to be there until half past five) before I start smashing things up or sink irretrievably into a deep, dark psychosis. Then it’s rush hour on the train where you can’t move for suit wearing, i-pod sporting, ‘Blackberry’ bashing business men/women or bloody teenagers with their amazing knack of speaking lots but saying, like, nothing, like. Weirdly everyone seems to get off at Horsley (a village largely populated by the well to do and their au-pairs) where the wives of the suits will be waiting in their Volvos to take hubbie home, where their two kids, Clitorissa and Labia, are practicing the oboe before dinner. Sorry, I meant supper – the word dinner does not exist in leafy Surrey.

But (thank Christ) all this is soon to be a distant memory. My time as a record dealer is at an end, I finished yesterday; I was expecting some sort of fanfare after around 14 years of peddling vinyl, I was hoping that my boss would come in and present me with a jeroboam (this isn’t a rodent) of champagne and a hearty thank you. Hrumph. All I got was a phone call from him saying he can’t come in as he’s got gout. Yes, gout. Anyone would think that I worked for Henry VIII or Michael Winner.

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So that’s it. Vinyl Richie is now as obsolete as cassette singles or VHS which means this blog is now definitely over. But don’t fret as you can follow the further adventures of me on my new blog page which is thus: http://apathyintheuk.wordpress.com/

Apparently it’s quite good, well I’ve had lots of hits but then again so has Rick Astley. Thanks everyone, it’s been emotional (mostly wailing and sobbing.)

 I saw some men on the TV news two nights ago. They worked in finance and were shouting each other like the way a normal person and a scientologist might do. The problem would appear to be that something or other to do with the economy had crashed – maybe one of them had dropped the other’s piggy-bank and had got irate. The newsreader sounded solemn and told us that no one has any money to spend due to this terrible piggy-bank catastrophe. I think the shouty suited guys may look after all our money and now it’s gone and rolled under the fridge where it can’t be reached.

This is my understanding of global finance. You would’ve thought that at 32 I may understand about stocks and shares and er, that - but I haven’t a clue. I have lived a sheltered life and I blame having spent too many years doing a job where these things never mattered. But now they do because I don’t have any customers! No one has any money for food let alone records. So this is where the panic sets in as the job market will need to be tackled and I’ll get found out to be the child I really am. Everyone else at my age is thinking of marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, re-divorce, ISAs, pensions, Life Insurance, buying sofas, holidays, choosing soft furnishings, buying cars and the like…

I’ve discovered that my record shop cocoon has dealt me a mortal blow: I’ve realised I can’t cope with the real world; I can’t drive, I’m totally ignored by women, so have no chance of pro-creating, cohabiting or spending the day buying cushions. I’m up to my ears in debt and my CV looks very small indeed and making the font bigger to use up more pages fools no one. I’m not really going to be sought after in any sphere, especially not the job market. And without a decent job I can’t afford anything, which makes me even more unappealing to the opposite sex and I can’t afford to learn how to drive. If I learn to drive I have more chance of getting a job, if I get a new job I have a slim chance of meeting some women (although they are all spoken for in my age bracket or just quite insane) and improving my CV and gaining confidence. Catch 22 or what? Maybe I’m wrong – I’m frequently told that I’ll be a good catch for some lovely girl. This statement is usually said by women – but funnily enough they are never interested either. My Mum used to say that I’m too fussy but I used to laugh sardonically at her. Fussy implies one might have a choice of whom to ’get it on’ with. She also said that I go for the wrong women. Of course they’re the wrong ones! They say no! I’m going to have to plough through the ads in the back of magazines for the lazy eyed and club footed 76 year old ’right ones’ with B.O methinks. Or someone who wants a British passport.

 And jobs? Oh dear. I applied recently to a book shop as I would like to indulge my other passion and also actually work with some other people. I didn’t even get an interview. It must be because I’m experienced, good at customer service and love books. Definitely wrong for the job without a doubt. People also say that I’m too negative but this springs from the fact that life’s favourite hobby is wrestling you to the ground and  farting in your face and accidently following through. Christ, even the people that write those cloying self help books are adulterers, alcoholics, workaholics etc. Why? Because they’re unhappy too - even though they tell people to cheer up and be positive for a living and get incredibly rich doing so. The biggest irony I can think of to illustrate this is this: reggae singer Bobby McFerrin wrote a very, very famous and chirpy song called ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ It features lots of whistling and positive vibes and is meant to fill one with strength and vim so the world feels conquerable…

A few years ago he killed himself.

I wonder what the b-side was? Maybe it was ‘Don’t Worry, There’s Always a Bottle of Vodka and a Tubfull of Pills Handy If All That Whistling Doesn’t Work.’

So what to do? I’ve been looking at jobs. Then I’ve been looking again and still failing to understand what the hell they want people for. Middleweight Web Designer? Surely it doesn’t matter who you can beat up when you’re supposed to be spinning webs? Strategic Conversion Analyst? I don’t even know what to ask about that except ‘Eh?’ It’s infuriating and I’d never be able to keep a straight face in a proper corporation when they started wittering on about ‘thought showers’, ‘blue sky thinking’ or ‘thought grenades’. My friend works for a big American company that even employs a chair specialist to teach people how to use chairs – or lower limb posterior reclining and rest units as they are probably called – how utterly idiotic is that? The thought of having to appear keen to get a job with people that talk that much through their arses leaves me cold and will probably see me sacked within days because I am far too cynical and am used to talking people using real language and everything.

Anyway, I’ll keep plugging away and might even put something funny in my next blog. Sadly (?) I’ve run out of record shop steam to keep this specialist blog going so this is the last post(bugles at the ready) on this particular theme. I will be back to talk about other things of which I know little about so you won’t get away from me that easily.

 Thanks to all that have read my witterings and laughed. Special thanks go to all that encouraged me, commented, recommended me to others and to the record buying nutters of this little town -without whom this blog and my depression would not have happened. Gawd bless ya.

This post has been withdrawn and is now very collectable.

 People frequently come to the assumption that if you work in a record shop you must be pretty cool. They envisage that your record collection is bristling with untold gems and rarities that they could only dream of. One of the frequent questions I am asked is: ‘how many records do you have?’ The answer is quite bizarrely not as many as some who don’t work in a record shop. After all, if you live in a river you don’t need to buy water do you? The other question which I get asked often is: ‘What was the first ever gig you went to?’ Wide eyed with the expectation that I might say ‘The Pixies’ or Lou Reed, the customer waits with baited breath ready to marvel at my sublime, jealousy inducing answer. Indeed, the response I get is usually an open mouthed one as the answer is:

Barry Manilow at Wembley Arena. Word.

 I was thirteen I think, and had taken up the rebellious hobby of smoking to ingratiate myself with the cool and slightly harder kids. Unfortunately for me I just looked like a small child brandishing a cigarette, not the gangster/hustler I envisaged. The fact that I could barely inhale didn’t do the image any favours either but I tried. One thing they don’t put on cigarette packets are warnings such as: Smoking may cause you to attend crap concerts. If they did I may have stuck to sherbert dib-dabs and Panini football stickers but alas, the folly of youth.

One Sunday afternoon I’d finished dinner and got permission to go and play, er I mean look sophisticated and hang out with my friend Andrew. The world was our playground, anything was possible in the heady freedom of the day (except I had to be back at half four as Mum and her friend Sue were off to see the aforementioned crooner big-nosed Barry that evening and I was being babysat by my sisters as my dad was going to drive Mum and friend to Wembley) so we went round the corner to see what delights the underground car park could offer. Well ’street’. Now that I was away from the parents and any neighbours that might see me I could safely spark up a snout (I’m trying to avoid the use if the word fag for my american readers, I don’t want to appear that I’m all for burning homosexuals). Near the end of the second ciggie Andrew dared me to smoke the filter to be ‘well ‘ard’. Piece of piss I thought, what a simple request and he would look admiringly at his daring, maverick smoking friend with a new sense of awe. So I smoked about three lungfulls, which I properly inhaled to illustrate what a man I’d become. Then it was time to go home.

 At the bottom of the street where I lived, a short way from the car park, things started to go wrong. I felt dreadfully ill, all the energy was draining from me and I felt weak, dizzy and nauseous. I was alone as Andrew had gone home another way and as I literally collapsed and began to crawl towards my front door I wondered whether I was dying. I also feared being murdered by my parents so the options weren’t great. I made it to the door and feebly knocked and scratched until my mum opened the door. My face must have looked a picture, the colour gone and my lips blue as she asked:

‘What the hell have you been doing?’

‘Smoking’, I weakly replied – choosing to omit the filter bit. My lie stood up as my parents thought that I was a good boy who had done nothing in his life more drastic than stealing a piece of bubblegum at the age of five. Mum was under the impression that my first attempt at smoking had backfired somewhat and she rather gleefully, as the knowing adult, watched her son learn a valuable life lesson the hard way. Something was happening to me but I didn’t know what, but I was damned sure I should be near a toilet. I crawled up the stairs, seemingly as insurmountable as Mount Everest in my poor state. I made it, now being watched by my dad and sisters too, who found the pathetic poisoned brother show utterly hilarious. Ahhh, the love of one’s siblings. Then I spent quite a while projectile vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea, crawling from bedroom to toilet with great frequency wishing that I was actually dead. But worse was to follow.

About an hour later I started to feel better, the poison now out of my system but my display of illness had alarmed my parents. They were reluctant to leave me alone in case I died or something. But it seems they weren’t alarmed enough to cancel the evening at Wembley Arena with Bazza. My older sisters, less than bothered at the antics of their little squit of a brother, decided they weren’t going to look after me as there were more pressing engagements to attend to like singing into a hairbrush or coating every surface in the house with the sticky residue of hairspray before going out to a roller-disco or something (this was the eighties after all). They weren’t about to give up an evening of boy-baiting to make sure I was ok so, horror upon horror, I was informed that I would have to come to Barry Manilow and either sit in the car for two and a half hours with dad or see if there were any tickets left. Most of you would’ve chosen the first option. I didn’t.

Upon reaching the Wembley complex (finally, after dad got confused in the horrible ring road chaos which saw us repeatedly going past ‘World of Leather’) I was swept up in the sheer magic of this wonderful occasion; loads of mums sporting Manilow T-shirts and clutching glossy programmes, excitedly jabbering at each other in their post-menopausal frenzy. How could I sit in the car on a night like this? The anticipation of hearing ‘Mandy’, ‘Could It Be Magic’, ‘Down at the Copa (Copa-Cabana)’ and many many more of the tunes I’d had forced on me in my formative years by my mum was just too overwhelming. So dad went to the box office and returned clutching our tickets to heaven, and they were cheaper than my Mum paid for hers, much to her chagrin when it turned out that we were only two rows behind her and had just as clear a view of Barry’s nose as her. Mind you, you can see that from space to be honest.

The gig itself was so overwhelming that I remember very little of it, except that Manilow just told jokes throughtout the second half of the gig which was excruciating. But my new found love of gigs was born on this night. But I vowed to only go to cutting edge concerts which would reveal my discerning and sophisticated music taste. So three months later I went to see Billy Joel and got told off for dancing on the seats. My hedonism knew no bounds, the rock and roll lifestyle had me in it’s grasp. I even went and saw Sting during his jazzy period…..LET’S ROCK!

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This entry is dedicated to my Mum. 28/12/46 – 7/2/08. Wish you were here to read this and share the memories xxx

Crikey. Isn’t January interesting? Some days in this wet, bleak northern hemisphere the sun doesn’t seem to rise at all and if it does it buggers off after five hours ‘work’ before plunging us back into the cloying and interminable darkness. Another er, positive is the fact that work is just as bleak too. There is nothing happening at all as it would appear that no one has any money to spend on second hand records having spent it on calenders, bath salts and perfumes such as Calvin Klein’s ‘Depression’ in the festive shopping free for all. Let’s not forget that January is also the top month for couples to divorce which can be expensive, but at least that means in February I’ll be getting lots of  ex-husbands’ record collections in from newly seperated women so they can make room for more shoes/cushions.

What can I do to make the money roll in? I did suggest to the proprietor that we double as an internet cafe. We have at least four stained mugs, a kettle and a computer so it’s all there ready to be utilised. The only problem is that I’ll have nothing to do as the PC will be commandeered by some geek who wants to play online ’World of Warcraft’ with some fat, socially inept B.O soaked man on the other side of the planet for seven hours. Only having one PC is quite a drawback and not having anything near proper catering facilities is detrimental to my fabulous idea too (the kettle is in the same spider and grime infested kitchenette room as the slightly wobbly toilet – it’s very grim as well as excruciatingly chilly). So there was my one half-baked idea thwarted and I don’t have any others at all due to lack of motivation/caring/lack of brain cells through substance abuse.

People tell me that we should get a website ‘built’ and list everything we have in stock. I find it hard to believe that people will trawl through page after page of Carpenters singles but they could be right, after all the web is frequented by total lunatics (marvellously and precisely illustrated by this: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/ for example) but it isn’t my decision. We do sell on the net but only list things that we can’t seem to shift in store (that’s a lot then) or valuable items. It’s highly lucrative and massively, unsurprisingly irritating. The main reason is that the public are capable of extreme fussiness – how many more emails am I going to have to reply to that insist on a full refund for their CD because the jewel case has a hairline crack caused by our careless postal service? Suggesting that it is cheaper for them to buy another case in their local record shop for about twenty pence rather than send it back for eighty pence never seems to work. Each to their own.

But thank God (TM) for the internet. In my youth we only had Ceefax and Teletext (this may confuse my foreign reader(s) – Google it) which was the eighties equivalent of the web but the porn looked very disappointing (cor, look at the green blocks on that!) I would surely go bonkers, sorry, more bonkers without it to keep me company on the those long days with few real people to connect with. Pressing F5 all day to see if anyone has sent me a message on Facebook is ever so fulfilling and makes the time crawl by that little bit faster and I go home with the warm glow of fulfillment at the end of the day. Sometimes, like you, I look for jobs on my PC whilst being paid (negligably) to do so. This is an excercise in confusion and bewilderment for me as I have no idea what the job descriptions mean in 99% of the listings. Let this be a warning to younger people: don’t stay in the same job for 12 years or you will be left behind and estranged from the processes of change, a bit like going to prison I should imagine, but at least you’ll get sex there. I don’t think I’m likely to survive if I get released back into the wild, I’ll probably be unable to move more than ten yards away from my place of captivity and will die of exposure scratching at the door of the shop forlornly whilst sobbing. So for heaven’s sake buy a CD of something from me or you will be responsible for my untimely, cruelly slow death. Or if you can point me to a job description that I may understand that would be better.

Right, I’m off now as I have a lot of F5 pressing to catch up on and there’s only three hours and thirty two minutes left to do it in now. Must crack on.

 The dawning of a brand new year heralds much soul searching amongst us humans. New starts are announced, self improvement goals are declared and, more importantly, easter eggs hit the shelves to tempt those new year dieters back into the trap of scoffing and self loathing where they belong. Thankfully diets aren’t something I have to worry about as I have the metabolism of a hyperactive shrew on amphetamines, so that leaves me free to worry about all sorts of other things including how the music industry is irrevocably altered for the worse each year and that, once again, I may be out of work very soon and will have to join the ranks of mobile phone sales people (although I’d have to have spikier, greasier hair and buy an even cheaper suit than the one I own already.)

It’s only the 8th of January and already the first bit of depressing news has reached me. The news is that HMV have decided to stop selling 7″ singles to (get this) ‘make room for more modern technology’. I think they seem to have forgotten a vital detail in their decision: if you are a record store you usually stock records. So now they have a section devoted to memory sticks and bloody i-pods. With each passing day I begin to hate the i-pod/MP3 thing even more and wish to return to the days of cassette singles, ‘Nice Price’ LPs and video tapes. This really doesn’t bode well for my technological future as I’m only(only?) 32 and there are bound to be more breakthroughs for me to lag behind with in the very near future whilst I deny their existence and continue to cling on to my ‘Walkman’ tightly. (At least you can replace the sodding batteries with those.)

But what of this brand new age? What is in store for us? I predict that in the future you will be able to have a microchip which holds all 900,000 Bob Dylan albums inserted in your buttocks with a syringe. I suppose it’ll be a bit like micro chipping a dog. Now, instead of doing that fiddling thing that everyone does with the all-too-clever twirly dial thing on the fascia of an i-pod whilst walking into people, all one will have to do is squeeze said buttocks together and think of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and it will pipe the music betwixt arse and earhole. The one draw back is that you’ll look even more vacant than usual or if you are singing along you’ll look more demented than those you see talking to themselves in the street only to realise later that they have one of those silly bluetooth things stuffed in their ear to make them look important/space age just so they can keep their hands free to hold frappacinos and lifestyle magazines.

I’m sure a fair few of you are more enthusiastic about new technology than I. (I’m sure most of you are actually more enthusiastic about everything.) I sometimes wonder if in  a past life I spent my time hunched over parchment illuminated by the sulphur glow of candlelight, scratching away with my quill bemoaning the invention of pens and other devil’s tools before nipping off to the apothecary to get my scrofula sorted. A lot of ‘advances’ are totally pointless though. Take Blu-Ray DVDs for instance. We’ve only just managed to replace our VHS tapes with DVDs and now they want us to replace our DVDs with newer, shinier versions of DVDs - in funkier cases and for £30 a pop. Imagine the disappointment on the face of techno lovers when they get their new copy of Blu-Ray ‘Independence Day’ home and discover that it’s still shit, but just clearer shit. Still, as Kevin Costner knows ‘if you build it they will come’. He was talking stupidly about dead baseball players but in this context I’m talking about the anoraks that wait for these new formats to emerge so they can swiftly max their credit cards, only for the price to plummet 12 months later to a level even your goldfish can afford (but won’t buy because it’s not that stupid…plus goldfish can’t go shopping. Yet. You’ll have to wait for the i-goldfish or something.)

So to sum up: old stuff – yay! New stuff: Boo shucks. I’m off to buy a word processor now, all this glowing screen thing is freaking me out. Until, next time. Happy New Year by the way.

 Old people. There are a lot of them about, you may have seen them hanging around in shopping centres congregating around seats sucking mints and saying ‘Ohhh yes, dear, I know dear’ to each other loudly before toddling off to dawdle in the street to stop you getting anywhere fast. (But they move bloody fast when they want to, oh yes. There isn’t anything more disconcerting than seeing a decrepit oldie with a stick moving faster than you. This I see a lot.)

Pensioners (I feel mean already) are so predictable that it can be an exercise in extreme annoyance to deal with them. This is because I have to have the same conversation with each of them, usually twice: once at normal volume and then at SHOUTING level as they seldom hear me over the gangster rap I like to play to them. Why do I find them irritating? You may have noticed I find ALL people irritating but they take the (slightly stale rich tea) biscuit. Mainly this is due to the fact that any music released after 1974 is ‘modern rubbish’. The last LP or cassette (CDs DO NOT EXIST) they bought would’ve been a Leo Sayer album but they didn’t listen to it much because it was too challenging. Therefore they went back to listening to Glenn Miller, the ‘Oklahoma!’ soundtrack or a Richard Clayderman compilation on MFP. Eventually their record player’s stylus would’ve died never to be replaced. Their record collection (usually numbering about 12 LPs) then redundantly sits beneath their all in one stereo radiogram for the next 25 years before they have a brainstorm and decide to sell them as they saw on the telly that all old records are worth a fortune. By this time they can barely lift a soiled handkerchief so they will telephone the shop to find out how many thousands of pounds they will get for a complete set of Mantovani LPs. The conversation will go as thus:

‘Hello? Hello? Do you collect records?’

‘Do I collect records? I take it you mean does the shop buy used records? Yes, we do.’

‘I’ve got some old ones. There are some big ones and small ones.’

‘What sort of music?’ I ask, knowing full well what is about to take place.

At this point I can stop listening and go and make a cuppa. They generally don’t know what they’ve got as they haven’t looked at them for years. One thing is for sure, they will mention the Beatles. It is a little known statute that every british household must have at least one Beatles record, preferably really scratched, written on and replete with stained/crinkled cover. Then I have to explain that they were the biggest selling band on the planet and just because they’ve heard of them and heard some bastard saying how valuable they are doesn’t mean anything. They think I’m lying as the bloke on the telly said it was true. To cut this short I’ll ask them to bring the bloody thing in with the rest of their records for me to yawn at. Great. What I need is another copy of ‘With the Beatles’ to add to the other 40 I have, the only difference being that the scratches are in different places….

Rather conveniently as I was churning out my waffle above, the door opened and I was presented with a couple of bags of records from an old couple. Lo and behold I have had my stereotypical attitude fortified with the contents of said bags. The bag (which I got lumbered with because they wouldn’t take them away again) contained: Geoff Love’s Christmas LP, The new sounds of Liberace, the Stars salute Sinatra (featuring performances by a stella group of crinkly or now dead warblers like Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe and Frankie Vaughan), The Big Ben Hawaiian Band, Perry Como’s 40 Greatest Hits (forty?!), the (ubiquitous) Sound of Music soundtrack, Mrs Mills Party Favourites….I give up. There are more but you’re probably just as bored as me.  It really is difficult to tell these pensioners that their records are only appreciated by the very nearly dead. For some unknown reason they must think that hoards of twenty year olds queue by the shop door each morning frantically jostling each other to get in first to snap up that copy of ‘This Is….Val Doonican’.

I can’t wait to see if this will be the case in decades to come. When I get old I like to think that record shops (should we miraculously survive the interminable march of ‘progress’) will be turning their noses up at Metallica’s black album for being too easy listening and the new generation of kids will laugh at us for listening to Radiohead (that old rubbish.) My dad is a great indication of who I’m likely to turn into. Only the other day he was sitting talking to a family relative lauding ‘proper music’ like Brian Poole and the Tremeloes as I sat shaking my head fully aware that I’ll be doing exactly the same to my nieces and nephew in twenty years. ‘You call this music?’ I will sneer. ‘In my day we had proper bands like ‘Muse’ and ‘Interpol’, none of this noise…’