Wednesday 5 August 2015

Shelf Portrait

It is my last day off before I do my biannual stint living above the pub. Shortly after that, we're off to the Isle of Wight for a few days and when we get back I've got to move house. I thought I would spend the day packing up my old record collection, binning the scratched ones and taking a few that I don't listen to anymore to the charity shop. Turns out the records were the only thing holding up my cobbled together shelving unit and the moment I pulled them all out the thing basically cracked spilling coloured pegs from my Original Mastermind set everywhere:

If you weren't alive in the Seventies and Eighties, Mastermind was how people entertained themselves before Facebook was invented.
To add shame to shelf-destruction, in the cobwebby cave revealed by record removal what should I spy but the pair of nutcrackers that disappeared after a New Year's Eve party eighteen months ago and that my inner Poirot has accused practically everyone in attendance of stealing. Unlike Poirot, I had yet to acquire sufficient evidence to gather everybody into the library and make my suspicions public. For the last eighteen months, I have been happily cracking nuts in a pestle and mortar. A method that is so surprisingly satisfying that I may not go back to nutcrackers. The chimpanzees in this short clip have got the right idea.

Records are easy to pack at least. They weigh a ton, though. Everytime I move house I think 'I must digitise my music collection.' But I get distracted easily and I've changed today's project from sorting out music to seeing whether I can get Windows 10 to run on my old knackered laptop and thereby give it a new lease of life. It is so achingly slow to respond to anything that I can write this on my shiny new Chromebook at the same time as waiting for it to wheeze its way through the six months of updates necessary to lay the ground for its new Operating System. It is not looking hopeful. But I owe the old machine the chance to live a new life... possibly as a hard drive for the record collection that I will definitely digitise before I next move house.






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