Tag: CD

MEDITATION 87

​It is quite comfortable to be sitting here by the candle on the table beside me. The candle flame gives a welcoming glow which contrasts with the hostile icy blasts outside, which are more reminiscent of January than early March. Ideally I should be gazing into a glowing fireplace, which would be even more comfortable and welcoming, but I don’t have one. A radiator, warm thought it is, doesn’t have the same effect. However I have substituted the fireplace with a glass of red wine so I am glowing a little. 

​As I sit here, glass in hand, a Strauss waltz is playing in my memory. I am tempted to play my cd of Strauss waltzes but I am too comfortable to get up and find it in my cd racks. So I will let it fade away in my thoughts as I try to remember what brought the Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss into my head. 

​    It is not a memory of a glittering ballroom or of an old movie for that matter or a classical concert I once attended. The memory is of a visit to a local charity shop. I recently went there to give away some books and cd’s I don’t need anymore. ‘Did I ever really need them?’ I asked myself. In answer to the question, I began to slowly empty some of my shelves. It’s a retirement thing. 

​So when I had deposited my cultural detritus with the charity shop assistant, I made my way out only to notice some boxes of old LP’s on a table in the middle of the shop. I couldn’t help but stop and browse through them. What opportunity do we have these days of spending time in a store to browse through LP’s or cd’s or DVD’s for that matter? The music shops have gone and browsing has to be online now, which isn’t the same. So I relished the chance to browse. Perhaps it was muscle memory – I used to spend so much time browsing in HMV and other stores when they were open.

​In the first box I explored quite near the front was an LP of Strauss Waltzes and Polkas. It was identical to one I bought when I was a teenager -I was 13 or 14 years old I guess. I remembered the cover so well. It was of a brightly lit spiral staircase in some elegant mansion photographed from above. And here was the album again in my hands. 

​For a moment memories of playing it came back. I used to play it on our radiogram with its spindly legs in our front room. The record player part of the radiogram would pull down when you wanted to use it, I remember. The radio itself was on the top. I would sit beside the radiogram listening to those waltzes and be transported into another world, to those glittering ballrooms and the ladies in their elegant dresses accompanied by gentlemen in their uniforms or evening dress across the ballroom floor.   

​Despite having a potent imagination, I couldn’t conceive then, sitting in our front room in Redcar that many years later I would be listening to those waltzes live at a BBC Proms orchestral concert in the Royal Albert Hall, let alone in the elegant surroundings of the New York Cafe and numerous other coffee houses in Budapest.  

​We would visit the New York Cafe every year on our Drama tour. It was the teachers’ treat at the end of the tour though we did usually bring a few students with us. The resident pianist was quite a virtuoso. He would work his way through waltzes, polkas, songs from the shows and operettas with great finesse while reading the newspaper at the same time. It was spread across the top of the piano above the keyboard. The New York cafe has changed now. It was closed for a long while while the building was remodelled into a high class hotel. The cafe has reopened but our multi-tasking pianist seems to have disappeared.  

​I continued flicking through the boxes in the shop and discovered yet another LP from my youth, a box set of 3 LP’s actually, of Handel’s ‘Messiah’. It had Salvador Dali’s striking depiction of the Crucifixion on the box lid. I bought my own copy of it it when I was in the Sixth Form I think.  Dali’s picture on the box lid stood out from all the other album covers I flicked through in W.H. Smith on Redcar High Street all those years ago. I guess that’s why I bought it, aside from having sung some of the choruses (including the famous Hallelujah one) in the school choir in a concert. Memories flooded in again.  I remembered playing the album on a portable record player in my bedroom. It was black and quite bulky, though not as bulky as the radiogram downstairs. I took the records and player with me to university eventually I think and then on to my bedsit in Brixton in South London. I remember listening to ‘Messiah’ in my bedsit.  

​I then quickly flicked through all the other boxes to see if any other memories of my youth were on display in the charity shop. There was: a recording of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony which I definitely did buy when I was in the Sixth Form.  I loved the intense slow movement as I was an intense young man then. As the notes drifted over me and played with my emotions as I lay in my room, again I could hardly imagine that I would see Gustav Mahler’s conducting baton on display in a museum in Budapest. It was actually a ceremonial one in an ivory casing, given to him when he was musical director of the Budapest Opera House in 1891.

​Fortunately I couldn’t find any more albums. It would have been very odd to find my entire record collection from my bedroom in Redcar in the LP boxes in Oxfam in Kingston, many miles and many years away.

​I am sure that if you are or were into rock music you could easily find albums from your teenage years in any charity shop. So I am obviously not the only one who’s youth is on display. But these were classical albums and those particular recordings of Mahler, Handel and Strauss, which I had bought and played over and over again. After all, there was only one version of The Beatles ‘Sgt Pepper’ when it was released so only one possible cover. So if you saw it in a charity shop, you wouldn’t be too surprised. But it seemed odd to me that those particular recordings from my paltry teenage collection should be in those boxes and that I was able to hold them again, even though they weren’t my own particular copies.  

​I found myself smiling when I picked up those albums. If I possessed an LP player at home (and they have become very popular again and are rather expensive) I would have bought them. I have the Mahler recording on cd now anyway. Everything gets reissued eventually, sometimes over and over again. I wonder if I’ll ever be reissued. 

I had so few albums then that I would play them over an over again. Now I have so many cd’s that I have hardly played some of them at all.  Hence the decision to give some away. The immediate link between buying an album and playing it straight away and really listening has gone perhaps, especially with streaming music. 

​The shop I was in specialised in books and music. There are others which are more general. Sometimes among the bric-a-brac I have seen on the shelves I have noticed kitchen ware and crockery that I remembered from years ago. I guess it is the designs that hold the memories, just like the album covers. 

​Those shops are very handy if you are looking for props for a play. I used charity shops a lot when I was putting a production together. I know professional companies do too. Last night I watched the final episode of ‘Endeavour’ on TV, about the early career of Inspector Morse. It was set in the early 70’s. I wonder how may props they used in the interior scenes originated in charity shops. Some of the interiors were quite nostalgic. 

​I am not a frequenter of charity shops. I guess I we be in and out of the Oxfam bookshop now and then with some more of my cultural detritus. 

​Perhaps charity shops should be renamed. Perhaps they should be called Memory Shops.

​Incidentally, when I returned to the Oxfam bookstore a week later, the boxes of LP’s had gone.

​But then, so has my youth.  

​​Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius

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MEDITATION 76

As I sit beside my candle to begin this meditation, I am looking in the corner opposite across my lounge. This is where my cd’s are housed on shelves that are virtually full now, almost from ceiling to floor. This is my prized classical music library and there are also several shelves of film music and musicals as well. I must also mention some more cd’s neatly stacked on or below my coffee table. Beside me to my left are more shelves of DVD’s and Blu-ray’s. Behind me are my bookshelves which are also full. I appear to be quite a collector. I hasten to add that there is still space to get to the front door in case of fire! I haven’t completely submerged myself in culture yet.

However I take comfort in the fact that they have been collected over a long period of time. I have been collecting my cd’s, for example, over the last three decades, and before that I collected LP’s since being a teenager. I replaced my favourite LP’s with the cd versions in the early 90’s. Some, as with my books and movies, were gifts or bought at reduced price in a sale. Some of my music was a given to me by my old friend Brian, who passed away ten years ago. Some I purchased on my many trips to Budapest, where cd’s were cheaper than here. When I was running the Drama tours, after a week of organising and directing, I would always visit my favourite classical music stores in a moment of spare time and treat myself to an album – or two. I would do the same when I was there on holiday of course. One of the stores even gave me a discount card.

I also take comfort from a remark by my Hungarian friend, Mariann, when she visited my house quite a while ago. She looked at my bookshelves and said, ‘Books make a home.’

You may be thinking that all these books and music and movies must have been a solace to me during the pandemic or at least helped to get me through it. The answer is yes and no. My retirement finally began as the pandemic started and part of my retirement plan was to absorb myself in my reading and music and movies, now that I would have time to do so. But, as with all of us, the lockdowns left me too unsettled at times to enjoy them. I did purchase more cd’s though, some of which I still haven’t played. Then I discovered that I now had three versions of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, as a result! I forgot to check I already had two – or did I? I think it was comfort-buying more than anything. A buffer again the storm. I am sure I will play them eventually.

Recently I have been led to reflect on why we collect things. Yes we may have a particular interest or hobby but what drives us on to collect more. Is it the innate need to possess within us or the primitive hunter/gatherer syndrome? Is it curiosity – I must hear that or see that? Is it the novelty of the new – a new artist on the block – I must hear or see him or her? Is it compulsion or obsession? The bottom line is: do we ever ask ourselves: Do I really need that?

Perhaps creating a collection is a relaxation from a stressful professional job, like my purchasing the odd cd or two in Budapest on my Drama tours. My Hungarian friend Adam is a high powered lawyer in Budapest and has a large collection of Star Wars figures and memorabilia going back to his childhood for instance. He also collects figures from TV series from his childhood. Perhaps he is harking back to his childhood when his life was less stressful, when he wasn’t so high profile. I must ask him. He also collects 1990s Honda sports cars – not models but the real thing! He currently has four, I believe, or

it it five? He scours the Internet for spare parts. I remember bringing a pair of head lamps in my luggage for him on a visit a few year ago! He has driven me around Hungary in one of them. Sitting in it, I imagined I was in some 1990’s American cop show. Although the cars are quite low to the ground and I am no longer agile enough (if ever!) to quickly get out and shout ‘Freeze!’

Another example of this is from many years ago when I was a student in Oxford. A high powered professor of Medicine at my college would occasionally invite small groups of his students for dinner and to see his elaborate train set which he kept set up in the loft. Digital collecting is so very easy isn’t it? Just a click then it is on its way. But not as satisfying or relaxing as spending time browsing in a shop. My dear friend Alan tells me he likes to listen to music while doing the family ironing. Currently he has collected 2,500 songs on Spotify and has 76 albums saved digitally too. He must have a lot of ironing to do! I should not jest as I have four complete Wagner Ring cycles and four complete versions of the nine Beethoven symphonies on disc! And all the rest. As I look at my music collection I realise that some discs reflect earlier enthusiasms which I no longer have. So perhaps I need to decide which I really want to keep and give away the rest as my dear late friend Brian did.

But where is the enjoyment – purely in possession? Sometimes I look around my shelves and think when will I have the time to absorb all this, to really enjoy it. I think back to my childhood and youth, when I would use my birthday or pocket money to buy a book and go home and immediately curl up in a chair and begin to read it. Or I would buy a record and take it home and play it over and over again and really absorb and enjoy the music. I had so few books or albums then I suppose. The ones I had were special. The connection between purchase and enjoyment was immediate then. I also used the local library to borrow books and music too, even when I moved to London and my little bedsit in Brixton. Borrowing rather than buying? Dear me! But I lived with more modest means then.

As I look around the lounge again I realise that, when you include my TV and the cable box, this little room is quite an entertainment centre. I am now a man of riches and treasures too: well, treasures to me. It appears I am wealthy man. It is good to look around our rooms with fresh eyes and take in our possessions. To realise just how wealthy we are compared with many others – and some of those others may live not very far from us. So we should be grateful for what we have and share our treasures with others if possible. And perhaps try to pay no attention to that little insidious voice encouraging us to purchase more and take that itching finger away from our phone or laptop where Amazon and other sites pedal their wares.

Some of these books and cd’s and movies are like old friends to me. Some are barely new acquaintances as I have hardly played them or read them, if at all. Some too, like true friends, have helped see me through difficult times.

But they are not really friends. Real friends cannot be bought, let alone possessed. Generally we only acquire real friends by accident, not by intention, where we find ourselves at different times on life’s journey. We shouldn’t pick them up and put them down again either like a cd or a book, let alone leave them to gather dust on the shelf. Friendships have to be kept in good repair. They are our true treasures, our true wealth.

Marcus advises us: ‘Whenever you want to cheer yourself up, think of the qualities of your fellows’, for which we could read ‘friends.’ So, instead of playing or streaming that movie or music or interminable Netflix series, or clicking on Amazon to buy something new, we could cheer ourselves up by reflecting on our friends and be thankful for them. And then give them a call.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested. I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius