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