“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery”

"Imagine me and you I do
I think about you day and night
It's only right
To think about the girl you love
And hold her tight"

I'm not really looking forward to my holiday next week (that time off work, other than the overnight in Glasgow, I have nothing planned except some vigorous housework). It just reminds me of other times, and other places.

Remember the pre-digital music age? When I was a boy, you bought an LP and listened to it. Then you listened to it again, and again and again and again . You had to make a choice how to spend your hard earn cash, pick an album and go to an actual shop (imagine that youngsters!) and buy it !
At home you listened to side one, you turned it over after 5 or 6 songs (how quaint) and listened to side two. You did this until the music was ingrained into your Psyche, so much so that even 20 years later my subconscious can predict the opening of the next track , Pavlovian style, without being actually mindful of what it actually is. Artists planned the order of the tracks, and the sum of the parts was often greater than the whole. Often the album was intended to be listened to in an holistic manner, not as a series of individual songs.
This process started to erode with the greatest hits albums, the coming of CD (with it's titchy artwork - remember the visual splendour of a 12" lp with a gatefold sleeve eh?) and finally the ipod shuffle feature. When I buy a new CD (and I still do) I rip the tracks, and sometime later one will pop up on my ipod. sometime after that another one might.
The album as "a whole" has been lost, reduced to individual displaced songs.

I don't seem to have a real point save venting some middle aged ramblings.

Must go to bed now, though hopefully no nightmares tonight!

“In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost” - Dante Alighieri (again)