I heard the other day that cassettes are coming back into fashion. For me, they never went out and I find myself ahead of the game, just as I used to be at school when, being so slow on my feet, I was always in the right place when the game turned.
How could people, I wondered, keep discarding one precious thing after another, as long-playing records took over from 78s and then more and more sophisticated electronic devices allowed a person to carry about more music than they could possibly find time to listen to, secreted in one small electronic device.
I was horrified when R, who was pretty much immune to shopping, bought himself one of those gadgets, and pleased that before long he had forgotten where he had put it and didn’t try to find it.
We went on listening to our records, CDs and the radio, sitting down beside the ‘music centre’ which had been our first major purchase. And, when away from home, I took my cassette player with me and always had just three or four cassettes which have remained, for ever, connected to the place where I listened to them most often. The ‘green record’ shown directly below (Mozart Trio K563) will always take me back to the Outer Hebrides.
Then, of course, there were those cassettes bought wherever we happened to be: Bruno Venturi in Naples, Georges Brassens in Paris, in Portugal Amalia Rodrigues and, from a rack in a Spanish petrol station, Nina de Antequera belting out some wonderfully coarse flamenco.
Less entirely pleasurable to listen to but wonderfully exotic are the Turkish dervish music from Konya and the cassette chosen for me – it was his favourite – by a boatman on the Nile.
Now that I seldom travel further than the local high street, these memory-laden tapes serve as time travellers and, ropey as most of them now are, become more precious with age. So, it seems, do I. You only have to live long enough to become of interest because of the people you have known: a kind of living relic.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE