You can’t buy common sense

Here’s a tip for all you ardent CD buy­ers. When you go into your local emporium of fine music and approach the counter clutch­ing the new album by Radi­o­head, do not let the keen young sales staff per­suade you into ‘upgrad­ing’ your copy to the lim­ited edi­tion ver­sion for ‘only’ an extra quid — even if it does come in a gate­fold sleeve and includes an arty poster. Res­ist all tempta­tion. Res­ist, I tell you.

Why?

Well, because you will return home with the afore­men­tioned com­pact disc, take it out of the bag, stare at it and promptly think, “That card case is going to fall apart in months, isn’t it?” Fol­low­ing this real­isa­tion, you will attempt to place the lovingly-crafted, orna­mental case in your carefully-organised CD racks. It’s at this point that you’ll remem­ber that IKEA CD stor­age units only accept those bor­ing, normal-sized jewel cases. This means that the Spe­cial Edi­tion CD will have to join the other Spe­cial Edi­tion CDs (fool­ish pur­chases, each and every one) in a dusty pile on top of your shelves. And that pile of CDs, as it grows, will stare at you from across the living-room, whis­per­ing, “I’m not tidy and organ­ised. I’m get­ting dusty. I’m get­ting on your nerves, aren’t I?” (Yes, com­pact discs talk to me; do you want to make some­thing of it? Well, do you?)

Typ­ic­ally, of course, I haven’t actu­ally listened to the new Radi­o­head album yet, because I’ve been listen­ing to Nina Simone while sur­roun­ded by candles. Mmm. Yes.

One more music-related annoy­ance. As I was in my local music store, I was approached by an acquaint­ance — the kind of ‘acquaint­ance’ one nor­mally hides in door­ways to avoid. With a super­ior and know­ing smirk, he eyed the CDs I was intend­ing to pur­chase. See­ing Radi­o­head and a Nina Simone col­lec­tion, he sug­ges­ted that I only listened to maudlin, depress­ing music, and moreover that I was obvi­ously intend­ing to spend the even­ing alone, wal­low­ing in my own misery.

He didn’t say it quite as poet­ic­ally, obvi­ously. Because he’s a moron.

I con­tem­plated my reply for a good ten seconds. My ini­tial thought was to tell him that, in fact, all my even­ings are des­ol­ate waste­lands of inter­min­able misery, usu­ally accom­pan­ied by the repeated play­ing of Lou Reed’s Ber­lin. I was then plan­ning to fur­ther over-egg the pud­ding by inform­ing him that I sit alone in my darkened room, con­tem­plat­ing the mean­ing­less of life, the fact that we’re entirely alone in the uni­verse, and gen­er­ally star­ing into the dark abyss — only emer­ging for a brief thirty-minute res­pite from this emo­tional tor­ment to get my reg­u­lar fix of East­Enders.

I was in a sar­castic mood, as you might have guessed.

Instead, I poin­ted out to him that I was being the model of restraint regard­ing my selec­tion of mel­an­choly music, since I’d just returned the new Tinder­sticks album to the shelf from whence it came. As a witty response it would have worked really well too, if only he’d actu­ally known who the Tinder­sticks were.

I must get back to Nina. She’s singing sweet noth­ings dir­ectly into my head and sooth­ing the frayed nerves of the day, and it’s glorious.