For the truly sad, there is always YouTube.
Not that I’m knocking YouTube. I wouldn’t dare with Toni so close. His answer to virtually any question is,
“Look on YouTube,” and to be fair, he has a point. You can ask virtually anything and numerous videos
will suddenly appear (usually made by teenagers from Minnesota) addressing, if
not answering your query. I am sure that
if I typed in “What is the square root of minus one” or “Why chameleons?” there
would be answers – or something approaching them in all the dazzling
frightfulness of human possibility unchained!
But that is not what I am on about. What I am concerned with is packing. An activity that I, and every right thinking
person, surely hates. I was once
beguiled by a ‘Top 10 packing tips’ electronic siren-picture in a side bar when
I was supposed to be doing something else on the computer and I lost a couple
of hours wandering through video mazes where human ingenuity had been
concentrated on how to pack an entire wardrobe plus electronic equipment into a
small case you could take on board a plane and still have space for souvenirs
to bring home with you!
I cannot say, truthfully, that I retain much, except to
realise that the principle of the Russian matrioshka doll (i.e. one doll inside
another inside another and so on) had been taken to another level where electric
leads inside socks inside shoes inside bags inside god knows what, was
something that every thinking traveller had to do. I also remember that shirts had to be rolled
and not folded and that one of those perfumed tumble dryer tissues should be
placed in the case to make the clothes smell sweet and not musty when you
finally got to your destination.
I still hate packing.
And I have hated packing ever since I can remember. I lack that let’s-treat-this-as-a-3D-jigsaw-puzzle
approach that separates the anal from whatever the opposite of that is. This hatred rose anew in me while listening
to the CD player in the car.
As they are now so cheap I have become addicted to buying
box sets of classical music that record companies are issuing to suckers like
myself who still do not realise that all this music is available from somewhere
else for nothing. I must be the only
person in the western world whose electronic music library can be directly
sourced to CDs that I own. Leaving that
sad fact to one side for the moment, return with me to just before the motorway
turnoff towards Terrassa and the first chords of an instantly recognisable
tune.
It was the sort of music that comes with baggage. It was jolly and upbeat, but there was also a
sense of melancholy connected with it as well.
It took me a few minutes to realise that it was music from my college
days, and music that was played at a specific time.
My first years in college were spent in Hall in Neuadd Lewis
Jones (now demolished), one of three Halls of Residence on the campus of
Swansea University: bed, desk and chair, rug, armchair and views over Singleton
Park; breakfast and evening meal and a sort of full board at the weekends. During the holidays the halls were needed for
conferences and the like so, while we could store some stuff in a lockable part
of the wardrobe, we had to clear out.
And that is where the packing came into play and my consequent misery.
I found that the only way in which I could counteract my
fatalistic torpor when it came to packing was to play music of a sort of
compulsively jolly sort. The very music
was found on a sale price disk that I probably bought from one of the sales in
Duck, Son and Pinker that I haunted.
This record was of ballet music by Gluck and Grétry. Wonderful.
That disk saved my sanity on more than one occasion when the utter
misery of how to pack so much in to so little seemed more than any arts
students should be asked to contemplate.
It was a moment of horror when a speaker from my (first) Boot’s
“stereo” record player gave the sacred disk a glancing blow during one of my
epic packing stints. This did not stop
my playing the record, it just meant that at a certain point I had to brace
myself for the needle to start skipping through a positively Stockhausian
racket until the needle found the grove again and the happiness continued.
I had not looked at the contents of the boxed set that I was
playing my way through in the car to Terrassa, it was merely the next disk,
number 21 that went into the slot and the Straussian waltzes that came out of
the speakers were more than acceptable, and the music matched the way Spanish
drivers regard a three lane motorway as a sort of open dance floor to sashay
their way around, sometimes with flickering lights to mark where they have
been.
It was well into the CD when the music suddenly changed and
the unmistakable tunes of Christoph Willibald Gluck came through the speakers
and I started humming. The orchestration
was hopelessly wrong for the eighteenth century, but by god, it was music and
orchestration I knew! And then tune
after tune in a sequence that I knew unfolded until the real gem of this
collection started, the ballet suite arranged by Constant Lambert from various
ballets of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry.
Let me not for a minute pretend that I knew the full first names of
these two musicians; I am copying from the notes! But the music was second nature to me.
I have been looking for this recording for years. My original record was ‘sold to Cardiff
market’ by Paul when the floor of the attic in which my record collection was
stored started to give way under the weight!
I never found a copy and now, unlooked for, I have it again!
I wonder if this is a sign that I will be moving again soon?
I sincerely hope not.
I prefer to listen and enjoy the jollity and remember the misery in the tranquillity
of memory!
