I Made This For You......

Many moons ago, when love hurt so much I couldn’t eat, and I was sure that wearing bangles made me look oh so impressive (until that day when I sat for an hour by a fire not noticing that one side of the bangles had got red hot – and stood up, only discover that they spin around your wrist when you move your hand – and it's not easy to remove red-hot bangles when screaming), when I had a waist line that let me scrape my body into drain pipes – and thought this looked good on a man (because at 15 I was so sure I was a man), back in the "summer of cider" as we named it then – I spent many hours – days even, making compilation tapes.

It was an art form; the careful selection of music which you had recorded from the radio, other tapes, and records, with lyrics that told someone how you felt about – given to a friend, but carrying the message loud and clear – "I can't live without you – I will die if you don’t love me as much as I love you – please love me back."

It is said that reminiscing is never what it was – and maybe this age was not so golden, but it had something to be said for it.


As regular readers will know, the long suffering wife and I have been putting together a CD (Well, okay, two CDs - one loud and one peaceful) of music that we like to play to the as-yet-unborn baby. A small testimony to our lives up to this point, sung by strangers who feel like they have become best friends. While we expected arguments to rage and battle lines to be drawn, in actual fact it was a short process, we agreed quickly, dragged and dropped our play list on ITUNES and clicked "burn"...and that was it – out popped a shiny CD with the music we consider to describe us, and our hopes and dreams for our baby. Of course, this needed to be repeated after we had listened to it again and realised that some of the lyrics might be considered a little blue....

So here I am staring at this CD. It's content matters – but somehow I am not satisfied. This doesn’t mean the same as compilation tapes of old. It was just too easy. I didn’t have to lay down in front of my cassette player waiting for a song to end, click stop, take the tape out, wind it back just a few mm so that the click wouldn’t show up on the final recording and then put the tape in for the next track...i didn’t have to carefully write out the track listing by hand..i just clicked a button.


When I was a teenager (which really wasn’t that long ago!) giving someone a compilation tape was a big deal. It showed a serious level of commitment to a friendship or relationship. You knew, when you got one, that the person making it had sat for hours, patiently fast-forwarding or rewinding tapes to find the perfect song, or even worse, trying to put the needle on the vinyl at just the right place – rewinding and taping over bits when the first chords were missed, as they inevitably were. Even when you had a song on CD, you still had to transfer it to tape, and get all the gaps between the songs just the right length. It really meant something, and I still have many of those tapes which people made for me.

I am a technophile – I am more than happy with new technology, but I miss the old compilation tape – sometimes – just sometimes – the effort counts more than the end result – I don’t care if it's perfect..i care that it shows that someone cares.


Yours in the past, as now,

The Broken Man

If Music be the food of love – then fight on

There is some evidence to say the babies pick up on sounds in the womb; that at this stage of development if for example you where to read a book to an unborn chuld and to do so repeatedly, when born, the baby would suckle more vigorously if they heard the story being read to them. This means that, to my mind, we are now in a prime time for the indoctrination of music tastes. So, when I am going to sleep of an evening; plugged into my ipod and listning to a lecture or some music, I have taken to placing one ear piece of my music player in the palm of my hand and wrapping my arm around the long suffering wife's bump. Okay, "ridiculous", I hear you say – "the baby won't really pick up on these things" – but I figure its worth a try.

This was not something that me and the wife have discussed, until that is last night – when she noticed. After the “What on earth are you doing?” came the discussion about whether I *really* felt that my unborn baby needed to be listening to the Yale lecture series with me – followed by the – "oh you have to be kidding, you think you are going to get to secretly influence the music tastes of our baby"…so the wife is busy trying to work out how to use i-tunes so she can insure she has a compilation CD of her music to play during the day when she is beyond my reach and influence. The battle of the bands has begun…