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