Electric guitar heaven

Like most addicts I have become accustomed to smuggling stuff into my own house. In the old days it was bottles of Scotch or wine. More recently it has been a couple of hundred quid’s worth of CDs after a binge in HMV. 

The trouble with CDs is that they take up so much space. Wandering round Cargo in Wimbledon the other Saturday I noticed a splendid chest of drawers for a mere £40 that would offer safe and stylish storage for some 400 discs. It was the work of a moment to snap it up and put it in the car. It was only when I arrived home that I realised the flaw in my plan. Fine to have this new unit to stash my illicit purchases, probably just about possible to get it upstairs without Mrs S noticing — she was in fact playing her cello, a new passion that gives her great pleasure but which in these early stages is causing serious suffering to her husband and son. The first time I heard her I thought the plumbing was on the blink. But how do you hide a largish piece of furniture in a small suburban house? Reader, you can’t and with a sick feeling in my stomach I realised I would have to confess. 

Once I’d picked myself up from the floor and applied a steak to my black eye, I set about rearranging some of my collection. And the first CDs to take pride of place in the new chest of drawers were by the amazing Sonny Landreth. A Louisiana slide guitarist, he has been described by Eric Clapton ‘as probably the most underestimated musician on the planet and also one of the most advanced’.