When you really want to feel miserable, read a few lifestyle features in a glossy magazine. The other day, in a momentary loss of concentration, I started reading one about a family who were willing to admit publicly that they own five televisions. Obviously I ventured no further, assuming they all have enormous bottoms, brutally compromised digestive systems, failing eyesight, withered musculatures and the brains of ferrets. But then I thought of my own modest north-London flat. We have just the one television, unfashionably small in that it’s only about the size of a small car. Otherwise, the flat is crowded out with children, books, secret hoards of stationery, clothes that may once have been fashionable but are now just clothes, and all the other accoutrements of the faintly impoverished freelance life. Including music. As you would expect, there is a fair amount of music here, and there are also a few different ways of listening to it.
So, to start in the other room, there is the stereo system. When a man is young, free and monied, he buys the best stereo system he can afford. He has speakers on those big pointy metal plinths, so the music can be played at considerable volume without undermining the building’s structural integrity. He has a posh record player because, as everyone knows, music sounds best played on a posh record player. Also, he owns hundreds upon hundreds of albums, most of which have been ruined on the cheap music centre he previously owned. Gradually, over the next 20 years, his beloved record collection will be superseded by CDs and, when his girlfriend moves in, shifted to the loft. When the cartridge needs to be replaced, he might not get round to it for a few years because it now costs more than £100. Then children arrive, and the record player is mothballed indefinitely. ‘What’s this?’ ask his children as they reach maturity. Their father, now grizzled and exhausted, tries to explain the idea of records and grooves and side one and side two, and the way the last track sometimes sounded a bit woozy if the hole hadn’t been pressed exactly in the middle, and his children look on dumbfounded, as though he were describing alchemy or the trepanning of skulls.
The trouble is, the CD player is also now beginning to show its age. It heats up and starts jumping. After every CD you have to give it a 20-minute rest. Sometimes it just switches off of its own accord, like an old aunt of mine. You have to look after it, nurture it, as if it were an old car, or indeed an old aunt. The sound it produces is magnificent. But on a day like today, when I have a lot of words to write, I might want to play eight or nine CDs. The poor old thing can’t deal with that.
Fortunately here, in the office, sits a newish laptop, with a much better CD drive than the old laptop, which breathed its last a few months ago, taking away all the songs I had stored on the hard drive, as well as about 15,000 important emails I had neglected to back up. Now I have a pair of speakers plugged into the machine, so I can play those eight or nine CDs a day, barely registering some of them, but noticing the silence when they stop. And elsewhere? Next door there’s an old upright piano, played by the two females in the household and by neither of the males. It badly needs tuning. Even when it has just been tuned, it badly needs tuning. Floating around the flat are several iPods. You can tell when someone is using one by the tuneless wail that bounces off walls, ceilings and wooden floors. Some people know whether they are singing along to their iPod. But those who don’t know don’t believe it when you tell them. It’s amazing how often I sit next to people like this on trains.
Otherwise, there are just the usual three or four radios and the boy’s ghetto blaster, sadly broken by unknown hands (possibly holding unknown cricket bats). Silence is something we leave the flat for. But at least we don’t have five televisions. This has got to be better, hasn’t it? Hasn’t it?
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