I had a letter from my friend Leo the other day, one of the most interesting men I have ever met. The son of a navvy and a cleaner, he won an exhibition to Balliol to read English and when he arrived in Oxford his Geordie accent was so strong that he was often incomprehensible to mollycoddled posh kids from the south like me.
At that stage, Leo was determined to become a bullfighter, and I will never forget the astonished horror on my Anglo-Saxon tutor’s face when Leo announced that he had been unable to write an essay on ‘The Seafarer’ that week because he had been talking on the local radio station about his ambition. Sadly he never became a matador, and after graduating he bummed happily around for many years, earning a crust as a life-class model. Then he decided he wanted a more ordered life, so he gave up drink, taught himself Finnish (a notoriously difficult language) and became a translator. He has never been anything other than his own man.
In his letter Leo said that he was staggered by the size of my CD collection and by the rate at which I’ve been adding to it. ‘My efforts and energies most definitely go in the opposite direction these days, towards minimalism, chucking stuff out and keeping life as simple as possible.’ He now owns only about a dozen albums and gets all the music he wants on YouTube.
I half envy Leo the uncluttered simplicity of his life but know it wouldn’t suit me. In these anxious times I’ve found tending to my CD collection, as others tend their gardens, a great comfort. I rearrange sections, plan future purchases, weed out the duds and read books on the subject.
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