Just as the Summer Bank Holiday weather is an English cliche – freezing rain – I spend mine mostly indoors, doing the equally corny and blokey Bank Holiday activity of 21st Century DIY – to wit, backing-up my computer’s hard drive. It is necessary, mind, as the iBook’s weird crashing effect is recurring to the point where the thing is impossible to use, and I now have to take it in for repairs. Am typing this up in an internet cafe in Highgate.
So over the weekend I go through all the mp3s, photos and text documents I’ve accumulated in the two years since I bought the laptop, listening to as much of the music as possible before deciding to copy it onto CDR or delete it. All the various Fosca mixes and demos take up enough space as it is, and I guess they do need to be archived (why? I should just delete the demos too), but there’s also the music by others that I somehow feel I need to have at my disposal. I’d managed to build up about 12 days’ worth of continuous sound. Thousands of songs, over 10GB of computer memory. That’s not an achievement, it’s a symptom.
And so the old arguments raise their heads. Just how much Leonard Cohen does one person need? How many albums by The Fall or Stereolab are entirely necessary? The answer, of course, is none. Or, if you ask any of their fans, all of them. And once again I’m finding myself in that whittling-down argument: it’s just as well I’m not a Fall fan, because if I were, I’d have to own all their albums. And I don’t want to own all their albums.
After hours – days – of this dithering and choosing, I end up wishing I didn’t like music at all. Which is ridiculous – you can like music without having to collect the wretched stuff in quantity. I should just delete the lot and go out and talk to human beings. But I don’t.
I’m currently reading Ted Hughes’s Collected Letters, which contain (as one would expect) more than a few ruminations on Modern Man falling out of step with Nature. There’s an instance where he’s visiting a village in Africa, remarking enviously how the local fisherman seem so entirely happy with their lives, as they don’t want for anything they haven’t already got. They live in the moment. Though admittedly, it’s a fairly fish-based moment.
Thing is, I don’t think of myself as acquisitive, or even much of a collector. My problem is more that I hoard things automatically, then find it so hard to know what to throw out. I still feel the need to own SOME music. When I’m not looking, it quickly turns into Too Much, and the upshot is I’m sitting alone in a room in Highgate at 3AM, staring at a screen, fiddling with blank CDs, trying to work out the exact degree to how much I do or don’t like Martha Wainwright.
I bristle at this very English – and very male – connection I’ve made between liking things and having to own them. I think of that stereotypical view of Englishmen that other countries are meant to hold. That we all have (a) bad teeth, (b) collect things needlessly, and (c) are secretly homosexual.
Well, two out of three isn’t bad.
(wait for it…)
I’ve had my teeth fixed.
