my life

When I was a boy I was lucky enough to visit Cornwall with my Mum, her partner at the time and my sister, Rachel. Hull to Cornwall is quite a long drive by British standards – about 7 hours, and around eleven if you keep getting lost! As I was going to be sat in a hot and sticky car for such a long time I decided I would be a good idea to compile a C90 tape of all my favourite Beatles songs. Classic titles like Blue Jay Way, Your Mother Should Know and Rain all made it on there. My Walkman (okay, it was a ‘Sanyo with Auto-Reverse!’) had brand new AAs, and with some spare ones in my pocket, I was ready for the long journey.

There was always something exciting about choosing which songs would make it onto a mix tape

Being a typical stroppy little 11 year old, and not wishing to have anything that even resembled a conversation with anyone else, I remember listening to around 15 songs non-stop for the whole duration of the trip, there and back. I knew which song would be playing next, every single word as well as every chord change and I was really happy.

Now, fast forward 15 years and I was the proud owner of a brand new iPod.

Not only could I listen to every CD album I had ever bought or downloaded, I could also rip and add every album that my friends and family had ever owned. At the last count, I had over 15,000 songs.

So, 15 songs and I’m as happy as a clam in high water; if I have over a thousand times as many songs then…… well all I do now is skip, skip… skip. I have become a lot less satisfied with the music I am listening to; not because of the music itself, but because of the medium I have chosen to listen with. Has the shear amount of choice killed the music, like video killed the radio star?

In case you haven’t guessed, this isn’t a post about Sanyo cassette players versus iPods and is actually a reflection of life in general. Not just my life, but also the lives of a good number of my friends who have been lucky enough to have ‘lived’.

I have travelled to more countries than most folk will ever visit in their lives; I have met more people than I can even remember; and have had more adventures than that little boy in the back of the Ford Escort had ever dreamed of having. On the contrary my sister, Leanne, has lived in Hull all her life and worked in the same admin job since leaving school. Leanne is one of the happiest people I know.

Whilst I know that her life choice was never going to suit me, I sometimes wish that I could go back to a time when things were just simpler. Trouble is though, once you’ve owned an iPod it’s so very hard to go back to cassette players.