After what seems a great deal more time than has actually been I finally stumbled across this old blog and read a couple of posts. Nothing much to report there, but it reminded me of a time when blogging was quite the popular thing to do; sitting there in a well-lit window like a little Carrie Bradshaw wannabe; scratching about for something outlandish but resolutely right-on to whittle on about for a page or so. I soon lost the inclination and set about going to the pub with friends to just talk shit instead of writing it.
So now I'm a forty-something and way too comfortable and settled into my own ways, I look for the kind of tripe being served up online in the bloggersphere with an eagerness to belittle and mock whatever I find. And there's no reason for this. No purpose or point to my destructive desires. It's just something that pleases me.
Here's where I paste a link or two to a couple of blogs I've enjoyed betwattering. But we all get that so let's just move along and take it as a given; there's plenty out there so you get the idea. It happened.
It's a wfh day today. Ahh the glorious mid-life crisis reward that is working from home. It's like working, but it's from home. It's like going to work, but without actually going. It's like working, but without actually working.
I jape. I so jape. I take my priviliged wfh allowance very seriously. I mean without it I wouldn't be able to enjoy one less commute a week, which to me is gold. So yes I work, from home, when I'm working from home.
Today during my wfh spell I'm running through some of my favourite cassettes. This is something I treasure; a little bit of me time all mixed in with doing work, but from home.
I love cassettes, or tapes as I'm going to inaccurately refer to them as. The aesthetic of the soft floppy tape safely concealed within that tough plastic shell, the little velvet pad on a thin metal suspension to maintain even contact between tape and playback head and the variation in tape type; ferro, chrome or metal. My most favouritest feature of tape decks was and still is the options of playback refinement: to Dolby or not to Dolby, that B the question, C? Oh S sir I do! (Apologies - a rather ruthless bit of noise reduction tapefoolery there.)
Currently I'm rocking (oh yes) Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits. This was a treasured tape because it was recorded on chrome tape, and therefore always worked well with B-type NR and lots of volume. Side one plays flawlessly, but after turning the tape over to side two I notice the tape's stretched a little at the start and the delecate intro of Ride Across The River now seems to resemble 'Splash and Splutter Your Way Across The River Like a Drunken Hobo'.
Still, let it play out and it soon settles down.
Imagine hearing such failed quality on a cd, or a sacred FLAC?! People would shit, relentlessly. Yet somehow because of all the nostalgia I can let it slide. As long as the vu meter is bouncing away like a good'un I'm happy.
Like LP lovers rave on about the warmth of a pressed musical disc (I refuse to call records 'vinyl' like some worthless hipster mong) I too feel far more presence in a recording played back from cassette than I do from CD.
And so I shall return to working, from home. And consider perhaps coming up with a point to my posting before I start rambling on about anything and nothing. Carrie Bradshaw where are you?
