Thank God for Wood Yards.

So I can buy a 2 terabyte hard drive from ebuyer for £69.99, proof technology may change but not 9.99 price points. And this is enough to store 500,000 songs, which will take on average 1.5 million minutes to play. At eight hours solid listening per day that would take up nine years of my life. The equivalent LP record collection would be 180 meters long and weigh approximately 3.5 metric tons. As CDs the volume and weight would be roughly the same but I would need a bicycle to travel the 400 meters from one end to the other. In my youth my record collection at its height was less than a meter but they were chosen and cherished, individual packets of sonic delight that I sat down and listened to. We are apparently spoilt by choice, we lose functionality, get moribund with confusion. ‘Which out of my 500,000 will I play next?’ It doesn’t happen, I just let on one marginally less unappealing than the rest. I don’t listen to it with an oooh of pleasure, just dum-di-dum along to it as a sort of half remembered reassuring presence like a wall. My 2 terabyte record collection has become lift music in a high rise to outer space. My TV has become the window. I am somehow being lulled into suspended animation, forever on route to somewhere I can’t arrive at. 

Now health and safety may at first sight seem unrelated to my gigantic record collection but cycling round it in my perpetual space ship has its dangers. The library of legislation designed to protect me results in restricting me from much activity. It contains me in my survival pod of consumer employment. One only has to imagine Lord Sainsbury sponsoring a bill, based on government statistics of  home deaths by eating, that private cooking be banned. How could one argue with such good intentions? That Sainsburys profits would go up is merely a side effect. Which brings me to the third layer of my cocoon. Whilst I can buy products my access to raw materials is dwindling. Maybe soon we’ll only be able to buy carrots, pre washed, pealed and diced for easy assembly, as part of hobby kit for those with an interest in the ancient art of cooking. So as my lift ascends past the stratosphere I can still thank God for wood yards.