Possessions, Loss, and the Record & Tape Exchange

Last weekend I rented a stall at Battersea car boot sale (loved by semi-famous people, like the main guy out of Metronomy and Susie Bubble) with my boyfriend, and attempted to sell all the crap I thought I no longer wanted. This was prompted in part by moving house. When one moves house, the sheer volume of accumulated stuff becomes unavoidably apparent, and if, like me, you are anti-stuff, it can be a little painful. So, of course, I thought, ‘why not sell all this shit and feel smug afterwards?’

So there we were, hawking our beloved belongings. I’d surrendered my entire CD collection, including all my Talking Heads, a load of wanky dance music I’d tried to ‘get into’ during a too-long phase of my life, and Ant and Dec’s Greatest Hits. Because I am very lazy, as evidenced by the rate of updates on this blog, I didn’t upload everything onto my computer beforehand, or do what several people recommended me to do and put it all on an external hard drive. That would have required considerable effort, and seemed antithetical to the ‘clean break’ I felt I wanted to make. Instead I just looked away as people bought for £1 CDs I paid full price for not that long ago. (I also sold DVDs and clothes, but the DVDs were mostly Hellraiser sequels, and I buy a couple of items of clothing a week from charity shops, so I didn’t mind selling them that much.)

I’m not sure why it turned out to be so hard, but it was only made harder by my experience the next day in Greenwich. I visited the CD exchange there to get rid of what failed to sell at the boot sale, and honestly, it was as bad as I thought it would be.

I hate the men who work in those shops. I think they referred to me as a ‘he’, for a start, which doesn’t make sense considering I am not remotely manly, but made me feel terrible anyway. And then the person serving me did of course do the signature flick of disdain through the CDs, all with that hugely attractive air of expert knowledge, while a couple of other record shop twats smirked at each other in the background and muttered about the massively rare record they were playing over the store’s sound system. I could barely control myself, really, in the face of all that expertise and power, not to faint with desire, but I did. At least long enough to accept their ‘£60 cash, £120 exchange’ non-negotiable offer. (That may sound a lot, but there were so many CDs, many of which he placed on the ‘sell for full price pile’, and five times as many on the ‘start at £4’ pile.)

I only really started to feel the loss on the bus to work the next day, when I realised that I wouldn’t again be able to just pop an old album on my ipod, subsequently realising a few plays later why I didn’t listen to it any more. And I wouldn’t be able to trace my silly teenage attempts to forge some kind of identity through the music I listened to. (Although I still remember! Discernable phases included when I was 14 and bought a Kiss FM compilation then a Damage album, when I was 16 and bought the Strokes, Moldy Peaches, and lots of the Smiths, and the years when I bought stuff like Fischerspooner and Bugged Out compilations because I was ‘cool’. My most recent buys were mostly Prince, in case you were wondering.) I know these albums weren’t an actual part of me, and any pain, mental or otherwise, is ridiculous, but I tried so very hard when I was younger, and I suppose part of me worries that I’m still not cool enough to get away with throwing out my carefully-selected CDs. In reality, though, I never played them, and I can still name all the most important albums because they were important. What with Spotify, and (don’t judge me for this, I am a terrible illegal downloader) buying downloads off Amazon, I don’t need lots of thin plastic boxes filling up a few shelves. I am still cool, anyway. I kept all my books.

Lotte