It has been pointed out to me that I haven’t posted anything in a while. This is true, and there is a good reason: the nightmare that is selling a house and moving the possessions of a lifetime into a new home. I won’t bore you with all the details, suffice to say that the process started in March 2024 and we finally moved in August 2026 after two collapsed sales, night panic attacks, emotional stress and heartache.

But, of course, the stress hasn’t ended with the physical move. While our new house could scarcely be described as small, it is a downsize from the very large home we had before. A house so large that it seemed capable of finding space for anything we wanted, anything and everything we could desire, and this move has meant getting rid of all sorts of stuff, some of which has been painful. It’s not the tables and chairs, the rugs and the paintings that hurt, but the things that are connected to memories and to times and places in my life.

To a degree I’ve been through this before. When we returned to the UK from Hong Kong – after 17 years in my case – we went through this exercise. Not that we were downsizing, but it had seemed a good opportunity to sort things out. A mistake. A completely unnecessary one at that. Bookshelves were thinned out – mainly just novels that I probably wasn’t going to re-read – or at least I thought I wasn’t – but how many times since have I said “Oh, I’ve got a copy of that…now where is it?” only to find that it was one of those books that didn’t make the cut. Worse was the collection of concert programmes that I had kept – sad, I know – but in the end I made the compromise of keeping a selection from each year. That was traumatic enough and I swore that I wouldn’t do that again. Marie Kondo has a lot to answer for.

But this time I had no choice. Books stayed, but the boxes of concert programmes had to go and it broke my heart when they went into the recycling. Is that stupid? Yes it probably is, but worse was still to come with the little matter of the something like 3000 CDs that I owned. I’d started buying CDs back in 1983 when they first came out, and I had never thrown any away, never given any way. I even know what those first CDs were: Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert playing Bach Brandenburg concertos, and a disc of Bernstein conducting American music. When I first moved to Hong Kong in 1993, my CDs were one of the few things that I took with me, and by the time I returned to the UK the numbers had only grown and continued to do so.

But it’s silly – I know it is – every one of those discs has been ripped to hard disc so that I can stream from my own server, and that hard disc is regularly backed-up. The music is all still there. So why does it matter to me that we don’t really have room for them all? Well, we could have the space but it would be asking a lot of my wife’s patience and tolerance for her eccentric husband. For the moment I have seventeen packing boxes of CDs kept safely in a storage unit waiting for me to decide what to do with them. I can’t bring myself to throw them into the tip – but who wants 3000 discs of an outdated medium? Who even buys CDs these days?

But again I ask, why do they matter to me? Except of course that they are a record of my life – one record only, but an important one. I’m not pretending that I know when and where they were each bought, but I remember my Schubert phase dutifully listening to every song on the Hyperion series, my Bach cantata phase, starting with Masaaki Suzuki and then switching to John Eliot Gardiner. Some of the music is childhood loves – Shostakovich symphonies – while other discs are music that is the consolation of old age. And when I am even older, when my memory starts to fail me, when I no longer have the discs that were given to me by friends and lovers? What then?

I don’t know. In the meantime would anybody like to make me an offer? Buyer collects.