Sitting up was quite difficult this morning, I felt like I needed one of those handles you grab that people with broken legs have. But I was out of the door by 10AM, loading another 40 boxes into The Archive, mostly CDs but some vinyl which I took from the storage because the boxes were damaged (not the records). There were also books and some magazines, a younger man might have been a better choice to lift them, but there’s costs everywhere and we are going to have to hire younger burly men to load in the bulk of the vinyl boxes because as I said in an early post, I simply can’t lift them by myself. The point is that I/we have to do as much as we can without paid help because when we really need it, it ain’t cheap – I can’t imagine how expensive it would be to do this in another country, at least we live in a place where things are a little cheaper.
After the loading, I sat on the couch and closed my eyes. Sarah had pushed all the boxes deep into the hallway and Olivia was getting the floor painting finished. We then drove off, back to the storage with empty boxes to leave there and to pick up more things, not boxes this time, speakers mainly. I’m wondering if I can get separate musical setups in different rooms. I already have one in the front and one in the back but one in the “loffice” (library-office) and one in the main vinyl room would be ace, we’ll see, there might not be enough room.
At the moment we’re squeezing through the corridor as the empty shelves get cleaned and built, the boxes impatiently gathering around them, like a queue of teenagers at a festival gate, “let us in,” they shout. Soon they will be in there in alphabetical order, asking to be played. Of course, I will never get to everything in the remainder of my life, but somebody will. There’s something awe-inspiring about being in a library, whether it be books or a library of music, just flitting through the pages and randomly listening to something you either love or on other days something you are investigating. Not everything is a success, but when you stumble upon something amazing, it was worth taking the chance. I can never tell what I’m going to like.
Narciso from the shop two doors down helped unload and the girls chose pizzas for dinner there. I went down the road and got an Asian takeaway from a popular place here called “Wok to Walk”, bought some wine for Sarah and a Fritz Kola for Olivia, spoke French in the supermarket queues, Spanish at the storehouse, Swedish with Olivia and English – all in little bits, but all these languages passed through my brain today in some form…not as fluently as Olivia’s Portuguese, but she is born to learn languages.
Music today has been an old favourite, Colin Blunstone – One Year (1971), I never tire of this record or his incredible voice. Check out what I wrote about it previously here: