Straight outta bed, straight into the shower, straight out of the shower, straight into the breach. It’s one thing having hundreds of boxes of music, it’s another getting them onto the shelves in order, whether it be CD or vinyl. So Sarah has been furiously building the vinyl shelves and placing the already completed CD shelves where they should be, and then putting the pins in with Olivia furiously putting the shelves on the pins. It’s not just that, everything has to be cleaned – all that time sitting in a dusty storage house, cobwebs on the cobwebs and dust from the breeze blocks in the building’s construction, shedding all over everything that wasn’t covered up. Then you have to find the boxes with the appropriate CDs, and although the main collection is alphabetised, A- An might be buried under a whole pile of other boxes so you either find it to put them in order or guess where the top box, Ko-Le, has to be – which in turn means if you don’t get it right that you have to move everything later. It’s an unavoidable process, but at least we’re here sorting it out, we are actually doing it.
Not everything is here yet, the main vinyl collection comes on Tuesday with the burly men. So the vinyl shelves also have to be built and although IKEA shelving isn’t the toughest, it still has to be secured with a brace and that first shelf has to get done before it becomes a flow. Then there are the corner-shaped shelves, they collapsed a couple of times, luckily, we weren’t crowned. Finally, we figured it out and then I popped in to help Sarah where it needed to be a two-human job and she got on with the bulk of it. In the meantime, Olivia was matching up some different CD shelves and finally getting some CDs planted.
So, also today, during opening hours, we went back to the storage house to sort more and pick out other boxes to bring whilst figuring out what to leave behind. I seem to have a lot of mystery boxes, which are mainly records I picked up when I was living in Sweden – there are a lot of classical records, versions of records I already have except as Scandinavian releases, meaning they might be on a different label or have a different cover, or something slightly different that record collector nerds get excited about, haha. So we have had to make space for them and that means moving boxes somewhere else to make room, whilst making sure we are not losing a box we need for the alphabet under the rubble (so to speak).
We brought some of the boxes without the burly men – vinyl boxes that had been destroyed on the journey, seams split, ripped sides and a crush that had them all askew. They are quite hard to handle because they are not a solid block, hard enough to manipulate with the weight, but even worse with gravity and no symmetry. My last act before I collapsed into bed was the discovery of one box that somewhere along the line had got wet – Suicide to The Sweet, including Andy Summers, Sutherland Brothers and Supertramp, all have destroyed covers, it’s horrible to see, but I keep on telling myself at least it wasn’t CAN or The Beatles. But it’s a lot of records at a certain part of the alphabet, I’ll see what I can rescue, but it’s so frustrating, I now have to buy all these titles again should I be able to find them all.
Music today has been Andy Summers – The Golden Wire (1989) with its now buckled cover.