A month or so ago I was getting work done in the house that involved knocking down a wall to extend my existing kitchen and fitting a whole new kitchen.
There are floor to ceiling bookshelves at one end of the room so before the work commenced, I packed up all my books. No mean feat.
Scoot forward a month and the work was complete…which meant that the books needed to go back on the newly painted shelves…all nine large boxes of them!
Previously there had been no rhyme nor reason as to how they had been arranged. (I can feel some of you book lovers twitching as I write that.) Books by the same author did tend to be grouped together but they most certainly were not in alphabetical order.
That had to change!
Was I up to the task?
Putting those books back proved to be something of an endurance event.
Initially I spread the alphabet out to allow space for the collection- A’s on one shelf, R’s nearer the floor and M’s in the middle of the middle shelf – you get the idea- and began to empty the boxes.
I quickly decided that there would also need to be a few separate sections for poetry books, biographies etc so each of those was assigned one of the smaller shelves.
As I unloaded each box, the shelves began to fill.
The alphabet gaps proved to be too tight, so shelves were stacked then oved along and down to squeeze in more R’s or S’s. The re-arrangement meant some of the books were lifted and shifted three and four times.
By the sixth box, the sweat was pouring off me and over three hours had passed.
By the seventh box, I’ll admit I was wishing I’d never started.
By the right box, I was cursing certain authors for writing such weighty tomes.
By the ninth box, I was exhausted.
More than five hours after I started the boxes were empty and the books were back on the shelves. There’s really not much room to spare!
Then my mother drops the bombshell – “We’ve got some of your books. When do you want them back?”
It’s no secret that I love listening to music and one of my guilty pleasures is playing very loud music in the car while I’m driving and singing along very badly.
There’s a very embarrassing story from a long time ago when I got caught at a set of traffic lights on a hot sunny day with the windows downs. I was alone in the car and singing along enthusiastically to the CD that was playing….yes, singing Heigh Ho Heigh Ho Its Off To Work We Go from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It was the kids’ Disney CD that was playing…. I’ve no defence. It’s a catchy song whether the kids are in the back seat or not. LOL
CDs in the car are a thing of the past and while I haven’t yet graduated to using Bluetooth to pair my phone up to listen to my streaming service, I do own an iPod (OK two) and play my music through that.
I usually select my music of choice by artist or a particular album by an artist I like (No, it’s not always Alter Bridge!) that was until 30th November 2019.
I remember it was an icy cold Saturday morning and when I started the engine, my iPod reset itself and returned to the first song stored on it alphabetically. I was about to return it to the album that had been playing when Boy Child suggested…Ok challenged me… to play right through the music library in alphabetical order by song title.
Challenge accepted!
It got me thinking though as I drove off down the hill….how long was it going to take to listen to 2988 songs while driving?
Well, there was only one way to find out!
Ironically, the Gracenote for the first song on there is back to front. The first song that was already playing was Medicine Man by Aaron Keylock.
Christmas passed with no Christmas tunes being played (Hallelujah cried my kids! They aren’t fans of my Christmas music choices.) I was somewhere about B or maybe C at this point.
Other dilemmas occurred too… what if there were multiple versions of the same song by the same band on there? Did I play them all or was it OK to skip a couple of versions? (Depending on the song, I skipped a few but there were a few that I played all versions)
The there were instances of the same song but by different artists…. These were all played, I promise.
Then there was another challenge that hindered alphabetical progress.
We went into full lockdown for 10 long weeks!
Instead of driving a 14 miles round trip to the office, I was walking for a few seconds between the bedroom or kitchen to work from home in my living room. During those long weeks I was only ever in the car once a week to drive to the supermarket.
Progress therefore stalled a little around the letter L.
There was a little stutter to my alphabet during T. There are several albums on my iPod that I got the day before the official release date (thanks to pre-ordering) and the Gracenote hadn’t caught up. These are all titled Track 1, Track 2 etc …C’est la vie.
As I reached the last few letters there still seemed to be quite a few songs to be played.
There are some jobs around the place that you keep putting off and putting off. There is one I have been putting off for years….
And what is it?
Sorting the family’s CD collection back into some semblance of order.
Once upon a time, a very long time and a few hundred CDs ago, they were all stored neatly in alphabetical order. Finding the CD you wanted to play was easy and took seconds.
Then we moved house…. and then moved again…. so for the past nineteen years the CDs have been stuffed randomly on a shelf.
As time passed and the kids grew and music tastes evolved, the collection has grown and grown…. and has never been put back into order.
Hours have been wasted scouring the shelf in search in search of a particular album only for the search to be abandoned in favour of an album that you found while searching that you haven’t heard for years!
Finding myself with a free morning last week, I decided to bite the bullet and tackle the chore.
After the first half an hour, I was questioning the wisdom of the decision.
After the first two hours, I was questioning my sanity!
Methodically, I lifted bundles of CDs down from the shelf and split them into the letters of the alphabet by artist name.
Slowly the piles grew.
B proved to be the most popular letter of the alphabet, closely followed by S. But what to do with the growing pile of compilation CDs?
With all the CDs now off the shelf and stacked all over the study floor, it was time to sort each letter’s bundle into alphabetical order and to return them to the shelf.
I reached N and decided it was time for lunch. This was taking a lot longer than planned!
Finally, I was left with the large pile of compilations. How best to arrange these? ….. hmm….
I split out all the musicals/film soundtracks and put these in alphabetical order. I put the NOW CDs ranging from 44 to 81 into numerical order. The rest I split by genre and placed them back on the shelves.
(The High School Musical and Disney CDs were stashed in the awkward corner where they will no doubt lie untouched forever…. Hannah Montana is there too!)
It might have taken me over three hours and, at first glance, look exactly the same as when I started but it’s a job well done.
Some useless musical trivia about the 600 strong collection:
-Stars by Simply Red was the first CD purchased (before we even had a CD player!)
-Bob the Builder actually belongs to The Big Green Gummi Bear
-Boney M also belongs to the The Big Green Gummi Bear
-No one is claiming ownership of the Boyzone and Westlife CDs!
-I’ll confess, the Status Quo ones are mine
It’s an eclectic mix of music and just highlights that we all have differing tastes in music. No one’s taste is better than anyone else’s – it’s just different. (Well, the rest of us might argue we have better taste in music than The Big Green Gummi Bear) There truly is something to cater for every taste on that shelf!
Finding myself with a free morning last week, I decided to bite the bullet and tackle the chore.
Coral McCallum 