Time to go cold turkey ... CDs on sale. Photograph: David Sillitoe
Making resolutions on New Year's Day is generally as inadvisable as any activity that doesn't involve lying on the couch, holding your head and bleating like a llama because you overdid it the night before. Nonetheless, millions of people choose the day after the world's most spectacular collective booze-up to make potentially life-altering decisions - usually starting with that perennial resolution to never drink more than three bottles of Moët in one evening (or is that just me?).
Still, as much as I recognise the futility of such gestures, I am myself making a resolution this year, and in order to ensure I stick to it, I have decided to announce it publicly here. Fittingly, it's a music-related resolution, so if I do break it, I will be honour-bound to confess it to you, dear readers - at which point you can flame me with vituperative castigations to your hearts' content.
Anyway, here it is: I have decided to forswear the purchase of CDs until the end of March. That's right: three whole months without a trip to the classical department of HMV. "Oh, big whoop," I'm sure some of you are thinking - but for someone who acquires an average of more than one CD a day, it is big whoop indeed. It will make for a coldly ascetic first quarter chez Jakob-Hoff.
My motivation is simple: I've become addicted to buying polycarbonate discs. One disc a day is quite a lot to listen to, you understand, and certainly more than I am able to at the moment: I can probably only get in about 45-60 minutes a day. As a result, I've started giving new CDs short shrift, only listening to a couple of tracks here and there, or playing one or two discs out of a box set before moving on to the next one.
This hasn't stopped me from purchasing more of the bloody things, naturally, and it's slowly dawned on me that I'm now buying them purely out of habit. Purely out of the desire to buy - not listen to, but buy - more polycarbonate. It's a bad habit, and one that needs to be broken, starting now. My three months' cold turkey will give me a chance to catch up on what I estimate must be around a hundred hours of hitherto unheard music, and maybe even give me a chance to rehear some of the discs I've loved the first time round but have never had the opportunity to revisit.
Of course, I will still need to download the odd track or two for research purposes but, scout's honour, I promise to listen to everything I purchase before I buy anything else. And no CDs - not even one! - until April 1st. Is anyone with me?
