Here's my quandary. I have a flat full of CDs, which I keep adding to. I have a husband who loves gadgets, but is less enthusiastic about thinking up Christmas present ideas. So, come December, do I bow to the seemingly inevitable and (theoretically) make us both happy by asking Santa for an iPod?
If I'm doubtful, it's not that I'm a technophobe, or that I have any great objections to Apple. It's not even, as Martin Kettle's recent post discussed, that the hardware isn't really ready yet to be friends with the classical side of my collection. No, it's because I suspect that an iPod will change the way I listen to all of my recorded music, in a way I'm not sure I want. I suspect it might flatten more than just sound quality.
At the moment I'm in a happy situation where the majority of the classical music I listen to is live; my classical recording collection functions partly as a reference library, so those CDs live in some very loose kind of alphabetical order. But elsewhere, a kind of vaguely organized chaos rules - and, I'm realizing, that's how I like it.
I love the fact that favourite CDs will gradually find their way to the bottom of their piles, then lie dormant for a while - weeks? years? - before being gloriously rediscovered. That way I get to re-live what made me love them in the first place. I might only remind myself every few years of the blues phase I went through aged 17, but rediscovering that I still know all the growly old words on that John Lee Hooker album is an immense pleasure.
I currently have a CD collection that I can browse like a second-hand bookshop. Just thinking about having all of them filed in alphabetical order on a little white machine makes me feel a tiny bit rebellious. Still, I suppose I could always get the iPod, and if I don't like it - well, I could always stop using it. Could I?
