NOTHING TO PLAY THE CASSETTES ON

An Audiobook company whose products I occasionally buy recently put out an appeal for old off-air recordings which were just the sorts of things that I used to record by pointing the microphone of the tape recorder that my Grandfather got me for my thirteenth birthday, back in the 1970s when particular people used to appear unexpectedly on the radio or television, and I wanted to record their mutterings for all eternity…

Or about ten years, as eternity seems to have turned out to be…

With this in mind I recalled a cassette tape with the word “Interviews” scribbled on its spine which dated back to the days when cassette tapes seemed extraordinarily expensive when you had to buy them out of your own pocket money, and I was less “precise” about my labeling.

I suppose back then I had less memories to remember and so expected that I would be able to just remember things, never realising that what was once the “now” might one day be “long ago”…

Anyway, I shifted heaven and earth, or rather the exercise bike and the coats hanging over it, and found my old stack of cassette tapes and, rather surprisingly, was able to put my hands on the very cassette that I was thinking of within five minutes of the thought occurring, which, as long-term readers might recognise, is rather unheard of in these here parts…

Chortle! I said “parts”…!

Sorry, thirteen year old me just made a brief comeback there…

Now, I’m not the kind of idiot who might then pop the cassette into a jiffy bag and post it off to “person or persons unknown” (or “complete strangers” if you will) without at first checking that what I thought was on the cassette was actually what was on the cassette.

Oh no!

Reaching this great age has taught me nothing if not to be far more shrewd than that…!

And this was the moment that I realised that there probably wasn’t one device left in the house that might actually be able to play a cassette tape any more. Both of the remaining dusty old “ghetto blasters” had long ago given up the fight against the march of progress and refused point blank to play or even rewind cassettes any more. This had happened quite a few years ago, but the radio and the CD player still worked, so they hadn’t yet been sent to the landfill, despite over 30% of their usefulness having gone.

The various “music centres” and their turntables went to the tip years ago, as did that old cassette player that my Grandfather gave me, as well as the one he used to inflict upon entertain us with tapes of his Hammond Organ playing upon, back on those endless Sunday afternoons of my youth.

The car no longer has a cassette tape option these days, and the Radio Cassette Alarm clock that saw me through my student years and beyond is nothing but a distant memory too…

Then I remembered the coming of the personal cassette player, the so-called “Walkman” in the 1980s. Now I never had the proper “Sony” version because they were always far too expensive, but I did remember buying a “Saisho” knock off a few years after they had become the trendiest of objets du jour.

I vaguely remembered that it was lying on top of a row of books on a dusty bookshelf somewhere, and I was not wrong about that and very quickly found it.

When it comes to tracking down long-lost “tat”, it would appear that I’m on something of a roll here…

I never have really got into the habit or taken to the idea of carrying a personal selection of music around with me, so that dusty old object might still be operational as it only ever played the odd audiobook cassette and test match commentary in its brief phase of usefulness. I blew the dust off it, tracked down a ratty old set of headphones that looked as if they might just be still able to talk to it, and rummaged around in the kitchen drawer for some suitable batteries.

Finally I had something that I might be able to actually hear those ancient recordings upon, and to check whether they were far more precious and rare than I first thought.

I turned the cassette to side “B” and, risking wearing out all of that twin AA battery power in an instant, hit “Fast Forward” as my old “personal cassette player” had no rewind facility. Perhaps both of these concept will be unfamiliar to younger readers, but never mind. The past is another country, we did things differently there…

When I heard that satisfying soft click that indicated that the tape had reached the end of side “B”, I took it out and flipped it over again, with it now magically set at the beginning of side “A” and hit “play” and waited for the blank strip at the start of the tape to pass over the tape heads…

It worked…!

…and I heard my thirteen-year-old self muttering the theme to “Little Blue”, a children’s programme of the time about a small blue elephant…

“Little Blue, Little Blue (Pom-pom-pom) Why do they call you ‘Little Blue’…? He bit his mother’s fountain pen and broke it in two…”

So there’s no way that I’m sending that cassette anywhere at all.

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 17th 2012)