Some of it has to go

Working from home, as I have for most of this year, has been a mixed blessing. Yes, it has been great to have a bit more time with the family, and to be more flexible with, for want of a better phrase, general life stuff. On the flip side, I have sorely missed cycling to work, and the flapjacks the canteen sells, well I've missed those too, even if my waistline hasn't.

One of the bigget downsides has been that, for the last eight and a half months, I've been working at the dining table, sat on a dining chair, surrounded by clutter. Pretty far from ideal ... but all changed now! We've had a bit of a move around at New Amusements Towers, and have finally changed one of the spare bedrooms into a study. It's a work in progress, for whilst one half of the room now contains a lovely big desk, proper 5-leg swivel chair (that I can even tilt back in) and a filing cabinet (all sourced for bargain prices on Gumtree), the other half of the room is stacked up with boxes and crates of stuff that needs sorting. Fortunately these are all out of shot in Teams calls...

A lot of the crates are full of CDs. My collection is simply too big, literally thousands of CDs. We don't have the space to store them all any more, and some I just wouldn't play any more either, even if they were accessible, rather than packed away in a plastic crate. Some, sadly, have to go. I know it's a purge that I will come to regret but, you know ... life.

So I'm stuck upstairs on my own, in what we previously called "bedroom 2" but now euphemistically call the office (and optimistically call the study), with a laptop in front of me and crate after crate after crate of CDs to my left. Seems like an ideal opportunity to start listening to some of them whilst I work, and sort the wheat from the chaff, with half a plan to sell the chaff on Discogs (anyone got any experience of buying/selling on Discogs, by the way? Any good?)

The first crate I opened starts at the tail-end of the T's, runs through U and V, and into W. There's a hell of a lot of Weller and Wedding Present in there, basically, which is all wheat, by definition. But I've just listened to The Triffids Present The Black Swan. It's fine, but it's not a keeper, for me. Maybe I didn't listen to it enough when I was young, but it has no significance to me, no importance imbued from nostalgia. I think it's going to be chaff. Sadly it is not going to make me rich on Discogs. But if anyone wants to buy a copy in mint condition (only the jewel case has light scuffs), well, you know where to find me.

Here's some Triffids, sadly condemned.

I will, undoubtedly, post other curios from the crates, both wheat and chaff. I'll tag all such posts with "The Purge"...