The Last of the Cassette Tapes

Had to make a terrible decision yesterday.  I'm tidying out our loft in readiness for our forthcoming house move and it's a mammoth task!  There is stuff in our loft that went up there the day we moved here in 1985 and has not come down since!

Anyway, I was going through stuff up there yesterday when I came across all of my cassette tapes, all stored in cassette briefcases for ease of transporting them to my car. There must have been around 250 of them, nearly all recorded by me.  Looking through them, it was like a trip down  memory lane - I could remember  recording a lot of them, and I had written the date that I'd made the the recording on the cassette wrapper. Some albums were taped in 1977!

I could remember putting my cassette collection in the loft - it was just after I'd bought my first CD multi change player and had it installed in my car. That meant I could then take 6 CDs with me on any car journey and not have to move to change the CD. So the cassette collection was consigned to the loft.  All 250 cassettes; each one had been painstakenly recorded and re-recorded until I was satisfied with the quality.

After a long long internal debate, I threw all of them into the dustbin - after all I no longer have a cassette player - with the exception of four.  These 4 were all taped from radio shows, one was Alan Freeman from his Saturday afternoon rock show from the late 70s, two were tapes of the Jonathan Ross show from the 90's and one was "Home Truths", a fantastic radio programme that the fantastic late, great John Peel used to present every Saturday morning on Radio 4, until his untimely death in 2005. I'm going to get the contents of these 4 cassettes transferred to MP3 so that I can save them forever.   The rest of my beautiful, painstakenly built-up cassette collection - some 400 albums - is now in the dustbin! I am moved to tears - but as someone once said - We have to move on.

With tears in my eyes.