There's a pound shop right across from the station. This is my favourite place to buy cleaning products; and occasionally, nail vanish. My Sally Hansen collection pretty much came from this little shop. I don't use them very often, but after all, you can hardly complain about an £1 nail vanish bottle. But that's a bit off topic.
Last Friday wasn't about the nail vanish. I dropped by the shop to pick up a bottle of Harpic. Have you seen "Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners"? That's me, just on Harpic and nothing else. Anyway, long story short, I somehow found myself flipping through the pile of second-hand CDs instead of buying toilet cleaner.
I didn't know Pound shops sell CDs. What the heck! Something caught my eyes and before I knew it, I was hunching over the shelf paying 110% attention to what was available.
I personally can't remember the last time I look at CDs. Most likely, my last encounter with those little plastic boxes happened a few months back in HMV on Oxford Street before they closed, while accompanying Mr. Mackey on a gaming bargain hunt. As much as I admire the grand scale of things in HMV, browsing CDs in the store was never my favourite activity. I was never an avid music lover to start with, and then the vision of looking through thousands of titles sort of exhausts me. I often prefer smaller stores, whether it was music, book or groceries where I could just have a casual browse then get out.
Also, who buys CDs these days? You can Spotify it, YouTube it, or just blatantly pirate it. I do use Spotify everyday, and I think it's bloody awesome. A tenner a month? Pff, take my money!
If it wasn't for my odd liking of low quality sound coming from a crappy CD player while cooking (something weirdly addictive about it), I most likely wound't have a single CD in the house.
So there I was, spending a good 20 mins in the Pound shop looking through CDs ranging from Christmas carols, boybands, odd singers you never heard of to god knows what, while Brixtonians went about their Friday evening picking up their favourite £1 items. Noone, and I mean, n-o-o-n-e, stopped at CDs shelf. I was left completely alone and utterly in peace to look through the pile of the past, zoning out and it was incredibly therapeutic.
I found them, the ladies of my youth, the voices I listened to religiously in the years when everything was a new discovery and the world was still a big place. And as I'm listening to Jewel while typing this post, I'm blissfully happy.
