It’s Vinyl Day X 3
by Trevor Jackson
Why do we get old and grumpy?
Why do kids stare at phones all day long?
Who invented liquid paper and… why?
In our house, whenever someone gets modern life overload, we have the cure. We call it…Vinyl Day.
Vinyl Day is a decree that states that no non-essential electronics can be used for a whole day. Yes, the youngster’s WILL and DO argue that their phones and ipods are essential… but when those inevitable disagreements occur, we are guided by the universally accepted wisdom of ‘Dad’s Law’… and peace reigns supreme. Once the declaration of Vinyl Day has been made… the Apples and the Samsungs are banished to the darkness of the third drawer down and can’t resurface for at least one full earthly rotation.
There are though, a couple of notable exceptions to the essential electronics rule. Firstly we don’t turn off the fridge… that’s a no-brainer, but secondly and most significantly… we get to use the record player, the old one, the one with dust on it. No CDS, no Spotify, just vinyl. Using vinyl means you have to get involved, you can’t just set it up to play on random, you have to make a physical choice. You have to take the record out of it’s cover, smell the plastic and the cardboard… let the memories of your 80s youth flood back on through the front door and carry you away to another time and place. Ahh vinyl, crackly and flawed, transporter of time and space….
Now you may have guessed, I could [and occasionally do] wax on about the virtues of slowing the whole world down to a more pedestrian pace.
A pace where there’s time to breathe, time to think. A place where we aren’t constantly bombarded with information that is really just there to make us buy stuff.
I know you know what I mean, but what about the younger folk in your house? Are they across it? Unlikely….They are probably tucked away in some room down the hall, right now, building a virtual world where they can’t get hurt, cold, bored, excited or anything at all that resembles a real life. Sound familiar? It did to us at Mike Ball, so a year or so back we set about investigating an itinerary that might have the Mums and Dads dragging their young dragon slayers, kicking and screaming out of ‘Neverland’, and tossing them straight out into Sea World… not the theme park, I’m talking the actual ocean. Summer breeze in the face, the swish of the ship’s wake, the crisp smack in the face that is that first plunge off the deck. Taste the salt. See the fish. Squint at the sun. Lose your hat in the wind. Ditch the Spotify. Play the album.
