THE package arrived while we were away. Next morning I rode to the post office in the rain. It was a difficult shape, thin, squarish and bearing a sticker saying, 'Fragile'. I put in in the panniers and cycled on to work, still in the rain.

I hadn't guessed what it was, which was dumb of me, but there you go. When unwrapped at home the package, a birthday present from our middle son, the one who loves his music, was an old-fashioned album. I slipped it from its sleeve and slid out the disc, admiring the shiny black vinyl filled with concentric rings spinning towards the centre.

The album was The Folklore Of John Lee Hooker, six tracks a side, starting with Tupelo, recorded live at the Newport Folk Festival of 1960 with John Lee Hooker on vocal and acoustic guitar and Bill Lee on string bass.

The sleeve notes, a whole essay contained on the back, said of Hooker: "His various single and long-playing releases have shown him to be one of the more powerful, direct and compelling of the current crop of blues singers, the possessor of a dark, brooding, thick-textured voice and a surging rhythmic guitar approach..."

All of which proved to be true when I played the album. What a classic it turns out to be; and, no, I don't recall it first time round (not quite that old).

Turns out the middle boy had been in cahoots with his mother. My birthday present this year from my wife was a record player, a stylish retro thing looking for all the world like a small case. The speaker is contained in the lid, which is removed and propped up. This allows room for the turntable, whose circumference when loaded is much wider than the player, leaving the albums spin half in thin air.

I had wanted a record deck for years so that we could play all the old LPs imprisoned in darkness upstairs. But the geeky boy side of me was waiting for the money to spend on a high-end hi-fi deck; and such a sum has yet to materialise. The record player is a fantastic compromise, and evenings have been spent listening to albums last heard perhaps 20 years ago.

The way we own and consume music has changed so much, especially if are you a middle-aged music lover or fan. First it was the album, big and comfortable, with two sides and a proper sleeve, followed by the cassette recorder and home taping (remember that skull-and-crossbones warning?)

Then came the upstart CD, small and shiny and irritating: until it wasn't and it became the standard form of delivery for years. Hundreds line our shelves now, arranged alphabetically, more or less.

After that the iPod and other players arrived, alongside music played on laptops and the like. My own iPod Nano, silver and scratched, is eight years old now, showing how these matters move on. After that has come streaming, where what you listen too is dictated by the tastes you indicated when signing up.

I've gone for most forms of delivery over the years, but streaming has so far passed me by, streamed on without touching me.

The strange aspect to all this is how physical ownership of music has fallen away. Now a house full of music could be delivered through wireless speakers from a central computer, without a solitary CD or album in sight. Nice and neat, but not the same as having the CDs or albums all lined up, offering short music histories all in a row. Too much, to this listener, like a house without books.


TOO many words have been spent/wasted on Ukip for me to add many more. A bit of perspective would be nice: Ukip now has one MP, thanks to a bye-election following a defection from the Tories. That's the same number as the Greens have, and no one makes a fuss about them.

True, the rise of Ukip makes an unpredictable election harder to call, but some of us still struggle with the idea that Nigel Farage's ragbag, right-wing, none-of-the-above party is really the new face of politics. If that's the new face, those old faces suddenly don't look quite so bad.