All That Glisters...

 I've been listening to a lot of CDs, lately.

 This would make me cutting-edge and hip if it were 1984.

 Of course, if it were 1984 we'd have a ruthless Tory government, an aggressively posturing Russia and Kate Bush on tour.

 ...Alright, fine. But at least it's not the book "1984." If it were "1984" we'd all be under constant surveillance from security cameras and... Alright, I'll come in again.

 I've been listening to a lot of CDs, lately.

 Partly this is the fault of my car, which doesn't have any way to connect to any sort of USB device. As we all know, flash cars are for men with small dicks, and based on that logic, my car implies that I can do an improv version of Jake The Peg at a moment's notice.

 The other reason for the CDs, which has probably escaped the attention of anyone under 65, is that "Gold," the oldies station, has gone off the air.

 Gold was a hideous, fuzzy sounding parody of a station. A monument to everything that was ever wrong with old school radio. Bad signal, tedious, waffling presenters, the ad breaks peppered with life insurance salesmen and Stannah stairlift pitches and long, dreary discussions about conservatories.

 A typical night listening to Gold involved a DJ having an opinion on something he knew nothing about (I remember one of them opining that clearly Paul McCartney and Heather Mills were never going to work out, some four years after they divorced and at least three years and three-hundred-and-sixty days after anyone stopped giving a fuck about Heather Mills) before taking a call from a frail-sounding nonagenarian in some grey and windswept corner of the nation who could vaguely remember the name of a song from 1952 and was calling to request it for the edification of her cat.

 These sorts of conversation (which could have been handled by an intern with a note pad instead of being broadcast to the public) were invariably as snappy as you'd expect as the product of a tortured back-and-forth between a senile caller and an idiot. Often, it would involve a story about how the caller met their partner, as if anyone listening at home gave a fuck about how two strangers bunked up to a Ritchie Valens number sometime just after Korea split in half.

 And still, I kept the station on my pre-sets, because the music was great.

 I've never liked contemporary music, even when I was a kid. It results in some of the more patronising questions I get asked (along with the slightly disbelieving "so is this your full time job...?") People say "How come you listen to this kind of music?! You weren't born..." by which strange logic I should also be incapable of enjoying a painting from before the mid eighties, or a book written any time before my conception, or a movie made outside of my lifetime. People like what they like, and the whole point of recording music is to make it timeless.

 So I kept listening to "Gold," despite it's general policy of assuming I was in a nursing home and hiring DJs to talk to me as such. Now, with the station being taken off the air due to declining listener numbers (it wasn't even that cold a winter...) I find myself adrift. I can't find any stations that play songs I like in anything like the same quantities.

 There has to be a market out there for people like me, who enjoy rock 'n' roll but still have their own teeth and organs, surely?