Proustian cassettes and former glory
Some people never liked the audio cassette, but I was (and still am) disproportionately fond of them. Wondering what was on an unlabelled one this morning, and assuming it belonged to OneMonkey (I am an obsessive labeller. I bet you never could have guessed that) a wave of memories crashed in as it turned out to be the final programme in the 2007 edition of BBC7's listener-written sci-fi chain-story (Picture This), plus the accompanying interview with Robert Shearman who wrote the first and last episodes. Steph May, author of alternative ending 2, got a mention in the interview but sadly I didn't - never mind, you can still read my alternative ending on the archived BBC webpage.
As I listened I was transported right back to the kitchen (2 houses ago) with the cassette player and DAB radio next to each other on the table so I could tape it for posterity. Not long after that I got this package through the post, containing the whole thing on one of those new-fangled CDs, and my excitement levels reached danger-point. I think it was the fact that this was from the BBC - blame Douglas Adams for that feeling, I guess (among other things).
The next unlabelled tape did turn out to belong to OneMonkey, and the whole of side 2 was snippets of Tommy Vance's Radio 1 Rock Show, probably from around the start of 1993 (Bruce had announced he was leaving Maiden at the end of the tour, and Tommy Vance hadn't yet defected to Virgin 1215 - these are the things I measure the passage of time by). A few years before I even met OneMonkey, and yet it brought back such vivid memories because I'd been listening too, in a different county. This is what I love about cassettes; even when it's an album I'd taped off vinyl to listen to on the move, I can often still remember what I was doing at the time, and the ones with bad editing and the odd word from Mark Goodier or Bruno Brookes just add to that scene-setting. Don't expect me to get rid of my tape shelves any time soon.