The Soundtrack of Our Lives

 Five hours out of the house, wandering not quite aimlessly but with no particular place to go, it was a downbeat, Larkin sort of re-make of Lou's Perfect Day in as far as there was nothing wrong with it.

We have a seafront, it was ideal weather for the occasion. We can put the world to rights - that took a while, talk about books and records and go through some classic old material, mostly work-based, that never lets us down. There can also be stops for tea or coffee, which is a major growth industry.

At first, I didn't notice the sound

the background music made

But in the cafe of Southsea Castle we were treated to Jon Waite's Missing You, Dolly and Kenny's Islands in the Stream and Irene Cara's Flashdance, all of which were records I bought at the time. 1980's, admittedly, but still from a time when I bought pop singles. The clientele on a Friday afternoon in January is going to be 'of a certain age' and for once in my life I was part of the target demographic and it meant something, just a little bit, to me.

A bit later we were in Waterstones, a tea and coffee shop that has a sideline in books. They did even better than the castle with Move on Up by Curtis Mayfield and My Girl by the Temptations. Could we ever have imagined 50 years ago that 50 years later we'd be sitting in a cafe listening to Curtis Mayfield. Well, we were. Perhaps we were just in the right places at the right time or possibly these places are astute in giving some thought to a suitable ambience. They are playing back the soundtrack of our lives to us and I don't want them thinking we're not grateful. 

I'm not regularly in bookshops these days but went back to the old test of assessing it by the poetry shelves. Not as bad as you might think but 'eclectic', which must be a good thing. I don't know how many copies of Basho or the Collected Marianne Moore they think they're going to sell off the shelf in Portsmouth's Commercial Road but there were there. Pass marks were achieved on Auden and Larkin, we checked a few lines in Ms. Duffy's The World's Wife and I found an Andrew Motion title I probably wasn't aware of. I'm not going to part with £25 for the Collected Lyrics of Lou but if I'm in there again I might flick through it for as long as the pot of tea lasts.

A few people in there seem to think it's a library. You could spend a couple of weeks in there and read War and Peace but it would cost you more in tea than buying the book would. I go into WH Smith's once a month to see what the CD with the BBC Music magazine is aand what's in Gramophone but I buy them if I want them.

It's been a good week for time spent with my specially hand-selected company. Unlike some of the names that cropped up in our free-ranging conversation, I'm not one to complain when there's nothing to complain about.