The Fortress Of Solitude
So, it’s that time of year when the kids go back to school. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been observing the growing sense of relief on parents’ faces in supermarkets as the blessed date draws closer. You can sense that they have had quite enough and that, if they didn’t have a specific day in September to look forward to relinquishing the care of their little darlings to someone much better qualified in the art of looking after them, they might go full Gilles de Rais. That same sense of relief has been playing out across Facebook, too, with parents practically counting down the hours until the school gates open and swallow up their beloved offspring for a few precious hours each day.
However, looking back into my own personal history, I suspect the relief is probably a two-way street and that plenty of the kids will be equally pleased to get back into the classroom. Perhaps they’ve simply had enough of their parents, or maybe they’ve become so bored with having nothing to do that they would genuinely rather sit through double maths followed by triple history than listen to another “when I was a lad” anecdote or be dragged around yet another Welsh castle. The Welsh castles are from Lin’s childhood, by the way, not mine, though I’m sure my own parents found equally imaginative ways of filling those apparently endless summer holidays.
Anyway, now that I’ve set the scene, it’s time to acknowledge that the end of summer is upon us. The nights will soon be “drawing in”, the central heating will be fired up, and the house will begin to feel like a cosy haven from the cooler autumnal weather and whatever this Super El Niño eventually decides to throw at us. Most importantly, the serious music lover will once again be able to get down to the serious business of listening to their HiFi system without feeling as though they’ve spent the last few months living in the outer reaches of Hell, where Beelzebub has left the aforementioned central heating on full whack. Instead of enduring the act of sitting in front of the system while slowly melting into the listening chair, we can get back to actually enjoying it. Music should never be endured; surely that’s entirely counterproductive.
Picture the scene. You’ve been toiling away at the metaphorical coalface all day, and your coworkers have been getting right on your tits. Man must always have some fly in the ointment of an otherwise wonderful life, and now that the kids have gone back to school, your coworkers have stepped up to the plate and taken over this important grounding exercise. You’ve eaten a lovingly prepared and suitably hearty autumnal dinner, completed whatever domestic duties the day has demanded of you, and can finally sit down for an hour or two and enjoy some tunes.
The lights are low, the fire might be casting an amber glow over proceedings, and the outside world has been shut out behind gloriously sound-muffling curtains. You’ve made yourself a mug of something warming or poured a generous glass of something big and red. The scene is set for an hour or two of escaping from the world and disappearing into your favourite records. Perhaps you’ve decided to revisit an old favourite, or maybe you’ve deliberately set aside the time to explore something a little outside your usual musical comfort zone.
The needle moves slowly down towards the record, or you settle into your favourite listening chair and scroll through the seemingly endless selection of music available to you. You feel the day’s stresses beginning to dissipate from your body and your mind starts to unclench. You take a sip of your chosen beverage as the first bars of music work their way through the electronics, cables and loudspeakers of your system before finally arriving in the room. The feeling of relaxation increases, you sink a little further into the chair, and for a few glorious moments all is right with the world.
Now, I don’t know whether you are familiar with the fine film The Wolf of Wall Street, but there is a scene in which Jordan Belfort’s father, Max, played by Rob Reiner, sits down with his wife to watch his favourite weekly television program, The Equalizer. This was in the days before streaming, catch-up services and the ability to watch absolutely anything whenever you fancied, and so this was Max’s one allotted hour of relaxation for the week. Then the bleeding phone rings.
He explodes with incandescent rage. Who could possibly be ringing at this hour? Who on Earth doesn’t know that this is the one hour of the week when he sits down to relax? Who could show such a complete lack of consideration and basic human decency? He eventually answers the phone in a comically forced approximation of polite British gentility, but it’s quite clear that what he actually wants to do is tear the telephone from the wall and beat whoever is calling to death with it.
You get the picture and, I hope, where I’m going with this. Snap back to that warm and cosy listening room, where the first few bars of your favourite track have just begun to play, and suddenly the phone rings. Alternatively, one of the little darlings appears because they have become confused by their homework. They didn’t bloody well listen to the teacher when the subject was explained the first time around, and now it is your responsibility to help them produce something vaguely legible and credible enough to submit the following morning.
You could, of course, ignore the phone and hope that whoever is on the other end eventually gives up and doesn’t immediately call back. But how many rings do you allow before you finally crack and answer it? Seven? Twelve? Twenty-three? When you do eventually pick up, do you adopt Max Belfort’s strained politeness and faux British accent, or do you explode? Likewise, do you tell your loving offspring to go away and work it out for themselves, or do you patiently welcome them into your chair and try to dredge up something from your own classroom days, when you yourself weren’t giving the teacher the attention you should have been giving either? Whatever scraps of knowledge you once possessed have long since disappeared into the mental ether of yesteryear, but you give it a go because that’s what parents do.
The point I’m making is that we all have busy lives, and for some of us, music and our HiFi systems offer a genuine haven of retreat. We need to make time away from the daily hustle and bustle and lose ourselves in music for a while, allowing it to reset our emotional barometer from something approaching boiling point to a much more manageable slow simmer. We create listening spaces that are welcoming and cocooning because we crave those stolen hours of calm, emotion, and excitement that music gives us. It isn’t simply about soundstaging, tonal accuracy or whether the cymbals shimmer convincingly enough; it’s about having somewhere to step outside ordinary life for a little while.
We’re moving house this winter, and I’ve been thinking about what the new listening room will become. Initially, I thought of it as a sanctuary within a sanctuary, somewhere I could disappear for an hour or two, switch off completely and let the normal hassles of the day carry on without me. The kids have long since flown the nest, so they’re unlikely to pester me with incomprehensible homework, but I’ll probably still have my mobile with me. Turn it to Do Not Disturb, Stu. Unless I turn the system up sufficiently loudly, I’ll also be able to hear the landline ringing from the next room.
Thinking about it, I’m not going to build a sanctuary within a sanctuary at all. I’m going to construct an impenetrable fortress of solitude where the outside world can do one and I can get on with the serious business of floating gently down the river, guided by my favourite tunes and protected from telephone calls, unexpected questions and the petty irritations of everyday life. The lights will be low, the curtains drawn, the chair perfectly positioned, and nobody will be able to disturb me.
But then, who the feck is ringing the doorbell at this time of night?
Stu
