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They say a change is as good as a holiday and it certainly is quite a true statement. A few weeks ago family of mine were due to arrive from England for the their first visit to South Africa. The arrangements were that they would staying with me for their first ten days, which was not a problem at all.

The only problem was that my house was in dire need of a spring clean and it’s not quite spring here. Nothing like having relatives over to stay to give you a rocket to get your rear end in gear and sort your house out. I’ve lived in this house for 5 years and was amazed at what gets acquired, stored in cupboards, kept and never looked at again! I must admit I was pretty ruthless with the majority of the stuff and reasoned that it had been kept for so long without being used, that the best place it belonged was in the trash. It was either that or buy a new house, which in any case would result in a clean out, so I opted for the cheaper route, spring clean! Over the course of a week I went through the house each night from one side to the next and cleaned out, or should I rather say, threw out! Magazines, books, newspaper clippings, you name it I had it. I even found the missing piece of my ABBA puzzle that I’ve been searching for, for years. I kept the ABBA magazines, books and paper clippings; they are now packed away properly and in decent order. I chucked out aeroplane magazines and books that I’ve paid a fortune for, but never read. It’s easier to fly a plane and leave it in the hangar when I’m done than to keep all the magazines.

I must admit I did have a very good trip down memory lane with quite a few things. I came across my parent’s first record player they bought in 1970; a type of mini-suitcase that when the lid was taken off it became the speaker and the turntable was the bottom part. A very antiquated piece of machinery, but how the memories of listening to my ABBA records as a kid came flooding back. In those days, when I wanted to record a record onto a cassette, I had to make use of a portable cassette player with a microphone placed in front of the speaker and everything had to be dead quiet whilst you were taping the record, even a barking dog was enough to make you start again! This was quite a normal way of taping a record in my house for a number of years until my parents bought, what we thought at the time, was a very sophisticated hi-fi system.

I even found my Walkman! Remember those things? That little machine kept me company for the two years I spent in the army in 1986 and 1987 during what was referred to as our bush war at the time. I wore out many a cassette during those two years, mainly ABBA. It no longer worked and also got chucked out, not worth keeping as it was just a dust gatherer, but it’s amazing what was such an integral part of my life 20 years ago is now totally obsolete and of no use to me. I even found an old Betamax videotape with what we know today as ‘ABBA In Concert’ on it that a relative recorded for me many years ago. Another obsolete item that went out of fashion years ago, and ended up in the bin.

The next pieces of paraphernalia were my records. Hundreds of the damn things that I’ve kept for years, moving them from house to house, cupboard to cupboard and I don’t think I’ve played a record since before I moved into this house! So, out they went too. I only kept my ABBA records and singles and a few others that hold special memories. The rest got dumped. Simply not worth keeping especially in light of the fact that I don’t have a working record player and besides, nearly every record in my collection has been replaced on CD and if I only liked a particular song, I’ve got it on some or other CD and if not, I’ve got what I needed off the internet. I don’t really like downloading off the Internet especially when I’m not paying for it. I’ve managed to clear my conscience by figuring out that I did pay for it once and want whatever it was I was downloading in a more advanced and appropriate format. There has always been a standing joke in my family, every record I ever bought has been replaced on CD and where ABBA are concerned, I have every album on cassette, record and CD, sometimes quite a few times! At one stage when we as a family were not quite up to date with technology and I could no longer record my ABBA LP’s onto a cassette, I simply started buying the albums on cassette.

Which brings me to my next piece in my archaeological excursion. My very first hi-fi that I was given by my parents when I turned 21. It had a double cassette player, one of those that you could copy from one cassette to the next, had a turn table on top, a tuner and was able to connect to a CD player. I can remember the day I bought the CD player to go with it, my Mum was with me and I thought I was so grand. None of my friends had a CD player and here I was getting the latest and the greatest. I bought my very first CD’s that day as well, Jennifer Rush’s ‘Passion’ and ‘The Best’ of O.M.D., which I do still, have and they still play 18 years later. For posterity purposes I plugged this machine in to see if it still worked and hey presto it did. The turntable no longer turned, the tuner still transmitted nicely, the cassette player chewed a tape and the CD sounded awful when I put one of those very first CD’s into the player.

My first thought was, wow, it’s lasted so many years, still works and sounds crap! Yet, back then, it was state of the art. Over the years I’ve acquired and changed CD players a couple of times and thought the surround system I acquired late last year was the ultimate and top of the range. That was until I bought an iPod with a radial at the beginning of March. The surround sound system is already outdated and I’ve only had it a few months! The days of keeping records in a cupboard or CD’s in a rack are no longer a mission; here I have a little machine that stores it all for you! Technology is amazing and I’m only looking at it from my music collection. I have this little machine, the size of a cassette that plays my music whenever I want to, I don’t have fiddle with a stylus, fight with a cassette or use the remote for the video machine or continually have to change a CD. My iPod just plays, whatever I want, even in the car. The days of changing CD’s in the shuttle are over or schlepping cassettes around with you are long gone.

Who would have thought that 30 years ago, when I used to fight with a microphone in front of a record player to record onto a cassette, that today I would have something like an iPod to store as much music as I want to on it and it’s easier to delete and add what you want than what it was all those years ago. It is hard to believe that 30 years ago, I was buying records and now I can select what I want to listen to by just touching a button on a computer.

It certainly is amazing how technology has advanced over the years, especially the last 10. I can remember my first Nokia mobile telephone in 1996. It was like a brick and today my daughter uses it as a toy! Now, my mobile telephone connects to the internet, I can retrieve and send emails from anywhere in the world and I can look at and compose a spreadsheet, as well as do my banking amongst other things and we all thought a telephone was something you only spoke on!

Speaking of the internet, when it first took off, we all made use of those antiquated 56k dial up modems, now we’re on broadband and sometimes even that is not quick enough. The other day, our broadband was down at the Office and I had to make use of our old 56k dial up modem, it took so long to send one email let alone retrieve what was in my in-box I wanted to tear my hair out. It certainly is a very fast world we live in today and thanks to a spring-clean, I realised just that whilst having some fun! The change did me some good it literally was like a holiday!

Which makes me wonder how ABBA would have turned out in this fast world that we live in today.

Catch ya next month!

Neil