Sitting by the river (if you want to call it a river)

Me and Duggie chop are sitting by the river, fishing, our bikes laid down next to us. Just like Albert Finney and Norman Rossington in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, when they discuss life, marriage and their parents.

We're talking records. that's recorded music, no matter what the format: CDs, vinyl, tapes. The lot.

It started when as a swirl of effluent splurged out of the waste pipe into the stream - it's not really a river, more like a kind of natural canal, close to the gasworks - a spit of bubbles twirling and curling around in the brown water.

"Looks like a record on a turntable," said Duggie, always the aesthete, "going round like that."

"Hmm," I said, "I wish I'd brought the ghetto-blaster. But the batteries have run out."

"Yeah, but then you gotta tape all your latest stuff," said Duggie, "it's a pain in the whatnot."

I look at Duggie and say: "don't be crazy, it's got a CD player and USB terminal for an iPod dock."

"Oh," said Duggie, "I sort of went all 1980s for a moment. I sometimes do that when I think about records. Nostalgia like."

I'm not going to lose the chance of a stimulating conversation, especially not with someone like Duggie, who usually dreams himself into a trance, "why don't we review our entire record collections."

"What, now?" said Duggie.

"Yeah, while we wait for the pike to bite."

"Ok. You're on - but we won't just review the music, lets think about what we were doing when we bought 'em. What they conjure up about our lives. I mean, records are more than just music."

And you know, he's dead right. So we begin.