Has Your Record Shop Opened Yet?

This was a strange question to be asked by my oldest friend. If he doesn't know, then who does? I thought. Um, maybe nobody knows. Maybe nobody even expects me to open a record shop after all. 

I haven’t had much to write about here, because a blog about waiting for a reply from a builder who clearly wants the job but isn’t in any hurry to get started really wouldn’t fire anybody’s imagination. So the long process of deciding where we are going to go and do this gets forgotten about, and now everything about this venture is low-profile and little-discussed. 

For a start, I left the vast majority of the folks I knew behind me in London. Although I’m loathe to judge people by my own terrible standards, one of the things I was looking to escape was London’s enormous gravity. How can I realistically expect people I knew in London to want to follow me two hundred and fifty miles out here to look at my records?

Before leaving London, I had a phone stolen and was made to give up its passcode at knifepoint. They also took my house keys and I got a little paranoid. I deleted all the content from the website I'd been tinkering with for eight or nine years, went as quiet on social media as I have been in all that time, binned all my old emails, lost my shit at the network for how unhelpful they were, and lost most of my contacts too. Very few of the people involved made any effort to be reinstated, but I can’t blame them as I’m sure I’d be the same.

This blog was intended to provide record shop updates to anybody who wanted them, but it has lived a quiet life, like a hermit crab. Occasionally some social media platform picks it out of the water for a while so a few people can look at it, but it spends most of its time scuttling around on the seabed, unnoticed by the other inhabitants of the salty blog ocean.

Before, during and after this transition, every conversation I have had about retail, business and the economy has revolved around how difficult it is to make enough money for one’s efforts to be considered worthwhile.

And yet the question is, has my record shop opened yet?

I've got to know this bloke in the town who plays the guitar like nobody I've ever heard. I’m determined that within a year you will be able to buy his début solo album from me on a pleasant-coloured compact audio cassette, perhaps presented in an oversized cardboard box with a bit of tissue paper and a hand-painted postcard of my bestest abstract art. He, for his part, doesn’t seem even faintly interested in this idea, and told me to stop stressing about opening my shop. He said that being ready for business within six months of arriving in North Yorkshire is the behaviour of a man in a terrible hurry.

The van went for its MoT in May. There was a little dog in the office. The lady owner said they were going to be away next week, so it would have to be the week after. I said this was fine. I went to see the man who had it up on the lifty thing two weeks later and he showed me rusty holes in the chassis that were big enough to fit your fist through. He guessed the last three or four tests had either missed or overlooked them. They’d need welding, he said, and a new piece across the front that just bolts on. It wouldn’t be cheap. I asked him if he would do it. He said he couldn’t do it next week, they were going to be away. I decided it wasn’t any of my business how often they went away.

So he passed it on to his friend down the road. I heard nothing for a week, so I went looking for it. It was parked shoulder-to-shoulder and nose-to-tail with a load of other vehicles, looking rather sad. “That’s my van. I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to start on it yet? I’m not in a hurry or anything, just wanted to know where it was. And say hello.”

Two weeks later, I went again, and saw Vanny in the same spot.

“I thought you said you weren't in a hurry?”

And all of a sudden, it was done. A brilliant job, at about a quarter of the price I had been expecting, in his own time. I’m hoping I’ll get the same from the builder, who doesn’t even reply to my questions about time-frame nowadays.

My guitarist friend said he had a bloke come round to look at some building work when he first arrived here. This guy spent the evening with him and his family, laughing, joking, telling old stories and drinking cups of tea. He said he'd be back in a few days to measure things up and they never saw him again. “That was twelve years ago.”