When you write, do you listen to music? For me, music playing low in the background when I’m writing really helps keep me settled – particularly in the Useless Hour that begins most sessions. But I can’t listen to anything too upbeat, and certainly nothing with lyrics else I start listening to them rather than the words wandering around in my head!

Recently, the West-End urchins have been using my TV cable as a swing/garotte so, this week, the aerial repairman came round to reattach it to the wall, hopefully out of their reach.

‘We’ll have to drill through there,’ he said pointing to the corner of the room where my Oxford English Dictionaries stood in a vertical and completely unusable pile. We moved them out into the hall which uncovered the footstool at the bottom – one of those with a little storage box. Inside, I found a whole bunch of old home-recorded cassette tapes.

The old cassette discovered this week. Tracklist: 'A Case of You,' Joni Mitchell; 'Getting There,' Bob Dylan; 'Cello Song,' Nick Drake; 'Suzanne' Leonard Cohen; 'Hey Jupiter,' - Tori Amos; 'After Halloween,' Sandy Denny and 'Bells For Her' Tori Amos.

In years gone by, I used cassettes extensively and, to be truthful, I have never quite recovered and adapted since their demise. I’d record scraps of songs, interviews with friends, radio shows… so I had a nostalgic few minutes shuffling through the tapes in the box, but one that particularly caught my eye went alongside a writing project from 10 years ago. It was the ’soundtrack’ to the novel I’d been working on and like so many of us who have made cassettes for our friends, or burned CDs, or shared playlists, it simply compiled a selection of songs and pieces of music, but here chosen to reflect the novel in some way.

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