Trust Tommy

There was a fantastic article from the BBC magazine yesterday, entitled “Giving up my iPod for a Walkman”, in which 13-year-old Scott Campbell swaps his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

This brought back nostalgic memories of the tape player I had when I was 9 or 10, that I used to listen to audiobooks on when going to sleep. I had a really cool bed back then that my Dad made for me. It was a bunk bed, but without a bottom bunk. It was just like the one in the picture, except mine was made of wood.

There was a little space between the mattress and the edge, and I used to slot the tape recorder in there, with a fresh tape from the library. I was an audiobook freak back then. Still am, kinda.

I don’t know where I discovered them, actually. I loved them.

However, it got to the stage when I needed them for sleep. My brain thought: ‘oh, there’s an audiobook on, I best get to slee…zzz’

So that when I didn’t have it on, like if a cousin was staying, or I’d simply run out of tapes, I wouldn’t get to sleep for ages.

This isn’t a good situation.

So, like a chain smoker, like a Facebook addict, like, well, someone-who-can’t-go-to-sleep-unless-they’re-listening-to-audiobooks, I went cold turkey.

I had a few nights were it took me about two hours to get to sleep, but within a week my brain learned that you can’t always get what you want.

But then, I began thinking. Well, what if I listened to them, but didn’t need them to get to sleep. A kind of but if you try sometimes, you get what you need affair. Enjoy them, but don’t need them.

This was when I was about 10. This game of cat and mouse continued, me getting addicted to audiobooks, me going cold turkey. Me starting to listen to them again after a while, me getting addicted.

Now, though, I just listen to audiobooks, consequences be damned.

I’m hardly ever sharing a room with people these days, and if I ever didn’t have my laptop, I have audiobooks on my iPhone, that I can play through speakers. I can get round the battery draining issue by setting up a countdown timer in Clocks to ’sleep iPod’ after a length of time. 10 minutes usually does it. I’m either asleep, or two almost-asleep to care about it going off too earlier. Plus, it’s easy to just set it again, and if ever I’m still awake after 10 minutes, I’ve yet to still be awake after 20.

So, reading that little anecdote from the BBC about Walkmans (men?) brought back memories of old tape audiobooks. See, now it’s all in iTunes. I can’t remember which had the better sound quality, but tapes were always through headphones, while these days it’s done from either laptop or iPhone speaker. Can’t compare really.