One of my favourite pastimes is playing records from my personal collection. The sound of an album you love filling the room while you’re in your comfortable space, is just such a lovely feeling. That said, I haven’t been able to experience this in over 14 months. Partially due to my records having been in storage for half a year after moving back from the UK, but also because we’ve commissioned a close friend of ours to craft us a custom made displaying shelf. This is great, since the result will be close to exactly as we designed it ourselves, but it sadly does mean that it will take another while until it’s finished. While waiting for our new piece of furniture to be completed, I’ve been steadily expanding my collection over the last year causing for a huge backlog of records I haven’t been able to spin yet. I often can’t contain myself when I see another amazing piece of vinyl in a record store. I mean: I can’t just leave it there and come back months later, right? Chances are way too high it’ll have been bought by someone else! The only saving grace of this expensive hobby is the fact that most albums I really want are so hard to find that I’m saving myself from becoming a spendthrift. Today, I spend some hours in town and felt like dipping into a record store or two, specifically looking for two of my favourite albums, being Mew’s ‘Frengers: Not Quite Friends But Not Quite Strangers’ (2003) and its follow up ‘Mew And The Glass Handed Kites’ (2005). Unsurprisingly, I failed to find either, though I hadn’t expected anything else. Through years of experience of scouring through hundreds of crates of new and old records, I’ve acknowledged the sheer impossibility of randomly stumbling upon these niche 00s indie records. I guess I will have to resort to some online marketplaces for a chance of owning a copy of each. Better luck next time.