I took a train down to Weymouth on the south coast to visit my parents for a few days. Unlike last time, the trains were on time and I had a very relaxing journey both ways.

A view across a small bay, with some buildings and a row of brightly coloured small boats all stacked up on their sterns

Colourful boats stacked in the sun in Wyke Regis

I spent an afternoon wandering around Weymouth’s various charity shops looking for interesting CDs and ended up with 17 more to add to my library. Total cost less than £10.

I’ve gone back to listening to music on physical media lately. I bought a couple of CDs at Iklectika earlier in the year, and although I can (and do) rip CDs to digital versions, I thought it would be nice to be able to just play them. Via eBay, I recently added a second-hand CD player to my hifi system for the princely sum of £25.

Then I discovered that you can buy CDs really cheaply these days in charity shops and market stalls: 3 for £1 at the low end, up to £2 each in the more expensive shops. Between Deptford Market and various charity shops in Peckham and Deptford, I’ve amassed a decent collection with a bias towards 90s nostalgia. I bought a batch of empty jewel cases – black ones and clear ones – and I’ve transplanted some albums that had cracked cases or broken centres, so that’s a small additional expense, but in total it’s cost me very little.

There are a couple of hard-to-find CDs I regret selling back when I got rid of my relatively meagre collection a decade ago, but I already have more now than I did then.

There’s obviously much less choice than the infinite variety on streaming services, but paradoxically it’s easier to find something to listen to when the choice is constrained, and it’s a much better user interface.

I snagged a couple of tickets to the Proms on Sunday, primarily because my cousin was playing with the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, but also because Holst’s The Planets is a guaranteed good time.

There were a couple of other pieces before the interval, in which she wasn’t playing: The Wood Nymph by Sibelius, which I enjoyed because I like Sibelius, and a specially-commissioned piece that frankly didn’t have enough ideas to sustain the length of time it went on for. It would have been interesting at about a quarter of the length. I was relieved when it finally finished.

Someone in the audience mentioned that people sometimes only turn up for the second half, and I think that’s a good strategy, especially if there’s a BBC commission and you’re standing, as we were.

The Planets was every bit as good as I remembered it. You can hear all the imitators it has spawned – The Imperial March from John Williams’s Star Wars score nakedly plagiarises Mars, for example – and Jupiter has at least three strong melodies in it, including the one that became the tune of the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country. The audience loved it, to judge from the applause at the end. It must be a gratifying piece to perform.

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