HER MAJESTY'S SECRET DIAMONDS (OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT)...

The tapes were secondhand when I bought them in 1981.
(Or 'pre-played' as they describe such items nowadays) 

It was 1981 and I was living down in Southsea.

One day, me and a friend decided to take a stroll into

Fratton, and while we were in a record store, I purchased

two JAMES BOND 007 soundtrack cassettes - ON HER

MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and DIAMONDS ARE

FOREVER.  Curiously, the tracks on the latter tape were

not in the same order as listed on the index card, but I

put it down to an error and learned to live with it.

11 and a half years later (which was a significant

proportion of my life back then), in '93, HMV opened a

record shop in my local shopping centre, and I bought two

CDs, the same soundtracks mentioned in the previous para-

graph.  Back home later that night, I covered the openings on

the top of the DAF tape, and recorded the tracks in the cor-

rect listed order from the CD.  It's strange just what a sense

of accomplishment I felt doing this, as if I were putting

right some great injustice of many years standing.

It may have taken me nearly a third of my life to

get to hear the tracks on that tape in the right running

order, but it was worth it.  Although I didn't really need to

play the tape because I had the CD, I made a point of doing

so anyway, just so my effort wasn't wasted.  Still got those

two tapes, and whenever I look at them, I'm back in that

record shop in Fratton (JACK's, I think it was called)

and I'm a young man in my early 20s again.

If only it could always be so.

Posted in: Cartoons