One turntable and no microphone

Back in my final year of University, shortly before I started the Friday Films blog, I took a class on creative writing to top up my nearly completed English Honours degree. The only thing I managed to write of any substance or import that semester was, as it turned out, a poem I’d knocked-off in about twenty minutes and which I’d thrown in with my week’s portfolio as an afterthought. I called it ‘How Dark Was This Night’ – a half-hearted tribute title to a film I’d never actually seen but which shared a similar theme, or so I imagined.

So when Bruce announced the recent release of a compilation album of original songs called Dark Was The Night - one that includes not one or most of but nearly all of my current favourite artists - I experienced a kind of full-circle serendipity that is probably best described with a single Latin expression I’ve no time to search for (Bruce is holding a growingly impatient Hartley in the next room), perhaps vainus familiarus or something similar. It’s like someone looked inside your head and made a compilation, he said, and I couldn’t have put it any better myself. The digital download format (the proceeds of which go to an AIDS charity called Red Hot) contains thirty six tracks, but we also plan to buy its trimmed back vinyl counterpart, it’s just that good.

If you’re wondering why the triple-vinyl acquisition, we’ve recently decided to purchase a B&O Bang and Olufsen sound system and have found one in pretty good knick that’s also being sold with its original speakers. I’m not an arrogant prick so I won’t even intimate that music sounds better on vinyl, always has done, because that is obviously a load of rubbish. But there’s something satisfying in the thoughtful interaction, and even mild effort, that record playing requires, and anyway we’re having a lot of fun compiling our wish lists and ransacking eBay in our attempts to find them.

You thought you could get away without having to read about my offspring but you would be WRONG. He’s seven weeks old today, and to celebrate (no, I lied – we were just very hungry and nobody wanted to cook) we took him out for brunch, where he sat sleeping on my lap like a good little sleeping thing while I tried not to drip hot porridge onto his head. We're updating Flickr with images of our little poser donning and sometimes rejecting the gifts that many of you so thoughtfully sent over the last few months, so get ready to click that badge in the right hand column. Or not, as you wish.