Monday, July 09, 2007

Apple Lossless

A couple of months back I listed a number of items I have lost over the years, many of them things I have since managed well enough without, the loss of which having occasioned only a temporary frustration. The weekend just passed almost added my iPod to the list, as at the double birthday party of two friends in a bar near Porte de la Villette on Friday night, I returned to pick it up from where a friend was mixing only to find that it had disappeared. Being among friends I didn't suspect it stolen and the presence of a similar apparatus, with a similar cover suggested that it might have been taken by accident. It had in fact been mistakenly given by my friend to a friend of the owner of the other iPod in question. After about twelve hours' worrying and resignation to its loss, its whereabouts were located and I collected it off a personable Mexican filmmaker called Juan on Sunday evening.

There are few things I carry about that I worry about losing - my laptop is obviously one, whenever I have it out and about, as is my wallet, for equally obvious reasons; another is my notebook (or notebooks) and I generally have good luck with them when I do lose them, my mobile phone is another, more to avoid the hassle and expense of replacing it, and since I bought it last November, my iPod is another. These are the only things that I keep on my person whenever I go out, entrusting them to nobody, and when people lose phones and mp3-players that they have left in jackets or bags lying in corners of bars I don't have a huge amount of sympathy. Nor did I have much sympathy for myself after my rare lapse of vigilance the other night. Which makes me feel guilty that I should attach such importance to such a clearly unimportant thing. It is truly dispiriting to evaluate loss in terms of consumer goods, and the fact that it has come back to a stupidly piggish consumer (as I am wont to see myself) induces a sort of consumer's remorse at this level of effeteness that I have allowed myself to attain. I soon got over my angst by putting Icky Thump on the retrieved toy, as well as Richard Hawley's 'Cole Corner', which I have dallied far too long over getting hold of. Thanks once again, Tim.

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