Amongst the many things I've lost, displaced or left behind in this increasingly long and disorderly life, is the big black crank-handled wind-up 78-rpm playing gramophone that I used to play my collection of scratchy 78's bought randomly and without discretion from car boot sales and second hand stores.

Some of you young whelps will never even have seen a 78 record, much less placed one (with infinite care lest your hand slips and the brittle shellac disc falls and shatters) onto the green felt turntable; fitted a needle, from a selection kept in a small paper envelope inside a compartment designed specially for that purpose, into the head of a heavy metal arm that curves chunky and tubular like a trumpet section; lowered the needle onto the rapidly revolving record and heard through the crackle and hiss the voice of a long dead variety hall star.
Here, in case such things are new to you, is a picture of the very same model - [link] - notice the little swing out draw on the front  nearside, for keeping the needles in.

I had one 78rpm record, entitled 'The Meanderings of Monty' recorded some time in the mid 1920s by Milton Hayes, who combined a career as a serious poet with that of a music hall comic. As Monty. he delivered a rambling and supposedly comic monologue in the style of an old school upper class English conservative, in which he berates the state of the country, politicians, self seeking opportunists, Germans and other, and grieves for the passing of better times, when times were better than they are today. Garbled, incoherent and outdated as the whole thing is, it's alarming how I find myself becoming more and more like Monty as the years go by.


However, that's absolutely not what I was intending to talk about at all...
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