Day Three hundred and nine - Faraday cage

There's a large bookcase in my bedroom that is now home to not a single book, but on its lower half there are doors, one to either side, and inside those doors I have boxes full of old stuff that I have been meaning for a very long time to sort through. Sometimes, when it fancies me, I'll try and get them out and sort of sift through them, to see what I want to keep and/or throw away. But for some reason doing this always leaves me feeling (more) exhausted. Because there's plenty of stuff there that brings back memories. Not necessarily good, and nor necessarily bad, but memories nevertheless. Last time I went through those boxes, I ended up throwing away a bunch of stuff I'd been holding on to for about twenty years or so, but it was nowhere nearly enough. So this Sunday evening I decided to have another run at it, and I came across something that I had not seen in years - a spindle full of CDs and DVDs, as well as some inside slim slipcases. Now, I do not now have a computer or anything else that can read or play them, so for its most part I have no idea what's in them. I can tell, though, that they have been burned, and they have something in them. It's probably music, or even comics. They're a relic of a time gone by. But some - a handful - I do know what they have, because those are the ones inside the slipcases. And I know precisely what's in them, when I burned them, why I burned them, and for who I burned them for. It's a weird testament to a really rough bit of my life - and to put it in perspective I'm talking about 2005 here, Christmas 2005 to be more precise. I had return from a stay in London but recently, and I felt like giving something to all my friends - something I found important, something valid I felt I needed to share. So what I did was compile my favourite records from the past couple of years, and I knew these would not be bands that they'd know, and put them all on one disc so they'd listen to them and hopefully enjoy them and maybe think of me - perhaps fondly - whenever they played them. I didn't burn many, less than ten to be sure, and maybe just a little more than half that number. And I don't think I ever did give them all, certainly I couldn't have seeing as I still have some. But maybe I gave out just a couple, though to who I could not now say, and I highly doubt that whoever I gave them to ever listened to them. Ah well, something else that got chucked in the bin.