Plutonic Rainbows

My new cable arrived yesterday and I fitted earlier today. The cable is the Chord ClearwayX 2RCA to 5DIN Analogue Cable.

The network player arrived on Wednesday; I set it up yesterday and have been enjoying it ever since. I finally decided to buy one after decades of listening habits built around physically hunting for a CD every time I wanted to hear something. Now I can listen to more than forty years of accumulated music that I’ve been gradually committing to disk over the past twenty years — including ripping more than 2,000 CDs, along with my collection of hi-res, lossless audio and other formats. Having everything available through streaming adds a different level of convenience: no hunting through shelves, no swapping discs, no manual file management. Just immediate access to the entire library from one place. It’s good to have it all so easily within reach.

Sometimes it feels safer to keep away from old fragrances and old music, because their ability to resurrect the past can be overwhelming, even uncomfortable. Scent and sound work on the deepest parts of the mind, reaching emotion before thought, so the recall arrives too quickly to prepare for. What returns is not just a memory but a former version of myself, a figure I can sense vividly yet can no longer inhabit. These triggers also revive entire social worlds that have vanished — cultural textures, atmospheres, expectations that no longer exist — so the recognition comes wrapped in the realisation of how much has been lost. The past reappears too alive, too intact, while I stand changed, weathered by years that the fragrance or song has never had to endure. Faced with that imbalance, avoidance becomes a form of protection: a way to honour what those things once meant without being pulled back into emotional terrain that feels too raw or destabilising. Keeping them at a distance is not denial; it is self-preservation in the presence of memories that still carry more power than I can comfortably hold.

If you believe the past has autonomy, you acknowledge that progress was never guaranteed. History is full of dead ends, lost causes, and alternatives that never happened. To respect the past's autonomy is to give weight to those losers of history as much as the winners, because at the time, the outcome was not yet decided.

Do not treat the past as a rehearsal for the present. It was a real, complete world to the people who lived in it, and it deserves to be understood within its own context.