In with the new

It's odd how periods of our life come to be defined by physical possessions.

My iPod finally gave up the ghost last weekend, the thick white brick that, for a while at least, was access to every record I ever owned. It was until I bought more records, anyway, and then - as often happens with gadgets - it started to look physically bigger and bigger as its memory got smaller and smaller. About two years ago I thought it had died, appropriately enough on New Year's Eve, but it was just a minor collapse. Eventually the apple logo glowed feebly again and it chugged back into life, but it was never the same after that. It would run out of juice after seemingly no time at all while I was out on walks, like an elderly and much-loved pet. The problem is that it was so big and capable that I couldn’t bear to let it go. Besides, it was engraved on the back with my name and the words "Music Snob" underneath, and I figured that counted for something.

I know this is a pretentious thing to say, but by the time I had to put it down it was more than just a music player to me. It was a link to the recent past, too; I bought it around six years ago, not long after getting married, just after I moved into this flat. It kept me company throughout countless journeys to work, bus and train trips all over the country, sessions at the ironing board, even slow lazy afternoons on a sun lounger on holiday. It provided the soundtrack to hundreds of tiny moments that, taken together, made up a huge segment of my life; the era of mortgage, marriage and happiness.

One time I went to Bournemouth for my friend Glenn's stag weekend, an event I couldn't have been much less genetically suited to without different chromosomes. The Friday night was spent sitting in a very townie bar listening to the sort of songs which a crowd that wasn’t mine might have described as crowd pleasers. All around me orange women weaved past in varying degrees of intoxication and undress carrying giant test-tube shaped glasses full of luminous cocktails. I found myself wondering what my stag weekend might have been like, if I’d had one instead of eloping, and decided it would probably have involved a wine tasting and a seven course menu. This was very similar in some respects, except that instead it offered all the WKD Blue you could stomach and a branch of KFC which appeared to stay open until three in the morning.

Back at our accommodation, I was sharing a room with the groom and his brother. This was in many ways a great honour, but the facilities were best described as basic. I had the saggy single bed by the window, leaving them to battle over a small double bed and a duvet which was smaller still (one of them shivered in t-shirt and pants on the former, the other got a bad back sleeping on the floor covered by the latter, I can’t remember who did which). I didn’t realise the real benefit of my sleeping arrangements - being stationed underneath the open window - until the following night, when the horrifying consequences of the groom’s brother eating his own body weight in curry became brutally clear.

I drew the line, though, at the events planned for the following day. There are certain rules about what you must do, it seems, on a stag weekend. Riotous drinking, naturally, and probably some kind of curry. A nightclub of some description. Either a strip bar or a casino or, if you’re feeling really devil-may-care, both. But then during the day there have to be some kind of manly activities to keep the energy levels high, and I’m afraid a nice tour round a local vineyard wasn’t going to cut it for my fellow celebrants. They were going paintballing.

I feigned a foot injury to get out of it, proving in the process that not only wasn’t I man enough to go paintballing but I wasn’t even man enough to grow a pair and tell them I didn’t want to go paintballing. I remember waving them goodbye as they got into cars and headed off to don camouflage gear, bond and shoot one another to primary coloured smithereens, and then I went back to my room (at that stage clear of the flatulent fug that was to envelop it later that night) to make my plans for the day ahead. I had Bournemouth to myself, for the next six hours or so at least.

As I walked away from the grubby bed and breakfast and through the residential streets, in search of the seafront, I headed through a park - climbing frames naked and sad, roundabouts and swings inert and forlorn - and Rainy Night House by Joni Mitchell struck up in my headphones. I think it might be my favourite song of hers: glorious, beautiful and enigmatic. I’m not even sure the song is about much at all, but it does have a terrific line in it where she sings ‘You sat up all the night and watched me, to see, who in the world I might be’ which has always summed up completely for me that sense of wonder when you’re with someone new, and where there is far more about them which you don’t know than that which you do. It seems to capture that wonderful point at the beginning when you have glimpsed the cover, picked up the book and are starting that first chapter. But now I will always associate that song not only with that feeling, but also with that park, and my solitary walk into the centre of a town I had never really planned to visit.

I spent the morning, if my memory serves, loafing in the gardens watching the teenagers and pensioners go by. Bournemouth, it turned out, was a city where, unless you were on a stag or hen weekend you seemed to age overnight from the former to the latter. I half-heartedly did some shopping. I swapped texts with my wife, who was at the hen do (they were in Alton Towers, I had tried to get permission to be treated as an honorary girl for the weekend, without success). I explored until I realised - and it didn’t take long - that there really wasn’t much to explore. Despite the very attractive green spaces, it was a strangely unlovely town with very little going on before nightfall. There was a miniature golf course which I briefly considered as an option, but I didn’t have the courage to play on my own. After all, little looks more paedophilic than a stubbly thirtysomething man going round a miniature golf course unaccompanied.

Later on, I sat on a bench with a milkshake and had a long phone conversation with my friend Anna about why the man in her Frankfurt office wouldn’t leave his girlfriend for her, which consisted of six instalments of a single ten minute segment of conversation, on a continuous loop, analysing the same five minutes of non-exchanges between the two of them. I didn’t have the patience or the persistence to just explain that he was having his cake and eating it, and even if I had she just would have carried on as if I hadn’t said anything. So I just slurped and ummed and aahed, and wondered whether paintballing might have been the soft option.

Later still, my wife’s friend Sally, who lived nearby, took pity on me and came to pick me up in her insane jeep that looked like a toy car. It rattled me all the way to an unfashionable suburban carvery where I sat in the sun drinking orange juice and lemonade and enjoying talking in person to someone with ovaries and most of her marbles. And of course, far later still came the delights of being reunited with the rest of the stags, boasting about their bruises in that macho way where it’s disguised as a complaint, followed by the horrors of all the gyrating Eastern European blonde skeletons in Spearmint Rhino, the place you go for no other reason than because it’s the place you go.

But that’s not really what I remember about Bournemouth. If you asked me to sum up Bournemouth, and you only gave me a split second to answer, I would tell you without hesitation about Joni Mitchell’s perfect voice as I drifted past that playground, or maybe Brand New Friend by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions playing as I wandered through the once-grand arcades, not entirely convinced of the appeal of my own company. My iPod was responsible for that.

My new one is sleek, beautiful and black. It has a gorgeous screen, no scuffs or marks. My name isn’t engraved on the back. It has been trying ever so hard, randomly picking happy songs when I need them most and unearthing old favourites I haven’t listened to in ages. I still believe that random play is nothing of the kind but simply the choice of the genie that lives in these boxes, and my new genie is keen to please. But it’s not the same. And I say that knowing perfectly well that, all things being equal, I am likely to be speaking in equally glowing terms about this iPod six years from now.

Often these endings and new beginnings come in phases, and another era ended this week when our new sofa was due to arrive. The outgoing sofa was one of the very first pieces of furniture we bought as a couple, for our first home together, the second floor flat overlooking the river. We both loved it the moment we saw it, a grey felt loop on legs, simplicity itself. Because of my wife’s background, she loved it just that little bit more when she found out it was reduced - a value I’ve come to share as my in-laws have, over the last seven years, stopped being somebody else’s family and have completely become mine. I still remember her going up to the shop assistant, tongue firmly in cheek, and asking “Is there any movement on the price?” This was probably the raciest thing anybody had said in the Reading branch of John Lewis for decades, but it worked, and when we snuggled up on it on its first night in our first flat everything felt as if it had fallen exactly into place.

I’m still rather attached to it - even if it’s not quite as plush as it was that day, and it’s not quite long enough to stretch out on your own on a sick day. I love it even if, increasingly, we don’t snuggle up together but one of us retreats instead to the chair by the window to tap away in peace and quiet. I remember it as the first concrete evidence of our commitment to a life together, long before we bought a new bed, and wardrobes, and hung pictures and blinds, painted and re-carpeted and hunched swearing over endless mysterious piles of flat-packed particleboard. Dozens of people have sat on it - some I still see, some I like and miss, some who dropped me and some it just didn’t work out with. And somehow, the way objects do, it absorbed all of those events, changes and personalities and became more than the sum of them. But all good things come to an end, and we decided we needed something bigger, something new.

This week we were both at home on Wednesday, her to await the arrival of the new sofa and me for another trip to the hospital for another tick in a long checklist all doctors seem to use when declaring me beyond the reaches of conventional treatment. Lifting the sofa onto its front we unscrewed its tiny feet and Kelly labelled them underneath with a marker pen.

“The back ones are slightly longer, you see.” said Kelly. “Do you remember? When we first moved in, we had them in the wrong places and we couldn’t understand why it kept wobbling.”

“God, no, I had forgotten that.”

“And you were convinced that this living room was the same size as the one in the old flat.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.” I smiled. Kelly never lets me forget being wrong about that. “And this room is much bigger and when we got our wobbly sofa into the living room I couldn’t believe how much more space we had.”

I remember that as clearly as if it was yesterday. My friend Glenn - he of the stag weekend - was off that day and he helped us haul all our stuff the short distance from the old flat to the new. I remember us carrying the sofa up the stairs, round all the sharp and treacherous corners, and plonking it on the brand new carpet, facing the empty alcove where we already knew the television would wind up living. The room was huger than I’d remembered, all right; so much space, with nothing in it, and now everywhere you look there are things we’ve bought along the way. I wonder if I will miss any of them quite this much.

“I’m going to miss this sofa, you know?”

“I know, but the new one is going to be lush. Come on, help me move this out of the way so we’ve got the space for when the delivery men arrive.”

Struggling between us, we moved it over to an empty space by the doorway to the kitchen and looked at the things we’d been storing underneath it for ages, out of sight and out of mind. Her laptop, my laptop, an art set she got for Christmas many years ago but had lacked the discipline or time to use. One era ends, another era begins, I thought to myself, and then I had to smile. There on that virgin patch of floor, glimmering in the sunlight, were what must have been half a dozen white feathers.