I gave up 'keeping up' in July 2000 when number one son was born, and I was two years into being a fully qualified teacher, I also hit 30 that year and was becoming increasingly irritable with 'new' anyway. It was at this point that I also gave up writing songs, recording music, watching the news and having anything resembling a 'life.' (I also gave up music because I wasn't that good at it, and there's too much of the stuff anyway.)

*sigh*

I have found time for The Wire, The Sopranos and a good chuck of BSG, but this requires me to avoid reading, watching 'proper' TV and going to bed early. Don't get me wrong in these cases it was well worth it. However, now that '24' is finished I doubt I'll commit myself to a long running TV series like that again. Now that the kids are bigger I have more time for these things, but I think I've just lost the habit. I do try to read more, and that has become my priority, but I don't like new fiction and tend to stick to the classics and history. I accept that much of this is a function of age.

While I'm here, and I was going to as this question anyway, can anyone recommend one good album for my summer holiday listening? Old, new doesn't matter - just point me in the direction of something good. Cheers.

After reading your column and nodding in agreement throughout I realised that I gave up some time ago. These days I'm trusting that others will point me in the direction of things I will like or I will randomly stumble across stuff. The great thing about the ridiculous amount of choice is that eventually things come around again be it repeats on TV dressed up as retrospectives or the inevitable multi format music box sets, graphic novels or blu-ray/DVD bonanzas.
Part of the problem for me certainly is the snobbish urge to be ahead of the curve. Which was always a nonsense when I was 16 with limited funds. At 47 with a family and only 24 hours a day sleep becomes far more important. Until the next big thing of course.

with Loop Guru?

when I was young and stupid, I thought if I read, listened and watched enough, I'd ultimately have a solid grasp of all music, film and literature. Then, when I was a little less young and marginally less stupid, I realised that this wasn't going to happen. At this point, I experienced a bit of the same anxiety David refers to, and got slightly depressed about it.

After a bit, it occurred to me that this was no bad thing. There are truckloads of books, films, albums, operas, symphonies, paintings, poems, plays etc etc that I am never going to see or hear. Hell, it's unlikely that I've even heard of a lot of the stuff that I'll be getting pleasure out of over the next few decades. (As a positive aside, The Massive has been an endless source of reading, listening and viewing I may never have have encountered otherwise, and may never get through. Thanks Folks.)

I've recently started listening to Wagner and Bach, and rediscovered a love of Kurosawa. There's P G Wodehouse and Rex Stout, not to mention the works of Billy The Shake. And I don't think I'm the only one with a pile of books on my desk that will probably take me a year to get through, and a further stack on the shelves to be going on with. If I just wanted to get through the guys I've just mentioned, it will keep me busy for the rest of my life. But of course there's a lot more available than that - and it's bloody fantastic.

There's a semi-reccurent theme around here that we just don't get the rush from music that we did in the past, which is fair enough. I'm never going to have that sense of discovery I did when I first started going to gigs, but I sure there's enough other stuff in the world to spark a similar feeling in the future. Even just the idea that I'll find something, somewhere, gives me enough to pick up the next CD or DVD and watch with a slightly warm glow. Corny, but true. I gave up years ago; there is too much stuff in the world, but it also gives us a lot to look forward to.

And realised I wasn't remotely interested. Was a time, working in bookshops, I'd've at least wanted to skimread most of the shortlist to see what they're like.

it is not about the "keeping up" but being one jump ahead of your mates when discovering next week's "new".

"Hey, just listen to the new LP by Rancid Groin. I had it specially imported from Bulgaria. It's rilly cool, er, man!"

As you get older you just become part of the marketing fodder that thinks one-minute film trailers are representative of a forthcoming blockbuster. The "must-have" CDs are the ones with "as advertised on TV" stickers.

After the last NW Massive mingle CD-swopperama I realise how much I have not kept up over the last 20 years but that's part of the fun. You never stop learning. You just don't have anyone sneering at you because you don't, like, dig the new Pixie Lott waxing. Whatevah.

If I stumble upon something I like I am happy.

Massive Attack were the last act who I can remember properly keeping an eye on.

Work. Family. Life - just gets in the way. But I think my interest/awareness of Film rather than music has suffered more. You can sort of keep up with music via the good offices of this 'ere blog (and I believe there is a related magazine), Spotify and You Tube etc.

Post-kids I'm much less aware of Film than I used to be. Haven't seen Avatar, unlikely to see Inception anytime soon. Ask me about Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on the other hand and I'm good to go.

Musically, I think I'm still pretty hip and down with the kids. It's just that they all sound like bands of the 70s and 80s.

*Shoots himself in foot and mutters "Christ, I am getting old"*

....even an old git like me probably spends *more* time listening to, watching and reading new stuff than ever before, just because it's available. What I can't do is waste lots of energy chasing things down and ticking them off. There's simply too much of it to be able to do it now. You don't get a TV series like Edge Of Darkness any more, which was done and dusted in a handful of episodes. You get programmes like Mad Men, which, great though they are, demand days of your time. Bands make more records than ever before, tour more often and then indulge themselves in lots of spin-off projects. It all takes time. Ours. I see people reading these Stieg Larson books and I think, I ought to read one of those but then I realise there are three of them. Probably four by the time I finish writing this.

A psychiatrist once told me that their in-joke is that autism is simply "extreme male-ness", in other words most men have an urge to "get it all, and get it all now". I find myself thinking this way if I see a band live, and then want to snap up everything they ever did.

Beany's comment is spot on, that it's also to do with competitiveness (another male trait).

A female perspective might help here!

it's been a few years since it was possible to read all the books in the world the difference is now a days you could order most of them from amazon and download the rest. I find it quite freeing not to see/hear certain things (never read a word of Harry Potter or seen a frame of twilight etc) you do have to put up with a particular show books fans trying to "convert" you though, which can be annoying.

on television, films and books. I watch/read when I feel like it and never read reviews.
I'm just starting to give up on looking for new music as I have way too many cds, records & cassettes. If something bumps into me and I like it, fine.
I'm still an enthusiastic gig - goer though.

...listening to my own collection, I find that there's enough that I either never listened to properly, have forgotten about or even, occasionally, that I never actually listened to at all, to keep me happy.

I make sure I listen to (and increasingly, NOT buy) stuff that get's recommended, but only by trusted sources (including here) and if it doesn't really grab me, it's gone. TV likewise ; there's only so many hour long American 82-part series you can spend time on and still leave time for 4 episodes a week of Eastenders

Until a couple of years ago I would still actively chase new stuff, but I just got to the point where so little of it actually makes me go WOW, that it's not worth it. This also makes those rare occasions all the better to savour.

Makes pub quizes increasingly hard, though, which DOES annoy me.

...work expands to fill the time available, then I think the solution to your problem is for you all to stop treating your leisure as work and just relax.

Ultimately, none of this really matters, y'know.

I still listen to a lot of Music.Some new but mostly old favourites.Music is one art form that can be indulged in whilst doing other things(Painting,cooking,reading,writing,watching televised sport,sex)but I stopped giving a stuff about being down with the hip kids a long time ago.It's not that I've lost any of my youthful passion It's just that like everyone else I simply only have so many hours in the day.As for T.V.I wait for the box sets and then watch them in bloody big chunks,It's quite rare that we sit down and watch T.V.when It's actually broadcast,we are usually watching one of the aforementioned box sets or a film,or reading,or listening to a podcast.Of course all this has to be fitted in around the small matter of doing all those other little things that constitutes a life.
I love the challenge of it and count my blessings that I am in the happy position of being able to indulge as much as I do in life's rich tapestry.

has a piece in The Observer today that is relevant. About the bloke habit of collecting comics, music, books, etc. Apparently, he has 6 feet of Fall Cds on his shelves

My mate wrote a poem inspired by reaching 60, a heart attack and needing to Keep Up ( maybe a feeling especially felt by those in the "arts" )

The Late Adopter
"They say in the end, it is the wink of an eye"
"The Pretender" Jackson Browne

Now that the last series of The Wire has finished
I am urged by my daughter to watch this US Cop series
I tell her that the five series of thirteen episodes
Each lasting one hour will take sixty five hours of my life
I am sixty years old and I don't know if I can commit
It isn't that I am running on empty, yet
But the tank is definitely is a lot less than a quarter full
There is no refills, no top ups and no reserve tank
There is a lot of road left to travel, a lot of sights still to see
And no time for long running Baltimore Police sagas
No matter how motherfucking good they are.

I can't possibly be expected to keep up with every "must have" now, so I've stopped feeling guilty about the gaping holes in my library/CD collection/viewing. If someone asks "haven't you read...?" I can just shrug and ask them if I should add it to the list.

The era of TV boxed sets, re-released back catalogues, PVRs and large hard drives means I'm freed to take things at my own pace.

As for getting anxious about all the things I might like which I haven't read, heard or seen, it's the opposite for me.

For years, whenever I've felt down, the one thing guaranteed to give me a lift is to wander into a book shop, think of all the great books I've never read, and realise that whatever happens, I'll never run out.

Bloody hell, I'm still catching up.

I'm still filling in gaps in all the good stuff that came out between 1967 and 1977 that I couldn't afford at the time. Most of the stuff that came out after that was rubbish anyway. ;)

I was interested in what David H said up above about long-running series with God knows how many episodes, compared to the six-parter works from the 70s like Edge Of Darkness and its ilk.

It seems that TV drama in particular has gone in two simultaneous directions over recent years: either it's stretched out over a boxed-set length arc, like Band Of Brothers, or it's been concertina'd into hour long single narrative threads where everything happens-so-fast-you-daren't-nip-out-for-a-leak or the plot will be six turns gone when you return, like the recent Doctor Who yarns.

Anyone have a theory why we don't seem to get many stories of a sensible length, and which are therefore easier to invest in, time-wise, anymore?

Crikey, so it's NOT just me! :-)

I think I agree with most of everything in this thread - I love browsing in bookshops but more often than not never buy anything, because I usually have books still to read. And much of that is of the catching up variety.

For instance, friend - a bookshop owner! - recommended 1920s-40s crime writer Freeman Wills Crofts to me a while back. He has very little currently in print but I regularly try to pick up old 50s Penguin reprints on ebay for a fiver (the originals and even, bizarrely, the 90s reprints are just too expensive).

Wolfgangsvault.com offers the chance to 'catch up' on vintage stuff that actually wasn't available at the time. I wouldn't be without the 30-odd Mahavishnu Orchestra 1973 concerts downloaded onto CD - they get me through the day at my place of work. (Yes, it's a lone working situation most of the time!)

Right now I'm hoping that someone - maybe Network DVD, who've done similar writer-based DVD collections - will come up with a loving-crafted set of Alan Plater TV plays.

Who has time for anything new?

I thought it was just me who feels there is not enough time left. I have so many unread books, unwatched DVDs (Stand alone films & more boxsets than I can shake a stick at), & more unlistened to music than anyone I know.

Like most, if not all of us on this site, I love music, & I used to buy the early beatles singles with my birthday money, so I have been buying music in its many forms for almost fifty years. (Please dont think it is a phase that you grow out of, Its an ailment that never goes away !)

My son is always suggesting I try this, that or the other, but I dont have the time or desire to watch 24,never seen a minute of it, & never seen a second oh harry Potter or the Twiglet films.. I am sure he is right, & they are all brilliant, but I have so much other stuff, I wont ever be able to fit it in.

BTW, watching a box set is my favourite way of "doing" TV, I recently watched, & loved "This life", magnificent series,( even if +10 was pants.)

I really want to like recent stuff, I was on a long car journey last week, & I was thinking mmm, Lady Ga Ga ?.... Ting Tings ?.... Maybe the Gorrillaz ?? Nope - Abbey Road - always hits the spot.

I realise that there is no real point being made here, just that the life of a music fan is a lifetime of pleasure, & the next thing I listen to, or read, or watch may well be the best thing ever............. Apart from the Fabs of course.

because I have this fear that if I stop trying to keep up, I'll stop progressing and that means I'd have lost my sense of curiosity and adventure and exploration and I've come to a standstill. But I also know that - as commented above - there is no earthly chance that I'm ever going to hear everything of value, much less properly listen to it. So why do I bother? Not sure really, except I have this fear...

My pile of unread books is reasonably low, although I still feel I should read more.

My pile / playlist of unheard music is reasonably low, although I still feel I should check out a few bands I've not yet heard (e.g. Moulettes and Syzygy) as well as listening to new records by Richard Thompson and Arcade Fire, plus a few others.

One frightening statistic: my "Unplayed" playlist on iTunes has got a manageable 10 lp's on it, including 4 Jane Sibbery free downloads. However, I just did an "Only played once" playlist and there are a staggering 17,000 songs on it. Now, some of this will include cover cd's that the, err, archivist in me has ripped before giving away and some will be copies of cd's I love and have played on the hi fi umpteen times. But it's still an awful lot of music that, if I'm frank about it, has only been given a cursory listen.

I can't keep up with the dawn of rock 'n' roll ('56) to the end of the 60s so I don't bother with anything else.
Life's too short and trust me, it's liberating.
It certainly beats having six feet's worth of Fall CDs!

My concession to modern life is that I get nudged towards things via Word or the Observer that might have been recently talked about or reviewed (in the last fortnight, a 1969 jazz CD mentioned on this site, an Alexander Baron novel from '63 and a Len Deighton cookery guide).

I spend even more time in bookshops. I see titles that look really interesting, some by authors I know, some that I've never heard of. I agonise over whether to buy or not, knowing that there's an ever growing pile at home. Generally I succumb, because I know not buying it will gnaw away at me. Then there's the 3 for the price of 2 deals; because I want this one and that one, I might as well get my money's worth and pick a third.
When the book I'm currently reading is finished I then go and look for the next one. Will one I purchased a few days ago; will it be the one I was told was brilliant; will it .....? Eventually I make a decision and think I must stop buying books until the unread list gets a bit shorter.
I then a few days later I'm walking past a book shop...

I remember going to a party in 1989 and hearing everyone banging on about this group called The Stone Roses who were - naturally - amaaazing. I have always been wary of groups that receive such unqualified praise and it puts me off listening to them. I don't think I heard the Roses album all the way through until around 1992, and after avoiding the hype I came to the entirely correct decision that it was quite good.

Sometimes - despite my best efforts - I have been caught up by the tidal wave of bullshit that accompanies successful bands - I briefly thought Nirvana were something revolutionary before their music started to date terribly quickly.

All I have ever been bothered about is hearing music that moves me. I don't care about when it was made or whether it's popular or not, nor do I give a monkeys about the "next big thing". If I like it I like it and that's enough.

Having next to no knowledge of contemporary music doesn't bother me in the slightest. I have the rest of my life to listen to records I haven't heard before and music that is on my wavelength will find me eventually, be it in five years time or twenty years time. It's better not to rush these things...

The same goes for all the other branches of the arts. I surround myself with the things I like and take enormous pleasure from them. Whether they are "current" or "hip" or "cutting edge" is something that never crosses my mind. I love what I love.

If things get played in the office a lot they generally have to have that quality of not annoying anybody. Inbetween the press day disco playlist and Mark Ellen's personal obsession with the Incredible String Band, here's four that we've played a lot of:
John Grant's "Queen Of Denmark"
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' "Mojo"
Jonsi's "Go"
Janelle Monae's "The Archandroid".
Pick the bones out of that lot.

I posted on Facebook recently how much I enjoyed this film, seen on a long flight last week. My brother responded along the lines of "I told you this was good months ago: don't you listen?" And I thought about that a bit. What disturbed me most? The implication that, if someone I love told me something was good, I would of course hurry to see/listen to said thing within a week so as not to cause offence? Or, that if you don't see/hear something while everyone else is still talking about it, it doesn't count as much? Or that about five months' wait in between hype and first hand experience isn't actually pretty good going in this day and age?

Spotify on the move goes some way to helping stay on top of music that friends say you must hear. But I still don't know a sociably acceptable way of saying "Yes, I know you gave me Mad Men for Christmas last year; and I really want to watch it, but my wife wants to watch it too, and there just isn't time; but I am looking forward to it and I'm grateful that you gave it to me," etc etc.

I'm sorry. There's just too much stuff.

Anyone have this statistic to hand? How many records were released in 2009 compared to 1979? Is there more new stuff being released, or is the backlog becoming the problem?

If I had to define my music taste, I'd say to it tends toward psychedelic rock. When I first discovered this type of music in late 70s, I had about 10-15 years to catch up on. Now this musical genre is over 40 years old, and new music of this style is still being created. And I still haven't heard all the stuff from the 70s!

I've given up being completest - I just go for stuff at random that intrigues me. I'm sure there's some shocking gaps in my collection - as well as some seriously obscure artists only I (and their mothers) like.

(Which reminds me, I must come to a meetup some time and get some new recommendations!).

I've got Treme and Breaking Bad with me and I'm meant to be watching them!

that keeping up is impossible.

Didn’t Brian Eno posit a conversation between our descendants in the future where they would be discussing our listening habits – “you mean they would listen to the same thing over and over again??” those habits don’t seem to be changing yet

I have had a hunger to hear a certain kind of music/tone/feeling – which has led me to mixes of stuff that matches my vague/difficult to describe ideal e.g. late night instrumental radio classical /jazz/”world” or mixes of new music e.g. Simon Reynolds recent pontone compilation of noughties (lots of hauntology).. – I make notes of artists and albums and tracks but I know that the exercise is futile, I feel ill and my survival instinct is to strip everything back.

Due to this nausea I’m culling my physical (and digital) music collection with a ruthlessness I never thought I had. It feels great, I’m regretting nothing. The panic and depression you refer to is outweighed for me by the relief of letting all this stuff go.

I hope to be left with a minimal collection of soothing music, instrumental perhaps, dub, some jazz, Mali stuff, a few faves,
Never before have I enjoyed my old so much - listened to Bring on the Night by The Police (vinyl) half a dozen times last week because I KNEW it was enough.

Realising you won’t cover everything can focus you also – I am specifically concentrating now on compiling a (very long) playlist of hits from 1978-1984 and collecting varied TOTP appearances from the same era. It’s nostalgic but also just a hobby and it keeps me off the streets.

about keeping up because I am not sure what it means.Best stuff I have heard this month is actually old stuff - John Mellencamps 4 cd boxset On the rural route 7609. Was interested in it but not enough to shell out £44 but amazingly it is available to download on Amazon for £12.99 - definitely a bargain.
Is Treme out yet because I would like to watch that. Again where do we find the time - I have around 1400 films on my Apple TV and have maybe watched 150 of them.

...ever kept up. It always seemed so obvious to me that you could never consume everything, so I just tend to be happy with whatever is turns up and turns out to be great. I happen across stuff, which is just fine with me.

should NOT buy another book until I´ve read the ones I´ve got. This usually lasts until the next time I enter a book store. My friends keep giving me books that "I read last week, you´ll love it".

North West Massive Mingle and couple of us who write about music and the arts were of the opinion now that we're not even embarrassed about not keeping up with music or TV.
I think due to the nature of the media and the vast extension of the PR industry we're told more stuff is unmissable than ever before. The majority of it isn't solid gold classic but merely very good.
There's lots of stuff, lots of stuff we are told is very good - I'm just not sure it is.

It stands to reason that we can't hear, see or read everything but what bothers me slightly is that there's a band or artist out there somewhere that I've never heard but is better than everything that I already know.

I've only got 10 pages of my book left and then I can start on the next. It seems to take me forever to get through a book these days. (Walking to work doesn't help on that score.)

I've become obsessed with the theatre this year and I can barely keep up with that (money being an issue there.) Film and Music have suffered due to that as you can't keep up with everything.

Podcasts, Twitter, Private Eye, When Saturday Comes, Word of course, it is of course impossible to keep up. And still some strange part of me wants to add MORE. I'm thinking I should check out Parks and Recreation, I'm 2 (two!) episodes into The American Office. Breaking Bad sits waiting for me on my hard drive and I've had a break of about a year into episodes of Season 3 of Mad Men before getting ack into it.

Occupational hazard for the sort of people most of us are I'm afraid. (We're all 'Seekers' here I feel.)

Above all else I actively seek out new music because I love doing it. It's not driven by an urge to 'keep up' as much as the sheer pleasure I get out of hearing something new and interesting. If I can get to see that music performed live even better. Joining up the two is still difficult despite the fact we are now in a music industry driven by 'Live'. Sites like Songkick help, but are still a bit hit & miss.
I quite often discover a great new record (still through the old school channels like my local indie record shop, magazine reviews, friends and websites like this 'ere one) only to discover that the band played a gig in my town a few weeks ago.

The interweb has meant it far easier to be made aware of more music than ever, and probably encouraged more music to be recorded. What it hasn't yet done is provide really useful tools for keeping tabs on it all.

It would be far easier if the dreaded Myspace wasn't such a woeful, poorly designed, unappealing shambles. Although it's original purpose for social networking has pretty much disappeared it still represents a very comprehensive database of pretty much every artist and band on earth, actively updated by the artists and their 'people'. An astonishing asset when you think about it.

What it should do is allow me to follow the ones I like, find out when they have a new record, and find out if they're playing live near me. Maybe recommend new artists I might like but in an easy to manage way. It sort of does that but I hate the interface and I feel ill at the thought of going near it and looking at any more horribly rendered HTML pages. A trick is being missed by a country mile.
Last FM tries the same thing but that's a bloody confusing mess as well.

Can only be a short time before some clever bugger invents a new way.....

Each month, when I find something I want to watch/listen to/read in my issue of Word, I tear the corner and fold it up, making a little bookmark. Then, once I've finished, I can quickly flick back through the magazine (using all those little handy bookmarks) and make notes of all things I want to come back to.

I keep this list online, in a google document, so I can refer to it when I'm out and about via my phone - so if I find myself in Sister Ray, itching to buy something, I can quickly refer to my doc and get some suggestions ...

Well, that's the theory, anyway. Problem is, this list is getting longer and longer, and I'm feeling a little nagged by it now. All these things I should be listening to or watching or reading, if only I had infinite spare time.

Maybe instead I should just give into the randomness of my failing memory and see what happens ...

This question has been there since Caxton first struck type.

If anyone other than Mr Hepworth had asked it, would it have been dignified with a stream of answers?

Some general thoughts - a few people have said that having families/careers means they don't have the time, and they've given up 'trying to keep up'. I'm single and stay on my own so, other than day to day stuff like the job/ paperwork/ exercise/ I can devote as much time as I like to reading, watching and listening to new stuff. But it's still bloody impossible to keep up!
My circumstances bring on another type of anxiety - I often feel, because I generally have so much free time, I should be making more of it than I am, whereas if your leisure time's offset against a really active family life/your kids, you maybe don't get that.
As for what's going on, let's say I have, say, 20-odd new albums in my Spotify playlists I haven't listened to yet, plus a Sky box pretty full of stuff to watch, not to mention new stuff in my iTunes, and three or four new books. That's before you get on to finding time to hear stuff on the radio, watching stuff on iPlayer and YouTube/ DVDs, the odd Xbox game, going to the cinema, podcasts and reading newspapers/magazines.
I do aspire to being cool, who here doesn't want to stay ahead of the curve? I don't feel the same pressure with books, I feel I'll get round to reading stuff eventually, whereas with music there is an urgency because you might want to share stuff your mates are into, or worry about missing the chance to see a band live if you don't get into them in the 'here and now'.

Existential or what!

It's easier than ever to 'sample' as much entertainment as you want to. So you can just about to keep up to speed with what's going on by reading an extract of book on Amazon, watching a bit of a tv show on youtube, or listening to a song or two from an album on Spotify or on a Word CD..). You can 'dip your toe in' to more things than ever - enough to form an opnion and keep up to speed with everything that's going on - and then only invest more time in the things that really interest you. I think there's actually less excuse than ever for not 'keeping up' than ever, if that's what you want to do.

...are very good and worth a read.

No danger of a fourth, he sadly died shortly after completing the trilogy.

When I was younger, access to stuff I liked wasn't easy. Tracking things down became a major, time consuming activity, and it was easy to put availability ahead of quality. I was never happier than finding a new town to scour for second hand vinyl and books. I always wanted to find out more about the bands I liked, films I enjoyed, and in a pre internet age, couldn't bring myself to ditch any "treasures" that I found. I remember the excitement of finding Curtis Knight's book on Hendrix. Pile of cack really, but at the time is the one and only book on Hendrix that I'd found, so I hoovered it up as fast as I could. In an era before Sky+, what you didn't see on TV tended to stay missed. So a video recorder seemed a great invention, for those TV moments you thought would never pass you by again.

These habits are hard to break. I still tend to acquire CD's, MP3's and DVD's of shows I think I'll like as and when I see them, although it's increasingly clear that they are not going anywhere and I could pick them up when I need them, or access them via Spotify and YouTube.

My step kids, having grown up in an era where all media is much more accessable show no such anxiety. It's all transient and disposable. Maybe I just never grew up enough.

I should be watching telly, because my mates in the office tomorrow will be asking me if I watched X, Y or Z ...
Or maybe I should be tweeting something, because that's what all my contemporaries are doing and I have guilt feelings that I should be out there on Twitter - but I just can't be arsed.
Maybe I should be updating my blog, but again, I post only once or twice a week these days because I have other things going on. There's a whole channel of 70s and 80s shows on Youtube that I recently discovered and want to revisit ...
But I also have this book One Day by David Nicholls that I should read, after seeing the article about it in The Word...

Season 3 of '24'. Can't keep up with the Bauers let alone the Joneses

You can't be across everything, it's physically and mentally impossible. I just don't have the time. I'm happy doing what I'm doing, and if I stumble across something I've not come across before that interests me - and that happens often - then it's a bonus.

But I'm not bothered about being a pioneer. No one listens to me anyway.

They're dead men with arrows in their backs.

Anyway, an interesting example of the perils of too much emphasis on First Mover Advantage has cropped up in the last week. I didn't watch the BBC's new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes which started last Sunday but even before it had finished the Twittersphere was brimming over with tweets hailing it as the greatest thing in the history of TV. A week later they've shown the second episode and those same people seem to have concluded it's A Bit Disappointing.

It's a standard trap of reviewing. The overwhelming need to Come To A Conclusion leads one into the trap of either over-praising or prematurely condemning whatever you're dealing with. The thing I always say when PRs ring me up and ask if I've heard a record is "it hasn't made much impression on me yet" which is a polite way of saying I have nothing particularly urgent to say about it. The problem with A to Z review sections is they're mostly written by people who haven't got anything very urgent to say either but can drum something up.

The recommendations that count are the ones people don't have to make, such as the ones in Home Service in the magazine where the writers are talking about what they liked out of the line of duty, the ones made peer to peer on this blog and the ones such as those I posted above which indicate what we've been listening to in the office. If I was *so* fascinated in what the critical fraternity thought about one particular record I would be listening to it, not waiting to be told that it was OK to listen to it.

And anyway, none of this stuff is going to go away. It'll be there for you to appreciate it whenever the stars are correctly aligned or you're in the mood or at the right age. For instance, I've written this to the accompaniment of "Sanctuary" from Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and it's sounded better than it ever has done. How old is that?

been the danger of wanting to have the first 'exclusive' review of a certain album, rushing to a conclusion before a magazine deadline. Have been quite amused to see several reviewers having a downer on the Arcade fire album 'Neon Bible', one which basked in praise all round when it initially saw the light of day, does that mean that when the next Arcade Fire album comes out, 'Suburbs' will be viewed as 'not as good as we thought it was'.

I myself have seriously curtailed my cd buying habit this year. Partly because of money, partly because I had a pile of cds that had hardly been played. I still get an itch to get down to the shop or on Amazon on a Monday to see what I can get this week, by wednesday any desire to get a certain album has all but gone. If the record is good and the desire to get it doesn't go away, then eventually I will get it i.e The National, Steve Mason or John Grant, anything else can wait.

"Who is JLo ?"

I went from being the geek to the High Court judge in the blink of the eye.

Still, like others here I hit the keeping up question early, and if you go on A Voyage Of Discovery (jazz, Joyce, Welles, Wagner...) among the old stuff then life will go on in your absence. Good.

Having blind spots means Old becomes as new as New, and the blind spots might be sorted one day. I discovered Neu! last week, the first album : aren't they great, and I have this the next ones to look forward to now.

Of course I don't work in the media, and am not compelled to be acquainted with everything, if only so I can murmur "Love your work" at showbiz parties with something approaching conviction. (Oh, such is my vision of the glamorous reviewer's lifestyle...)

Haven't been 'down with the kids' for a long time. I work with students and when I first started with my job I wasn't much older than them so could quite easily relate to the music, films, even fashion that they were into. Now I hear them banging on about TV shows and bands I've never heard of but it doesn't bother me - there's nothing worse than the member of staff who thinks he still 'gets' young people and tries to flaunt it (I can think of a couple of guilty offenders where I work...).

Most of what I get into now comes from 6Music - I listen to it a lot and a few times a year something they play worms its way into my head and I go out and explore that act further - this method has about a 90% success rate. I largely gave up on TV long ago - apart from the news, I reckon I don't watch more than 6 or 7 hours a week.

Then listen to the recent Guardian Music Weekly interview with MJ Cole... he lost me when he was lamenting the dearth of decent progressive two step grime or some such.

The expansion of available music has just led to ridiculous micro genres... back in the day it was either hard or soft... and the odd bit was noodly.