Unless you happen to be a Russian double agent, or have previously absconded with the proceeds from a multi-million pound coke deal, the occasions in life when your past catches up with you are likely to be few and far between. Most of the time the past just crumbles away at your heels, leaving you with no option other than to shuffle reluctantly into the future.

Late last December I stepped onto the escalator in the HMV store near Bond Street tube, allowing it to carry me away from the jostling Brownian motion of Christmas shoppers that filled the lobby, up to the music department on the first floor. As the moving staircase ferried me past the silvery, lenticular images of records that morphed to reveal black and white photographs of iconic musicians when faced head-on, I sensed change on the air; one of those subtle shifts in a familiar environment that you initially overlook but which leaks back into the consciousness, as if it’s come to you by way of some strange sixth sense. It’s the same way that you sometimes feel the turn of seasons. You can’t quite put your finger on what’s changed but you know that something has. That day I felt like an enthusiastic bit-player in an archaic ritual. I remember the flagship Tower, Virgin and HMV stores as being the places where you could find absolutely anything. Recently the racks have seemed a little sparser. The records that you would expect to find conspicuous by their absence.

A few months prior to this, on August bank holiday, I had walked from my home in Thorpe Bay to the top of Southend High Street, with the intention of buying Jungle Blues by C.W. Stoneking. When HMV didn’t have the album a part of my mind couldn’t process its absence. I made increasingly desperate searches of the Jazz, Blues, Folk, Country and Easy Listening sections in a fruitless search for it. Eventually, after I had accepted that no amount of flipping back and forth through the jewel cases was going to make the record appear, I decided to walk to an independent music store called Fives, which is a few miles away in Leigh-on-Sea, on the off chance that they had a copy.

It was a beautiful day at the tail end of summer. I walked in the shadows of tall trees along streets where I hadn’t ventured in years, and down other unfamiliar roads where I had never set foot despite having lived in Southend for most of my life. My wanderings gradually took on an intrinsic value, separate from their end destination. I became very receptive to the minutiae of my surroundings - the way that a pair of braced iron hinges spread like the silhouette of some invasive climbing plant across the timbers of an arched church door.

Outside one of the old brown-brick terraced houses, near the railway line, a heavily pregnant woman swept a carpet of dried-out leaves, that looked like matt-green plaster casts of dinosaur footprints, from a cracked concrete driveway that seemed in the process of being lifted up in sections from underneath. Maybe the upheaval was caused by the spread of tree roots that were altering the topography of the pavements sending cracks radiating across the broken tarmac.

Further along the same road, a hob from a gas cooker, marred by small patches of rust that were blossoming from chips in the white enamel, had been propped up against the wooden post of an Estate Agent’s ‘for sale’ board.

When I reached Fives it was closed for the Bank Holiday. The plate glass window was tiled with posters advertising records and future live events. Peering through the narrow vertical and horizontal gaps and into the gloomy interior beyond, I could see a small tower of CDs piled up on the racks, as if someone had temporarily balanced a stack of potential purchases there, freeing up a hand to flip through an adjacent column of albums. The shop didn’t really seem shut, but more like somebody had accidentally nudged the pause button and that, at any moment, it would restart, customers would re-materialise, music would play and the uneven commerce of the independent music retailer would resume.

During the walk home I listened to my iPod. Mystified by the source of the chiming harpsichord thrown at me by the shuffle function I stopped to investigate and discovered that it was a song by Chris Robinson called Fables. I played it repeatedly, letting the random setting carry me forward a few tracks and then skipping backwards so that I could hear it again.

I’ve lived through the golden age of the compact disc and the rise of new technology that allows a person to carry large quantities of music around with them in a digital format. The balance is shifting now away from the physical medium. You can tell partly by rush of bands with an interest in their legacies re-releasing what will stand as the definitive versions of their back catalogue. This is the perhaps the last time to get it right before market forces pull music pulled beyond the digital event horizon and into the unquenchable black hole of cyberspace.

The end of the compact disc doesn’t bother me so much as the end of the way of life that I’ve built around it. My entire record-collecting existence has been characterised by journeys like the one I made on August Bank Holiday. These long speculative walks are as a valuable as any music I may have purchased.

Often when I listen to a record I am transported back to the day when I bought it. I can remember what the weather was like, the way that I felt, and what I was doing. Listening to a record purchased in my 20s reminds me of a time when I wasn’t in chronic pain. It evokes lost youth. Beet, Maize & Corn by High Llamas will always flood my memory with images of Lincoln where I purchased it; of standing on the roof of the Cathedral, buffeted by crosswinds, staring out across the patchwork fields that stretched beyond the town, while contemplating the alien concept of Wi-Fi that I had read about earlier in a copy of New Scientist magazine. Jungle blues – an album that evokes the balmy heat of the tropics - will always bring to mind August in Southend. Records are personal things. You make them your own.

In the run-up to the release of Radiohead’s fifth album - Amnesiac I read short descriptions of the songs in the music press – track by track breakdowns of the album that seeded my imagination. The night before the record came out I charged the batteries of my CD walkman. The following day I walked into town and bought the deluxe library book edition. I took it to the cliff-top gardens and sat on a bench near to a statue of a throned Queen Victoria who, despite missing her hand, still pointed imperiously across the Thames estuary. I played the album twice in a row in that setting. I remember it so vividly – the first time I heard Pyramid Song and Knives Out. A few years later Radiohead’s 7th album - In Rainbows was the first piece of music I ever downloaded. I clicked a couple of buttons and within a few minutes it was on my computer. I owned it but I never felt like it was mine.

On virtual paper, digital music makes a lot of sense. You have a compact unit onto which you can potentially download any single or album you could possibly want, plus a back-up drive by way of insurance. This approach ignores the fact that the acquisition of music, like any other interest taken to extremes, is neither practical or logical, but likely to be steeped in personal rituals entirely separate from the thing itself. I keep my CD collection in cardboard boxes that I pick up from Waitrose supermarket on the walk home from work. Space is a problem. Currently there are seven boxes lined up along the portion of my mattress closest to the wall. On the rare occasions that I make it to bed I sleep on the narrow strip alongside them. A long-suffering spouse would have put an end to this a long time ago. I live like a teenager and, given the choice between a warm body and what I have, I think I would rather lie down next to my solid and reassuring cardboard boxes and awaken with my arm draped around the new Rival Schools album.

A couple of weeks ago I went back to the HMV near Bond Street tube. The escalator was cordoned off. You couldn’t go upstairs anymore. A small sign announced the imminent closure of the store. The shelves in the large ground floor lobby area had been picked almost clean. I didn’t have the heart to make an inventory of the remaining stock – the things that nobody wanted.

Big record shops seem to be poised on the brink of becoming an anachronism. I will miss my hunter-gatherer lifestyle when it’s finally over. I will miss the anticipation; the wandering; the sheer illogical joy of it.