I’ve sold all my CDs. Can I live without those cracked plastic cases of magic and memories?

Mine was a collection gathered over years, rich with personal significance – but no one really needs two copies of the same Hot Hot Heat album

For sale. 937 CDs. No longer played. Hemingway himself might have shed a tear at the heartbreaking story unfolding in my living room last week. A lifetime’s hoard of albums, EPs, singles – some of which had been dragged through every home I had ever lived in, many of which had done little more than sit in their boxes once they got there, wondering when I’d finally find a place with proper central heating – were about to depart.

My wife is expecting our first child, and it was gently conveyed to me that assets such as space and cash were likely to be more important in the future than, say, the second album by the Soledad Brothers. I found it difficult to launch a decent counterargument. Since iPods and hard drives entered my life, the wall of CDs that has followed me through life has taken a backseat. Then Spotify and Sonos came along, and I have barely touched them since. The Herculean task of searching through the rack, putting a disc in a machine, ejecting it to wipe the fingerprint that made it skip through track two and then putting it into the machine again felt so arduous in this new world that it may as well have predated the industrial revolution.