Over the weekend I think I mentioned that I had come across my new favourite record shop on Cowley Road in Oxford.

Eighteen years ago when we used to live just off Cowley Road on East Avenue there was a record shop called Green River Records. I can’t remember the names of the two guys behind the counter but I was in there most Saturdays leafing through the racks of records until I came across something I fancied which was then duly taken up to the counter. Inevitably there would be something playing and I would ask “What is that?” and no matter the answer I bought that as well. I could probably go up to the attic now and start to pull out the various records I bought there. It was mostly obscure post-grunge American bent out of shape – no more so than Truman’s Water, mixed with a bit of Brit-pop and other stuff that caught my eye because the record had a good sleeve.

It perhaps no great surprise that Green River Records shut its doors soon after we moved away from Cowley Road to Liverpool.

So it was a pleasure last year to find that Trunk Store had opened its doors only a few hundred yards up from where Green River had been.

I paid my third visit there this last weekend. Of course its is mostly CD’s now as opposed to albums. It only took me five minutes to lay my eyes on five or six that I wanted. I made a mental list of them as I went through the racks and shelves trying to tick off in my mind what I could afford, what I would probably pick up later, balancing up the risk of not seeing something again and so never acquiring it against the number of times I would actually listen to it.

It took another fifteen minutes to narrow things down to a point at which I could take four CD’s up to the counter to pay for them.

It was at that point the rest of the family found me and we sat down to have coffee on the half dozen or so chairs squeezed up along the side of the shjop. Then Galen decided he wanted to look as well and he was trying to find something by King Krule and there I was flicking through the k’s only to come across a new King Creosote CD. So I had to have that as well.

It was well worth it. They all were although I gather from the questions being raised on me playing the Syrian Wedding music by Omar Souleyman that there may be some pressure that to have that on repeat too many times.