n DING-DONG merrily on High Street ... record-shop tills are ringing. And thus, as we approach the twelfth day of Christmas, the charts are stuffed with turkeys: the Woolpackers' Emmerdance; the Smurfs' Christmas Party; Anthony Way's Choirboy's Christmas; 100 Golden Love Songs by Foster and Allen.
Pop and Xmas are concepts which marry as easily as the names Robson and Jerome - and with equally appalling consequences if you're a year-round lover of music. Record shops are now thronged with part-time disc-buyers operating on the principle that it is better to give anything than think for more than two seconds about what the recipient might actually want.
So spare a thought for those harassed front-line troops pinned down in the trenches - record-shop sales assistants. In one hellish fortnight, they have to face desperate mobs who know not what they want - and they want it now!
That's in marked contrast to most of the rest of the year when 99% of those who enter record retailers will know exactly what they want. The feeling on both sides of the counter is one of cloistered academic enquiry, the calm pursuit of musical knowledge.
This ordered universe is roughly rent asunder by sweat-stained outlaw shoppers who want a tape for their Auntie Nelly, and they don't know who it's by or what it's called, right, but they heard it on the telly last week, or was it the week before, or perhaps it was on the wireless when they were out in Poona just after the war ... but surely the sales assistant must know. After all, this is a record shop, isn't it?
After having listened to the day's fourteenth punter trying to hum the Inspector Morse theme, the sales assistant will feel his soul shrivel and die as he utters this phrase: ``I think we're out of that just now, but perhaps your Auntie Nelly would like Daniel O'Donnell's new album instead?''
For this promotion of the Dreaded Hibernian Warbler is not only a mortal sin against the assistant's own artistic beliefs ... he knows the punter will bring it back for a refund on Boxing Day.
Ah yes! 'Tis Christmastime in the Record Shop! Don't hum it - it only bugs the poor devils who work there.
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