Owing to crappy radio reception in the bedroom I have to tune to anything that makes a suitable level of noise to wake me in the morn (the buzzer is the sort of harsh sound that I imagine in any other circumstance would be used to herald the end of the world, not what I need at 8.30am, it's Wednesday, not God calling out the final judgements and we all know the Rapture will be on a Friday). This process of suitable radio signal acquisition is not improved by the fact that I live on the side of a steep valley and stations from the metropolis come and go and I'm really scared of Classic FM and Smooth. For every 10 seconds of classical music I have to scream for 20. As for Smooth, it's like narcolepsy. I could slip into coma and never wake up. Let's not even talk about about LBC.
But I made a bigger mistake. I found Radio 1. This, the internet informs me, is music for the younger generation. Sorry, 'music'. This is why I'm middle-aged, I'm now reduced to putting the word music in quotes. I did get through about 20 minutes this morning which solely consisted of terrible rap songs with singy choruses (come on, didn't that Eminem chap do that – better – when I was a lad) and unaccountably the dental drill screech of Whitney Houston, presuming echoing all the way from The Great Beyond. Or it could have simply been the collective screams of the tormented. How do you tell?
This means I've turned into my dad. Call this music? he'd say, and I'd run before he managed to manifest Celine Dion.
On the plus side, I'm still on that island of middling years were I don't have to listen to Adele, that warbling curse of the young and old, and generic shopping mall soporific.