HER MAJESTY'S SECRET DIAMONDS (OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT)...

The tapes were second-hand when I bought them in '81.
(Or 'pre-played' as they'd be described nowadays)

It was 1981 and I was living down in Southsea.  One day, me and a friend decided to take a leisurely stroll into Fratton, and while we were in a record store, I purchased two JAMES BOND 007 soundtrack cassettes - ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.  Curiously, the tracks on the latter tape were not in the same order as listed on the index card, but I put it down to an error and learned to live with it.

11 and a half years later (which was a significant proportion of my life back then), in '93, HMV opened a record shop in my local shopping centre, and I bought two CDs, the same soundtracks mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Back home later that night, I covered the openings on the top of the DAF tape, and recorded the tracks in the correct listed order from the CD.  It's strange just what a sense of accomplishment I felt doing this, as if I were putting right some great injustice of many years standing.

It may have taken me nearly a third of my life to get to hear the tracks on that tape in the right running order, but it was worth it.  Although I didn't really need to play the tape because I had the CD, I made a point of doing so anyway, just so my effort wasn't wasted.  Still got those two tapes, and whenever I look at them, I'm back in that record shop in Fratton (JACK's, I think it was called) and I'm a young man in my early 20s again.

If only it could always be so.