These are all the tapes I still have

I bought my last cassette tape more than 20 years ago now, but it was my primary method of listening to music for a good decade. Everybody had their own tape deck and everyone had their own collection of tunes on tape, and some people have held onto them, even as the medium of listening to music has gone through several huge evolutions.

I don't know why I still have this handful of music, or why these tapes survived when, say, DAD's most excellent No Fuel Left For The Pilgrims disappeared long ago. The covers are all scuffed up because they have spent most of their existence getting shoved into glove boxes of various cars, and while the tape covers were tough, they could only take so much.

We sold our last car with a tapedeck a decade or so ago, but I was still listening to The Cure's Mixed Up album on tape well into the 21st century. My mum bought that tape for me for my good school cert results when I was 15, and last year it got chewed up in an old tape player, but I've still kept that tape, because I got very, very good at repairing broken tapes back in the day, and have no doubt I could do it again.

There are another 80 or so where the case hasn't survived, and I still have the tape, and the name of the artist has long worn off, so there are just dozens and dozens of the things with blank surfaces.

My main takeaway from looking at what survived is that I really liked soundtracks - my peak tape buying period was also the moment when I really fell hard for movies, (all kinds of movies, not just the horror and science fiction and action adventures I had been inhaling), and buying scores and compilations was a major part of that obsession.

I am genuinely surprised that Pulp Fiction survived. I probably listened to that more than any other tape in history, and once almost dropped it in the sea while dancing on a midnight rock at the edge of the world, but it's still there.

My other main takeaway is that I really had the most heterosexual tastes in music as a teenager. The gayest thing in that lot is probably The Doors, because everybody had a crush on Jim Morrison at one point in their lives, but the rest of it was cis as fuck. 

I like to think my tastes have broadened since then, but I can't escape the past when it's sitting there in chunky plastic, and still complete in the case.