October 02, 2005: Hey big spender

It's always been a dream of mine to walk into a music store with unlimited funds and buy everything I wanted. Well today I did. Almost.

I've been doing a bit of out of hours work for the corporate Intranet recently. It was finally launched last Wednesday. Friday I presented it to the company and as a little thank you, they rewarded me with an HMV Gift Card. Today, I spent it all!

A shopping trip like this requires some planning. HMV have a sale on at the moment, so I needed to make sure I made all the right purchases. I checked my various lists, then the charts, then the sale items, and then my lists again.

I compared the HMV website prices to my favourite online retailers - Amazon, Play and CD Wow.

It was clear to me that this was a great opportunity to finally get a load of albums that I've had copies of for years but not ever come around to buy myself. I wasn't going to limit myself to sale items though. I've been meaning to get the Magic Numbers since its release. Plus there's a few CDs that I could never really justify like Four Tet's 5 track EP - My Angel Rocks Back And Forth.

By coincidence, HMV opened a very much overdue store in Hammersmith on Wednesday. It was just meant to be. So with my draft list in hand, I donned my iPod and set off for certain music-geek hedonism.

It turned out that HMVs store sale items can be slightly different to their online counterpart. For example, Foo Fighters was £1 more, but their second album The Colour & The Shape was £1 less. Placebo's eponymous first album was only £4.99 on-line, but in store it was an extra ten pounds.

My hand was beginning to ache as it stretched over 9 or so CDs. Soon I was forced to balance them against my chest as 9 became 12, which became 16. I noticed a few people double take as they passed me with their measly single 5", pah - amateurs! An employee then handed me a basket, which was such a good idea. Although, I was just about done - it was time to make them mine.

The final selection then? Here it is. 187 songs, 12.8 hours of listening. Nearly 3 quarters of a gigabyte for my iPod.