And a successful trip it was too. I got a few new clothes, most notably some new swim shorts for holiday, covered in muppets! I also got a selection of bargain books - Scarlett Thomas's "Popco" for £2 from the Oxfam bookshop, three books in Smiths (two for me (Roy Grace 2 and the new Julian Barnes Levels of Life paperback) and one for Nicky (Jennifer Saunders' autobiography)) taking full advantage of a combination of BOGOHP and £5 off when spending £15 offers to end up getting the books for half price, and then in Waterstones one of the Times+ £2.99 offers mentioned previously - I got Man and Boy, which I have definitely read before, but don't appear to have a copy of. The shop assistant was completely unaware of the offer, which probably goes to show how much uptake there has been so far, but the offer came up on his till when he scanned the book and my voucher, and even better, when Nicky handed over her Waterstones loyalty card there were enough points on there to end up getting the book for free - result!
The final shopping success was from Richer Sounds. To mark the fact that tomorrow is Record Shop Day, they had a special offer on the Ion iLP turntable, at only £39.95. Even better, when we went in, they didn't have that model in stock, so gave us the next one up for the same price (albeit that I think the difference is that the next one up includes a record cleaner, but hey, every little counts!).
As we needed to head up the road to the Anderson's fairly soon after getting back from our shopping trip, I didn't get a chance to play with my new toy until we got back later this evening, but since then, the turntable is all set up, plugged into the laptop, and playing through the old computer speakers. It sounds fantastic for a cheap and cheerful unit, and I am loving listening to old records. The turntable came with the recording software on a CD, which obviously isn't much good to a MacBook Air, but I went onto Ion's website, and the software was easy to download, and even easier to get up and running with recording LPs onto iTunes. Combine all of this with the happy news that the record store in Brighton finally had THIS IS THE KING'S SINGERS in stock when I was in Brighton a week or so ago (for the bargain price of a fiver), and I am a very happy man who will be enjoying singing along to "God Bless Joanna", "It was almost like a song", "The Gambler" and so on for the foreseeable future.
