Somewhere in the long flat stretch between Christmas and the new year, with nowhere to be and not much I was allowed to do, I went up into the loft for something else entirely and came back down with a box of records I had not played in years.
I had forgotten how different it feels to listen this way. There is no skipping, not really, because getting up to lift the needle is enough friction that you mostly don't. You put a side on and you let it run. A whole side, in order, the way somebody decided it should go. It is the opposite of how I listen the rest of the year, which is a shuffle of half-tracks while I do three other things.
There is a small ritual to it that I had forgotten and find I rather like. Sliding the sleeve out, checking the surface, setting it down, lowering the arm. The faint hiss before the first track, which I used to think of as a flaw and now think of as the sound of the thing starting. None of it is convenient, and that is precisely the point.
So I have been sitting and listening to entire sides of records, with a coffee going cold beside me, doing nothing else. That is the whole hobby. It turns out doing nothing else is the part I had lost, and the part I most needed back.