A prickly problem: work or records?

It wasn't anywhere near as bad as the CD shelving disaster of 2012. Nor 2013's records-that-got-warped-because-I-stupidly-put-them-on-a-shelf-in-the-window debacle. Nor the horrific iTunes meltdown of 2015 (from which I still haven't fully recovered). In fact, at first I thought it wasn't even a real problem. But actually it was. Bear with me readers - I'm talking about this ...

Mikey Dread getting caught up in the confusion 

Yeah, a prickly problem (ahem). What happened? Well, in my haste to dutifully get to work on time this morning I demonstrated all my usual physical dexterity by sweeping my arm across these spindly (but quite tall) cacti sitting on the window sill above my seven inches singles and ... well, you can see for yourself. Disaster! Soil and grit smothered all over my records. Records which are slipping down all over the place and no doubt getting gritty soil ground into their grooves moment by moment. Every one of these several hundred records was positioned with the sleeve opening at the top (yes, more Niluccio weirdness) so the likelihood of soil infiltration was ... high. Yet, I had to bloody well leave the whole lot and dash out the door. Work ethic v record preservation - a terrible dilemma. Anyhow, readers will be relieved to know order has now been restored. After a mere two hours tonight of sweating my way through every one of these 500 or so records - cleaning, blowing the dust out, replacing some plastic sleeves, anxiously pulling a few records out of their sleeves to check for grit - they're all back in place. Are they damaged? Hmm, only time will tell. One or two were definitely badly doused with dirt - a particular anxiety being Felt's Penelope Tree, which scraped ominously as I pulled it out to blow on it. Poor old Felt - creators of some of the most sublime music of the 1980s and now mostly forgotten. Just a fading twinkle in Lawrence's eye. Overlooked and virtually buried. Buried in the gritty soil ...