Cassette Appeal: Please Help!

In September, I leave home for university. The idea with leaving home, albeit briefly, is that you're a legitimate adult. Not necessarily grown up, but old enough to look after yourself. For most, including myself, it's a time to put childish things behind us and discover ourselves as adults. I'll pack up all the bits of me and my life I want to take on, all the adult bits, and leave my childhood tidied away at home. All my old toys, my teddies, my old clothes. Well, brown bear may come with me. I've had him since before I was born and I don't want to leave him, although on the other hand, I'd hate it if he got damaged. 

But there's one thing I'd like to find, before I try and pack away all the relics of my childhood. I'm looking for an audio cassette tape of Philippa Pearce's 1958 novel, Tom's Midnight Garden. It was probably made during the 1990's, when I would have been listening to it, as it was a high quality cassette - possibly even as late as 2001. We owned it until recently, but somewhere along the line one tape was misplaced and so the other - it was a two tape set - was thrown away. Ironically, the second tape later turned up, and so followed its sibling into the dustbin. Being a child, I had no reason to remember who read the story, so I'm having a hard time tracking down these cassettes. Many adaptations of Tom's Midnight Garden have been made over the years. YouTube has thrown up no hints, and it isn't possible to hear a sample of the tape on ebay to verify whether it's the right one. I'm only after one particular adaptation. It had particularly beautiful and entrancing music. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood are listening to these tapes in the car with my family or falling asleep, and this was my absolute favourite.

I'm also interested in any tapes of Diana Wynne Jones books - they always made me smile :) Thankfully we still have our dramatisation of the Hobbit and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which were equally wonderful tapes. 

If anyone reading this - which I know is very unlikely - owns any of these tapes and doesn't want them, or knows of an inexpensive way to copy them, or would even let me borrow them, I would be immensely grateful. The Tom's Midnight Garden tape, for some inexplicable reason, is very important to me and I would love to hear it again. Equally, if anyone knows of a better way to find old tapes on the internet than google searches, which have proved pretty useless so far, I would love to hear about it.

Please forgive me for writing such a sentimental post. I'll try and write something more serious next time! When I first started this blog I intended it to be more personal, looking at the tiny adventures of my everyday life, and as I've gone on I've realised that I want to talk about bigger things than myself, even if I have no right to. I worry that, despite having an opinion on everything, I'm not a very interesting person. Now, I am a not-very-interesting-person with a strange interest in old children's tapes. Well, it's a development... 

Until next time, go find your old cassette players, wind up the spools of tape with the end of a pencil and let the memories flood back - 

                                                      - for in a few years those tapes will just be plastic rectangles that unravel when you try to use them... 

God bless,

J.R.

Update: Within a few hours of posting, not only have I received an offer to turn the tape into a CD - thankyou! - but my lovely mother managed to locate it on amazon, so I have purchased the CD version. I am now a happy almost adult. Thankyou :)