You always hurt the ones you love

Tonight, while I was eating my dinner and doing my ironing and watching yesterday's taped TV shows, my drink bottle was slowly leaking through my bag. Right next to my portable CD player and the CDs I had with me at work today.

As far as I can tell the player, which was in a (now very damp) case, and the actual CDs escaped unharmed. I don't know for sure because I'm too frightened to try them out before giving them a chance to recover. But the CD booklets were not so fortunate.

In the midst of the carnage, Christian band Third Day's Come Together escaped untouched. I am wondering whether there was truly some divine protection at work here.

Volume 1 of a mix of Radiohead B-sides that a friend recently bestowed upon me only suffered a glancing blow, with one bedraggled corner.

Marc Cohn's self-titled debut suffered slightly more damage, particularly as two pages resolutely stuck together. A few fragments of the lyrics of True Companion shall have to adjust to a new home as mirror-images underneath the album credits. Otherwise Marc should make a fair recovery.

I am less certain about Scarlet's Walk. Yes, that's right, the legendary Tori Amos was close to the epicentre, as always. An ugly shadow now stretches across about a third of the once beautiful American landscape, and it remains to be seen whether the darkness can be defeated.

Radiohead's Amnesiac is just as damaged, but fittingly it's rather hard to tell. The booklet is so dark and disturbing anyway that it doesn't look like much has changed. The only clear sign is a small tear in the spine that occurred as I tried to separate the backing picture from its plastic prison.

But the worst hit of all was a relative innocent. Mark Lizotte's Soul Lost Companion surrendered well over half its images to the waves. At the front, Mark looks like he has been suddenly afflicted by some bizarre disfiguring skin disease, with blotches creeping across his face. To make matters worse, I put a rather large crack in the back of the casing which was refusing to allow itself to be dismantled. I only bought Mark for $4.95, and I'm thinking that if I come across him again it may be better to acquire a new clone and put the current one out of his misery.