I am a little concerned.

This is the twelfth week of 2008.  Essentially, a quarter of 2008 has passed us by and the Minister’s record collection has not yet been enhanced.

The Minister last purchased a new album in December 2007.

While this would not necessarily be an unusual state of affairs for most people, the sheer volume of CDs cluttering up the Ministry means that I must have bought an average of around 100 albums each year for the past decade (and, in some years, far more than that).  While I’m not into John Peel territory I have, literally, thousands of CDs.

This year represents the thirtieth anniversary of me as a purchaser of pop music.  I genuinely can’t remember the first record I bought (and they were vinyl records in 1978) but every week I would sift the racks of cheap, ex-jukebox singles in Beeton’s newsagents for things that had been hits a month or two before.

I can’t claim to have been the coolest six-going-on-seven-year-old in the pre-Thatcherite East Midlands but I do remember buying Figaro, Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs, My Life (Billy Joel), Rivers Of Babylon/Brown Girl In The Ring, Y.M.C.A., Forever Autumn and – of course – the Grease soundtrack album, which I played incessantly all summer, and which led me to buy Olivia Newton-John’s A Little More Love at the end of the year.

(It’s crippling to admit this, incidentally.  I could have just lied through my teeth and claimed my shopping basket contained Ever Fallen In Love by The Buzzcocks, The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks, White Man In Hammersmith Palais by The Clash, Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and Patti Smith’s Because The Night.  But I still stand by My Life, Y.M.C.A., Forever Autumn and Grease.  Quality control improved significantly in 1979: much to my mother’s horror I bought a Sex Pistols single – albeit a poor Eddie Cochran cover version with the by then very dead Sid on “vocals” – and, more acceptably, fell in love with Debbie Harry.)

There has been a bit of Ministerial downloading in 2008: new albums from Adele and The Feeling have already been dismissed (can you blame me?), the Duffy album is still under consideration (love the voice, not so sure about the material), as is the Goldfrapp album; but the only one certain to become a permanent addition to the Ministerial iPod is the Juno soundtrack.

(For the record – pun intentional – I tend to download things initially, listen to them a couple of times and then ditch the stuff I don’t like and buy the stuff I do.  While I don’t claim for one second that is anything other than unlawful under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, I would point out that it’s no different from what everyone did 40-50 years ago by availing themselves of listening booths in record stores before parting with their cash.)

I have a modicum of interest in hearing the Hercules and Love Affair album and as previously discussed I’ll give the R.E.M. album a whirl (in fact, an – ahem – “pre-release” of it is downloading as I type this post) but there’s nothing coming up that really excites me.

On top of that, I have voluntarily agreed to sort through the aforementioned CD-related clutter with a view to offloading about half of it.  Let’s face it, I haven’t actually played those Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Death Cab For Cutie CDs since the first week I purchased them and I could probably live without them.

A friend once said that his parents’ record collection ended in 1970.  That was the year in which he was born.  He realised that his parents probably had neither the money, the time or the energy to buy new music once he came along and they fell out of the habit.

Being without an heir, I don’t have the concern of Junior Ministers interfering with my music appreciation but a genuine thought occurs: at the age of 36, do I now basically have 90% of the music that will see me through the second half of my life?

I’m sure there will be things that come along from time to time that pique my curiosity.  And I hope some of the artists I already like will produce stuff in the future that I will also like.  And I expect that there’s already plenty of music recorded about which I am currently unaware and that I will stumble across in the future.

But seriously – is that it?  Have I been there and done that?  Am I – whisper this quietly – Radio 2′s target audience…?