The Best Present Ever

For the second anniversary of our meeting in April 2005, Leslie and I returned to Boston where (granted she had to visit Wellesley in any case but the karma factor always has been at play in our trips to Boston)she surprised with what I can only describe as the best present any one has ever given me. Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles box set.



It's a collection of 9 discs of XTC demos, outtakes, experiments and unreleased gems. She is probably the only person on the planet who would have known how excited I would be to get this. The kicker being that I didn't even know it existed.

The packaging is put together to look like a children's stamp collecting book. It took me a few moments to figure out just what was going. on. Is this an Atlas? A game? Wait Andy Partridge? XTC. I flipped the box over and saw the titles of 161 XTC/Andy Partridge songs most of which I had never heard in the form they appear here. That's 498 minutes of music by one of my all time favourites that I didn't even know existed.

What a gem. And I'm referring to Leslie.