My first record player

I got my first record player when I was about nine or ten years old, passed on to me, I think, when my parents replaced the stereo in the living room with a newer one and I was allowed to have the old one in my bedroom. It was a big chunky box with a heavy wooden lid on top which you had to lift up to put the records on. In those days (around 1975) televisions and record players were designed to look like proper furniture, with dark wooden veneers and so on. There were three speeds on it - 33, 45 and 78rpm. Vinyl albums, of course, played at 33rpm and 7 inch singles at 45rpm. The 78rpm setting was already fairly obsolete at this time, used only for old style discs which were made of a hard shellac (which shattered if you dropped them.) I was actually given some of my grandmother's old 78's. I can't really remember the songs, but one of them was the Ugly Duckling song. Of course, as a child I enjoyed the novelty of playing records at the wrong speed, or putting my finger on the record and playing it backwards. Among the first records I had was Abba's Greatest Hits, which came in a gatefold sleeve. The cover showed the four of them sitting on a park bench; on the front Bjorn was reading a paper while Agnetha stared vacantly ahead looking vaguely sad, and on the back Benny and Frida were embraced in a kiss, which was slightly racey to my young eyes. After that I collected all the Abba singles, eagerly buying them at the local record store each time a new one came out. I always enjoyed the B sides too. Nowadays downloading is undoubtably convenient, you can get what you want when you want, but I don't feel like I own the music in the same way as when it was a physical product which can be handled and touched and looked at.