Do you keep every album you buy?

This problem recently became relevant to me when we finally got a car to go in our garage. This of course meant evacuating years of vinyl archives from said garage, as my good lady made it abundantly clear that she did not want a garage smelling "like digestive biscuits" and "you never listen to these old things anyway. Move on!" Fair comments both. The problem starts, though, when you look for suitable candidates for evacuation. Any reasonable-minded individual would have no difficulty; simply do a periodic spring-clean and get rid of certified duds and fallen favourites. But here's a thumbnail example of how unreasonable people such as myself go about it.

OK, let's start at the bottom left hand side. Frank Zappa!! You could junk all of these, couldn't you, Carlin? When's the last time you sat willingly through all of "The Grand Wazoo"? But hang on . . . oh, I loved "Weasels" when I was 15, it opened my eyes to so much else . . . ah, I've never seen that one on CD. If I flog it now, I'll never find it again . . . some good twin bass counterpoint on that track . . . oh shit, this one's got Archie Shepp on it . . . now this one was always a bit of a bummer. But side four, track six was OK . . . oh I can't remember how this one goes - must remind myself . . . and so on, and so on. All right then, Neil Young, your turn! You see the problem. In the end I will of course invent every conceivable excuse not to sell a wall of slabs of vinyl, 98% of which I will almost certainly never listen to again. I can't explain it rationally beyond the fact that I just like to have a lot of records in the house - I could say that they were there "for reference" but then that's just a pretence towards a career in music writing which I'm never sure I really wanted.

My partner, however, is far more astute. She armed me with a suitcase full of blank TDKs and locked me in the garage for a fortnight with unambiguous instructions to sort out the crap, tape what your gut might want to listen to again, and flog the rest and help pay for this fucking car. Or else! Pal!! What else could I do? Brute force always triumphs over sweet unreason.