The dramatist Jean Anouilh said, “Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.”

Jean hadn’t set foot in the basement of Night & Day Café.

It’s January 7th 2002, day one of what I’ll sardonically refer to in the future as my 9 to 5 and the effects of deterministic chaos are everywhere. Somewhere a bored barmaid drops a bottle of mascara and a year later the drains explode. That kind of thing.

I get down to the job in hand. Well, the jobs in hand. The many jobs in hand. I decide to tidy.

My memory is hazy of any methodology but I do remember my good friend Brian Hartley pitching in and that we found broken CDs and CD cases just about everywhere. Hundreds of the things in far-flung corners of that dingy, grimy basement office and all shattered beyond recognition.

So we shift books, bikes (one with a satchel full of old men’s ties), Christmas baubles, bar paraphernalia, ancient guitars and a potato-baking stove. Everywhere more and more ruined CDs.

And then I found them.

A squash racket and a tennis racket, both battered to hell and back.

Back in those pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook, Precambrian days CDs were in plentiful supply at the venue and as I’d soon discover they’d arrive relentlessly 20, 30, 40 a day from bands wanting shows.

Keeping up with it all became a mammoth task and my predecessors had become so exhausted from the constant CD barrage they’d found the release that worked for them.

CD tennis.

And while I had my own traditional release care of the Night & Day bar, CD tennis was never far from my mind as I answered, rejected, deflected and encouraged more of the things to be volleyed my way like a tiny, determined armada of UFOs.