A quick one

A tiny, nice, warm, inviting record store on the third floor of an apartment building in downtown Kyoto. It smells a bit funny, as if the air of the room was much too stale, much too breathed. There is no other customer but me, and I'm afraid I'm no customer. At first sight the place looks empty. The owner of the shop is hidden behind the desk. He is sitting on a low chair, only his head visible. When I come in he greets me with the traditional Japanese expression for greeting. I greet him back, phonetically, oddly. I don't know what I'm looking for when I enter the record store. I don't even know why I went inside. I only know that there's something that keeps making me want to visit such shops. It has been like that since I was a teenager, record stores have always had a powerful attraction. And it remains so to this day, more than three decades later. This shop displays a remarkable collection of old vinyl records, a huge amount of them from rock bands from the British music scene of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Who seems to be the band the shop is mostly focused on. The storekeeper must be an authority on that group. There are plenty of CDs and vinyls, along with a very large collection of DVDs, larger than I have ever seen even in the UK. This secluded little shop in Kyoto provides a more extensive choice than those specialized shops in London's Carnaby Street I sometimes visited as a teenager, and which sadly seem now gone for good. There's also a good number of The Who posters displayed on the walls of the shop, one of them depicting Townsend in a most spectacular jump on stage, guitar in hand. I browse aimlessly through the shelves, not quite knowing what to do. The owner does not pay any attention. He seems busy with the computer.  The initial impulse is there but the thrill is soon gone. After a few minutes I leave the place muttering a much too faint sayonara from the door. There was a time when I would have spent a good deal of money in this shop. I am today a different me.