Breakfast With Timothy

The radio interview would bring more business to her little record shop but it brought so much more as well...

Cathy wasn't a morning person. She was a laying on the couch in the on listening to classic albums from before she was born sort of person.

She'd promised herself she wouldn't do that last night, but after breaking up with Robin there was no way she could have come home and gone straight to bed. Like an alcoholic promising herself to have "just the one", she'd slid Carole King's Tapestry from its cover and put it on the turntable. James Taylor's Sweet Baby James had followed, and before she knew it, it was stupid o'clock in the morning.

Now here she was at even stupider o'clock, pointing her face into the spray from her showerhead two hours earlier than she had ever risen in her life. She'd almost turned the alarm clock off and flopped back to sleep, but she wasn't going to miss a golden opportunity because of Robin. He'd complained that she put her work first. He was a nine-to fiver and resented the fact that she was so often busy during what he felt should be "their" time. Well, he couldn't make her feel guilty about it any longer.

Wriggling bare toes into her psychedelic rug, Cathy perused a wardrobe full of band t-shirts from Abba to Zappa. She decided it was a Ramones day; spiky and defiant.

Muttering the words to Rockaway Beach, she teamed the shirt with "double denim" - a badge-adorned jeans jacket and skirt-fishnet tights and black pointy-toed ankle boots decorated with buckles and chains. She tucked a pair of black sunglasses into her top pocket in case she felt like hiding her red-rimmed eyes behind them later.

Outside, the clouds were pink in the Cathy Vinyl, emblazoned on each side, along with big stickers in the shape of LPs.

Vinyl wasn't her real surname, of course, but it had served her well, whether she was hawking her stall around the country's record fairs, trading online or, as she did now, running the shop she'd always dreamed of owning.