I live in London (though I’m originally from the northwest of England), and I teach maths to 16-19 year olds.

Music is hugely important to me, right back from when I learned to play the recorder when at primary school. It wasn’t until my teens that I started collecting LPs. In fact my first three classical LPs were bought in a charity shop in Windermere – Beethoven’s 9th with Horenstein (Vox), Beethoven’s 5th with “Erich Ridje” (Fidelity) and Finzi’s “Intimations of Immortality” with Ian Partridge and Vernon Handley (Lyrita). That Finzi sticks out a bit, doesn’t it! By this time (aged about 16) I’d been learning clarinet (and bassoon a little) for about 6 years, so I knew Finzi because of his “5 Bagatelles” for clarinet and piano.

I gained a few more LPs over the next couple of years, with performers such as Ansermet, Backhaus, Boult, Solti, Klemperer, Karajan, Brain, Reiner, Dorati, Fiedler, Sargent, Mravinsky. Over the same time, I’d dug out my family’s old record player, ordered a 78rpm stylus for it, and started visiting local junk shops. My first haul, of 24 records, included Foster Richardson, Robert Radford and Normal Allin, starting a fascination with English singers. Also present were Mackenzie-Rogan and the Coldstream Guards (purely for surname interest to begin with, but then pretty soon for enjoyment), Lauritz Melchior, Gigli, Ferrier and Frederic Lamond. It was such a clear interest that my parents bought me a set of Boult conducting the Planets as a birthday present. Every family day out then became an excuse to visit second hand shops, charity shops, junk shops and so on to see what I could find. A major antiques centre near Lancaster gave me an extra 159 records (including the first three movements of Albert Coates’s acoustic Beethoven 9th). The interest continued through university, and hasn’t abated.

Before going into teaching, I was hoping to somehow get involved in the music business and use my interest in historic recordings, but it was not to be. The pace of technological advances amazes me – I can now enjoy remastering old recordings as a fantastic hobby in my own home.

Of course there are plenty of CDs in my collection now as well. I just about keep up with what I buy (though some fantastic box sets make it difficult!