Music Arcades: Various: The Rough Guide to Bluegrass

D gave me this for Christmas 2001, part of a fantastic selection of gifts that I can't remember in full now, but definitely included The Modern Antiquarian. And, yes, we had seen O Brother, Where Art Thou? together (I found it disappointing), but that's not the reason D got me a bluegrass album.

Somehow she'd picked up that my guitar teacher had given me a DVD of of beginners playing bluegrass tunes as an aid to practising — it can have only been the briefest of mentions, but she picked it up and worked on it. In the great tortoise birthday metaphor of gifts, D was the mouse. (To keep the peace — for if Lucy reads this at all, it is to measure her share of column inches and positive mentions with in comparison to the exes — I should make it clear that she played a similar role in later years.)

I guess it's superfluous to say that neither the teacher's DVD nor D's CD did anything to improve my guitar technique, but, there, I've said it.