How green was my Vivaldi.

I'll admit it. I'm a nerd. I have about 700 CDs of classical music. (I say "about," because I've never counted them. I'm not that much of a nerd.)

They're sitting in a cabinet in their own nook in the living room, alphabetized by composer. (Okay, that raises the nerd quotient.)

Or they were. Noticing some odd regularities cropping up on one or two shelves, I look more closely. Tertius has apparently decided they look better if they're arranged by color, and he's made a start by grabbing all the London company recordings and shoving them on one shelf. (Britten's Britten, Dutoit's Ravel and Stravinsky, Ashkenazy's Sibelius, and Haitinck's Shostakovich, mainly, cheek by jowl in rough, twentieth-century familiarity.) It took an hour to fix. Which I quite enjoyed. (Yup, slap me on the ass and call me 'Nerdy.')

There is a literary precedent. In An Embarrassment of Corpses (okay, I used the word 'literary' pretty loosely there), I mentioned that my character Oliver arranges his books by color, on the grounds that you never forget the color of a book you've read. (I tested this theory on Primus recently, who got all seven volumes of the Harry Potter series right.) I'm not sure this works for recording labels, though.

It's not just me.