And if this sounds petty and contrived, heretical, somehow Marxist, snobbish even, then ya-boo, and I suggest you make your case in the form of a Bunraku puppet show about the life of Rosa Luxemburg. Or else speak to my head butler.

Not to dismiss shops that sell product but I’m simply less inclined to patronise them. Records shops though I will never tire of, because – like football grounds, childhood haunts or favourite cafes – these are places that can elevate your emotions, massage your mind, and salve your soul. Whereas shops that sell records, they sell records, it’s a transactional thing.

My dream record shop, decidedly not a store, the one I do dream of from time to time, is Bogart’s in Oxford. It shut four decades ago but happy is the memory of climbing that frayed carpet before turning left to see the wall of Bowie seven inch picture sleeves and a handwritten note: Don’t try to steal these – we can see you! It was the size of a broom cupboard but its stock offered everything you could wish for as a teen with aspirations to crack the code of the more esoteric articles in the NME.

Subversion, revolution, art, sex, the counterculture, philosophy, fashion, drugs, the beats, cinema, Sci-fi, poetry, it was all there if you had a clue where to look – say in the four sides of the Clash’s genre-defying London Calling, or the kitchen sink opera of the first three Smiths singles – and this was where I commenced my Jabberwocky-like hunt for the ever-out-of-reach chimera of cool. But let me just check over there behind the tum-tum tree.

Skip forward in time and Groucho’s in Dundee captured my curiosity and the contents of my wallet for a while, introducing me to new musical friends and more often than not the artists I didn’t know I liked until I did: Vangelis, Kris Kristofferson, Nancy Wilson. Alas it too is now gone and not that I’m obsessive about this stuff but I have a Groucho’s plastic bag somewhere, and one from Aberdeen’s One-Up, but not a keep sake from Bogart’s.

Record Shak, also no more, was my Edinburgh emporium of choice. To calm wedding day nerves I came away with a Love Best Of and the Stooges’ Metallic KO. Another time I found a copy of Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan At Joujouka, which had apparently belonged to a couple who’d shared a flat with Nick Drake.

In Glasgow’s east end, Monorail was and is a glorious place to gawp at vinyl treasures and gossip with Stephen, Dep and co. There I’d fall in love with Bill Callahan’s back catalogue, CD compilations on the Ace and Soul Jazz labels, Derek Jarman DVDs, and an Aidan Moffat novelty bottle opener which played The Little Beer Song, until the battery ran out, and which I no longer possess. I’d shed a tear or two into my pale ale but of course I have nothing to open the bottle with.

Record shops outside of Blighty? Amoeba in San Francisco was heaven, if your idea of heaven is a warehouse filled with records, which mine very much is. I began in the bargain bins and immediately found Roberta Flak’s second LP for the cost of a cup of coffee. This odyssey ended not in blood-letting in Ithaca but in the singles and EPs section, when my oldest child told me my allocated time was up and hadn’t I noticed that wall of soul singles for a dollar each? In a record shop everyone can hear you scream.

Discos Babel in Madrid had a poster in the window for the Kaisers, Edinburgh’s premier Hamburg-era not-a-Beatles tribute band. I came away with records by the Young Rascals, Sandy Shaw and Billie Davis, all Spanish releases. A shop in Prague was less fruitful, a two hour search resulting in nothing but a couple of prog singles and the ire of my partner.

Those in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, whose names I forget, saw my Euros and Kroner spent on LPs by Jackie DeShannon (who wrote Bette Davis Eyes and Put A Little Love In Your Heart), Chris Spedding (whose CV includes The Sex Pistols and the Wombles), and The Saints (Australia’s Ramones).

Where I looked in Egypt was in truth a bit underwhelming. I expected to discover shelves creaking with North African jazz, soul and disco, the sort of tunes Gilles Peterson would swoon over. Instead I came away with a couple of Jimmy Cliff albums and Debussy’s La Mer Nocturnes on the Deutsche Grammophon label. These were nice finds but discs I could have bought in a shop in Tollcross or Canonmills rather than Zamalek, a qism in the west district of Cairo, the name thought to have originated from the Arabic for preciously owned. Hmm.

There are shops that sell records and there are record shops.

Me? I go to record shops. ■