This season of immunological challenges continues to keep us pretty heads-down around the Home Office these days. My second visit to the Long Island College Hospital Emergency Room in the span of about three weeks took place this weekend, this time for our daughter, whose latest bout with a cold left her so logy we were beginning to worry. (She's fine, she was just a little dehydrated as it turns out.)

For our readers abroad, by the way, Emergency Room sounds quite dire -- and then there's that panic-inducing music they play on the series ER. Rest assured that while people in real Emergencies go to the Emergency Room, most of the people there just Need to See a Doctor. And why do they then go to the Emergency Room? Because it is quite likely that when you Need to See a Doctor, it is an evening, a weekend, or a holiday. Because that's when God makes people sick (goes double for atheists, natch). And at such times, it's the ER or nothing -- unless you're a film noir-type private eye, and know some disreputable drunkard of an MD, and he can see you in his office after hours and remove that bullet with no one the wiser.

OK, where were we...oh, yeah. Anyway, we seem to have at least two people at any given time dedicated to the needs of our Virus Buddies(TM), drinking pots of ginger tea (or sippy cup upon sippy cup of heavily diluted juice), and swearing that This Is the Last Round. Not that we have any control over the issue at all.

Plus, the freaking INAUGURATION.

It has been a dark time which I would prefer to forget soon and yet one little bonfire of restorative warmth came in a package that Theresa bestowed on me for Christmas -- XTC's Transistor Blast, a collection of BBC studio sessions (some for John Peel, some for other hosts) ranging from the late 70's to the late 80's, and some concert recordings from the '78-'80.

I'm not normally one for live recordings or collections of alternate versions -- especially since my CD collection is full enough of holes that I often don't have a number of the "basic" studio recordings of favorite bands (do I, for example, have Mummer? No. I've worn out the cassette of it, and I can hear every note in my head. Yes, I should buy the CD and rediscover it -- but that would mean NOT buying something brand new. You can see why my collection is so swiss cheesy).

So this was an unusual collection for me to have, and I wasn't entirely sure what I'd make of it. Live versions on record are often wonderful, but sometimes only for the completist. And since the BBC performances didn't include songs not available in other versions, it wasn't like having your favorite band doing a special session where they tore through "Sweet Jane" or something like that. These were just alternate versions of XTC songs.

Except that they're terrific. The studio performances particularly are superb. The version of "Life Begins at the Hop" they recorded for Peel almost improves on the album version, goosing the energy without losing any of the restrained grinning charm of the familiar version. Songs which I'd found a bit underwhelming before -- like the early "Roads Girdle the Globe" and the much later "Garden of Earthly Delights" have a raucous energy that puts them in my head long after the headphones are off (OK, to be fair, "Roads" is much more memorable than "Garden," which is Partridge at his most overbearing. But the performance they did brings his sense of delight in it to the song, which is almost enough to redeem it).

The live performances are less uniformly satisfying, but it's a treat to hear the audience sing the opening lines of "Respectable Street" (yeah, I know, Bruce Springsteen gets the crowd to do it to cheesy effect on "Hungry Heart", but that's the point. The idea of a pretty large concert hall filled with people who can sing all the lyrics to the first song on Black Sea just fills me with longing to have been a much better-informed 13-year-old in 1980), and on the whole it's more than listenable instrumentally (the vocals are those of a performer who's at the end of a long tour).

Anyway, once it was all on the iPod, my subway rides felt like trips into an alternate adolescence, one in which I'd been magically bequeathed a copy of Drums and Wires in the years I was still blasting Rush in my bedroom.

I so enjoyed Transistor Blast that I found myself returning to the last XTC record I unreservedly liked, not their most recent release (Wasp Star) but Apple Venus Volume 1. Years and pastoral miles away from the pogostick pop of the Drums and Wires era -- it's as if Skylarking were recorded with no "Earn Enough for Us" or even a "Season Cycle."

I love it more, now that I hear it again in juxtaposition with those early live sessions. Partridge hasn't lost the tendency to put one too many layers of poetic wax on, and Dave Gregory is a presence sorely, sorely, sorely missed. But the sense of pop as intensely meaningful play -- and meaningful play as a kind of Platonic ideal of life -- is still there. And even in the midst of a cold and moderately cruel January, I can feel, somewhere out there, that absolutely idiosyncratic punk-pastoral-pagan Springtime waiting to burst out, burning with optimism's flame.

P.S. Yeah, I know I already blogged about re-listening to Black Sea. But I was hoping you'd forgotten.