A new girl at the office asked me at lunch if I had photos of my grandchildren to show her.
If my Budgens Creamy Coleslaw tasted a bit tart before this question was put, it was pure vinegar after it. After all, the Queen and David Attenborough are both old enough legally to be my grandparents, for God’s sake. Grandparents, you’ll note, not parents.
I mention this only because I am rather nervously entering a ‘never too late to start again’ phase of my life, and I don’t want anyone making snide comments about day centres, or the University of the Third Age. I am all too aware that a 59 year old man needs elegantly to tread a tight rope between not being seen to have ‘let himself go’ and not being thought to be ‘trying too hard’. ‘Dynamic’ and ‘valuable’ are the adjectives we seek, not ‘plucky’, useful’ or ‘game’. But then for white, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road, moderate, comfortable, anglo-saxon males, it’s become a minefield out there. Enthusiastic I am, but woke I definitely ain’t.
So I was hugely encouraged by events last night, when I witnessed 72-year old rocker Joe Walsh ripping his guitar for 150 minutes at Wembley Stadium, alongside 71 year old Don Henley and 71 year old Timothy B Schmit. Most of the audience could have given them a run for their money age-wise, so it was arguably the only remaining demographic I am likely to encounter where I feel positively young. But then the assembled Eagles are mere striplings in connection with my Hyde Park entertainers next month, Dylan at 78 and Neil Young at 73; who knows? Joan Baez (78) may turn up and give us Diamonds and Rustall over again. And they are merely the same age as last month’s session at the O2 with Mark Knopfler (70 this month), and only fractionally older than Friday night’s act, Billy Joel (70), which I didn’t go to, but hear was pretty good.
Somewhere out there on the eastern horizon, Mick Jagger (75) is still stretching his tight leather trousers, and, bloody hell, the favourite to take over from Donald Trump (73) is a 76 year old bloke who no one has heard of. Things are looking good out there for us baby-boomers, if only we stop moaning for long enough to hear the warm winds of change blowing in on our behalf.
‘Dinosaurs may be old, but they leave big footprints,’ said Don Henley early on in last night’s concert, and it made me think: Wiliam Pitt the younger, when he first became Prime Minister, was legally young enough to be my grandson.
And that, by the time he was my age, he had been dead for thirteen years.
Just saying.
Oh, go on then.
Comments