It’s my birthday soon. Very soon. I’m not fishing for presents. There again…

And I will be… 65 years old! So I’d just like to say: FUCK! ME! How could that even happen? My old dad, at 96, probably feels the same, but a lot more so. How do we ‘suddenly’ change from 23 to 65, in an ‘instant’? It defies belief. It defies science. And yet remains true, nonetheless. I’m so fucking old that I remember:

Spurs winning the league! 1961 it happened. Ok, not so much ‘remember’ as ‘was alive when…’ Because at 5 I’m not sure the news was as important to me as eating mud.

I ‘remember’ the Bay of Pigs incident, 1962 when world war 3 almost started in Cuba because neither the Russians nor the Americans wanted to ‘shit on their own doorsteps’ when, to stretch that metaphor to excess, the nuclear ‘stink’ would last for about 75 years afterwards.

Everyone remembers exactly where they were when John F Kennedy was assassinated in Texas in 1963. Except me. I have no clue. Probably in school. Possibly on the naughty step. Not saying its true, just a distinct possibility.

I do remember the Beatles arriving on the scene. Probably because I have an older brother and liked to copy what he did. But in a really annoying way. Then the Rolling Stones came along and ‘we’ didn’t like them quite as much. But loved the Kinks, the Who, and pretty much all the bands and none of the ‘crooners’ who still populated a lot of the charts back then. Which meant I was perfectly placed for the ‘birth of music’, which didn’t exist before the Beatles and died with Kurt Kobain later on.

I watched the 1966 World Cup Final on Harvey and Bradley Porrett’s little black’n’white tv. I screamed. It remains, to this day, the only football match my football-loathing brother has ever watched. I’ve seen a few more.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was there. I remember it because we had special dispensation to get up in the middle of the night to watch it. Then Armstrong had the walk taken away for ‘substance abuse’. Oh, sorry, that was the other Armstrong, Lance.

Monty Python arrived in 1969 by which time my memory was working perfectly fine, thank you very much, as it did for the next 40 years before it… what? Yeah, whatever.

1970 provided the best World Cup ever, won by (for me) the best team ever to play the play the game; that Brazil squad. Who also, by no coincidence really, scored the best goal ever scored, in the final. The sheer nonchalance of Pele’s pass for Carlos Alberto to slam home defines everything wonderful about the entire universe and man’s place in it. (Who said ‘hyperbole was dead’?)

I remember being introduced (along with the rest of the nation) to Lady Diana who was to marry Prince Charles. And much later, I was in Paris when Diana died, about 10 miles away. I didn’t kill her, just for the record.

I remember Winston Churchill’s funeral (boring), Maggie Thatcher’s reign of terror, the Vietnam War, the 6-day war, the Yom Kippur war and shit loads of other wars. I even remember some peace, but we don’t name those.

Holy shit, I’m old.

Happy history

A xxxx