I had a birthday last week, and as many people remarked, my age reminds them of a song.
That sounded quite cute, until I realise that the song is ‘When I’m 64’.
It was sung by the Beatles in 1967 and released on the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP. I was 14 at the time, and remember it well for the simple reason that I was at boarding school and the prefect in our dormitory played Sgt Peppers every night in his cubicle while us juniors were trying to sleep.
He particularly liked ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, which he told us was about LSD.
He hinted darkly that he went to parties where such hallucinogens were ingested, and we were scandalized.
I later discovered he was lying through his teeth because soon after leaving school he became a pillar of society rather than an addled junkie.
Anyway, the song I liked least on Sgt Peppers was ‘When I’m 64’, mainly because I didn’t relate to it one bit.
Sixty-four seemed so old and far away that it was too ridiculous even to contemplate. I was young and bulletproof and would live forever.
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Last week proved all my assumptions wrong. I’m no longer young or bulletproof, and I now regularly contemplate mortality – although mainly in the sense that life is to be celebrated without reservation while you can.
I also now know that I wasn’t alone in thinking ageing was for someone else. Even Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, said he never dreamed he would actually turn 64.
When he did 10 years ago, he was almost apologetic. I mean, going grey is sooo non-rockstar. Roger Daltrey, singer for The Who, summed it up for us in ‘My Generation’: “Hope I die before I get old.”
Didn’t happen. Daltrey is now 73 and looks very old.
The last time I heard ‘When I’m 64’was not quite the way I expected. I was watching the news on TV when Cherie Blair, wife of ex-Prime Minister Tony, grabbed a microphone and sang the song to a bemused group of Chinese officials during a state visit to that country. Don’t ask me why.
I am not a big fan of Cherie Blair. In my opinion, she’s an ambulance-chasing lawyer whose firm made a fortune from sometimes questionable ‘Human Rights’ cases.
So if I didn’t like the song as a bumfluff 14-year-old, I liked it even less when Cherie sang it.
Okay, my initial disdain was because ageing was irrelevant to me. But now that I actually am 64, I find the song – if not ageing – to be equally irrelevant.
Take this line: “I could be handy, mending a fuse, When your lights have gone”. That’s not going to happen in my case. If you want to make my wife weep with laughter, bring up my handyman skills.
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Or this: “If I’d been out till quarter to three, Would you lock the door?”
The short answer? Yes.
But here’s the real zinger for me: “Doing the garden, digging the weeds, Who could ask for more?”
Again, if my wife hoots at my DIY expertise, her mirth at my horticulture prowess is infinite.
So I may be 64, but it’s certainly not the way The Beatles envisaged it.
In a nutshell, if you had told me as a squeaky-voiced teenager listening to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 50 years ago that I would one day be 64, I would have laughed even harder than my wife does at my DIY and gardening skills.
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