The right place, the right time

I went to an Al Stewart concert the other night.  I thought in advance that it was likely to be women of a certain age but I was partly wrong.  It was men as well.  All of us baby boomers - if you saw us in the street you’d see respectable middle-aged (or a little older) people, a little bit overweight, arriving here from our respectable jobs, or our respectable retirement. 
 
And when Al appeared he was older too. 
 
Was there anyone in the audience who had been at his concert at Nottingham University in 1973?  Scattered hands raised throughout the audience, with a murmur of acknowledgment.  Forty years ago I was a sixth former, with a crush on D, who played Al Stewart songs at a concert in the boys’ common room. 

The songs bring back the smell of the orange flavoured tea I used to drink, and the floaty clothes we used to wear.  I find that part of building an empty nest is remembering vividly, now that I am so much older, how it felt to be young.  Feeling incredulity that the 1970s, which seemed such a buzzy, young time, are now my memory and that of the people I see around me, with our greying hair and our spreading bodies.  I see hints of who we were in a velvet coat here, a cascade of loose curls there, the jeans that even the grey-haired men are wearing.  It’s a long time since any of us lived in bedsitters or experienced those intense first loves, but Al Stewart’s voice is as bell-like as ever.

The Year of the Cat is almost unbearably poignant with its images of the freedom and love that the hippy dream promised.  By the time I was in my late teens that time was pretty much over and punk was coming, but we, the youngest of the baby-boomers, experienced its last days, clutching after them while we were still too young to take part fully.  

Time has passed, but the music, like a time machine, takes us straight back to the 1970s for this evening, and once again life is all ahead of us, and in the darkness we’re young again.

After the concert, I asked Al to sign the CD I’d bought, and told him I’d waited 40 years to see him in concert.  ‘Why?’ he asked, ‘I’m always over here’.

‘I was never in the right place at the right time,’ I replied.  ‘Are any of us?’ he said.