Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Past it

Have you heard that trailer on Radio 4 for a brand new comedy programme?

"Now available - new improved high speed Stannah Stairlift - gets you upstairs before you've forgotten what you went for!"

Well...

We went to see Ralph McTell last night at the Buxton Opera House. We booked back in April. It's a thing unheard of in this house to book something so far ahead, and as the day got closer we worried that we would forget to go and we'd wake up this morning and remember where we should have been last night. This is despite the fact that it was inscribed in both our diaries in red felt tip and the tickets were clipped to the kitchen calendar. At the weekend we asked the Californian wing of the family to give us a reminder call. We also printed out large notices and pinned them all round the house.

Thankfully the ruses worked and we got to Buxton. The audience were terrifyingly geriatric: did we look as ropey and as past it as most of them? Surely not...

As someone not a million miles away from me said "People throw knickers at Tom Jones, but at Ralph McTell they throw anti-macassars."

Ralph McTell was great - as always - but even his fingers weren't so nifty on the fretboard, and even he couldn't reach the high notes any more. OK, we're older than we were when we first saw him in 1969, but does that mean he has to be older, too?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

sigh!