64

64

Now that I’m older and have lost my hair

inevitably 

nobody is sending me a Valentine

just a birthday card and a bottle of wine

If I'd been out, and that is rarely,
I’d rather have stayed indoors
Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me
Now I'm sixty-four

We’re all older, though,
And it seems absurd
I couldn’t stay with you

I couldn’t be handy, and wouldn’t choose
domesticity
You can’t knit although it’s true that you can drive
and it’s great we’re both still alive
Doing the crossword, playing CDs
Who could ask for more

Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me

Now I'm sixty-four

Every summer we can still meet for lunch
In Portchester or Cosham High Street
No need to scrimp and save
You can be Cilla
I’ll be Cliff, not Dave

Send me an e-mail, from time to time
with anything new
Tell me all the pop records that you have played
like Lauren & the Heatwaves

And then I’ll answer, true to form
Yours, for evermore
Nobody needs me, nobody feeds me
Now I'm sixty-four

--

My last remaining wine glass was cracked and I had to admit I needed some new ones. It might seem bleak but it's also reassuring that, like with any work done on the house, I take the view that I might not have to pay for that again.

I came back from Gosport yesterday via Commercial Road, Portsmouth, where at least the saxophonist busker was coming to the end of I'll Be There by the Jackson Five. Stephin Merritt knew what it felt like when he wrote,

What am I doing in this dive bar

except Commercial Road no longer even has the dive bars it once had. 

I thought Argos was a place to get some new glasses and, to be fair, six for £11.50 looks like value for the forthcoming years of Merlot, Cabernets or maybe Zinfandel. But rarely have I been treated with such contempt as a customer as I was by the experience of being processed by Argos. 

Yes, I am betting without one particularly disdainful shop assistant on the Copnor Road but otherwise the staff in the convenience stores there have taken on what I assume the staff training tells them, that it is the customers - those that still pay and don't just loot the place- that pay their wages. But in Argos even in the one, last and only interaction with a human being, I didn't seem to even be there as far as the operative was concerned once they'd decided to attend to their desk.

Much more hilariously, though, one gets no sense of scale clicking on things on an Argos computer. The digital radio in the kitchen is very small because it didn't occur to me to check its dimensions and my new wine glasses, which were listed as gin glasses, are far bigger than it. I didn't want 'small' glasses but at 64 I'm going to be too old to drink gin in the quantities accommodated by such sumptuous crucibles as them if I'm ever lured into drinking it ever again.

But, what can you do. I've somehow got this far, having scraped through by the skin of my teeth, with a little help from my friends and the kindness of some who had previously been strangers.

Thank you very much to those special people who know that it is not only the birthday of Johnny Haynes, Wyclef Jean and, according to most sources, Rosemary Tonks, today. 

For no other reason than it is the latest record to be added to DGBooks Radio, here is the wonderful Tracy Chapman with a gorgeous birthday request played by me for myself,

and then, since it has come up next because I play it so much,