Late in t day getting with it..!? 19 2 13 (9) 25 2 2

It was this programme I had recorded from one of our TV stations about a show Michael Caine did about his career as a budding actor in the 1960's, when earlier in the week his film or movie "Alfie" from the same era had been repeated for the n'th time, which we also watched, when it suddenly dawned on me "Yeah, I was there in the 1960's too!" ..only most of it had passed me by, as if I was vaguely aware of what was happening as a youngster in the 1960's, only I wasn't a part of it until the 1960's were nearly over, when at last I became a part of where it was at, right at the eleventh hour, if you can catch my drift..?

The event which changed everything was this college Ball at the University I attended around Christmastime 1968 when the guys in my year all younger than I by about 5 years decided which should all hire D-J's at enormous expense from Moss Brothers in Manchester city centre, and attend the Christmas Ball. I guess it was the Student Union which hired the bands for this once in a life-time salubrious occasion, and who did they hire to top the bill but "The Who".

Imagine all those mid-1960's years when I lived a 40 minute train journey out of Central London and I never once had the courage or self-confidence to go to one of the clubs where bands like the “Rolling Stones” or Jimmy Hendriks, etc., were strutting the boards doing their stuff? The Beatles meanwhile were doing their thing in Liverpool and establishing the fact that they for the first time were doing it with north-country English accents. One of my problems of course was that I too had a north-country English accent but at the time it still wasn't acceptable...

In the documentary Michael Cane complained how this director an American guy asked him as an actor who had already spent 9 years in repertory could he do an upper crust English accent for the part of a cavalry officer in the film they were making together, probably "Zulu" shot in 1964, when with his cockney accent he claimed he could do any British accent whatsoever, and so got the part a 6ft 2inch man struggling to get ahead at the time, and punctuating the fact that there was no way a British director would have entertained the idea of giving such a part to a Cockney, and he was correct of course: class snobbishness still de rigour in Britain in the early 1960’s.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any leanings towards music for I had already demonstrated from the late 1950’s that although I had passed up the opportunity, unlike my elder brother J to take up music lessons for a piano our mother had bought us, because of her love of music, I nevertheless used to sing, and sing in pubs on a Friday night with the guys, when the thing that gave one confidence was the awful noise some of the people, who got up to sing after drinking too much beer, were making…

And whilst I was still buying records of Frank Sinatra my brother J was buying his first "Beetles" albums and also "The Shirelles" featuring Dianna Ross. By the late 60’s I had at cottoned on, so begun to buy records such as Jimmy Hendrix’s “Hey Jude” but it has to be said it was fortuitous that I got to see a group of the standing of “The Who” in their hay-day!

But by the time I went to college, another feature of the late developer I have been all my life, was the fact that my girlfriend was quite a bit younger and also a fact that she had become my wife which is to say she also felt nostalgic about the time we shared of the swinging sixties of London’s 1966 when England for the only time in its history won the World Football Cup…Have a good day everyone and welcome aboard to my new visitors from Azerbaijan, Portugal, Russia, and The Netherlands!