My Dad was born on this day in 1938, which makes today his sixty-fourth birthday.
I decided to burn him a CD for a birthday present, not just because it's cheap to post but also because a compilation album based on the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band seemed a very appropriate gift. There were a couple of scratchy vinyl Apple albums in my family's record collection while I was growing up, but never this one so I was definitely onto a winner.
Track two on side two of Sgt Pepper is the wonderfully catchy When I'm 64. As with so many Beatles songs, the tune is disarmingly straight-forward, has a hook as sharp as barbed wire, everyone in the country knows the song off-by-heart, and there's a sting in the tale if you actually stop and listen to the lyrics.
Will you still need me, Will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?
You'll be older too, And if you say the word, I could stay with you.
My Dad would have been approaching 30 back in June 1967 when Sgt Pepper was released. I'm sure old age was the last thing on his mind at the time, but here he is now having reached the actual day that Paul McCartney was singing about. He's lucky enough to be in a happy marriage of exactly the kind referred to in the song, and has been since well before the album was released. Today has indeed seen him doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more? and with grandchildren on your knee, just as the song said. I realise I've been very lucky too, raised and brought up in an ordinary loving stable family, the type that's so ordinary that I often forget how extraordinary it actually is.
Anyway, my dad liked the CD and he's promised that, when he's in his nineties, he'll send it back to me for my 64th birthday.
When I get older losing my hair, Many years from now.
