...see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swPrkGpc5F8
Jagger in Hyde Park in a white dress singing Jumping Jack Flash...
I'm reading Austerity Britain, 1946..1951, by David Kynaston. The old black and white photographs of holidaymakers on Margate sands look like refugee camps, with stolid Britons making holiday sheltered by beach chairs in the rain.
So does the orderly but very strange queue at Waterloo Station of even more holidaymakers, in dresses and suits, in what looks like a bomb crater. I mean they knew how to PARTY in 1948: queue up to go to a rainy beach and here comes the sun, little darling.
You chaps were lucky if an American gave you a Camel cigarette and you made it last. Bread was rationed, coal was rationed, and because it was rationed, it was very often not available.
Fast forward to 1968:
I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash,
It's a Gas! Gas! Gas!
I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag,
I was schooled with a strap right across my back,
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash,
It's a Gas! Gas! Gas!
Yeah, baby, Life is made for living. It was the genius of British foreign policy to note the winds of change in 1961, and leave Hong Kong in 1997 without some silly comic opera war. [With the exception of the Mad Woman about whom the less said the better, a Sycorax to Mark Thatcher about whom even less said the better, who failed where James Callaghan succeeded (by sending HMS Conqueror on a jolly southern cruise in 1977) to prevent Argentina from even thinking about doing that silly awful thing, as far as I can determine from the available Books.]
Our own experience in America was rather different. They bellyfull but they hungry. So when Jack Flash hit WLUP radio I was like, wow.
I was playing it on the piano, when my kids were small, and I looked around to see my son, 4 years old, rocking out. He's now a musician.
And today I sit with my eldern mates on the ferry and we speculate where our hair went, and those old photographs where we looked like the cast of Lord of the Flies, or I, in my first passport, just looked, according to my first only and former wife, strange, and vulpine, with hair, everywhere.
Ou sont les neiges d'antan?