"Let me know when we can throw a party every night..."

“Chasing tomorrow - get ready to run...”

/

“On the day that I die, I’d like jokes to be told

And stories of old to be rolled out like carpets

That children have played on

And laid on while listening to stories of old...”

Well, it was 13 years ago this year, Paul McCartney sprung a second album in two years upon us - fresh from critical acclaim far from “Frog Song” mockery of the Eighties and Nineties.

And did so by inviting us to imagine...his dying, albeit in sombrely, richly resigned and inviting tones.

Now, here we are again, a rejuvenated Macca still standing - even in this far more dispiriting of times, splaying McCartney III upon a world in need of, well, any more McCartney.

Paul is live? Paul is loving living, it sounds, happily jamming and drumming and riffing and fiddling in his Sussex studio while others (present company inclusive) might have considered it a major feat to merely manage fixing a hole where the rain gets in.

Not that this is your stereotypically-blithe Fab Wacky Macca Thumbs Aloft. Just as on 2018’s seriously-ranging, alternately-deep-and-daffy Egypt Station, he can’t help but come across as a little more reflective than in the past - now he’s 78.

And yet the melodies keep on simply pouring from Paul.

Remembering Rene...

Words from my mum on her mum, January 16 2020:

REMEMBERING RENE

It was 25 years ago today … that we said a sudden and far too early goodbye to my totally outrageous, unashamedly outspoken, embarrassing, but irreverently witty “Mum” known to officials, neighbours and grandchildren alike as “Rene”.

In the mucky, murky West Midlands town of her birth, Tipton - she used to boast to newcomers in a pseudo posh voice, “I come from the country: the Black Country” - Mum was known as the News of the World. What she didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. But because she knew everyone, she cared about them deeply too and her other nickname was “Rene with the ‘eart of gold”.