WILL YOU STILL NEED ME, WILL YOU STILL FEED ME?

So sang Sir Paul, a late Sixties landmark song,

lyrics and score penned in seconds I’m sure and

jaunty as they come, neither revealing nor concealing

the big issues of the day, but a ballad for our time, a devotion,

a short, sweet love song, a subliminal gong on the froth and sweat of

Britpop’s arriviste best, a testament to the worth of the small, the simple,

the joys of the ordinary surely round the next corner,

an epic in the baking of teacakes and muffins,

in the making of bonfires and models in bottles.

 

Everyone who was an anyone who was at one

with the raw humanity of this homage to middle age

would remember its words – more readily, perhaps, than

the Lord’s Prayer, Jerusalem or much of the National Anthem.

For many, the countdown years to the average mid-to-long-stop,

announcing entry to true old age, would become clearer,

a bonus in words shelled out to all, a gift from Sir Paul,

a call to carry on doing what you always have done

and the end will be wonderfully rosy and cosy.

 

And to the degree that I need to explain my delay

today in reaching the end of my regular contemplation of

the way life evolves, revolves, resolves and dissolves –

all the four seasons in every day – the reason is that the song

picked out as the age, some way down the road, at which we might

credibly pitch our performance against a dozen doyen paradigms,

a rhyming sixty-four (“would you lock the door”) – which, some would say,

introduces a frivolity, a superficiality of purpose, a travesty,

the elevation of a ditty to a treatise.

 

“But it is and always will be a song” say a population

of fans of every age. And so it is. But wisdom may lie

with and in the words, just as it might in a parable; or may be

barely comparable with any other piece – it  is what it is,

perfect, refreshing, a single brush-stroke on a canvas.

It’s my sixty-fourth today. As this morning’s light accrued with consciousness,

the song seeped in and I was gratefully reminded of the shortness

of the road ahead and the things that remained to be done

to be one of the needed, one of the fed.