Listen to the song first to get in a mood.
I’m watching the Lord of the Rings prequel. It’s for 12 years plus, visually sumptuous with many painterly images, with lines of Old Testament weight and, like a 1950s Western, it hides the awful truth of violence.
I’m not watching the Game of Thrones prequel. It’s for 18 years plus, not quite so good-looking, hateful in word and image, blood, brains and guts spilling all over the sets. Like a Sam Peckinpah Western, you see it all. I’m too young for that yet.
Watching the central character, the icy beauty that is the Elfin Princess Galadriel, I was reminded of the late 60s prog-rockers Barclay James Harvest who had hits with the above and Mocking Bird.
Feeling the urge to escape Scottish politics for a moment and to connect with the many other silver surfers who follow TuS, I thought I’d share this.
My purpose? Not theorised enough to even get a C pass.
When I do this kind of thing, readership tends to be low but heh.
Talking-up Scotland / Scottish media fact checking is like shooting fish in a barrel 
Oh, to be young again.
By the age of about 20 (1969/70) I had read many of the best books I have ever read–including Lord of the Rings-my copy was wonderfully illustrated with an array of maps. I lent it out and never saw it (or it’s like) again.
The world seemed brighter then, great music, more possibilities, more revolution in the air, an innocence of things like pot, meeting and hanging out with total strangers. Living life without fear.
A FREEDOM that seems missing for kids today.
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In 2014, my wife and I were in Paris. It was around the anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and, to mark the occasion there were displays of photographs of the period mounted on the railings of public buildings. One of these displays was in the Luxembourg Gardens and it showed a number of scenes from the Western Front. There was a photograph which specifically referred to JRR Tolkien, who had served near the place whic the photograph showed. There were heaps of earth, large pools of water, broken trees (it was in a forest). As the caption asked (in French, of course!), “Did this scene remain in Tolkien’s mind when he started writing the “lord of the Rings”?
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Morning John
I had just been getting wound up about the latest Tory gambling, otherwise called tax cuts for the rich and this post was what I really needed to chill out.
Thanks for posting
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Sometimes, for the good of my blood pressure, I take time away from the constant Yoon propaganda press. I know exactly where you’re at. We all find ourselves there. Just keep walking towards the light of a free and independent Scotland!
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Forever young…in my head!
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When I have any despair with regards Indy
Then I go and partake of The Declaration of Arbroath and read and soak into my cranium
“As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule.
It is truth not for glory, nor riches ,nor honours , that we are fighting , but for freedom- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself ”
Can any suggest a more apt reset button of ones thoughts
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Oooh, well this old silver surfer appreciated that BJH blast from the past, I remember seeing them at one of the Woodstock style festivals which were popular then complete with orchestra – Weeley sticks in my minds as it was weeley wet and we all got soaked whilst the drugs squad “mingled” – It was amusing to see them “blend in”, afghan coats, beads, sunglasses and wigs, oblivious to the fact that walking as pairs in unison with hands clasped behind their backs like Dixon of Dock Green was obvious enough, but the shiny boots were a dead giveaway…
Ah the invincibility of youth….
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It is of course the privilege of those of more summers to look back with nostalgia to when they were young. A former colleague used to talk about how “the girls were prettier, the summers were longer and the beer wasnt warm”. Another used to make the point that if when he was 17 he had known then what he knew about women now, he would have had a great time. The thing is that I’m not sure it’s that easy.
Would I want to be young just now? Frankly I’m not sure. There are a great many advantages – obviously personal – my (admittedly mild) arthritis wouldn’t bother me. I might still be able to run as my knees would be less knackered. But consider some of these
Compare the state of medical knowledge now to the 60s and 70s – they know much more and can do much more much more easily. If only you can get to see a Doctor!
Communication is much easier. Communicating this way was sci-fi back then. We didn’t have the equivalent of a Library via our computer keyboard. But, as others have noted, we can’t get away from the damned thing, which can monitor our every keystroke.
My daughter graduated with a starred first from Strathclyde ten years ago. Did she have the sort of University experience that her mum and I had thirty years earlier. It was well structured, but it beat curiosity out of her. Criterion referenced assessment means the kids know where to stop, and they do (or at least she did), My experience as an undergraduate was certainly not structured – you got a reading list, lectures, some tutorials and left to get on with it. But the curious were able to, and left to, exercise their curiosity.
The point is our youth was ours. It’s why we have affection for it. But it’s nobody else’s. Keith Emerson came to Glasgow in 2001 to play at the Concert Hall. I asked our two kids if they wanted to come with me to see the best keyboard player of the 60s and 70s. Both said “who?”
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Saw Emerson when in the Nice, sticking knives into his organ (Hammond).
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Usher Hall 1971?
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He would be in ELP by then.
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1970 then?
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Green’s 69, maybe 70 (early). Do you know “Take a Pebble”, in which there is a long piano solo. He did that at the Concert Hall. I had gone on my own and got the last seat right in the middle of the front row (really!) and I can still recollect very clearly as he started on this very long piano solo he sighed as if to say “not again!”. Shame what happened to him at the end.
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Alas, the beer WAS warm. In London Watney’s Red Barrel. In Scotland’s central belt, there was Toby Jug. Ugh!
The start of the Real Ale campaign.
I started drinking lager, which had previously been unknown to me.
Rock and roll/ prog rock/ underground–music was everywhere and LIVE.
Rose Street in Edinburgh was probably the best drinking experience anywhere up till the early mid 1970’s, with a host of really good pubs.
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