FULL CIRCLE..

I`m pretty sure it was the Spring of 1978 when I went on a journey with the local Primary School my sons attended. I had been asked to go on the week long school visit to either Swanage or the Isle of Wight and `take charge` of about a dozen 11-year olds so they could experience being away from home for the first time and explore the wider world beyond our village. I took my car which was a lumbering Morris 2200 with even a hint of lavender in its paintwork and I had about five of the children in the car throughout the journey home to relieve congestion on the even more lumbering school minibus.

On the way home, the girls in the back got a bit noisy, as they do, so I turned on the radio and that was the first time I heard Dire Straits` Sultans of Swing - 32 years ago now. I remember it began as we drove up the A31 near Ringwood and kept going until we reached the other side of the New Forest heathland at Stony Cross about 12 minutes later. I was hooked and so it seemed were the girls in the back, whose relentless cackling gave way to what passed as some kind of juvenlie appreciation for Mark Knopfler and the rest of the then Dire Straits lineup.

Last night I went to the Royal Albert Hall for the first time in my life, to see Mark Knopfler and his current band and heard again all the old favourites - Sultans of Swing, Romeo and Juliet, Brothers in Arms and the incomparable Telegraph Road - as well as some of the newer stuff. My eldest son was kind enough to drive me up there and act as my carer for the evening and we both enjoyed a spectacular concert by the sainted Mark and the master musicians on stage with him. We went courtesy of my middle son, who is Production Manager for the Get Lucky world tour, which is almost half-way through having toured the USA and Canada, doing some gigs here in the UK before heading off to Europe at the end of the week.

It occurred to me that yet another circle of life seemed to have been completed, which began with me ferrying children around to the sound of Dire Straits 32 years ago until now, when in the wide eyed innocence of my own second childhood, between them, two of my own sons ferried me around and presented me with the new experience of the Albert Hall and a reunion with the Sultans of Swing. Mark Knopfler is 60 now and like the Royal Albert Hall, has matured deliciously over the years. I just hope I`m doing the same, even though I never could `play the honky tonk like anything.`