I wonder if we're losing our ability to create deep memories.
I wonder if, because we drink from a firehose of information all the time, we're unable to let that information soak in.
I wonder if it's ‘too much of a good thing’.
So, let me tell you a little story just to try to frame this in the way that I'm beginning to understand it…
It's the summer of 1985 and I'm 13 years old.
I get that Peter Hart bus from Gourock into Greenock. There has been a ‘battle of the busses’ from the normal council run busses to the independent ones because things have been deregulated and Peter Hart is winning (there's rumours that he's a gangster).
I get off the bus on Kilblain street next to the Tesco that I would go on to work in for 4.5 years, and I meet my friend, Kevin Judge.
We mooch around in Greenock, go to the arcade, play some games and I get some chips on the way home about one o'clock.
It's those proper big chip shop chips with loads of vinegar and loads of salt and then tomato ketchup that you apply from a red plastic tomato with a green plastic leaf on it. The type of ketchup that seems to be made only out of vinegar and lemon juice and that’s never seen a tomato in its whole life.
I can still taste those chips today.
I get home just after 1p.m and Live Aid is starting on the television.
So, I had been aware of Live Aid as a thing and I think, probably from the radio or maybe from my Dad's paper about what was happening and what Midge Ure and Bob Geldof were doing to create this charity concert at Wembley.
I don't have time to tell you everything about the memories of Live Aid here, but I vividly remember Bob Geldof opening the show and doing ‘I don't like Mondays’ and how he stood silently, immediately after that line ‘and the lesson today is how to die’.
I can remember that like I can see it in front of me now.
I remember many of the rest of the artists, but I absolutely and vividly remember the saliva dripping off Freddie Mercury's mouth onto the microphone as he played Bohemian Rhapsody.
I remember Phil Collins doing his set and then jumping on a Concorde and arriving in Philadelphia and later I remember watching the Philadelphia set as Simple Minds came on and realising that Philadelphia was nothing like as good as London.
I can remember these memories deeply and in fact, recounting them now makes my chest feel like a giant is crushing a coke can down to zero as I feel as if I've lost a childhood all those years ago, because the memories are so dear and so sweet.
Those were the memories of a 13-year-old just entering that age that psychologists now say, is the stage of your life where your values are created (14-24 approximately).
And so, the memories of that and of people trying to do good for people who had less and the pictures on the television of the starving in Ethiopia and Bob Geldof saying live on BBC TV “give us your f*cking money” and The Cars ‘who's going to take you home’ and the montage of pictures from Africa… oh my god!
Maybe it's because I'm old now and I'm 51 and I live in a world, which is a billion times faster than that world was, maybe it's because then after the concert finished, I had no way of going on social to find out other things or to relive it, I just had to think about it and talk to people about it and embed it in my memory.
Maybe it's because I had the space to do that.
Maybe it's because now there would be a big football game the next day or a trip to somewhere else or something else that was supposed to be great or something competing for the attention.
Maybe we just can't create memories like that anymore or maybe it's just that I can't.
I look at my kids now, Callum particularly, and I want him to savour these things.
I want him to taste it and to hear it and to smell it and to remember the chips and the plastic tomato and the Peter Hart bus because life is just so much more than bagging things that you can take a photograph of to improve your status with a few other people.
I was never involved in Live Aid, apart from being one of the billions of people who appreciated what was going on and who made the world a little bit better for just a little while.
Blog Post Number - 3371