Saying bye to our dancing days

Sometimes it’s the first time a player they used to run rings around for fun leaves them for dead in a match. Sometimes it’s a catastrophic knee injury in their early 30s. And sometimes they’ve made enough money to last two lifetimes and simply cannot be bothered to run around anymore.

Me and the boss had a similar experience last week when we knew that our gig-going days were over, well, at least going to watch bands on the way up, instead of those content to ride the nostalgia bandwagon until the wheels fall off.

The outrageously talented Anderson .Paak and The Free Nationals brought some welcome California sunshine to a chilly spring night in Manchester. For those of you who just said “Who?”, a lazy comparison would be somewhere between Prince at the height of his powers and Stevie Wonder at his most melodic.

In the past few years we’ve been to see bands such as The Stone Roses, New Order and the Pet Shop Boys where the majority of the crowd were, how can I put this, not quite as young as they used to be. But within 30 seconds of walking through the doors, we clocked that we were the oldest in there by at least 15 years. The more we tried not to look like a pair of off-duty coppers, the more we did.

As far as I’m concerned, people can take whatever they want but the level of al fresco drug-taking was quite something.

One young lad in front of us had even brought his own metal spatula for him and his young lady to snort their pharmaceutical of choice off, then he barged past us and tried to order a round of drinks from the mixing desk.

SOUTH AMERICA UPDATE: Daughter #1’s “gap yah” road trip this week resembles the star prize on a game show. They spent a few days at a Peruvian desert oasis called Huacachina where they bounced around the dunes in a desert buggy that looked like a vehicle off a Mad Max film and went to Lima to see the Arctic Monkeys. Next, they’re on a day trip to Machu Picchu.