Old

“Do not complain about growing old. It is a privilege denied to many.”

Yeah, I get it, Mark Twain, but wow, I’d be so much happier if my left calf muscle didn’t shred like a wet tissue at the first sign of any vaguely rapid movement.

That never used to happen when I was younger.

And yet… guess what?

So it’s back to walking and weights, avoiding any strain on the calf, because obviously, a week (which would have been fine to have fixed it a few years back) clearly wasn’t enough to fix it this time around. Nothing major, just grumpy and a bit painful. (The calf muscle, not me.) (Although…)

And I know I’m getting on a bit now because 6Music put out an ad for a series of shows they’re doing on Friday to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of OK Computer.
“Twenty-fifth”, indeed! I think you’ll find that OK Computer was actually released in 1997, and that was only… oh… oh my dear god…

A quarter of a century. Wow.

Living in Oxford at the time, and Radiohead coming from Oxford (pre-OKC, you’d regularly see Thom Yorke wandering down St Aldates, but I guess things went a bit mainstream celebrity after that), we stayed up ever so late on that Tuesday (I think?) evening and went into town for the special midnight release at the HMV on Cornmarket Street. Free poster, free sticker, a whole pound off the CD.

And it’s fair to say that, despite all the hype – even the local hype – the album was (and still is) something very special. I wonder how you deal with anything and everything you produce after something like that being measured against it and always falling short.

I’m sure the massive royalties help with the continual disappointment.