STACKRIDGE LIVE!

Dear Friends,

Ghosts from the past disturb and trouble us: the mistakes we made, the doors we didn’t enter and the desperate cul-de-sacs we did, the hurts given and taken and even the happy days that are now distant …. The past can still haunt us. Fantasies from the future, too, invade the present: ambitions unlikely to be fulfilled, failures that we fear, changes that threaten us, imagined lives that delude us into thinking that our real lives are dull ….

No, living – reasonably at peace, reasonably content – in the present, so straightforward for children, is surprisingly difficult for us older ones.

Now here’s a tale that may seem a sad admission to some, but which gives encouragement to me ….

A pop group of about 1971 – 1976, popular though by no means huge even then, but formative and special to me all those years ago – this band reformed a year or two ago, produced new songs to play alongside the old, made a CD and is performing live again. I went to see them recently – in some trepidation: nostalgia may be fine, but what would the music be like?

They played in a pub near Bath. OK, so it wasn’t Wembley Arena, but the atmosphere was great, you could drink beer in proper glasses, everyone was friendly and you could see. And the band came on …. They were, in a word BRILLIANT. The whole set was pure gold.

It wasn’t like revisiting the past. It was more like the past, and the old songs had revisited the present. After a good long rest they’d got up, fresh and better than ever, ready to dance with all the new tunes. This wasn’t nostalgia. It was a wholly new thing, but one which could only happen because of the past. The past made present, and made anew and better than ever –enough to send you into a new century with feet tapping and up for anything is throws at us.

Remembrance of the past (even when it hurts) and openness to the future (even when it frightens): I guess there’s no other way to live humanly in the present. I think it’s called ‘living by faith’. Perhaps, after all, the best is yet to be.

With love,

Philip.