During the school holidays I remember spending hose long, warm, summer afternoon listening to those long, warm songs on [What's the Story] Morning Glory. One of the tracks seemed to suggest that, unless I got off my bed, took off my headphones and actually did something with myself, ten years would go shooting past and everyone would be wonder where I was while they were getting high, in a champagne supernova in the sky.
"What a load of rubbish.' I thought at the time. We bizarrely received no real drug education back then to speak of but we didn't need it. Oasis were a living, breathing example of what recreational pharmaceuticals could do to the human mind. Ten years, as any teenage boy knows, is a century.
Pretty soon, I was 18 and time was still floating around like a sycamore pod floating in the gurgling current of a mountain stream. If anything, there was even more spare time on my hands than there had been in my childhood, mostly because I wasn’t wasting so much of it on pointless maths homework.
However, when you hit your mid-twenties, everything changes. Time straps a jet-pack to its back, lights the afterburners and sets off at Mach 5. The sun flies through the sky as if God's got his finger on the fast-forward button. Blink and you can miss a whole week. This was hammered home during the summer when I inadvertently ran into some old school friends in an old haunt of ours in Rednal. We used to go there a lot in the early 90’s, which we all agreed, seemed only like yesterday.
It's weird, isn't it ?? No-one ever says when you're in your twenties; "Gosh, it only seems like yesterday we were fifteen." But god, the time from when your dreams are smashed and you realise you'll never be a Formula One driver, to the time when your body starts to swell up, go wrong and fall to pieces really does go by with the whim and vigour of a Noel Gallagher guitar solo. When I was 18 my friends and I went to the pub, when we were 21, we still went to the pub. Nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed, and then, all hell broke loose.
One of us moved to France, one of us died in a drug overdose in a nightclub, one moved to America and got divorced, one had had a lung and most of his bottom removed and one was moved out of his flat by social services to secure accommodation in Solihull ... ... for no reason at all. Ten years ago we only ever used to go home whenever we ran out of money, or whenever the managers ran out of patience. In 2014, we all left ... because we had lawns to mow, and lofts to clear out.
I simply cannot believe how quickly time blazes past these days. It’s like God has taken the job of marking time away from Oscar Peterson and instead given it to Ozzy Osbourne !!
On Saturday afternoons I used to listen to music simply to pass the time until I could listen to some more. I had the time to read entire books and not only listen to Oasis songs, but work out what they meant. I used to travel fast purely for fun, now I only travel fast just to keep up with the clock.
I despair when I read in the papers about people who have given up city life thinking that when they're in the countryside time will settle down again and float past like a dandelion poppy in the breeze. But this isn't the problem, it's NOT where you are, it's WHEN you are.
In the old days you got married and had children in your thirties, made a few quid in your forties, enjoyed it in your fifties and retired in your sixties. Now you either do nothing in your teens, nothing in your thirties and by the time you're reached your forties you're dumped well and truly on life's scrapheap, a five-chinned has-been with a spent mind and saggy man-breasts. This means you have to try and cram your whole life into your twenties.
And that's why it whizzes past at eleventy million miles an hour.
Well, I'm 33 now, and I have decided that I want the Gibson back. I want to be lying on my back, chewing grass, and doing nothing but thinking about what my final words might be.
And I have already decided how that end will be.
I want to drunk, warm and happy, and then I want to explode.