A nation is grieving, said more or less everybody after the awful events in Las Vegas. Really? In the old days one grieved for the loss of someone you knew or were related to, someone you had cared about before they headed off to a better place. It was part of the process of coping with the absence of someone who had been part of your life but was now just not there anymore.
I am not sure when that all changed. When the "People's Princess" headed off to a shagathon in the sky we were told the nation grieved by our war criminal of a Prime Minister. That was the excuse for us to intrude on the private sorrow of her family and to dictate how they should grieve. Now 59 Americans lie dead, 60 if one includes the killer. But it will be their friends and families who truly grieve. The rest of us are terribly sad but to we are surely not grieving.
Another American died yesterday, that is to say the singer Tom Petty. As a teen it was Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers that I listened to. I trekked to Birmingham in my first weeks at university to hear him as warm up man for Bob Dylan. A common interest in the great man helped cement a bond with Abbe Aronson, the woman who broke my heart 32 years ago. The radio today is playing Tom's later material - Free Fallin', Last Dance for Mary Jane's Last Dance, I won't back down, etc. Those are the songs you hear quite often and for which he will be remembered.
My happy memories are of another era. I did not mind the acoustic album Southern Accents but it was earlier material from Damn The Torpedoes or the eponymous debut album that got me hooked albeit a few years after the records came out. From the latter here is American Girl, natch you all know of which one I am thinking. And then a bit of the later material which will be all over the radio, far more in the US than here, for the next few days.
As another chap from the generation ahead of me heads to a better place the front line beckons ever closer for me