Not Dark Yet, but it's Getting There.

I find it hard to accept Bob Dylan'a album Time Out of Mind is twenty years old now.

This is not the only example of this type of disbelief. I’m also struggling to come to terms with the fact Paul McCartney’s Flaming Pie was released two decades ago, and that the first series of I’m Alan Partridge is the same age too; everywhere I look, I'm surrounded by things far older than should be; something which also applies to me: I can’t believe I’m twenty years old either. 

Part of the problem stems from finding it hard to differentiate between the past two decades' names; the jump from 2000 to 2010 and onwards just doesn’t have the same ring as the difference between the Fifties and the Sixties; it’s all too murky and indistinguishable. But this doesn’t take away from the fact more time has passed since Time Out of Mind’s release than between JFK’s assassination and my birth; that’s unfathomable on every level for me.

Something else that surprises me about that album (which is one of my favourites) I only discovered after reading an article about it the other day, and that’s that Dylan was only 56 at the time of its release; yet again, that just isn’t right. I’ve always thought of it as being voiced by a man in his autumn years (and that’s not just due to the way he sounds these days) but in reality, he was relatively young; he was only a couple of years older than George Michael was when he died and that was no age at all, though Dylan obviously weathered a little more heavily.

I don’t like being at the time of my life when I can remember things that happened twenty of thirty years ago, let alone when some of those memories are those of an - albeit - young adult. It’s an exercise in madness and I refuse to let it lie. What makes it worse: in twenty years time, I’ll be the same age as Dylan when he released that bloody album and, as I’ve learnt, that time can pass remarkably quick; how long before I have his pencil moustache too?