On the radio Charlie Watts describes his most despondent moment: miserable before his packed suitcases as another tour begins. Keith calls and asks a single question. He asks: ”Charlie, what else are you going to do…?” In my imagination I hear a long pause, a sigh, a click as the phone goes down. Nothing has been said but everything has been answered.

This summer I caught the radio interview but last time round I paid top dollar and caught them up close and personal. Few commercial entities survive forty years or more. Even fewer make me feel anything at all. The shiver, the wet eyes, came with the riff that always does it for me: the falling glissando, the chunky chopped swaying rhythm, the ominous piano chords, the black girls already at the front of the mix. The band have retreated from a promontory way out in the crowd but the singer isn’t with them – he’s preening and presenting to the auditorium. The intro grows, voodoo like, into something all of its own: a low black sedan prowling around the block. It’s Mick’s stage but it is Keith’s band and the tension is palpable. Some of the sparest lyrics in the rock and roll canon have to wait until Mick turns and, shit he is nearly sixty, he bounds back to the ensemble. Beside me Kenneth Clarke turns and murmurs ”God, they play this one so well”. And he is right. They do, they do.

He only looks like Kenneth Clarke. I remember when he looked very like my daughter standing on my other side. Lucy is lit up, slim, gamine and eighteen. In the intervening decades age has happened to my friend and to me. But something persists. The lyrics that swept me away as an adolescent are alive for me still….A storm is threatening, my very life today. Massed in Twickenham we tingle to the crackle of electricity. If I don’t get some shelter, I’m going to fade away…. Oh brother… Lucy takes photos with my new phone.

This is the way I see it: if I am in regular communication with my teenage kids I am doing good. Music really helps here. Sometimes, after they have come to stay, I find a new song on my music stick, downloaded for my edification. Sam and I anthologise pop perfection: under two minutes thirty please. Lucy tells me she could dance all night to this. Harry takes me though the line up at the summer festival. At the top of the house I hear Betty sing hits from a west end musical. Mike bounces and bops to ska. Nadia the bookish reads and dreams to Jack Johnson. And I slip reissued CDs into their christmas stockings and take them to concerts of bands from my generation. In music our passions pass across, one to the other, and for a little while our wildly different orbits draw close.

I catch the Stones interview as I drive to Reading to the offices of Parents and Children Together. I dislike Reading, I dislike the name of the organisation and I particuarly dislike its cosy, punning acronym. I don’t much like the woman we spend the afternoon with and I suspect she does not like us, although I see that it is her job to put people off (only one in three couples return after this first meeting). Ann patronises us with sweet severity, shows off with statistics and tries hard to dismay us by counting off the hurdles on the course we must run. Nevertheless by the end of the session it appears possible to everyone in the room that we might do business together. Eighteen months, and fifteen thousand pounds, from now we could take possession of a Chinese infant girl (or two). We need to act quickly because my age will soon cross the cut-off. PACT has done its sums: when these kids are pushing through their teens I will be pushing through my seventies. Or I will be dead. Either way it will be a hard ask to stay in touch with my daughters.

On the radio Charlie Watts describes his most despondent moment: miserable before his packed suitcases as another tour begins. Keith calls and asks a single question. He asks: ”Charlie, what else are you going to do…?” In my imagination I hear a long pause, a sigh, a click as the phone goes down. Nothing has been said but everything has been answered. Charlie has collected a wife, wealth, children, and cancer. There are countless things he could do, even at his age. But the die was cast long ago. This is what he does. He is the drummer in a band and the band want to play.

To rhyme fifty with shifty is trivial, flippant but it’s the word Philip Larkin chose. After this age those of us still trudging the road of happy destiny are inevitably wary of any glance over our shoulder. So much of our becoming in the world has happened. We have run out of the young man’s resource: we have reached the end of ambition.

I wanted to be many things but maybe I never wanted them enough. The trail of a journeyman publisher, pursued for so long, is already scuffed over. The moneyed man never really got going. The learned man is emerging from a sleep in the gorse or somesuch. There are wisps in the air that have remained for ever fantasies. But there is one path that is growing broader with every step. I am a father to children, my own and other people’s. There, despite my selfishness, I see achievement and positive attainment. There I am thought kindly of by those who come after. That which I often saw as an impediment has most become me….and I am preparing for more. I feel giddy, sad, trapped and weirdly proud. I am not miserable but I feel sudden fatigue as I stare at the packed suitcases and the hike ahead.

But really…what else am I going to do?

I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on…Please. Enough. Gimme some fucking shelter.

The song is a remarkable one I think. Early on The Stones worked out that it’s the chorus that does the work but this song is all chorus. The two verses are short and are quickly covered. The singer falls back and gives up the high ground to the female vocal. It’s her song and the inversion is strange and moving. The chorus mesmerises with its painful insistence: war, children, it’s just a shot away (it’s just a kiss away). The song is wild and exultant because it has a message.

Right in front of us life is in the balance. Choose now. Choose carefully.