Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all

Subject: "Better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all".

It is of course pure nostalgia, that parachute which music provides taking you back to a time when you were a different person, stimulated as you were by music and of course the opposite sex. The fixation that girls brought to our lives made most other things pale into insignificance. The tug of war which went on between ones male friends and the comfort we gained form the uncomplicated friendship of ones mates and the quagmire of the emotional depth-charges which lay in ones path when one fell for a girl and entered her world of self absorption. 

The music,  Peter Paul and Mary, Tim Buckley, Joan Baez  targets us right back to those emotionally turbulent years when we thought the experience would never end and we were immortal. The vocal story telling the sound of a acoustic guitar driving us out of our complacency, out of our greasy, noisy jobs, out of our Monday blues and the grey sky's  which signified the mood of a teenager. 

Where did all that testosterone go, all those nights of anticipated glory mixed all too frequently with the disappointment of rejection. The highs and the lows are remembered through the songs which idealised our passion and signposted our failure. 

The rockstars stamping their way around the stage snarling into the microphone to screaming thousands of youngsters like ourselves seemed to epitomise the gulf between what we wanted and what was available. Those songs still have the power to unlock the emotional ambiguity of our youth. The unrequited love, the hopelessness of being rejected far out weighed the successes since these successes only led to an eventual rejection. We were as guilty in the function of an attained desire, once attained, the attention went elsewhere. That human failing of not  recognising when you had found something special only to cast around for an illusion.

The Beatle song  "If I fell in love with you" rang through my head in Sydney after coming unstuck and if I were to hear it today I would remember the miserable incomprehension of those weeks until something else turned up.

It's lucky we have this ability to succumb to nostalgia since in old age the fire of passion has been truly quenched.

 "The bitch is back" (Elton John) is the setting for Sun City. Rod Stewart's "Baby Jane" harks back to the USA. I remember attending a black tie hotel extravaganza and being captivated by the songs "Born Free" and "Yesterday" sung by Mat Monrow, aided and abetted as I was by a beautiful lass from down under. I can still remember the sense of place and moment as if it were yesterday.

We are lucky if, as Oscar Wilde wrote, " it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".