I WAS at the James Taylor concert in the 3Arena in Dublin last Monday night.
My wife had bought tickets as part of my Christmas present, with the show rescheduled due to Covid. My wife did well; if our seats had been any closer to the stage we'd have been sitting on the great man's knee.
Being married to a woman nearly a decade younger involves compromises on both our parts. Along with loving your partner in sickness and in health, the marriage vows should have included loving them despite their taste in music.
Not that the understanding is one way. I've done my bit over the years attending nearly as many U2 concerts as Bono. At least I'd heard of U2; James Taylor was a complete mystery to my wife.
Every time he launched into a classic such as Sweet Baby James or You've Got a Friend, I looked at her for any sign of recognition only to be met by a shake of the head and a "Never heard of it".
Eventually, when he sang Fire and Rain, she admitted, "Oh, I know this one", only to argue he was doing a cover of a Taylor Swift song rather than the other way around.
It was heartening to see James Taylor hadn't been tempted by the lure of perpetual youth via plastic surgery so common amongst ageing stars. He shuffled onto the stage resembling more a Dublin busker than legendary music superstar.
Dressed in grey slacks and jacket, topped off with a flat cap, he wouldn't have looked out of place in a nursing home. Unlike other luminaries who wear headgear to cover baldness - nudge-wink, U2's The Edge - Taylor throughout his performance unembarrassedly doffed his cap in acknowledgement of applause, exposing his bald dome.
Belying his 74 years he bounced around the stage for two hours, only stopping for a 20-minute break. At the intermission I joined the herd of other middle-aged, enlarged-prostate victims sprinting for the urinals.
Returning to my seat 10 minutes later, I was surprised to see he had remained on stage signing autographs, making him unique among his contemporaries who invariably surround themselves with burly bodyguards.
That his audience were asking for autographs rather than selfies was yet another sign of their average age. An outlier was a girl in her twenties sitting beside me who asked her mother where the people had bought the square pictures they were getting signed.
The mother tried her best to explain that they weren't pictures but LPs; this initiated a question-and-answer session which only ended when the exasperated mother said, "For God's sake Mary, look it up online, he's coming back on."
At breakfast in our hotel the next morning I overheard people talking about the concert, commenting, "Sure at least we can say we got to see him."
This, of course, is an underlying motivation for many of us wishing to catch our childhood heroes before they fall off the perch.
With that in mind, tickets for my end of year tour go on sale in the next couple of weeks.
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I WASN'T surprised when our recent census results showed for the first time more Catholics than Protestants living in NI. Sure, if you believed some unionist politicians, Catholic woman can have up to four babies a year with every one jumping to their feet, screaming, 'Tiocfaidh ar lá' even before their umbilical cord was cut.
Joking aside, there's karma that NI, gerrymandered to forever remain 'a Protestant state for a Protestant people', has been usurped, not by war, but by love.
I've joked that while Protestants seemed obsessed with vertical marching, their Catholic neighbours specialised in the horizontal variant.
The rush to extrapolate the census as justification for a border poll, while understandable, is both premature and possibly counterproductive.
While there exists an obvious linkage between religion and political affiliation, the link between political affiliation and a desire for reunification is more tenuous.
Scotland demonstrated the danger of rushing into an independence vote without a guarantee of success. Wedded to the long-game, Sinn Féin no doubt believes once the first border poll vote is achieved reunification then becomes when, not if.
Yet, as with the Catholic birth rate, the law of unintended consequences may yet prove to be nationalism's greatest asset. As the UK sinks into economic and social decline due to successive Tory maladministration, unionism may soon come to view the Republic as less the old enemy and more a welcome lifeboat.
